• Google Ventures Takes A Sip Of Milk, Invests In Kevin Rose’s New Startup

    Monday, November 7th, 2011

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    milk1
    milk1

    Kevin Rose’s mobile lab, Milk, has a new investor: Google Ventures. The startup raised $1.5 million in a seed round last April from investors including Chris Sacca, Evan Williams, Dave Morin, Joshua Schachter, Ron Conway, Chamath Palihapitiya, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, First Round Capital, and True Ventures. The total amount now raised in the seed is $1.7 million.

    “We started talking to Google after we closed our round,” says Rose, “but decided to open it up for them as they’ve been adding a ton of value right away.”

    Google Maps is a big part of Milk’s first mobile app, Oink. And Rose wants to build in more Google technology in future updates.

    Oink lets people rate and discover things in the places around them. It is a first step at creating a directory and recommendation system for things in the physical world. When it launched last week, Rose gave me a demo, which you can watch below.


    Company: Milk
    Website: mi.lk
    Launch Date: 2011
    Funding: $1.7M

    Milk is a mobile development lab founded by Kevin Rose, Jeff Hodsdon, and Daniel Burka. Milk has announced its first mobile app, Oink, released last fall. The company has since been acquired by Google.

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    Kevin Rose is an angel investor and serial entrepreneur. He is a Senior Product Manager at Google and previously the founder of Digg and WeFollow and co-founder of Milk. Rose also co-founded Revision3, and Pownce (acquired by Six Apart). In addition, Rose is the founder of Foundation, a private newsletter and podcast, and formerly was co-host of the tech news podcast Diggnation.

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    Financial-organization: Google Ventures
    Launch Date: March 31, 2009

    Google Ventures was founded in March 2009. Google Ventures is broadly interested in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others. They invest amounts ranging from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital.

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