
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.
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.
Kevin Rose is a Partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage and seed investments. Prior to joining Google Ventures, Kevin co-founded Milk, a mobile application development company in San Francisco. Previously Kevin was the founder of Digg, and co-founder of 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.
Google Ventures is the financially motivated venture capital arm of Google Inc., founded in 2009. Google Ventures invests in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others. They aim to invest about $100 million a year, with deal sizes ranging from seed to late-stage investments of tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital. Google Ventures currently invests in the U.S. and has offices in...
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