Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise $16 billion. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 days. We’ve made a couple of charts to show how it compares to other historical IPOs, according to NASDAQ data. Then we also have historical price data from SecondMarket, which is a private secondary market that became popular among former Facebook employees who wanted to offload some shares.
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Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to re-think those clunky, inflexible whiteboards found in classrooms and offices around the country. They developed a portable, flexible alternative: An inexpensive, “instant” plastic board that weighs less than two pounds and adheres to any surface without screws.
Wilk tells us that WhiteyPaint has since found an eager audience, leading to the fortunate problem of demand quickly outpacing supply. Struggling to finance demand on a bootstrapped budget, the founders reached out to Dallas Mavericks owner, Shark Tank investor, and HDNet Co-founder Mark Cuban. Seeing a billion-dollar market dominated by a few bloated players, Wilk said, Cuban believed WhiteyBoard was onto something. → Read More
Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company’s insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the first photos are starting to trickle in. There was a standing ovation for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a talk before several long-time engineers bounced in while wearing capes or bringing boomboxes.
Tonight Facebook is having its 31st Hackathon to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. Some of the big products that have come out of earlier Hackathons include Facebook chat and an early version of Timeline. → Read More
The rush of interest around crowdfunding is spawning many variations on the theme, and one of the more original of them — Crowdtilt, part of the most recent crop of Y-Combinator startups — is today announcing a funding round of $2.1 million for its platform that lets groups of friends come together to fund an event or project, like a house party or group vacation.
The company tells us that the seed round is coming from SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Y Combinator partners Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan, and DCM and Felicis Ventures, and it follows on from a very impressive three months of growth. James Beshara, the CEO and co-founder, tells us that it has now seen nearly $1 million of events funded since launching in February 2012.
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Buffer, the little service for scheduling your social media updates, has some big news today: it’s acquiring competitor ShareFeed, and is bringing its CEO Hiten Shah on board as a mentor and advisor. ShareFeed was launched in 2009 as a side project from Shah’s company KISSmetrics, which is backed by True Ventures, SoftTech VC, Polaris Ventures, and other angels. Of ShareFeed’s team of three, only Shah will be working with Buffer going forward, and will advise the company on how integrate some of the technology the ShareFeed had previously developed.
While terms of the deal were not being disclosed, ShareFeed’s main contribution to Buffer, outside of Shah’s mentorship, appears to be the technology itself and the data the company had previously collected on social sharing. → Read More
Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of growth: the funds to take the image-based social network into new international markets, and a business model.
First up, Rakuten’s home market of Japan, where “Pinterest is growing very fast,” notes Rakuten’s CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, in an interview with TechCrunch. He wants Rakuten to grow right there with it by using Rakuten’s services to become the basis for buying things off the site.
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Independent online video company Funny Or Die is about to get a lot of help from a traditional TV company, as it’s struck a strategic partnership with Turner Broadcasting to collaborate on multiplatform video content. As part of the deal, Turner is taking a small minority stake in Funny Or Die — terms of which have not been disclosed.
“We’re at an inflection point with digitally distributed video,” Funny Or Die CEO Dick Glover told me by phone. He says that as a result, the timing of the deal is poised to coincide with that inflection point and catalyze further growth for Funny Or Die. → Read More
Pearson, the educational publisher, today made a move to beef up its international professional IT testing business: it announced that it is buying Certiport, a developer, marketer and distributor of certification exams and practice tests for IT and digital literacy skills, for $140 million in cash from the private equity firm Spire Capital Partners.
The deal will give Pearson’s VUE unit, where Certiport will sit, much further reach into the retail distribution of testing services in markets outside of the U.S. and UK: Certiport currently sells its certifications and assessments through a network of 12,000 testing centers operated by 70 partners in 150 countries, serving the range of skills in the world of IT. In all, it delivers 225,000 exams in 27 languages every month, and generated revenues of $48 million in 2011.
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Contactually, the lightweight CRM solution for email users which launched into private beta at the beginning of this year, is today announcing its public debut with a number of new features in tow, as well as $500,000 in angel funding from YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, co-founder of CapLinked Chris Grey, and a re-up from previous investor, 500 Startups.
As for the new features, there are quite a few, but the major ones include the launch of “Contactually for Teams,” Microsoft Exchange support, a Gmail plugin, and additional integrations with other services and CRM systems. → Read More
Last year, CollegeBudget launched with the goal of bringing a variation on the Groupon discount and group buying model to the campus. The goal being to help college students at colleges and universities across the country fight high costs by offering discounts on everything from textbooks to student loans.
Today, CollegeBudget is moving more aggressively into local offers, particularly around food. For hungry, cash-strapped students, food discounts can be extremely appealing, especially when one of the alternatives is the school’s cafeteria. That’s why the startup is today announcing that it is acquiring Y Combinator-backed Munch On Me, a food discovery portal that connects people with great good at affordable prices from local restaurants. → Read More
Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, following its March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announcing it has acquired Cull TV, an independent music video sharing site, which CTO John Hurliman describes as a little bit like Pandora mixed with MTV.
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Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health’s inaugural batch, HealthInReach has been on a mission to combat the high cost of healthcare and put consumers back in control of their healthcare by creating a transparent online marketplace for comparing the quality and price of health providers and procedures. The startup has built a consumer-focused (or B2B2C) complement to services like Castlight, whereby those who are uninsured or pay out-of-pocket for medical procedures can use its platform to search for and learn about doctors and dentists based on experience, reputation and prices. To date, over 3 million people have used the service to look for doctors.
However, from the outset, HealthInReach intentionally limited its market to southern California (the startup is headquartered in LA), and, as a result, it’s been looking to expand nationally and grow its database of doctors, optometrists and dentists. To do so, the company is today announcing a merger with PriceDoc, a similarly aligned marketplace for healthcare providers, in an effort to combine HealthInReach’s proprietary tech with PriceDoc’s national database of tens of thousands of providers. → Read More
Simplee, a Mint-like platform for tracking healthcare expenses and then paying them online, is today announcing the close of its $6 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership (aka “s23p”), and includes current investors, Greylock Partners Israel. As a part of the investment, s23p’s General Partner Ted Maidenberg and Greylock’s Tilli Kalisky joined Simplee’s Board of Directors.
The funding will help Simplee extend its product from bill tracking and payments to other areas, including plan recommendations, care recommendations, and more. The company is also preparing to roll out its B2B offering to partners, and launch its first mobile app. → Read More
BagThat, a new UK entrant to the daily-deals/e-commerce space, has picked up an investment of £2 million ($3.2 million) to develop its service, a mash-up of two well-known models for selling products online: auctions and group buying.
The funding is being led by Oxford Capital and is the first close on this round. BagThat says it is expecting additional institutional investment in the round.
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Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter’s $25.1 billion in mergers and acquisitions, according to top-tier accounting firm Ernst & Young.
The total value of all deals fell by 12 percent from the year before while the number of deals was about the same. While that’s not too huge a drop, the firm attributes it to “ongoing economic uncertainty.” (Thanks Greece.) Quarterly deal volume has apparently reached a plateau after two years of growth and is being restrained by concerns about the macroeconomic climate.
If you’re curious what the biggest deals of last quarter were, here are they below. → Read More
At the end of March, we covered Behance’s major site redesign, at which point we learned that the startup was launching over 20K new projects every week, with 1 million projects created to date, and its network had doubled over the last month, with 10 million visits to its network in the last 30 days.
Since its founding in 2006 and launch less than a year later, Behance, which, for those unfamiliar, is an online platform on which creative professionals can connect, showcase and discover creative work, has been a bootstrapped enterprise, Behance CEO Scott Belsky tells us. But, no longer. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised its first round of outside funding, a $6.5 million round, led by Union Square Ventures, with noted investors like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment fund), Path Founder Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure, Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp. → Read More
The online stock photography service Shutterstock filed its plans for an initial public offering today. The company plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering haven’t been decided yet, but the company’s S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) notes that it plans to raise around $115 million through this IPO. That’s the number Shutterstock used to estimate its filing fees with the SEC, though, so the actual size of the IPO could still turn out to be different. → Read More
Alexia said this was coming a few weeks ago, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, but… Viddy announced this morning that it has closed a $30 million Series B funding round. The new financing comes from investors that include NEA, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and Battery Ventures, and the round closed just a few months after Viddy raised $6 million in a Series A round back in February.
The investment was made as the race to become the next “Instagram for video” heats up, especially after Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion just a few weeks ago. With that in mind, Viddy, Socialcam, Klip, Mobli, and others have been trying to attract users who wish to share their personal mobile videos with each other. → Read More
Miami-based streaming music startup Senzari, which aims to take on Pandora by targeting the markets Pandora misses (i.e., the rest of the world), has just closed an additional round of funding totaling $1 million. The round includes investors in both Miami and Silicon Valley, including, notably Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.
The company had previously raised $2 million from undisclosed angels in Silicon Valley and Boston (mainly friends and family) and a private equity group in Southern California. → Read More
It’s easy to miss the launch of the latest movies. You get a week of marketing and by the time you’ve figured out if you want to see it or not, it’s moved off the theatre and you’re waiting for the DVD release. Most movie marketing dollars are spent in these first few days. So MoviePilot, launched out of Berlin, brings upcoming films to fans based on their taste, turning the marketing model on its head and making better use of budgets. It focuses solely on upcoming movie projects and TV shows so that fans are less likely to miss new releases. This gives them a place to gather often long before official homepages are created, finding the right film for its natural audience and the right audience for a film.
Today it’s sealed a $7 million Series B financing, led by leading venture capital firm DFJ Esprit, and continued participation from existing VC funds T-Venture, Grazia Equity and VC Fund Creative Industries Berlin. This will be used to expand in the US and develop the platform.
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