Malaysia is an easy place to get cheap, good, English-speaking talent, with overheads that are often far lower than in more advanced markets in Southeast Asia. But it continues to suffer the effects of brain drain. Simply put, Malaysia isn’t cool to be in for some of the nation’s brightest, and this has hurt its startup scene, according to Khailee Ng. Ng, who is from Malaysia, was… → Read More
500 Startups appears to be on a mission to take over the world. With about 20 percent of its capital going to international companies, the seed fund and accelerator has expanded its scope to include India, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Brazil and last year it snatched up LatAm startup accelerator, Mexican.VC, to aid with its efforts south of the border. → Read More
Dave McClure’s 500 Startups is no stranger to investing in international startups, with about 100 companies in its portfolio hailing from outside the U.S. But it’s now looking to make a bigger bet on Southeast Asia, with a $10 million micro fund devoted to the region, as well as the hiring of Malaysia-based entrepreneur Khailee Ng as its newest venture partner. → Read More
VERSUS IO, the natural language-styled comparison engine backed by Dave McClure (amongst others), has closed a $2.8 million Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital. McClure’s 500 Startups also participated, as did Hightech-Gruenderfonds, Lars Dittrich, and Dario Suter. → Read More
By now you’ve probably seen that 500 Startups Accelerator has a new class of startups, its sixth. And it’s got a ton of international folks taking part and that is fucking awesome. You know what’s not so awesome? The video that accompanied its announcement. → Read More
500 Startups today is announcing the next 28 companies to take part in its Accelerator program, unleashing a largely international class of startups who have come to Mountain View to accelerate their startup progress. There are 28 companies in this Accelerator class, and as usual there’s a bunch of diversity there. → Read More
SkyGiraffe, an enterprise mobile platform provider, has raised a seed round from well-known investors, including Parker Thompson, a partner at 500 Startups and Yuval Neeman, a former corporate vice president at Microsoft, who started and led the company’s .Net development. SkyGiraffe makes a platform called SkyGiraffe Studio that connects data from different business groups with mobile apps… → Read More
Optical character reader (OCR) translation app Waygo, which was part of the 500 Startups accelerator batch that graduated in February, just launched a new version with more functions and social-sharing options. The handy app, which I reviewed back in January, is also currently in the process of closing its first round of investment. The new version of Waygo boosts more translation capabilities and… → Read More
500 Startups has had a bit of personnel shuffling, with the promotion of George Kellerman to partner, the addition of Pivotal Labs’ Parker Thompson as a venture partner, and the unfortunate departure of Paul Singh, who’s running off to do his own startup. The firm now has 22 employees stationed all around the globe, in Silicon Valley, NYC, China, India, and Latin America. → Read More
500 Startups is already focused heavily on investing overseas, with partners looking at startups in markets like Mexico, Brazil, India and Southeast Asia. Now you can add China to the list, as the firm just hired a venture partner to focus on that region. Rui Ma will be joining 500 Startups as its first venture partner in Beijing, where she will be investing and sourcing deal flow in China. → Read More
Ever since the launch of the 500 Startups Accelerator a few years ago, Dave McClure and his crew have filled five classes with recruits that have come through his vast referral network — recommended by mentors, advisors, and alumni alike. But that will change this time around, as 500 Startups will now leverage AngelList for all applications after successfully testing out the platform. → Read More
15Five, a startup that offers a cloud-based platform for employees to provide weekly feedback about their progress — and for CEOs and other managers to be able to read all of it quickly, is today announcing that it has raised its first VC money, a seed round of $1 million from a list of investors including Richmond Global, 500 Startups, Yammer Founder David Sacks, USTREAM founder John Ham, Jason… → Read More
When his grandmother was no longer able to live safely at home, Tal Ziv and his relatives set out to help her find the best senior care facility — better known as assisted living communities. It’s an experience many families face at some point, and it’s not always an easy one. What’s more, the stakes are high; we want loved ones to be at home in a great environment, but there’s also the fact that… → Read More
Leaky, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that helps customers compare the price they’d pay with car insurance companies, is expanding to full nationwide coverage today.
The startup first launched more than a year ago, but the site quickly attracted attention (as well as cease-and-desist letters) from insurance companies, so it was taken down and reemerged in March with a new approach. → Read More
A lot of companies are getting into the content marketing business, creating blog posts and articles to promote their brands and products. But are they doing enough to promote that content? Well, startup OneSpot is opening a new platform to help them turn those posts into regular ads.
OneSpot started out as a news aggregation company, but founder and CEO Matt Cohen said it’s now focused on a… → Read More
Marketing startup TrueLens announced that it has raised a $1.2 million round of funding. The company is also unveiling its core customer intelligence product, which it calls Socialgraphics.
Co-founder and CEO Roy Rodenstein admitted that social marketing and advertising is “a noisy space,” but he argued that TrueLens fits into a different bucket than most of the bigger names in the industry. → Read More
500 Startups yesterday filed an SEC document for a 500 StartupWallah fund, which presumably would be focused on investments in India. And today, a document surfaced for a 500 Luchadores fund, for investing in Mexican startups. With each of the filings, 500 Startups seeks to raise $5 million for those regions. → Read More
Mobile app platform biNu just announced that it has closed a $4.3 million Series A round of funding.
Back in August, the company said it had raised $2 million from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, along with the Savannah Fund, David Risher, and Paul Bassat. Now the company says that was just a partial close of the round, which has expanded by another $2.3 million, and now includes 500… → Read More
It seems like there are an infinite number of marketing tools competing for local businesses’ attention nowadays. An AngelPad-incubated startup called LocBox helps those businesses manage their efforts in a way that’s focused on acquiring customers and driving revenue — and it just raised $5.1 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by InterWest Partners, with participation from Google… → Read More
Dave McClure’s 500 Startups has just announced the newest batch of companies to be accepted for its fifth accelerator class. This group is the first through which 500 Startups used an open application process, rather than rely solely on referrals when evaluating participants. → Read More
CompStak‘s data is wildly valuable. Without paying a penny, its crowdsourced real estate info platform has compiled the rent, size, and more of 40% of Manhattan commercial leases over the last decade. It’s selling the data to banks and private equity while trading it to real estate agents and landlords for more data. Now CompStak is getting serious, joining 500 Startups who’s led its $565,000… → Read More
Adora Cheung, co-founder and CEO of Pathjoy, said her goal is to make maid service “ubiquitous” — a basic service for a broad audience, rather than a luxury for the rich.
To make that happen, Cheung and her brother/co-founder Albert are offering four main twists on the traditional cleaning service model. First, she said Pathjoy is more affordable, charging only $20 an hour, compared to the… → Read More
Lesson for social networking startups: don’t mess around with your early adopters. Tiny Post, the 500 Startups-backed company that lets users post photos with short messages attached to them (like a visual Twitter), has been called out by one of its users for putting bots on the network to follow legitimate people on the site. To its immense credit, the minute we alerted the company to this… → Read More
Dave McClure’s 500 Startups is looking for participants to join its next incubator program, which will run from October through January. And for the first time ever, it’s going to open the process up to allow anyone to apply. To help with the process, 500 Startups Accelerator will be using AngelList to help it get through the process, making it the first incubator to leverage the platform for… → Read More
Babelverse, the language translation startup that landed the title of “Audience Choice” at Disrupt NYC this past May, has raised a seed round led by 500 Startups along with a group of other angel investors.
Babelverse’s online marketplace provides speech translation services in close to real-time through a worldwide network of human interpreters. Today, Babelverse co-founders Josef Dunne and… → Read More
Over the last two years, there’s been a significant increase in the amount of educational media available to the world’s learners, but teachers and parents are hard pressed today to navigate the education content jungle. As a result, curators, algorithms and content analyzers like Learning Registry have popped up to help educators find the best and most effective learning media from the 100K apps… → Read More
Chicago-based startup eSpark Learning, which founder and CEO David Vinca describes as “Pandora for education apps,” has secured $5.7 million in series A financing from MK Capital, Learn Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund and 500 Startups to help fuel national expansion. The new capital brings the startup’s total funding to just under $7 million.
In addition to its raise, eSpark is also announcing… → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 20-city event series hosted around the world to help educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. He’s an ex-Electronic Arts employee, as well as the founder of Commonred and Vaporware Labs.
Until a few weeks ago I’d never met Dave McClure. Like many of you I have read all about him, casually Twitter followed him… → Read More
MyHealthTeams, which develops social and local networks for communities of people living with or caring for those living with chronic health conditions, has announced a $1.75 million seed round today. It was led by Adams Street Partners, with participation also from 500 Startups and “notable” angel investors in the consumer technology and life science space. It’s to use the cash injection to help… → Read More
A designer’s eye can change the world, but some don’t know how to build a company. So today, veteran Facebook designer Ben Blumenfeld revealed to me that he’s moving on to co-direct Designer Fund, a community of angels and mentors who support designer-led startups with a positive influence. Blumenfeld’s departure follows a string of other high-level post-IPO exits from Facebook, as employees… → Read More
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