How much should you pay for a used iPhone, TV, or bicycle? Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and more think you need to know, so they’ve invested $1.5 million into Priceonomics, a Y Combinator winter 2012 startup. The seed round that shall be announced later today will go towards hiring front-end developers and back-end engineers to make the site beautiful but simple and beef up its machine learning technology.
The site saw 250,000 page views in March and is still growing traffic by a brisk 65% every month. Investors see gold in possible business models built around the data Priceonomics crawls and ads shown to people about to make a purchase. Co-founder Rohin Dhar says the startup aims to beat general search engines by immediately knowing you’re looking to buy when you type in the name or maker of a laptop, appliance, camera, or stereo. → Read More
“The series A is essentially dying. If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” This is Ark co-founder Patrick Riley’s reasoning for why instead of raising a Series A round, his people search engine just locked down a jaw-droppingly massive $4.2 million seed round. Ark will use the money from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, SV Angel and more to build out its mobile and search teams, and do a big marketing push when it opens to the public.
Riley believes more founders will try to avoid early Series A rounds that often come with an investor board member attached. This will help them stay more agile and avoid having to approve pivots or other big changes through outsiders. Riley tells me, “I think the future is larger seed rounds.” → Read More
The startups that presented at Y Combinator’s Demo Day last week were remarkable in their own right, but perhaps the most striking thing was the sheer number of them.
With 66 companies and 180 founders in this season’s batch, the auditorium at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum was practically bursting with angel investors and reps from every notable venture firm last week. And that was just the latest class. Since 2005, Y Combinator has since spawned more than a dozen batches of startups including Dropbox and Airbnb. The last two classes alone have created more than 120 companies.
So it raises the question of how Y Combinator has been able to grow in size while sustaining both the quality of startups it churns out and the value it provides for founders.
Essentially, how do you scale a company that creates companies? → Read More
Google and Facebook can’t help you find which of your friends are single, or live in New York and like Radiohead, but Ark can. Today Y Combinator-backed Ark.com sails into open beta in hopes of becoming the best place on the web to do people searches. With a variety of layer-able filters, Ark lets you search through public profiles and the private data of your friends across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other networks. It’s also got filter sets for easily discovering old classmates and new business contacts.
Ark could pull searches away from Google and Facebook, disrupt dedicated sites like Classmates.com, and give us a better way to find people than broadcasting “Who do I know here that does this?” TechCrunch readers can get early access to the beta with instructions within this article. → Read More
You want the best price on things you buy second hand, but finding out how much you should pay is a hassle. Removing this friction from a lucrative part of the purchase funnel is the goal of Priceonomics. The first startup out of the winter 2012 Y Combinator batch, Priceonomics has crawled the web to compile its next-generation price guide. It launches today featuring 10 million prices on 50,000 products, and plans to expand across verticals soon. → Read More
As medical records move online, doctors are increasingly bringing laptops into the exam room to take notes, write prescriptions and more. But laptops can be cumbersome, and the iPad has emerged as a popular device for medical professionals. In fact, one out of every five doctors in a private practice own an iPad. Enter DrChrono, a Y Combinator-backed startup that produces an iPad app and SaaS for doctors.
The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process. → Read More
Remember Start Fund, the investment vehicle established by DST’s Yuri Milner (as an individual) and Ron Conway’s angel fund, SV Angel?
A couple of weeks ago, we broke the news that the fund, which is managed by SV Angel partner David Lee, made a gutsy blanket investment offer to every single one of the 40 or so Y Combinator startups in the most recent batch. → Read More
For decades, my mother and grandmother have both religiously scanned the weekly coupon books and circulars that arrive in the weekend newspaper. While clipping coupons can be tedious, grocery stores’ weekly deals can often take out a significant chunk of change of the weekly food bill. Of course, as print couponing becomes obsolete, many consumers are looking to the web for deals at their local grocery stores. Today, Y Combinator-backed AnyLeaf is launching its intelligent grocery deal aggregator to the public.
AnyLeaf scours local grocery store sites in the San Francisco Bay area and aggregates all the deals from these stores, including CVS, Lucky, Nob Hill, Raley’s, Safeway, Target, and Walgreens. You simply enter your zipcode and email address, and AnyLeaf will send you a weekly email with deals from the local grocery stores near you. → Read More
Y Combinator-backed startup ReadyForZero is announcing a $260,000 seed round of funding from a number of well-known angel investors including Steve Chen, the co-founder of YouTube; Dave McClure, Benjamin Ling, Nils Johnson, and Maneesh Arora.
Launched in private beta in September, ReadyForZero is an easy to use web-based platform to help guide consumers out of credit card debt. ReadyForZero is trying to help those consumers who are having trouble paying their debt off, as opposed to those who are already in collections or bankruptcy. Essentially the site is trying to help people be able to eventually not carry any balances month to month. The company says that in the US alone there are 100 million people with revolving balances, meaning they carry credit card debt from month to month. Combined they owe $900 billion to banks and credit card companies. → Read More
Hands across the water everyone! It appears that pulling together a combination of European and U.S. investors is creating some interesting synergies for young startups. UK-startup GroupSpaces, which recently announced new funding, has partnered with WePay, a former ycombinator startup billing itself as the “Paypal for groups”. With some deep API integration, GroupSpace users can now sign up to WePay within GroupSpaces and collect money for their groups. This gives groups a U.S. bank account with a debit card, something even PayPal doesn’t do.
Since its launch in 2007, GroupSpaces has hit 500,000 group memberships and recently secured a $1.3m investment from Index Seed Fund and leading angel investors including Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Simon Levene, Meagan Marks, Ariel Poler and Quincy Smith of CODE Advisors.
Note that it’s extremely rare for this many high-profile Silicon Valley angel investors to invest in a U.K. startup, and it appears these U.S. links are paying dividends for GroupSpaces in enabling it to set up deals with U.S. partners like WePay. Let’s have more of the same. → Read More
“Good on paper” just became “good on video” with the latest double launch from the Ycombinator crew. With Hirehive, founders Dave Albert and Nick Bergson-Shilcoc are attempting to replace at least some part of the unwieldy hiring process with browser based video questionnaires, on a web platform where applicants can submit video, text or image responses. → Read More
The Difference Engine is shaping up to be the kind of raw, Web 2.0 incubator the UK has lacked for some time.
Whereas Seedcamp tends to take more fully formed early stage startups on, The Difference Engine is closer to having a hacker mentality.
When you want to just go and build a product, this might be the kind of programme that appeals.
Word on the street is that the programme is sidling up to the TechStars programme in the US, but nothing is confirmed as yet. → Read More
There has always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet format) and hard to find in a Google search. An finding the data, and then putting the data into a format that is easy to digest can be a laborious task. Y Combinator’s Data Marketplace is hoping to change this by providing a platform where financial professionals can request data sets and then data aggregators/consultants can then find and format the appropriate data.
Founded by two former analysts at investment banks, Data Marketplace is essentially the middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users can submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format. → Read More
Qwisk, which is launching today at the Real-Time CrunchUp, is an innovative new way to add a social twist to your browser. The site, which is a product of Y Combinator-funded company Socialbrowse, connects with you with your friends on Facebook and Twitter in real-time as you browse the web. We have 500 invites exclusively for TechCrunch users. You can redeem these invites simply by clicking here.
It’s important to note that Qwisk is a browser extension, not a plug-in to a browser. On the site’s page, you sign into your Facebook and Twitter accounts via Facebook Connect and oAuth. Qwisk will then add a sidebar to your browser that will show a feed of Facebook status updates and Tweets. You can also share any link or content to Twitter and Facebook from the sidebar itself. → Read More
Y combinator’s annual startup school event was held in Berkeley last Saturday and featured a stellar lineup of speakers including the founders of Twitter, Facebook and Zappos. The founders speaking were almost universally charming and funny, even Mark Zuckerberg who I was determined to dislike (he does look around 12 though). This reinforces my belief that charm goes a long way in business.
Jason Fried of 37 Signals gave one of the talks which seemed most relevant to European startups. His business partner is actually from Copenhagen and they worked together for 2 years before meeting in person. Here’s a summary of his presentation and a chat I had with him afterwards. → Read More
Anyone who has tried to use the immensely popular ‘housing’ section of Craigslist to do some apartment hunting is well aware of its limitations: aside from breaking listings into basic neighborhoods, for the most part they lack any structure, which can make them a pain to browse through, especially when you’re trying to compare more than one apartment.
Y Combinator startup RentHop is looking to offer an alternative, featuring thousands of structured housing listings that are much easier to search though and compare.
Of course, there are plenty of other sites that offer comprehensive housing listings, so RentHop is also looking to differentiate itself by eliminating housing broker fees. For the time being RentHop is only available in New York City, largely because of the way apartment hunting is set up there. For those who aren’t familiar with the situation, most of the time when you’re looking to find an apartment in New York City, you’re forced to work through a broker who will charge a fee of 15% of your first year of rent (which works out to around $3,000 based on NYC’s average rent). → Read More
The founders of Inkling Markets, a prediction market platform and a Y Combinator alum, found that their staff needed a secure chat room every day to work together on private issues within their business but most of the collaboration apps send an email when they’re updated with a message, which while is convenient, is not necessarily secure. They also wanted an uber-simple email collaboration tool that was secure across all email clients and could be accessed from a laptop or an iPhone. The looked into Basecamp and Google Groups, but found the interface too clunky for simple email correspondence.
So they created Tgethr, a simple, easy-to-use secure, free email collaboration platform that can be used between family members or within an enterprise. All you have to do is set up a group name, i.e. “techcrunch@tgethr.com” with a distribution list of whomever you want to participate, and write to it. You can write from your own email client or from Tgethr’s interface. Tgethr will keep a private archive of everything you write on the web. You can cc: or bcc: to it, tag your correspondence, search for emails and keywords, and it’s secure with both ssl and email encryption. → Read More
While many people in the tech world only make the trek to Austin, Texas once a year for SXSW, the city has a fairly sizable startup community. Now Austin is getting its own Y Combinator-esque program, dubbed Capital Factory.
As with other similar programs, Capital Factory offers entrepreneurs a modest amount of funding in exchange for equity (the program is offering ‘up to $20,000′ in exchange for 5% of each startup). Capital Factory is also advertising ‘$20,000 in free stuff‘, which includes server usage, PR support, and legal help. But the real value from these programs comes from their associated mentors, who work with the startups to help them get on their feet, and help tap into their established networks of VCs and other entrepreneurs. → Read More
The latest venture fund to set up a separate seed financing program is Boston-based Spark Capital, a prolific investor in Internet and new media companies such as Twitter, Boxee, Tumblr, Veoh and KickApps. The initiative is dubbed Start@Spark, and is primarily geared towards startups from the Boston and New York areas.
Early-stage investments will amount up to $250,000, and will not be restricted to information technology companies but also periodically be granted to startups offering financial or educational services. Entrepreneurs who get into the program will have access to Spark’s partner network and legal counsel, and will also be prepared for a second, more formal round of funding at a later stage if progress is deemed satisfactory by the firm. You can apply here. → Read More
First we had Ning, which lets you build your own niche social network. Now we have Fliggo, which lets you build your own YouTube. Fliggo is the latest startup to come out of Y Combinator. It has been in private beta for a while, but is now open to the public.
Fliggo lets you create your own video-sharing site. It hosts and streams the videos, and provides “grandma-friendly” management tools to customize the site and monitor usage. Fliggo sItes can be private or public, and are geared towards groups, companies, or video bloggers who want more control over who can see and comment on their videos, and the ads placed against them. Fliggo takes the expense and custom-work out of building a video-hosting site. → Read More
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