Data center automation is a hulking $14 billion segment of the enterprise IT industry dominated by hulking giants like IBM, HP (through its $1.6 billion Opsware acquisition), BMC (through its $800 million BladeLogic acquisition in 2008), and VMWare. Companies often have thousands of servers, both physical and virtual, that need to be managed, and on top of that they are trying to keep track of virtual machines on Amazon’s EC2 or Rackspace. A new enterprise startup called ScaleXtreme is tooling up to attack IT systems management from the cloud.
It is backed by Accel Partners, which took its entire $2.5 million series A round last August, and its two co-founders have some serious enterprise startup chops. CTO Balaji Srinivasa was the principal product architect for BladeLogic before it was sold to BMC. CEO Nand Mulchandani founded and sold several enterprise startups in the past (Oblix to Oracle, Determina to VMWare), and was also the CEO of OpenDNS and an EIR at Accel. → Read More
Andy Dunn is part Indian and part European. He’s tall and slender, but he has surprisingly meaty thighs. As a result, he could never find pants that fit well. European cut pants were too tight but when he tried to wear American cut pants he felt like he was swimming in billowing fabric. And if he spent all day shopping to find great pants, he didn’t feel great afterwards. “If I spent a Saturday shopping, I felt like I misspent my time as a man,” he says.
So while at Stanford Business School he and Brian Spaly started Bonobos- a company that makes pants that fit. In their first year they sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in pants, mostly to classmates out of the trunk of their cars. There was another sign of success: Girls in bars starting grabbing Dunn’s butt for the first time. As a single guy in his early 20s, that was an important data point. → Read More
In the venture business being ahead of your time can be almost as bad as being late to a market. But the other great thing about the venture business is there are exceptions to every rule. Craig Donato is hoping that Oodle is the exception to that one. He’s spent more than ten years building a social classified company, powering the marketplaces for Oodle.com, MySpace and Facebook and growing to more than 14 million unique users. It’s backed by some of the smartest investors on the Web like Reid Hoffman and David Sze from Greylock, who both invested in Facebook and LinkedIn so they know a thing or two about the social graph.
Now one of Facebook’s other hot venture capital investors, Accel Partners, has funded Yardsellr which claims it’ll be the “eBay of Facebook;” meanwhile Groupon’s runaway success has made everyone reevaluate social shopping. So what does all that mean for Oodle?
For one thing, the company isn’t slowing down. → Read More
In 2005 Accel Partners closed its $440 million Accel 9 Fund. That fund may not go down in history as the most profitable venture fund ever, but it will certainly be one to remember. Why? Facebook, for the most part. It is a stunning turnaround for a firm that many whispered was pretty much done earlier in the decade.
In 2005 Accel invested a small part of that fund – just $12.7 million – in Facebook. In exchange they got 11% of the company, and a lot of derision around Silicon Valley for paying such a ridiculously high valuation for the fledgling startup.
Fast forward to today, though, and no one’s laughing any more. The firm sold part of that investment, less than 20%, at a $35 billion valuation. That brought in half a billion dollars or so in cash, paying back the entire capital base of the fund in one transaction. → Read More
Most of the apps being developed for Android phones are consumer apps. Yet enterprise apps could be much more lucrative. One startup focusing on enterprise apps for Android is 3LM, a company so stealth that it’s Website is nothing more than a Google Sites landing page with nothing on it but the words “Coming Soon.” The top search result for 3LM links to this question on Quora, which remained unanswered until now.
I’ve been digging around, and found out a little bit about 3LM. It raised a $1.5 million seed round in July from Accel Partners and other investors. The company was founded by Tom Moss and Gaurav Mathur, both ex-Googlers who used to work on the Android team. Moss was in charge of business development for Android, striking many of the deals with handset manufacturers and carriers. Guarav was on the Android engineering team. → Read More
When you want to hang out with your friends online, you go to Facebook. When you want to look for a job, you go to LinkedIn. Well, maybe not for long. BranchOut, a startup that is essentially building a LinkedIn for Facebook, raised $6 million in a series A round. Several news sites reported the funding yesterday when the SEC filing came out, but other than Accel Partners, none of the investors were known. Here they are:
In addition to Accel, which led the round (partner Kevin Efrusy sits on the board), the other two VCs were Mike Maples of Floodgate and Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners. But the round also attracted a lot of high-profile super angels, including Napster founder Shawn Fanning, former Facebook platform manager Dave Morin (Fanning and Morin are now co-founders of Path), Bebo founder Michael Birch, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, Tickle founder James Currier, Blippy founder Philip Kaplan, Googler Ben Ling, Naval Ravikant, and Josh Elman (former Facebook, now Twitter). → Read More
“So ResearchGATE is Facebook for Scientists?” I asked ex-Facebook exec, current Benchmark Capital general partner and new ResearchGATE investor Matt Cohler. “I bristle at that characterization,” he responded telling me that doesn’t adequately describe the company.
Either way he’s invested in the Berlin based startup, along with Accel Partners, Simon Levene, Michael Birch, Joachim Schoss, Martin Sinner, Ulrich Essmann, Christian Vollmann and Rolf Christof Dienst. Cohler, Levene and Schoss also join the company’s board of directors. Oddly the company won’t disclose the size of the round, other than to say it’s a typical series A round, which implies $5 million or so.
We first wrote about ResearchGate in May, when Leena Rao called it, ahem, LinkedIn for scientists (I know, but context is always nice): → Read More
Crafty commerce site Etsy just raised another $20 million in its fifth venture round (that would be the Series E). Index Ventures is the new investor leading the round, with partner Danny Rimer getting an observer’s seat on the board. (The board is made up of founder Rob Kalin, Caterina Fake, Accel partner Jim Breyer and Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson). Previous investors Accel and Hubert Burda Media put in some money as well in this round.
The round gives Etsy a pre-money valuation of just under $300 million, about triple the valuation it got during its last, $27 million round in January, 2008. Most of the shares sold—nearly $14 million of the $20 million—were secondary shares held by some of the early investors. But unlike other rounds we’ve seen lately, this wasn’t a liquidity event for founders. Kalin says he did not sell any shares, nor did any employees. → Read More
It is not often that a company’s first round of venture funding comes in at $60 million and eight years after it was founded with $10,000 worth of credit card debt. But Atlassian, which was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2002, is taking its first venture money today from Accel Partners. The company pulled in $59 million in revenues in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, and has been “profitable from Year One,” says co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon.
The money will be used to give some liquidity to the founders and employees, expand its product portfolio, and possibly acquire other startups. n order to get a return on its minority stake, Accel is expecting Atlassian to one day have a very successful IPO. But he is in no rush. Wong thinks that once the company passes $100 million in revenue, it will be time to start thinking of an IPO. If revenues continue to grow 30 percent a year, that will be only a few years away. → Read More
It is not often that a company’s first round of venture funding comes in at $60 million and eight years after it was founded with $10,000 worth of credit card debt. But Atlassian, which was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2002, is taking its first venture money today from Accel Partners. The company pulled in $59 million in revenues in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, and has been “profitable from Year One,” says co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon.
The money will be used to give some liquidity to the founders and employees, expand its product portfolio, and possibly acquire other startups. In order to get a return on its minority stake, Accel is expecting Atlassian to one day have a very successful IPO. → Read More
Application store company GetJar this morning announced it has secured $11 million in a Series B funding round led by previous backer Accel Partners, report PaidContent and others.
The company says it plans to use the funding to bolster its consumer-facing sites as well as its professional solutions geared towards app developers and publishers. → Read More
Application store company GetJar this morning announced it has secured $11 million in a Series B funding round led by previous backer Accel Partners, report PaidContent and others.
The company says it plans to use the funding to bolster its consumer-facing sites as well as its professional solutions geared towards app developers and publishers. → Read More
Booyah is the not-so-little location based engine that could. The company behind MyTown has raised $20 million in new funding from a group of investors led by Accel (current investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DAG Ventures, also participated in this round). Accel’s Jim Breyer, a board member of Wal-Mart, Dell and Facebook, will join Booyah’s board. (According to a source close to the deal, the valuation was sizable but definitely under $120 million)
The company has now raised $29.5 million since 2008 and MyTown has more than 2.1 million users, according to CEO Keith Lee. While fellow location based service, Foursquare, has yet to reach that milestone, Booyah is preparing for serious acceleration. Lee says Booyah will hit 6 million users by the end of this summer across MyTown and its future products. Lee was not ready to outline Booyah’s pipeline (expect some major announcements in the next few weeks) but he gave us new clues on his expansion plans, revenues and how he plans to transform the “check-in.” → Read More
Online educational technology startup Knewton has completed a $12.5 million round of funding led by New York City-based VC firm FirstMark Capital, after securing a $6 million Series B round of financing a little over a year ago.
Returning investors include Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and angel investor Reid Hoffman, who are bringing the total of capital injected into the company to just south of $20 million with this third round. → Read More
[UK] Lovefilm co-founder and ex-CEO Adam Valkin has joined VC firm Accel in London as a partner. Most recently Valkin was head of digital and new business at Endemol Group, and prior to that he spent nine years as an investor at Arts Alliance Advisors where he invested in and managed portfolio companies in Europe and Israel.
Accel Partners is focused on investing in early stage technology companies in the areas of consumer internet, enterprise software, networking and mobile. It has offices in Palo Alto, London, Bangalore and China (via the IDG-Accel Partnership). → Read More
Israeli genealogy site MyHeritage has completed its third acquisition, buying Germany’s OSN. OSN operates seven genealogy sites including Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland and Dynastree.com in the US. It was launched in 2007 just after LA-based Geni and, at first, it was just your typical German clone. But it added features and grew fast in older European markets like Germany and Poland, and even emerging markets like Brazil. In a clone-rarity, OSN grew twice as fast as Geni in the early days according to TechCrunch.
The merger gives MyHeritage a lot of new features and a whopping combined 540 million profiles, 47 million active users and 13 million family trees. The companies have been quietly merging the sites together for the last few weeks, and all of OSN’s information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of about thirty minutes ago. → Read More
The way venture capital firms are structured makes it almost impossible for outsiders to see what’s really going on inside those 1970s lodge-like Sand Hill Road offices. It’s an industry perfectly structured for sweeping problems under the rug, and as its fundamentals have declined over the last decade, that’s just what it’s been doing. But those big, lumpy problems are getting harder and harder to hide. Aside from rumors, it’s hard to know exactly who couldn’t raise a new fund in 2009, but we know the numbers were down precipitously. And slow economic recovery aside, it’s not going to get easier in 2010.
Limited partners, the institutions that invest in venture funds, are finally accepting what almost every VC I know has been saying for a decade: There’s too much money in the industry and it’s killing the kind of early stage investing the asset class was founded on. And that’s killing returns.
But just as we’re finally starting to see limited partners make the hard decisions to throttle back investments in private equity, so too are some VCs grappling with their own hard decision: Stick with a broken asset class and try to fix it or just leave and start anew. → Read More
Private online shopping clubs are springing up like mushrooms all around the world in light of the successes companies like Vente Privée has been seeing, and venture capital firms are increasingly starting to invest in companies who are bringing the concept to specific niches or introducing the private online sales model to interesting geographical markets.
In the latter category falls Russian KupiVIP.ru, which has just raised a monster round of $20 million in venture funding led by Accel Partners and joined by prior investors Mangrove Capital Partners, ARLAN, Direct Group and angel Oliver Jung. → Read More
Private online shopping clubs are springing up like mushrooms all around the world in light of the successes companies like Vente Privée has been seeing, and venture capital firms are increasingly starting to invest in companies who are bringing the concept to specific niches or introducing the private online sales model to interesting geographical markets.
In the latter category falls Russian KupiVIP.ru, which has just raised a monster round of $20 million in venture funding led by Accel Partners and joined by prior investors Mangrove Capital Partners, ARLAN, Direct Group and angel Oliver Jung. → Read More
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