Silver Tail Systems, a provider of predictive analytics for detection and prevention of online fraud, this morning announced that it has secured an additional round of funding from Citi Ventures, a unit of Citigroup.
This investment, the size of which was not disclosed, is part of a previously announced $20 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (closed in June). → Read More
A group of former Mercury Interactive executives are behind a new Israeli-based startup called Capriza, which is still in stealth mode. But the company is in the process of raising $10.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz and another investor to bring corporate IT onto smartphones and tablets (with $2.5 million of that still outstanding).
The founding team consists of CEO Yuval Scarlat (former… → Read More
My, what big eyes you have Jawbone! It hasn’t even been four months since the consumer electronics company closed its $49 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and already it’s making funding news again.
Jawbone has raised another round of growth funding, this time it’s $70 million from a group of unnamed investors advised by JP Morgan Asset Management. This brings the total raised so far… → Read More
Andreessen Horowitz is announcing today that economist, former US Treasury Secretary and former President of Harvard Larry Summers is joining the firm as a special advisor.
Beyond his well known academic and political credentials, Marc Andreessen was quick to point out that Summers has nerd cred too: He was admitted at MIT at the age of 16 to study physics. → Read More
Foursquare has just closed one of the most secretive rounds of venture capital TechCrunch has seen.
The company is raising $50 million, and all of it will go towards building out the company, no secondary sales here. The valuation had been rumored to be as high as $1 billion, but our sources say it settled out at $550 million pre-money, $600 million post. → Read More
Love photos but utterly bored by wave after wave of iPhone photo sharing apps? Lytro is the company for you. This is also the company for anyone who thinks Silicon Valley has fallen into a rut of innovation-less posing. And it’s the company for anyone who complains that the Valley is more about media and marketing than brass-knuckles, hardcore technology. This is the company that jaded, cranky… → Read More
According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.
That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and… → Read More
I guess $1 billion under management just wasn’t enough. Andreessen Horowitz has just announced a new growth fund of $200 million. The fund with co-invest alongside the firm’s most recent $650 million fund, providing more capital for the kinds of late stage deals that have been raging in the Valley of late. (Check out our three part series on the trend here, here and here.)
That “co-invest” part… → Read More
“It’s fucked up when your mind’s playin’ tricks on ya” —The Geto Boys
By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is part two in an in-depth series exploring the ramifications of the explosion of late stage capital being raised by the Valley’s elite venture firms. For part one, go here.
In the mid-2000s when nearly every top venture capital firm was expanding to India and China, Benchmark Capital did not share its peers’ worldly ambitions. In fact, while the firm retained its Israel fund… → Read More
Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz continues its expansion today, bringing on former Veritas and Citrix Exec Peter Levine as a venture partner. Most recently, the firm added entrepreneur Scott Weiss as general partner. With Levine, Andreessen Horowitz, which is just shy of $1 billion under management, gets a seasoned executive in the areas of virtualization and data storage.
As a venture partner… → Read More
In Silicon Valley it’s not just who you invest in that matters– it’s also when you invest in them. The earlier the investment, the riskier the bet. But the more jawdropping the returns if the company hits it big. It’s so lopsided, that typically just 5% of those unsure early bets create some 95% of the entire venture industry’s returns. Miss one of them, and it haunts you for years. Snag it, and… → Read More
Jawbone, the company most known for its headsets seen on the terminally hip kid to your left, has raised $49 million from Andreessen Horowitz to continue to build new devices to take advantage of the smart phone/mobile Web boom. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz invested in Jawbone as angel investors back in 2007, and CEO Hosain Rahman credits Horowitz as one of his most important mentors. Finally… → Read More
This week’s Ask a VC has a different twist, since we had a different kind of VC on the show, John O’Farrell Andressen Horowitz’s guru on business development and deal-making.
The questions you asked O’Farrell are below. As usual, feel free to watch the whole show or use the links to skip ahead to your question.
“Have you ever invested in a single employee startup? Would this be a situation… → Read More
When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched their venture firm, they talked a good game about things being different; about having a smorgasbord of partners skilled in different areas that could tag in-and-out of portfolio companies as appropriate. And a lot of that sounded like the usual “value-add” venture capital spiel.
But two funds into the firm’s life, that vision is starting to take… → Read More
Ben Horowitz is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of Opsware.
Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called “the consumerization of the enterprise.” They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will “consume”… → Read More
Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called “the consumerization of the enterprise.” They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will “consume” enterprise products proactively like consumers pick up Twitter.
But when I talk to the most successful… → Read More
It’s a chaotic week for Instagram. First it becomes the darling of the app world, then its investors Andreessen-Horowitz decide to double-down on competitor Picplz instead, effectively making the company an orphan. Of course it’s one sexy little orphan half of Sand Hill Road would just love to adopt. Cue swirling rumors that Instagram is in the process of putting together a series A and even… → Read More
It’s a strict rule in the venture business that you don’t fund two direct competitors, for obvious reasons. There’s a massive difference between the valuation of the number one player in the market (think YouTube) and the number two player (think any of the other hundreds of online video companies launched in the mid-2000s). It’s in a venture capitalist’s best interest to make his presence on a… → Read More
Just 15 months after Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz officially jumped to the venture capital darkside with the close of a $300 million fund, Andreessen Horowitz is announcing the close of a second $650 million fund. In less than two years, the firm has rocketed up to a whopping $950 million under management, an investment staff of 18 people and a portfolio that includes everything from Skype to… → Read More
Apptio, a Bellevue, Washington-based provider of SaaS-delivered Technology Business Management solutions this morning announced that it has closed a $16.5 million Series C round – the company has now raised up to $37.5 million in venture capital.
The financing round, which the company says was oversubscribed, was led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from all current investors including … → Read More
Long before he was part of the powerful investing duo behind venture fund Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz was a co-founder and CEO of Opsware (previously known as Loudcloud) a pioneer for cloud computing companies (Opsware was eventually sold to HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion). He’s considered an expert in the cloud so his first investment in a cloud computing startup is something to pay attention… → Read More
Foursquare, the geo-mobile startup everybody tried to invest in or buy, now has officially closed its Series B funding round. The “wire transfer heard ’round the world,” as board member Bryce Roberts puts it, was for $20 million, giving the company a $95 million pre-money valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, as previously reported, with existing investors Union Square Ventures and… → Read More
The long dalliance between investors and Foursquare appears to almost be consummated. According to a Tweet by Foursquare board member Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, about an hour ago he was “approving the wire transfer heard ’round the world.”
That would be the wire transfer from the new group of investors led by Andreessen Horowiitz, as we reported a few weeks ago. Despite being… → Read More
Andreessen Horowitz celebrates its first birthday with a number of new hires, including its third general partner – John O’Farrell – who joins founding general partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. O’Farrell was most recently a vice president at Silver Spring Networks.
We covered the launch of Andreessen Horowitz a year ago here.
The company has also recently hired two partners – Margit… → Read More
A months long fundraising process for Foursquare is in its last stages, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and Andreessen Horowitz looks to be preparing to check-in to Foursquare to take an investor badge.
The company has delayed committing to new venture capital as they considered buyout offers – negotiations went deep with both Yahoo and Facebook, and possibly Microsoft. The Yahoo discussions … → Read More
Editor’s note: When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he… → Read More
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile… → Read More
eBay has just announced that it has reached a settlement with the founders of Skype, clearing the way for the sale of the Internet communication company to a consortium formed by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Index Ventures, a historical investor in Skype, is not going to be part of that buying party after all, and its… → Read More
Getting a meeting with Marc Andreessen isn’t easy so I made sure I cornered him and shoved a camera in his face backstage at TechCrunch50 to ask him about his new life as a VC. It’s been seven weeks and one day, and so far, he says he loves it and it’s fun. Of course, as he notes, seven weeks in there’s no expectation that companies will have exited and it’s not enough time for any of them to fail… → Read More
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