Founded by former employees of travel booking site Hotwire.com, Limos.com, an online marketplace for limo and car services, this morning announced that they’ve secured $10 million in financing from Austin Ventures. The new Austin Ventures investment adds to the company’s original funding of $5 million from Canal Partners.
Coinciding with the funding announcement, the company has released a new corporate travel management product, Limos.com for Business. → Read More
Today, an SEC filing revealed that Solar Power Technologies raised $6.08 million for technology that helps wirelessly measure, manage and optimize the performance of large, solar photovoltaic power systems. Investors included Austin Ventures and Oxantium Ventures, the filing said.
The company’s website claims its core technology — the Clarity optimization and monitoring system — enables commercial solar arrays to harvest of 15 to 20% more total power (over a 20 year lifespan) than they would otherwise. → Read More
You can always count on Hunch founder Chris Dixon for interesting Tweets. He just sent out this one:
turns out patent trolling might not pay. Intellectual Ventures has negative 78% return.http://bit.ly/bSfamC
The link is a PDf download of a document from the University of Texas Management Company listing all of its private investments in venture funds and private equity funds, along with their internal rates of return (IRR). One of the worst performers is Intellectual Ventures, the patent portfolio fund started by Nathan Myrhvold that has a reputation for patent extortion. One of its funds, the Invention Development Fund I, has a negative 73 percent IRR (Dixon mistakenly thought it was negative 78 percent, but close enough). Another fund, the Invention Investment Fund II, has a negative 10 percent return. The two funds combined are delivering a negative 36.66 percent IRR for the University of Texas. → Read More
Spredfast, recently a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has raised $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. This marks the first financing secured by the startup, which markets a social media management platform for businesses. → Read More
The third quarter saw the number of U.S. venture funds raising new cash decline by 29 percent to 55 funds, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters. That compares to 78 new funds a year ago and 76 new funds in the second quarter of 2008. And 45 of that 55 were follow-on funds rather than new funds.
Each of those funds, though, raised a lot more money on average. The total raised for the third quarter was $8.1 billion, down only 6 percent from the third quarter of 2007 (but down 12 percent from the $9.2 billion raised in the previous quarter of this year).
And remember, all of this was before the financial meltdown of the past two weeks that had alarm bells ringing at every VC firm. → Read More
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