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
GrabCAD, which offers an online community and cloud-based collaboration tools for those involved in designing and building physical products, has raised an $8.15 million series B round led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from new investor David Sacks (co-founder of Yammer and former chief operating officer of PayPal), and existing investors Atlas Venture, NextView Ventures, and … → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 30-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He’s ex-Electronic Arts as well as the founder of Commonred.
A few years ago I asked a successful entrepreneur for advice on what I should do with my latest product idea. His reply was simple. “Trust your gut. What does your… → Read More
Veteran VC firm Charles River Ventures is announcing its 15th fund today, increasing its fund size from $325 million in its last raise to $375 million in its latest “heavily oversubscribed” round.
Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary tells me that the firm, which has 42 years of investment behind it, is looking to go in early and at a high percentage in “change the world” companies. It… → Read More
First it was distribution. Then it was monetization. The next generation of Web entrepreneurs’ make-or-break challenge will be localization and a big part of that is language.
The Web is so powerful today and the valuations are so high, because it is a billion-person-audience and growing. But more of them speak Chinese than English, and critical masses are developing around Spanish, Portuguese… → Read More
Heartland Robotics today announced that it raised $20 million in a series B venture round led by Highland Capital Partners. Other investors include Sigma Partners and existing investors Bezos Expeditions and Charles River Ventures. The Boston-based company previously raised $7 million in August, 2009.
The founder of Heartland Robotics is Rodney Brooks, a former AI reseracher at MIT and one of… → Read More
My guest on Ask A VC this week is Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures. He’s also a professional kiteboarder. You may ask: Why would a guy who has been a VC since 1991 need kiteboarding sponsors? That was my first question.
Generally in this video we talk about how the venture business has changed during the last 20 years and how kiteboarding has changed over the last 10 years. There are a lot of… → Read More
How many mailing lists are you on that fill your email inbox every day? Figuring out how to unsubscribe from all of them can be a pain. From that frustration was born Unsubscribe.com, an LA-based startup that just closed a $2.1 million Series A financing. Charles River Ventures led the round. Other investors include Ron Conway’s SV Angel, First Round Capital, DFJ Frontier as well as angel… → Read More
Energy storage system producer 24M Technologies spun out of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems today to become a separate venture.
The company raised a $10 million Series A funding round from Charles River Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. → Read More
Wireless technologies developer SpiderCloud Wireless has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Opus Capital. Shasta Ventures and existing Series A investors Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to a healthy $40 million.
SpiderCloud Wireless provides the industry’s first Enterprise Radio Access Network… → Read More
People love Blippy. Well, they love to talk about Blippy. And complain about it. And argue that it’s the end of privacy as we know it. But some people do actually love Blippy, the service which lets you share you credit card transactions with the world. In fact, a number of investors do, as the service has just raised a $1.6 million round of funding.
The large angel round was led by Charles River… → Read More
Remember Philip Kaplan, better known as “Pud,” the guy who created FuckedCompany at the tail-end of the first Internet bubble? Yeah, him. He just joined Charles River Ventures this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. The EIR position is usually where venture firms park executives they want to work with but who don’t yet have a company. EIRs get to see a lot of deal flow, work with the… → Read More
Zendesk, a Danish startup that markets a nifty cloud-based, on-demand help desk system, has raised an undisclosed Series A round of funding from Charles River Ventures which it intends to use to expand its customer base worldwide, starting with the opening of new headquarters in Boston. That move makes sense because apparently over 70% of its customers are currently located in the United… → Read More
Last week, Elon Musk had a candid conversation with VC George Zachary at the Charles River Ventures CEO Summit. One of the most interesting things Musk talked about was his desire to see electric airplanes in the future—and perhaps even one day help develop these green, energy efficient planes himself.
It makes sense—Musk has an interest in aeronautics (he founded Space Exploration… → Read More
The first quarter of 2009 wasn’t just a dry one for venture-backed exits, very little money went into the coffers of VC funds as well. According to data released today by the National Venture Capital Association, only 40 funds raised new money during the quarter, down from 71 the year before (1Q08) and 47 the previous quarter (4Q08). Out of the 40 funds, only three were brand new
In dollar… → Read More
At a time when limited partners are being stingy with their venture dollars, Charles River Ventures just announced it raised $320 million for its fourteenth fund, Charles River Partnership XIV. (The last fund it raised was $285 million in April, 2007). With the new fund, the firm now manages $2.1 billion.
Raising any capital in this environment is an achievement in itself. But CRV has been able… → Read More
Fifty thousand dollars will only go so far. As the winner of last year’s TechCrunch50, that’s how much workgroup micro-messaging service Yammer received in prize money. But Yammer has now raised a $5 million series A financing from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures, according to founder David Sacks. Yammer is a spinoff from genealogy site Geni, which also just received another $5… → Read More
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