Russian venture firm Troika Ventures is announcing that it has sold its share in productivity app Evernote to fellow investor Sequoia Capital. Troika Ventures was Evernote’s first institutional investor, and backed the company with $4.5 million in 2009, and participated in Evernote’s $20 million C round in 2010. Evernote has raised a total of $95.5 million in funding. The most recent round took place last year, when Sequoia and Morgenthaler Ventures put $50 million in the company.
Troika is not disclosing deal size but the firm invested back when Evernote only had 500,000 users (that number has shot up to 20 million since then). And valuation (based on sale price) is up 10 times. Just based on Troika’s $4.5 million investment in the A round, it is safe to assume they sold their stake for more than $45 million.
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It may seem strange to think of productivity app Evernote as a platform, but with 20 million users and 9,000 apps built on the client, the three and a half-year old startup is a veritable apps ecosystem. Beyond this developer ecosystem, the company released five of its own simple and unique Evernote-based apps in the past year: Hello, an app that helps you remember people, Food, and app that helps you remember important meals, Skitch, an app that lets you communicate visually, Peek, an app that utilizes the iPad cover for a novel take on tutoring, and Clearly, an app that makes content easier to read within Evernote.
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The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
Skitch, the popular photo editing Mac app acquired by Evernote in August, is now available on the iPad. The release follows the launch of the Skitch for Android app earlier this year, and is the first iOS-compatible version available. Using the new app, you can annotate just about anything – a new photo, one from your camera roll, a screenshot, a map or you can just draw on a blank canvas.
And, of course, when you’re finished with your creation, you can save the photo to Evernote for safekeeping. → Read More
Today at the Le Web conference in Paris, Evernote is debuting two new applications for iPhone and iPod touch devices. The first one is called Food, and is designed to help people easily save and ‘relive’ all of their favorite meals and food experiences.
The second app is dubbed Hello and basically wants it easier for users to remember people after meeting them, as well as recording thoughts about and experiences with those people. → Read More
Evernote is today introducing its first stand-alone product since Peek: a browser extension called Clearly that enables “distraction-free online reading”. Only available as a Chrome add-on for now, Evernote Clearly removes ads, links, navigational elements and whatnot from any block of text you’d like to read on the Web and lets you easily save it to Evernote to read later.
If that sounds a lot like the core functionality of the likes of Readability or Instapaper, you’re probably thinking in the right direction. → Read More
We caught up with Evernote’s Phil Libin after his talk at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing and delved deeper into a theme that he’s touched upon many times when describing his vision of Evernote’s future — the idea of building a hundred year old company in the age of the acqui-hire and the quick flip.
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I’ll admit it right off the bat: Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. I consider myself an actual “fan” of very few living business men, but he’s one of them.
Phil joined Sarah Lacy on stage today at Disrupt Beijing for a quick fireside chat, and, along with explaining why he plans to stay with Evernote for the long haul, offered up a bit of sage advice for the budding entrepreneurs of the world. → Read More
As we announced last week, we’ve been busy securing some of the most exciting names in China for our Disrupt Beijing conference this October including Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma and Chinese entrepreneur and angel investor Lei Jun. But it wouldn’t be a TechCrunch event without bringing a little of that Silicon Valley magic too.
In selecting people to bring to China we wanted a mix of some people who are new to the country and others who have a long experience doing business there; people who are existing successes and those who have a fast-growing, tiger-by-the-tail right now. We also wanted a few people who could speak to the culture and whimsy that makes the Valley so unique. → Read More
Today at the Evernote Trunk Conference, Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced that the company has acquired Skitch, one of the best-selling apps on the Mac App Store. The app used to cost $20 currently in the app store, but Evernote will offer it for free. “We really expect this to become a fundamental part of Evernote going forward.”
Also announced at the conference was the launch of Skitch for Android, which is available for free today. Versions for the iPhone and iPhone are already in the works. “We will put Skitch everywhere,” Libin said. → Read More
A couple of weeks ago we wrote about Evernote’s new rumored venture round. It was a big one, said one source, putting them in the billion dollar valuation club.
Today they’ll officially announce that deal – $50 million in new funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. And while they didn’t quite get that billion dollar valuation people were whispering about, the company is still doing quite nicely, thank you. → Read More
Evernote is as hot as any startup in Silicon Valley, even if they don’t get quite as much press. Last year they raised $20 million from Sequoia Capital, on top of the $25 million they’d already raised.
The company is profitable with 70 employees, and has revenue of more than $1 million per month. Profitable enough, in fact, that it’s rumored they haven’t spent a penny of that $20 million venture round.
Even so, they’re close to raising a new round, we’ve heard from multiple sources. It’ll likely be in the $50 million range, and Sequoia Capital will once again lead. Our guess (and this is only a guess) is that at least some of this new round will be secondary, allowing the founders to take money off the table. → Read More
Evernote, the record-everything app for smartphones and desktops, is launching on Windows Phone 7 today. Built specifically for Windows Phone 7, this is Evernote’s 14th supported platform and looks as solid as every other Evernote release. The home panorama leverages Windows Phone 7 panels for notes, notebooks, tags, and recent notes. At the bottom of each screen is a context-aware Application Bar providing access to additional features. If you’re a Windows Phone 7 user, don’t delay: Evernote is free! → Read More
One of the best parts of the iPad 2 is the colorful, magical smart cover that comes as a peripheral. Lift the cover and your iPad turns on, drop it and it goes to sleep. It’s kind of addictive. But what if someone actually built an app around that fidgety behavior?
Well, Evernote just did. It’s called Evernote Peek, a free app for the iPad 2 that is designed around the smart cover. It is the first smart cover app, and it may even make you smarter. → Read More
May 2009: Evernote hits 1 million registered users
December 2009: Evernote hits 2 million registered users
May 2010: Evernote hits 3 million registered users
August 2010: Evernote hits 4 million registered users
November 2010: Evernote hits 5 million registered users
Today (6 June 2011): Evernote hits 10 million registered users → Read More
Evernote, once described to me as “my remote brain”, is releasing a new Google Chrome extension today to make clipping and saving webpages easier than ever. It’s optimized to grab the body of any blog post on any site. It automatically recognizes the structure of any post, and “captures it beautifully without any need for the user to select anything.” → Read More
Evernote for iPhone launched with the Apple App Store, and the app has ungone a number of evolutionary steps in the years since. Today Evernote is unveiling version 4 of their iPhone app and the changes, while maybe not revolutionary, are certainly substantial. The home screen, for example, is completely revamped to show snippets of notes making the app useful as soon as you launch it. → Read More
We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.
—email attributed to Steve Jobs
There’s been so much confusion in the wake of Apple’s new subscription billing policy for apps that Steve Jobs felt the need to issue the proclamation above via his preferred method, a personal email. (It’s his version of the burning bush). While Apple’s new policy clearly states that all subscriptions for purchasing “content, functionality, or services in an app” must go through Apple, Jobs suggests that Apple will make a distinction between “publishing apps” and “SaaS apps” (software as a service). Apps like Salesforce or Evernote, for example, operate under an SaaS subscription, and are available to the same subscribers on the Web and other devices besides the iPhone.
Apple appears to be backtracking here. As I suggested on Friday in a Fly or Die video with Rhapsody’s president Jon irwin (who offers a music streaming subscription app on the iPhone), Apple’s initial broad-stroke rule may very well have been a trial balloon. The subscription billing system was obviously designed with media apps in mind, particularly publications. Maybe Apple won’t apply it to other types of subscription apps. Indeed, this latest email from Jobs appears to signal that Apple is adjusting to the market reaction. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, which is currently the No. 5 app in the Mac App Store. It also didn’t hurt that the app has been prominently featured by Apple.
We just finished our first week on the Mac App Store and it might have been the most important week in Evernote’s history. Here’s how it went and what we learned:
Over the past year, about 70% of Evernote’s new users came from mobile app stores, mostly iOS and Android. This led us to the understandable conclusion that mobile was the crucial thing that made a platform attractive to independent developers. Last week made us realize that the reality is a little bit more nuanced. It isn’t mobile that’s overwhelmingly important, it’s the app store. Until a week ago, all the good app stores just happened to be on mobile devices, but someone with a shiny new Macbook is just as eager to get the best apps as someone with a shiny new iPhone. → Read More
