A new venture firm is launching in Silicon Alley today. VC Charlie O’Donnell, who has worked as at both First Round Capital and Union Square Ventures, is launching his own venture firm today, New York-based Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.
O’Donnell says that Brooklyn Bridge Ventures will make investments in early and seed stage technology companies in the “Greater Brooklyn Area” (which includes Manhattan and other boroughs) across a variety of information technology sectors. The fund will also be looking to lead or co-lead seed rounds. → Read More
Okay (First Round Managing Partner Josh) Kopelman, you win.
Every year VC firm First Round Capital gets creative with its holiday video. Its previous video holiday greetings have been riffs on Les Misérables, the Old Spice commercial and dancing through the worst of times.
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33Across, a provider of social targeting technology for online marketing, has landed $9 million in Series B financing in a round led by Flybridge Capital Partners with participation from Series A investors First Round Capital and QED Investors.
As part of the funding, Flybridge Capital’s Jon Karlen will join the company’s board. → Read More
New York City startup BankSimple today disclosed that it raised its first venture funding in a round led by First Round Capital, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, and Village Ventures, along with seed investors SV Angel (Ron Conway) and Nauiokas Park, and Jerry Neumann. But it did not disclose how much it raised. I’ve confirmed that the round was $2.9 million, with an additional $190,000 raised last year in convertible debt (which converted to shares with this round), for a total of $3.1 million raised. Not exactly “a big round,” but more than enough for what BankSimple is trying to do. → Read More
BillFloat, a San Francisco-based startup incubated by PayPal and Venrock, has raised $4.5 million in a Series A round led by First Round Capital, with renewed participation of PayPal and Venrock and joined by early-stage funds and angel investors such as Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Mint.com board member Mark Goines.
The company soft-launched last week with a proper website and is today for the first time presenting its value proposition to the world. In a nutshell, the company aims to help people get their bills paid in time. → Read More
When we last wrote about SafetyWeb in November, they hadn’t launched yet. Still, that didn’t stop Battery Ventures from pumping in a $750,000 angel round of funding. Now they’re about three months post-launch and investors are clearly liking what they’re seeing as the service has just raised another $8 million.
SafetyWeb is a services that allows parents to monitor their children’s activity on social networks in realtime. They scan the web for a kid’s activity online and send alerts when something notable comes up — things as mild as negative comments being said, all the way up to a person convicted of a sex crime friending a child on a network. Initially, they’re scanning the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc), but eventually the plan is to scan all sorts of things — including the fast-growing geolocation services. → Read More
Mobile video advertising startup Transpera has completed its Series C financing round, totaling $9 million. The round was led by BlackBerry Partners Fund, an independent venture capital firm that works in collaboration with Research In Motion and backs companies focused on building and selling applications, services and supporting infrastructure for mobile computing.
Existing investors Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Intel Capital and Labrador Ventures also participated.
Transpera also announced the launch of what it dubs The Attention Network, its mobile video advertising platform. → 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
The ash cloud over Europe is proving a nightmare and a boon for some startups. It’s certainly a nightmare for startup teams traveling to events, like GeeknRolla on Tuesday. (And on that note, please now follow @GeeknRolla where we will sharing information on the event and helping you get to London). But if you are in London tomorrow (Sunday) you have a rare opportunity, and it’s thanks to the ash from Iceland.
First Round Capital, are one of the lead/premier early-stage VC funds in the US. One of their managing partners, Chris Fralic (@chrisFRC) is stuck in London because of the volcanic ash’s effect on the airlines. So he’s planning to host one of First Round’s famous “Office Hours” events. This is when anyone/everyone is welcome to pop over and meet and chat with him (usually entrepreneurs wanting to pitch). This will be the Volcano Office Hours. → Read More
70% of users on the web do not speak English. Considering how many web sites and services are done entirely in English, obviously, this is a problem. Smartling thinks it has the solution. And now they have $4 million in funding to prove it.
The realtime website translation tool has raised the Series A round led by Venrock. Also participating are U.S. Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and several angels, we’re told. → Read More
PackLate.com, a new startup that aims to make it easier for people to book affordable vacation rentals online at the last minute, recently raised $685,000 in seed funding from Philadelphia-based Genacast Ventures, First Round Capital, ETF Venture Funds and angel investors.
What the fledgling company is trying to accomplish is to fill a gap in the vacation rental market by building a website where second homeowners can connect with people who are interested in renting a place at the last minute, potentially at a substantial discount (subject to market conditions). → Read More
In case it wasn’t obvious, being an entrepreneur is risky business. Even those that get investments have a relatively small likelihood of a successful exit. So early-stage investment firm First Round Capital has a plan to alleviate some of the risk: an entrepreneur’s exchange fund.
For those not aware, an exchange fund in this regard is exactly what it sounds like: company founders are given the option to give up a small piece of the stock they own in their venture in exchange for a piece of the action of the larger pool of all the First Round portfolio companies that choose to participate. Basically, this allows these entrepreneurs to diversify their own holdings without having to sell any stock. More importantly, it lowers their risk of walking away with nothing while adding an incentive to see other companies in the portfolio succeed. → Read More
One Kings Lane, an e-commerce startup that operates a private sales website dedicated to home furnishings, decor, and related products, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with First Round Capital and angel investor Reid Hoffman participating.
One Kings Lane was started by Susan Feldman and Alison Gelb Pincus, who took notice of the success of the online private sale model (see Amazon’s $3 billion interest in Vente Privée) and applied it to their passion: home furnishings and decor. → Read More
Sequoia Capital has led a second round of funding for Outright, provider of a free and drop-dead simple online bookkeeping service, investing $5 million in the fledgling company together with returning backers First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures and SoftTech VC.
Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap) launched its online bookkeeping app in public beta earlier this year after raising $2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors and the VC firms that have now joined this second financing round alongside Sequoia. → Read More
Do venture investors with the biggest and best networks end up producing the best returns? An academic paper from a few years ago by Yael Hochberg, Alexander Ljungqvist, and Yang Lu titled “Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance” (embedded at the bottom of this post) suggests that is the case. They looked at historic venture returns and found that “better-networked VC firms experience significantly better fund performance,” as measured by how many of the companies in their portfolios exited via an IPO or acquisition.
A venture firm’s network in the study was defined as being made up of all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds. The more co-investors a venture firm has, the better its network. The better its network, the better its overall returns. The correlation between the size of a venture firm’s network and its returns may have something to do with better access to deal flow, talent, advisers, potential customers, and potential exits.
If this is true, then who are the most connected venture firms and angel investors today? Vijay Dondeti, a graduate student in bioinformatics, applied the analysis in the Hochberg paper to about 2,700 investors in CrunchBase who participated in over 3,300 startup funding rounds between 2006 and 2008. He scored each investor based on how well connected they are to other investors as well as how well-connected their co-investors are to other investors. “In summary,” says Dondeti, “to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.”
So which venture investors have the best networks? → Read More
Online educational startup Knewton has raised $6 million in Series B financing from Bessemer Venture Partners and returning investors, which include VC firms Accel Partners and First Round Capital as well as several angel investors who had participated in the $2.5 million Series A round from May 2008, such as LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman and Zenbe co-founder Peter Stern.
The company says it will use the extra capital to better serve both the enterprise market (where it says demand for its adaptive learning engine is growing) and end consumers with its online test preparation services.
Read an excerpt from Erick’s earlier review after the jump, or head straight to the post from late last year to learn more about Knewton. → Read More
