Founders Fund, the firm founded by Peter Thiel and other PayPal executives, famously declared that it wants to back companies with big, ambitious visions (not just dinky web startups). And that description certainly fits Hampton Creek Foods, a startup that wants to move the world from animal-based foods by creating alternatives that are genuinely tastier, healthier, and cheaper.
Founder and CEO… → Read More
BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in what is a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPal Mafia. → Read More
Leap Motion is announcing today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald told me that the company is still planning to ship its gesture-based controller sometime during the first quarter of this year, and he’s also announcing a partnership with Asus that should help get Leap Motion into the hands of consumers.
This is just one of the first in a… → Read More
Startup biotech company Transcriptic has raised $1.2 million in a seed funding round from a wide group of investors led by Google Ventures and FF Angel (Founders Fund‘s seed stage arm), and private investors Mark Cuban and Naval Ravikant. Notably, more than 60 accredited investors contributed $150,000 through a partnership between investment platforms AngelList and SecondMarket, which Transcriptic… → Read More
Bruce Gibney, the Founders Fund partner who criss-crossed the country raising its fourth fund of $625 million, has left the firm, multiple industry sources confirm. Details of why he departed are unavailable at this time, but we understand he’ll be going to work at a holding company or a portfolio company. Gibney championed the Founders Fund philosophy that startups should change the world, not… → Read More
Yes, the nine-figure exits and even acquihire stories certainly do seem glorious in the TechCrunch headlines every day. But what do founders actually walk away with?
It’s often a very different picture when dilution, taxes and retention are factored in.
Founders Fund, the irreverent venture firm from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Sean Parker, is shedding light on how term sheets… → Read More
It doesn’t matter if you have one million Facebook fans if they never see your news feed posts. That’s why SV Angel, Founders Fund Angel, and more have backed a $1 million Series A for news feed optimization service Booshaka, which is also launching a big product update today.
The startup helps businesses identify their most active fans — especially the 10% generating 90% of the engagement … → Read More
Practice Fusion is the frontrunner in the fevered race to become the electronic medical record platform, and today it finished raising a $34 million Series C led by hedge fund Artis Ventures to make sure it wins and lead it towards an IPO. Practice Fusion’s valuation is now around a half a billion dollars, it tells me. Startups trying to compete? “We’re squashing them” founder and CEO Ryan… → Read More
Ringadoc lets you pay a flat fee to instantly talk to a real doctor at any hour of the day, and its big vision to be “the frontline of primary care” has landed it a $750,000 seed round led by FF Angel.
So if its 2am and you’ve got some weird rash, you can call Ringadoc’s toll-free number, record a quick description of your condition, and get matched with a doctor who’ll give you medical… → Read More
Faster than you can say “Can I borrow your copy of ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People,’” it’s tech conference season again. There hasn’t been a week during the month of May where I haven’t attended a tech conference or traveled to something tech conference-related. And judging by Techmeme’s events calendar the state of affairs only gets worse as we get deeper into summer.
Between Disrupt… → Read More
OpenTable for hair stylists and other salon professionals StyleSeat is announcing a raise of $775K this morning, from enviable angel investors Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade, Founders Fund (!) and actress Sophia Bush.
The round will be added on to the company’s previous $700K from another Valley “Who’s Who?” list of investors including Jeff Clavier, Chris Sacca Dave Morin, … → Read More
What do you do if you’ve got $625 million lying around and the ambitious goal of propelling the world faster towards the future? Founders Fund, which has invested in world-tilting companies like Facebook and Palantir, is putting some of its most recent raise towards an especially unorthodox sort of conference. → Read More
Some call them wackaloons, others visionaries, however any way you slice them the Founders Fund – consisting of Partners Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Derik Pridmore, Lauren Gross, Bruce Gibney, Sean Parker, Toby Prosky and others — is definitely an unconventional lot. → Read More
Want to predict what your personal health will look like tomorrow, or 10 years from now? Well, look no further than 100Plus a new stealthy health startup founded by Chris Hogg, a healthcare and health data research specialist and Ryan Howard the Founder and CEO of free EMR service, Practice Fusion.
Essentially, 100Plus is a personalized health prediction platform that uses data analytics and… → Read More
Quantitative analysis startup Quid is getting a major vote of confidence and $10 million in a seed round from a raft of serious investors. Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Endeavour Vision, Infocomm Investments, and Korean investor Charles Lho all invested in the series C financing. (Founders Fund and Lho were already investors. Max… → Read More
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel… → Read More
Audience measurement company Quantcast has raised $27.5 million in a third round led by Cisco Systems and joined by Polaris Venture Partners. Other previous investors, namely The Founders Fund and Revolution Ventures also participated. The Series C round brings the total of capital injected into the analytics company to a healthy $53.2 million.
In the announcement, Quantcast says the extra… → Read More
Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned.
Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50… → Read More
PayPal co-founder and Founders Fund Managing Partner Luke Nosek is tackling a new field: DNA sequencing. Nosek sent out an email (which we’ve pasted below) saying that he has joined Halcyon Molecular, a human genome sequencing firm, as founding president.
According to the email, Halcyon will sequence complete human genomes in less than ten minutes and for less than $100. This is significant drop… → 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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