CircleUp, a startup that connects investors with retail and consumer companies that wouldn’t attract traditional venture funding, has raised a $7.5 million Series A.
The round was led by Union Square Ventures. New backer Google Ventures also participated, as did previous investors Rose Park Advisors, Maveron, and David Topper. Union Square’s Andy Weissman is joining the CircleUp board, while… → Read More
After 19 months of working with our founder, Michael Arrington, on setting up CrunchFund, MG Siegler has moved on to a similar role at a firm that continues to make waves in the venture world, Google Ventures. In a post on his own blog today, Siegler discussed the move, saying that he had been speaking with its team and managing partner, Bill Maris, for a few months now. He called the move a… → Read More
Today, Google Ventures announced a partnership with two of the biggest technology venture capital firms in the world, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, on what they’re calling the “Glass Collective.” While this isn’t a fund, the three firms will be sharing seed investment dealflow for entrepreneurs and developers who are working on Google Glass software and hardware. → Read More
Late last year, former Googler Gabor Cselle had a problem. He’d launched a fun app called DrawChat, and it was starting to see some real usage — which would be great, except Cselle told me that DrawChat was always meant to be “a palate cleanser” and that he wanted to pursue a “billion-dollar thing.” So he auctioned off DrawChat (it was purchased by OneLouder, a division of Handmark) and got to… → Read More
Daniel Burka, who co-founded mobile incubator Milk, has joined Google Ventures as a design partner.
In a tweet earlier this morning, Burka noted that this is another chance for him to work with his Milk co-founder Kevin Rose. Before Milk, Burka was a designer at Digg and a co-founder at Pownce (Rose co-founded both). → 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
Apptentive, which offers tools to mobile app developers to solicit in-app feedback from users, has scored $1.2 million in seed funding from Founder’s Co-Op, Google Ventures, Social Leverage, Golden Venture Partners, along with some of Seattle’s leading angel investors. The startup, whose founders include alumni from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, and Greystripe, says it will use the injection of… → Read More
Adelphic Mobile, a mobile ad startup founded by executives from Quattro (which Apple acquired and turned into its iAd program), has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures.
The startup previously raised a $2 million seed round led by Matrix Partners, and the firm also contributed to the new funding. In the funding press release, Google Ventures managing partner Rich Miner… → Read More
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
You’ve heard this story before: Person sets out to find an apartment or buy their first home. Person struggles to navigate the noise of Craigslist, manage applications, impressions, notes, scheduling open house times, and find quality, searchable recommendations on apartments, houses, landlords and real estate agents. Person becomes frustrated and either moves to Canada, blogs about it, or begins… → Read More
Google is increasing the amount of money it makes available through its venture capital arm, Google Ventures — from $200 million per year to $300 million, according to Reuters. The news agency notes this will push Google Ventures into the “top echelon of corporate venture-capital funds”, putting it on the same footing as more established corporate VC funds like Intel Capital. → Read More
It seems like there are an infinite number of marketing tools competing for local businesses’ attention nowadays. An AngelPad-incubated startup called LocBox helps those businesses manage their efforts in a way that’s focused on acquiring customers and driving revenue — and it just raised $5.1 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by InterWest Partners, with participation from Google… → Read More
In what it describes as another effort to make its portfolio companies better at design, Google Ventures is announcing a new Designer in Residence program.
The firm had already created a Design Studio where its startups could get help through design sprints, workshops, mentoring, and recruiting. With the new program, designers are matched with multiple companies, and they work together for… → Read More
Cozy, a startup trying to take a lot of the headache out of the landlord-tenant relationship, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.
The round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership, the venture fund by created by former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya. Other investors include Google Ventures (Kevin Rose is Google’s partner on the deal), Tim Ferriss, Jason Calacanis, and Gary… → Read More
Kevin Rose defended Google Ventures today at Disrupt SF in response to the fracas that Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham caused when, in an internal note, he accused Google Ventures of low-balling on valuations and investments. The note was then leaked by Business Insider.
“Nobody’s trying to go out and halve valuations,” Rose said unequivocally. He also made a big effort to diffuse the drama… → Read More
Egnyte has raised $16 million from Google Ventures for its cloud file storage solution. Exisiting investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Polaris also participated in the Series C round.
Egnyte provides a service that stores documents in a cloud environment with the file appearing on the desktop with shared and private folders. For instance, with Google Apps, people may use… → Read More
Today at Web 2.0, John Batelle sat down with Bill Maris and Graham Spencer of Google Ventures for a quick peek inside Google’s venture arm. For those unfamiliar, Google Ventures’ team of 43 invests up to $200 million a year and in 2011 will make upwards of 100 investments. The value proposition of Google’s venture wing is that, according to Maris, it’s highly focused on engagement with the… → Read More
Everybody seems to be bulking up on VCs today(!); Google Ventures is also adding to its roster, bring YouTube Product Manager Rick Klau to the team as Partner, Startup University.
Startup University is Google Ventures’ efforts to transfer as much knowledge and as much background information as possible to its portfolio companies.
It does this by providing educational opportunities like… → Read More
Just yesterday, we wrote that those developers waiting on a Google+ API would have to wait a while — months, even. This disappointing information came to us by way of one eager developer based on what they were told by a project manager for Google+. And that’s undoubtedly the case for most developers. But not all of them.
If you happen to be what Google considers a “Trusted Tester”, you could… → Read More
Airy Labs, a startup building mobile, tablet and browser games with an educational twist for young children, has landed $1.5 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Foundation Capital and Playdom founder Rick Thompson.
Airy Labs says it wants its social games to come with genuine learning value that parents will approve of. → Read More
Last April, one of the strongest startups from TechStars’s Demo Day in New York City was ThinkNear, which turns mobile ads into hyper-targeted daily deal offers for local merchants. The startup is officially launching later today to restaurants, spas, and hair salons in New York City.
It also raised $1.63 million in a series A, which was previously reported by Ben Popper at Betabeat. The… → Read More
Yesterday, at the MobileBeat Conference in San Francisco, Google Ventures Managing Partner and Co-founder of Android Rich Miner announced that Crittercism, a startup that provides support infrastructure for mobile apps, had raised an undisclosed seed funding round from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures, among others. GigaOM was the first to report on… → Read More
Mobile payments are coming, and there are many paths being beaten to get them to our phones. Google-backed mobile payments startup Corduro launches this week with a combined mobile wallet/payments processor for Android and the iPhone (which will be available in the respective app stores later this week).
Like Square, Corduro is primarily a way for merchants to take payments on mobile devices. … → Read More
If you’re a Google employee and you know about a stealth startup that wants funding, you can pocket a cool $10,000. The Google Ventures team announced the new program at Google’s weekly all-hands “TGIF” meeting, earlier this afternoon.
It’s pretty straightforward. If a Google employee knows about a startup that Google Ventures might be interested in, they fill out a form on an internal website. → Read More
CoolPlanetBiofuels — a company that converts grass, woodchips, and other non-food crops and farm residue into high-grade fuel — attracted a series B investment From Google Ventures, the companies revealed Thursday.
Based in Camarillo, Calif. CoolPlanet claims its biofuel products are not just net zero, but “negative carbon fuels,” because the byproducts from making and using them can… → Read More
23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, Google co-founder Sergey Brin‘s spouse, has raised $22 million+ in its third round of financing. The Series C round was led by Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, with current investors participating – including New Enterprise Associates and Google Ventures (ah, family …).
23andMe, which was founded in 2006, aims to… → Read More
Google Ventures, the VC arm of the search giant, has made an investment in popular iPhone/iPad game developer ngmoco, say multiple sources. The company, which is already profitable, took the money as part of a new round of funding — probably in the $3-5 million range. ngmoco currently has some very popular games on iOS, including ‘We Farm’, which is currently the second most popular game on the… → Read More
This morning at its Mountain View headquarters, Google held a press roundtable to share some updates about Google Ventures, the search giant’s sort-of-independent investing arm that was officially announced in April 2009. Back then, Google Ventures only consisted of two people — it’s now up to fifteen, with another ten advisors (and it has a new homepage). Leading the discussion were Google… → Read More
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