Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, isn’t the first person to try to convince people to eat fewer animal products (after all, someone manufactured the Tofurky that I eat every Thanksgiving), but he’s not satisfied with what’s already out there.
“Let’s face it, a lot of vegans have low standards,” Tetrick said — and he’s a vegan himself.
His point: There are plenty of meat… → Read More
DB Networks has raised $4.5 million in Series B funding from Khosla Ventures for its database security equipment.
DB Networks has developed a security platform for real-time advanced database attack detection. → Read More
Behavioral health analytics startup Ginger.io just announced that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from seed investors True Ventures and Romulus Capital. In the funding press release, Vinod Khosla says the company is “at the forefront of data-driven technology and healthcare.” CEO Amnol Madan also noted that Khosla actually… → Read More
The legendary mentor Vinod Khosla criticized accelerators like Y Combinator who produce startups with overly slick pitches that he says garner “so much hype that they get valuations that no one who will help the team are going to pay.”
During his TechCrunch Disrupt talk, Khosla explained that the key role of early investors is not funding, but personal attention and guidance. But generating… → Read More
Computer vision/robotics company Blue River Technology announced today that it has raised a $3.1 million Series A round of funding from Khosla Ventures. Steve Blank, Ulu Ventures and Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs also participated.
Blue River is designing weed elimination robots for agriculture. No, the company’s not making marijuana crop destructobots — these machines will kill the bad… → Read More
A designer’s eye can change the world, but some don’t know how to build a company. So today, veteran Facebook designer Ben Blumenfeld revealed to me that he’s moving on to co-direct Designer Fund, a community of angels and mentors who support designer-led startups with a positive influence. Blumenfeld’s departure follows a string of other high-level post-IPO exits from Facebook, as employees… → Read More
Fragmentation isn’t just a problem reserved for mobile operating systems, it’s inherent to our online identities as well. Our digital identities exist in a loose and fragmented consortium of usernames, email addresses, scree names, social media accounts, passwords, and sitekeys. Many have tried to capture the single sign-on holy grail, and most have failed, because as much as we are inconvenienced… → Read More
Is there a future for social browser startup RockMelt? Despite attracting only a few hundred thousand active users since its much-hyped launch, the company filled with ex-Netscape rockstars and backed by former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen just managed to raise another $30 million in a B round led by Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway, Bill Campbell and… → Read More
Venture capital firm Khosla Ventures is raising $1 billion for its new fund, Khosla Ventures IV, an SEC filing reveals. From the looks of it, the new fund will be roughly the same size as the previous one (raised in September 2009).
The news comes a few weeks after former YouTube and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu left the firm after joining them less than two years earlier, to go work for the San… → Read More
Gideon Yu, the former CFO of Facebook who left two years ago to become a partner at Khosla Ventures, is leaving venture capital to become the chief strategy officer of the San Francisco 49ers. “The drama of being a venture capitalist isn’t really for me,” he tells me. But he insists, “I am absolutely not leaving tech.”
Yu will remain on the boards of Square and Meebo, and says he works one day… → Read More
Khosla Ventures likes social advertising startup MyLikes. The VC firm is leading the startup’s $5.6 million Series A financing. Lightspeed Partners also invested and Metamorphic Ventures, which participated in the all-Googler $600,000 seed round, ponied up again.
Additionally, seed investor Paul Buchheit is joining MyLike’s board of directors. Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and founder of… → Read More
Ciris Energy, Inc., a Centennial, Colorado energy startup, raised a series B investment of $23.9 million a recent SEC-filing revealed. Khosla Ventures led the round with earlier Ciris backers Braemar Energy Ventures, Rho Ventures and GE Energy Financial Services, the companies announced Monday.
Ciris Energy aims to produce natural gas from coal in a way that is more environmentally responsible… → Read More
While much of Silicon Valley spent the last two weeks skiing or otherwise reveling in all that money made this year from acquisitions, partial liquidations and secondary deals, Square founder Jack Dorsey was apparently hard at work. TechCrunch has learned that Square is in the process of closing a large round of funding. The company is being valued, we hear from multiple sources, at somewhere… → Read More
A new SEC filing revealed that LS9 — a biotechnology startup turning plant-based materials into fuel and chemicals for use within traditional petroleum-based systems — has raised a series D investment of $30 million.
The round was led by BlackRock and joined by all of LS9′s previous investors: Flagship Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and CTTV Investments LLC, the… → Read More
Soladigm raised a $30 million series C investment the company announced this morning. Founded in 2007, the company makes smart glass for green buildings that can change from clear to tinted automatically, in response to changes in light or temperature. Windows using this “electro-chromic” technology help building owners and operators reduce their heat, cooling and lighting costs, and energy… → Read More
“Meebo did widgets super early. Guess what we learned? Don’t build stuff that sits in a box.”
Better than a box? A bar. No, not one with hotties and booze– a toolbar.
In part two of our interview with Meebo’s co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg, we talk about the value of reach online– given the gargantuan reach companies can get on platforms like Facebook in no time. Like a diamond, if… → Read More
Pivot. It is the new buzzword seemingly taking on a life of its own ala “SUPER ANGEL” after this iconic, viral talk by Mike Maples. Ngmoco did it and cashed in big time. Instagram did it and became an app sensation. Twitter did it, and became, well, Twitter. And now Meebo has done it and raised another $25 million from Khosla Ventures to continue building its business.
Seth Sternberg, Meebo… → Read More
According to an SEC filing, cloud-based phone systems provider RingCentral has raised $10 million in its third institutional financing round (with another $851,240 remaining to be sold).
The filing lists previous investors Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital – it’s unclear whether the company’s third backer, DAG Ventures, also participated. → Read More
Not one to shy away from bold and at times controversial statements, heavyweight investor Vinod Khosla took the stage at Disrupt this week and compared green tech innovation in Silicon Valley to Microsoft’s IE9 browser launch.
No offense to Microsoft, but in this analogy Khosla was criticizing the Valley for its deficiency in game-changing technologies and its focus on incremental advances. We… → Read More
In venture capital, there are three people who rule Silicon Valley: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. All three will be speaking at Disrupt. (There are still a few tickets left). We’ve already mentioned Doerr and Moritz, and now we are pleased to announce that Khosla will be completing the triumvirate.
Khosla, of course, was… → Read More
Smart window startup Soladigm announced today its plans to build a factory in Olive Branch, Mississippi. The Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners backed company makes dynamic glass windows that can be tinted on demand to block excess light and heat.
Founded in 2007, Soladigm has been operating in stealth until now. The company employs about 50 people in its Milpitas, California headquarters, and… → Read More
EcoMotors announced today a $23.5 million series B funding round from Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates that the company will use to build and test its eco-friendly engine, known as an Opposed Piston Opposed Cylinder (OPOC) engine.
EcoMotors makes engines that run on diesel or gasoline but have greater power density, weigh less and produce lower carbon emissions than conventional engines. OPOC… → Read More
Seattle-based online advertising startup AdReady has raised $5.3 million in funding.
Xconomy had the scoop last week based on an SEC filing, but now we also know the names of the investors, all of which have invested in the company in the past. → Read More
MokaFive this morning announced that it has raised a $21 million Series C round led by NGEN Partners, with existing investors Khosla Ventures and Highland Capital Partners participating.
This round totals more than the two previous rounds combined – the total of capital raised by the company is now $41 million. → Read More
In venture capital, Vinod Khosla likes to go his own way, which is why he’s been so successful. He was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and then moved to venture capital and became a star partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he backed Juniper Networks, Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7 billion) and NexGen (sold to AMD and formed the basis for its challenge to Intel). About five years ago, after… → Read More
Either Vinod Khosla has the magic or institutional investors are easing back into venture capital, or both. His Khosla Ventures raised $1.1 billion for two new funds, with about $800 million going to Khosla Ventures III and $275 million for a new seed fund.
Taken together, the $1.1 billion is the biggest capital raise for a venture firm in two years, and if you count it as a first-time fund, it… → Read More
I haven’t been much of a cleantech bull in the past, at least when it comes to venture capital investing. I think it’s a huge market, and there’s clearly a pressing social need. I just don’t quite think the science, government cooperation and economics are there yet for it to be a great opportunity for classic venture investing.
Sure there’s low-hanging fruit, and the outliers like Elon… → Read More
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