As you may have heard, the San Francisco Port Authority recently shut down the tech hub located at Pier 38, which was home to companies like Automattic, True Ventures, 99Designs, and others. One of the tenants, Polaris Venture Partners‘ Dogpatch Labs, was also kicked out and has now moved to downtown Palo Alto along with its 18 current residents.
Xconomy reports that Dogpatch Labs’ new Palo Alto home is adjacent to the also new Polaris Venture Partners office (the might want to update their website if this is indeed the case). → Read More
Most charts I get sent are up and to the right. Not this one.
The chart ReadyForZero sent me (above) goes down and to the right. This is meant to showcase just how much debt the service is helping users eliminate. They’re the blue lines on the bottom. It’s like golf, the lower the better.
All told, ReadyForZero is already helping their users eliminate some $42 million in credit card debt since the beta launch just four months ago. We’ve covered the Y Combinator alum a few times over the past several months for a good reason: it’s a solid and much needed service. And today, investors are putting even more of their money where the credit card debt is disappearing, giving ReadyForZero a fresh $4.5 million Series A. → Read More
If you have an idea for a startup in New York City, this might just be the summer for you to get that idea off the ground. There is no shortage of startup accelerators, incubators, and other venture programs to help get you started—from TechStars NYC and HackNY to DreamIt and FinTech for financial startups. And there is also NYC SeedStart, which is now taking applications for digital media startups.
NYC SeedStart is a 12-week summer program “focusing on advertising infrastructure, e-commerce, digital content, and mobile technology.” Ten startups will be selected to join the program, which includes $20,000, office space, and mentoring from corporate partners including Time Warner, News Corp, Google, Hearst, The New York Times, MTV Networks, GiltCity, and AOL Ventures. → Read More
Cardlytics, which provides solutions for transaction marketing within banking, this morning announced that it has raised $18 million in financing. New investors ITC Holdings and Kinetic Ventures led the round.
According to the press release, all of Cardlytics’ previous investors participated, including Canaan Partners, Polaris Venture Partners and Total Technology Ventures. → Read More
Every place and object in the world has a secret past: who lived there, who passed by, who touched it. The secret lives of objects are filled with such details. If only you could make them talk. But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. All anyone would need to unlock the message is a phone with a special barcode scanning app. Stickybits is that app. → 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 funding will primarily be used to support the adoption of its recently launched Quantcast Media Program. → Read More
Jon Steinberg, now former Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB (Small Medium Business) Partnerships team, has accepted a position as Executive in Residence at Polaris Venture Partners. Steinberg will be working from the VC firm’s New York offices, where he’ll help identify new investment opportunities as well as working with existing portfolio companies.
The investor’s portfolio is of course listed on CrunchBase in its entirety, but the most familiar to our readers will be JibJab, Sprout, Quantcast, LogMeIn, Thing Labs (of Brizzly fame) and Automattic (parent company to WordPress). → Read More
