Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

In this, our third installment of “Free Startup Tools”, we wanted to highlight an agreement launched by Seedcamp, the European startup accelerator, to help startup founders negotiate the early stages of building a company. (You can check out our first post on The Founder Institute’s effort to standardize the founder-advisor relationship and compensation here and the second post on a tool that helps founders compare their term sheets to the standards here.)

While we’ve touched on these better ways to negotiate term sheets and relationships with advisors, founding a company also often entails bringing on co-founders to help you build your business. Of course, in doing so, it’s important for co-founders to be able to establish a level of trust that allows each founding member to fairly share in the benefits of success.

To do so, Seedcamp (via its Seedhack initiative) is launching the “Seedhack Founder’s Collaboration Agreement”, which according to the initiative’s blog post, has been created to allow newly formed founding teams to “agree on what each founder’s shareholding stake should be” as well as codifying the amount of equity co-founders should receive in accordance with the level of time and effort they pour into the business.

Readers can check out the PDF of the agreement here.

As the accelerator said via its Seedhack blog, the intent with the collaboration agreement is to have it be of use to accelerators and incubators that hose events like Seedcamp’s Seedhack, where “collaboration is key”, as well as to the thousands of startups out there building businesses (and investing sweat equity) in those many ideas, products, and tools before officially creating a “formal” company or enterprise.

Seedcamp says that it wants co-founders to treat the document as fuel for discussion, which can either be used “as-is”, but it should be noted that it is still both a work in progress and a template which founders should modify as they see fit. (Hence the items in brackets, which are left up to founders to input their own language.)

Note: The Seedhack Collaboration Founders Agreement is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Please feel free to share your impressions of the agreement, including whether or not readers believe that the vesting schedule proposed in the document applies generally or is more in line with hackathon-type scenarios.

Excerpt image courtesy of Ideachampions.com

As I wrote last week when Seedcamp made a flurry of announcements, including fresh funding and ambitious plans for international expansion, I spent some time in London last week to get acquainted with a bunch of interesting European startups.

Below is an overview of all 20 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, starting with the 3 (well, actually, 4 winners).

But first, it’s worth noting that Seedcamp, which had already financially and otherwise backed 16 of the 20 companies that presented their wares during Seedcamp Week 2011 – over and over, I might add – held interviews with the four remaining startups and decided to inject some seed capital into them, too. So, in a way, they all sorta kinda ‘won’.

I’ve spent the past couple of days in London getting caught up in the Seedcamp Week craziness, meeting some of Europe’s finest entrepreneurs and investors. Me and Mike Butcher will soon post a round-up of this year’s finalists (and highlight a few interesting ones separately), but first, Seedcamp has some – actually, a lot of – news of its own to announce today.

The organization, which combines an early-stage seed investment fund with a world-class mentoring program for European entrepreneurs, is expanding by striking a number of international partnerships, setting up new events (Seedhack), establishing an ‘experts-in-residence’ program and an impressive advisory board, raising more funding from a number of new strategic investors and strengthening its offering to fledgling companies with the help of several corporate sponsors.

Where to begin?

About a year ago, Seedcamp raised €3 million euros in funding. Today, the organization is announcing that €2 million more has been invested in the seed fund by a number of strategic investors, including ACT Venture Capital, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, GIMV, Reed Elsevier Ventures, Samos and HENQ. Individual investors such as former Google M&A exec Anil Hansjee and John Pfeffer are also participating.

Seedcamp’s fund is now €5 million euros, twice as much as its initial fund. Existing investors include Index Ventures, Atlas Venture, NESTA, Eden Ventures and plenty of others.

Seedcamp says entrepreneurs have been asking for a lot of things from the organization and its network of mentors, but one recurring theme was more ways to enter the U.S. market and establish partnerships with American companies. Meeting those needs, Seedcamp is today announcing that they’ve formed partnerships with the likes of 500 Startups, Dave McClure’s investment firm, and AngelList, a network that connects angel investors with promising entrepreneurs.

“We’ve already invested in 3 Seedcamp companies, and we keep coming back for more,” said McClure. “Our experience bringing international startups to the US is a great match for Seedcamp startups, by helping them improve their product and marketing efforts, as well as making introductions to Silicon Valley mentors and platform companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and PayPal.”

500 Startups has indeed invested in 3 Seedcamp startups (ERPLY, Brainient and LOOKK) but I’ve also heard one of the companies in this year’s batch has closed a financing deal with the firm.

The partnership with AngelList strengthens Seedcamp’s own, similar initiative (dubbed Seedsummit – read more about it here) and Seedcamp is exploring other partnerships in the United States.

Seedcamp is also teaming up with startup events all over Europe that will feed into the regional Seedcamp events, in order to tie the European startup ecosystem a little tighter. Winners from events put on by the likes of Arctic Startups (Scandinavia), Garage48 (Baltics), TISEE (Eastern Europe) and eFestival + Social Media Week (Italy) will receive a spot in the relevant regional Mini Seedcamp.

We’re not finished yet.

Seedcamp is also slated to announce today that they’re establishing an experts-in-residence program, which is essentially a way to match up Seedcamp startups with relevant advisors who want to do more than hold a one-time mentoring session. Seedcamp will provide guidance to both the startups and experts on how to setup an ‘official’ advisor role and any documents they will need to formalize such a relationship.

Seedcamp has also set up an advisory board of its own, formalizing many relationships it’s long had with a number of people with various key skills.

The initial list of its Advisory Board members for 2011-2012 includes people like Anil Hansjee (ex-Google M&A exec and angel investor), Bindi Karia (VC and Emerging Business Lead at Microsoft), Bryce Roberts (investor with OATV), Christian Hernandez (Director of Platform Partnerships at Facebook), Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier (investor at SoftTech VC), David Yu (until recently CEO of Betfair), Gustav Soderstrom (Head of Product at Spotify), Henri Moissinac (Head of Mobile at Facebook) and many more.

Finally, Seedcamp is also strengthening its offering to startups by increasing the value of additional services it can offer via its 34 corporate sponsors (Facebook, Google, Qualcomm, Amazon and others) beyond the capital injection and access to its mentor network.

Sponsors are putting up around £50,000 in value for solutions ranging from infrastructure services to analytics, advertising, marketing and other services.

A lot of news to digest, but in essence: great news for both Seedcamp and European startups.

What if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from across different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format potentially form great new startups that address untapped needs?

Those are the three rhetorical questions asked by Seedcamp, the well-known European early-stage seed investment fund and mentoring programme. In its quest to get answers to those questions, the company is organizing a new, totally free event called seedhack, which will be sort of like a hackaton – like the one we organize during TechCrunch Disrupt – but not just for programmers and designers but also for business people (with or without ideas).

The event will be held at the London Business School campus on September 23rd-25th, 2011, and is sponsored by Facebook, Paypal, and .me Domains. You can register here.

Read the full article on TechCrunch Europe.

I have no idea why it seems to be “Europe week” for me, but here’s some more news from across the pond: Seedcamp has raised a new €3 million fund. I’m a huge fan of Seedcamp, even though I’ve given the co-founder Saul Klein a hard time about some of its winners in the past.

It is a combination of Y Combinator, a competition like TechCrunch Disrupt and a super angel, but one that aggressively takes itself on the road every month to find the best startups in emerging markets, particularly Eastern Europe. (It’s not unlike my own obsessive emerging market reporting. Oh wait, it’s completely different. They have actual money to invest.)

We caught up with Seedcamp’s other founder Reshma Sohoni to find out more about Seedcamp’s newly enlarged global ambitions. The video is below.

More than money, Seedcamp gives crucial mentorship for these early companies and has a decent track record over the last three years of helping these diamonds-in-the-rough connect with big Western investors like Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures, who is also a backer of Seedcamp.

This is just a first close, and Seedcamp is hoping to raise more money in coming months. This seems a no-brainer investment for a VC firm with too much cash that wants a savvy eye on up-and-coming companies and talent in Eastern Europe. Just throwing money at someone who is crazy enough to kill himself (or, ahem, herself) scouring emerging markets for unknown companies is a lot easier than doing it yourself. (cc:Michael Arrington/AOL)

In this video, Klein tells us about the overall theme of this year’s Seedcamp, and we dig in on the company we liked the best (Spoiler Alert!) and the company we liked the least (Spoiler Alert!). We then ask him why with so much going on in fast-growing economies in Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East we should still care about stodgy old London’s tech scene, and he gives a pretty good answer. We wrap up with a discussion about Klein’s latest experiment: He’s relocated to Israel for a year to figure out why returns have fallen off in a country with so much technical and entrepreneurial talent.

Then Paul and Sarah say goodbye to Klein and have a fight about incubators. Paul tells people to get on a plane to the Valley if they want to start a company; Sarah loses it and calls him names. A lot of eye-rolling ensues.

It’s a long WITN this week, but, forgive us, we cover a lot of global ground.

The original plan to hold a Seedcamp Week every year in London for a 3 year run, investing in a total of 15 companies in that period, has now changed. The emphasis is now on a regular touring programme of ‘mini-seedcamps’, a move pioneered this year with seven events.
In 2010 there will be 8 Mini Seedcamps (Spain is the new addition) and majoring on the Balkans and Eastern Europe which has produced previous Seedcamp finalists like Erply, Codility, Zemanta, Ubervu and Brainient. These dates will be:

Held at the offices of NESTA in London, the event was outlined by Seedcamp’s Saul Klein on his blog.

Attendees included around 60 people, including high profile investors like Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein, Jyri Engestrom and Sherry Coutu.

The debate is an important one, in part because Seedcamp, as the only Pan-european YCombinator-style organisation, now has a position that is largely unmatched at this level. That is at once a great thing for Europe – afterall, there was nothing else like it before, and Europe really needed a pan-European Seed fund which could also educate young startups. It’s also a potential challenge both for Seedcamp to explain how it operates – after all, despite its laudable openness to date, let’s not forget it’s a business – and for those that want to sit outside the burgeoning Seedcamp ecosystem.

There are other startup programmes and competitions in Europe but Seedcamp seems to have cornered the market in that scare resource: smart European tech CEOs who can mentor new startups.

Put simply, if you’d thrown a grenade into the Costa Coffee at University College London today much of the tech startup scene in Europe would have been wiped out. Which would be a pity. But back to the startups: What are the trends this year?

The data points are interesting because they show the trends in how tech companies are being formed from the primordial soup of Europe’s startup scene and which trends are emerging.

LaunchBoxDigital says they’ll invest $15,000 – $30,000 in six to ten startups, in exchange for 4% to 8% of the equity. Founding teams must spend the summer in Washington D.C. to participate in a twelve week incubation program. Applications must be received by March 14, 2008.

The model is based on the much emulated Y Combinator, which has now funded dozens of startups. London based SeedCamp and Colorado based TechStars have nearly identical business models.

Most of the spots are reserved for Seedcamp attendees, but we are opening up 100 tickets to the public as well. To discourage no shows, we are charging a £10 fee per ticket, which will be donated to charity. Tickets are available here. There will be plenty to drink (and we’re working on food), and we’ll be giving away a ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch20 conference.

I will be flying in to London for the Seedcamp event and to attend the party. Hope to see you there.

We are taking a limited number of sponsors to offset the cost of the event. Email Jeanne Logozzo for more information about sponsoring the party.

In all, 240 applications were received from 40 countries.

SeedCamp Finalists

The mission of Seedcamp is to develop the next generation of entrepreneurs in Europe by providing the money, mentoring and media to help propel forward great ideas. At the end of the week, Seedcamp will invest €50K for a 10% stake in each of final five teams and provide ongoing mentorship and support for three months in preparation for the companies’ formal rounds of financing.

Applications are due August 12th.

TechCrunch and the Financial Times are the exclusive media partners for Seedcamp. We’re supporting Seedcamp because we believe that it will help incubate some great new products from young entrepreneurs in Europe, and we’re enthusiastic to provide exposure to this new initiative and expand our editorial coverage internationally. We have no financial interest in the venture.

The idea for Seedcamp came from Saul Klein in a post earlier this year looking to energize the European startup community. Participating VCs and advisors include Index Ventures, Atomico Investments, Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, TAG, Forsyth Group and Brown Rudnick.

We’ll also be hosting a TechCrunch Meet-Up one night in London during the week of Seedcamp. More details on that to follow.