Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred and is ex-Electronic Arts.
I met Ryan Smith about nine years ago in a college apartment in Provo Utah. We were both attending school, and after asking him what he was working on he replied, “I’m building… → Read More
More than ever before, venture capitalists are digging in. To stay competitive and top-of-mind, VC’s are no longer loaning their advice and their capital, but actual “core” services that portfolio companies need. This shift isn’t necessarily new. For example, top VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Greylock play a hands-on role in helping recruit talent. Recently, we’ve seen firms roll up… → Read More
Mu Sigma, a startup that provides ‘decision sciences’ and analytics services to help companies make business decisions based on ‘big data’, has secured $25 million in Series C financing from Sequoia Capital.
Mu Sigma in a press statement says it currently employs some 1,200 analysts (and growing), mostly based in India, in an effort to build the world’s “largest applied math lab”. → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha took the stage for an interview with Michael Arrington, where they discussed everything from startup valuations to Sequoia’s biggest misses.
Early on in the conversation, Arrington asked Botha if Sequoia partners have a lot of internal pressure to perform, or if the firm is patient with investments. Botha says that the firm is… → Read More
Sequoia Capital has invested ‘multiple millions of dollars’ in Milanoo.com, a China-based online retailer and wholesaler with a “passion for fashion”.
The proceeds of the financing rounds will be used to strengthen Milanoo’s product supply system, optimize its online shopping platform, allow it to lower its prices and to hire more people. → Read More
U.S. venture capital firms raised more money last quarter than in any period since 2001. The total raised for new funds was $7.7 billion, according to Dow Jones LP Source. The capital going into VC funds was up 97 percent from a year ago, when they raised $3.9 billion. (Venture capital funds benefited from an overall influx of money into U.S. private equity funds overall, which attracted a… → Read More
Messaging apps that let you use your smartphone to text or chat with your friends or even large groups of people, often free of charge, are red hot. We’ve heard from a reliable source that one of the companies making waves in the space, WhatsApp, has just secured $8 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, and possibly other investors.
WhatsApp enables users of iPhone, Android, Blackberry and… → Read More
People. Colors. Apps. Cats. Bacon. Organic. Bieber. Mobile. Social. Local. Pivot.
That’s the key slide in a faux-deck making the rounds this morning on the web. The subject of the ridicule? Color, the just-launched social sharing mobile app. Why such animosity towards a new player in a crowded space? Well, there are 41 million reasons.
The most fascinating aspect about Color right now isn’t the… → Read More
Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme is leaving the firm in a full time role to become the director of the Ohio Department of Development, where he will focus on driving Ohio’s economic growth. He was appointed by incoming governor John Kasich.
Kvamme joined Sequoia in 1999 and led early investments in LinkedIn, MarkLogic, Funny or Die, StrongMail and CastIron Systems (acquired by IBM). Prior to… → 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
iYogi, an independent remote consumer tech support company based in India and New York, this morning announced that is has secured $30 million in a fresh round of financing, led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors Canaan, SVB Capital Partners, SAP Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson participating.
The round comes less than a year after investors injected $15 million into the… → Read More
What makes Sequoia invest an undisclosed multi-million dollar round in a 22 year-old’s startup? The future. No, not in the sense that young entrepreneurs hold the future of our industry. Literally the future. Or to be more exact, selling advertisers future trends. Of course to pull that off one needs some precognition.
One route was to comb the earth for mutated humans and exploit their gift, but… → Read More
Memory enhancement service Evernote is loved by many, including, it appears, venture capitalists. This morning, the startup is announcing that it has raised its third institutional round of funding, and it’s a whopper:
Sequoia Capital and previous backers are injecting $20 million into the company – that’s on top of the $25.5 million the company raised earlier.
Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia… → Read More
According to an SEC filing, DNS service provider OpenDNS has raised more capital, $4.5 million to be specific. We’ve confirmed the additional financing with the company and learned that this was an inside round handled by Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners (they took a stake in the company in July 2009).
Chief executive David Ulevitch (see this SFGate profile for more about the man) tells me… → Read More
Search engine marketing startup KENSHOO has secured an undisclosed late-stage round of funding from Sequoia’s Growth Fund, the Israeli company announced this morning.
This marks the fourth time Sequoia Capital has injected capital into the company, which claims it is now profitable and has doubled in valuation since 2009. → Read More
Exclusive – Snaptu, the company that aims to bring a smartphone-like experience to regular handsets, hit an important milestone today: 10 million registered users.
Coincidentally, the announcement comes at a time when the startup is disclosing that it has secured $6 million in Series B funding in a round led by Carmel Ventures and joined by early backer Sequoia Capital.
As a result of the… → Read More
Klarna, one of the biggest providers in Europe of in-store credit and invoice based payment solutions for the e-commerce sector, has secured funding from Sequoia Capital, which famously also backed Google. Terms have not been disclosed but we’ve learned Klarna will do a directed new share issue of SEK 70m (approx. $9 million).
Highly unusually, Mike Moritz, Sequoia Capital Partner and former… → Read More
Service-now.com has raised $41M of a $66M funding round, the company disclosed in an SEC filing today. The company was founded by Fred Luddy in 2004 to provide on-demand Enterprise IT services and 2009 has been a boom year for the company. Service-now.com specializes in cloud-based Software as a Service (Saas) IT service management solutions. They cover everything from licensing compliance to the… → Read More
Unity Technologies, the San Francisco company behind the eponymous multi-platform game development platform, has now closed its first round of funding. The Series A financing was led by Sequoia Capital like we reported last week and apparently also included some Silicon Valley notables like David Gardner, the CEO of Atari, and Diane Greene, founder and former CEO of VMware. → Read More
When we first covered real-time photo-blogging service DailyBooth last August, we had noticed how remarkably vibrant the community already was, and how quickly the site was amassing tons of traffic.
The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and… → Read More
Israel-based search engine marketing (SEM) automator Kenshoo has received another capital injection from its existing backers Sequoia Capital and Arts Alliance.
As with the Series A round, this second round of funding remained undisclosed, although our contact person at the company ensures it that this was an “up-round” financing and that the valuation was “50% higher than the last time” it… → Read More
Yesterday, I reported a strong rumor that Sequoia Capital had invested in image-hosting site ImageShack. Today, I spoke with CEO and founder Jack Levin. He would not comment specifically on the funding rumor other than to say that over the past few months he’s been in discussions with a variety of VCs. So he may still be in the late stages of discussions, or he may have closed the round. He… → Read More
Update: See follow-up post here with comments from ImageShack CEo Jack Levin. If you had to name the top five image-hosting services on the Web, would ImageShack be one of them? It turns out that it is No. 5 in worldwide visitors, with nearly 28 million last March, according to comScore. (Ranked above it are Facebook Photos, Flickr, Picasa, and PhotoBucket). You might be more familiar with… → Read More
Princeton Computer Science Professor Andrew Appel and his students bought five Sequoia voting machines over the Internet for $82 each and are now reverse engineering the monsters to figure out how horribly our democracy is dying. The professor bought them from election officials in North Carolina during a government auction. Sequoia is well-known for their claims that opening up their voting… → Read More
Update: The deal was just announced; Google has purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion – all in stock. The Wall St. Journal (subscription required) was among several sources this morning who reported that an announcement between Google and YouTube could come later today. The WSJ also confirmed an estimate that Sequoia Capital holds roughly 30% of YouTube, something we had previousy speculated… → Read More
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