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 their sleeves for another core competency: public relations.
More often, I’ll be pitched on a story on a startup by the in-house PR rep for an investment firm that has invested in the said startup. Traditionally, either the startup or an outside PR agency tends to do the outreach when it comes to launches, trend pieces, financings or other news items. And the rise in pitches from the VC firms themselves (as opposed to the startups) got me thinking about the evolution of the role of the VC, specifically in the context of PR. But in the past year or so, we’ve seen a rise in the addition of top PR and communications talent to these firms, specifically to help work with portfolio companies on PR strategy.
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 indeed patient, but that there’s an internal motto: “you’re only as good as your next investment”, and that partners are always staying hungry.
Next, the conversation turned toward the broad array of companies that Botha is involved in — he’s on the board of Square, Tumblr, Evernote, Meebo, Eventbrite, Unity and other consumer-facing companies. But he’s also involved in bioinformatics companies like Gene Security Network (GSN) and AssureRx. → 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 total of $31.6 billion in the quarter, up from $13.5 billion a year ago).
Institutional investors and limited partners are putting more money into ventre capital, but are concentrating their bets in fewer, higher-quality funds. The money from limited partners, however, was not spread willy-nilly. Only 25 funds tracked by Dow Jones were able to raise money, the smallest number since 2003. → 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 Nokia Symbian60 devices to exchange text messages, images, audio and even video messages with one another. → 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 product at all, it’s the intense backlash occurring on Twitter and the tech blogosphere. And what’s fascinating about the backlash is that the vast majority of it also has nothing to do with the product itself. Instead, it’s about the $41 million in funding that Color raised pre-launch. (For some context, that’s more than the price Yahoo paid for Flickr in 2005.) The general tone of the backlash seems to range from the all-too-predictable “BUBBLE!” to the oddly spiteful “how dare they”. Again, fascinating.
But let’s take a step back for a moment. → 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 joining Sequoia he was CEO of advertising agency CKS Group.
Kvamme says he has big ideas about driving economic growth, noting that there aren’t a lot of people in government today with good business acumen. “Decisions are made with billions of dollars that lead to unsustainable solutions,” he said by phone yesterday. “I want to get Ohio back on track and drive people and businesses to the state.” → 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 close to $200 million.
We don’t have confirmation on who did it, but we hear that Sequoia Capital was in the mix to lead this round, along with previous investor Khosla Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Our sources say Sequoia ended up on top and will lead the round.
A strategic investor is also likely to invest, sources say. Someone like Visa, Mastercard, or American Express. → 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 company – iYogo has raised a total of $57.6 million to date. → 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 Taykey took the other route – algorithms. Watch out, Agatha. → 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, will join the Evernote board as an observer. → 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 there wasn’t really a need for more venture capital – the business has been running profitably for a while now – but that OpenDNS had the chance to be “opportunistic”. → 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 funding deal, Carmel partner Rina Shainski will join the Snaptu board. → 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 board member of PayPal, Google and Yahoo, will join the Klarna board. This is significant as this is the first time ever that Moritz has joined a European company’s board. → 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 service desk all with a built in analytics system.
On July 21 of this year a company press release detailed some of the company’s accomplishments including: recurring revenue of more than $28 million, 105 percent growth in recurring revenue and a variety of accolades. We’re awaiting word from Service-now.com about the funding. In the meantime we can deduce that some of the funding is probably from Sequoia Capital. → 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 individual investors. → Read More
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