May 13th, 2013

P2P Currency Exchange TransferWise Raises $6M Led By Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, With Participation From SV Angel, Others

images

Here’s some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. TransferWise, the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it’s closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor’s international… → Read More

May 1st, 2013

SV Angel’s Brian Pokorny Says Facebook Isn’t As Much Fun Anymore — It’s A Utility

sv angel disrupt

Brian Pokorny, who recently rejoined SV Angel as a general partner, weighed in this afternoon on the future of a number of high-profile companies — Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo.

Pokorny was interviewed at Disrupt NY, where he was joined onstage by his partners David Lee and Ron Conway. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington asked them how they felt about Facebook and whether it was going… → Read More

May 1st, 2013

SV Angel Team Counters Chamath Palihapitiya’s Startup Skepticism: ‘Innovation Is Not Dead’

ltJ5w8kgWdEB095L0jZ-Jai9e_mABnpZ4qlzBZayXdM

Michael Arrington began moderating a panel at Disrupt NY today with Ron Conway, David Lee, and Brian Pokorny of SV Angel by noting that he was “pissed off” by investor Chamath Palipitiya’s comments on Monday that startup quality is at an “all time low.”

“I don’t agree,” Lee said, explaining that he thinks the ideas in the last 12-18 months have been bigger and bolder than those before them. → Read More

April 25th, 2013

SV Angel Says Health Informatics Is One Of Its New “Megatrends”

sv-angel

SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms, says it’s starting to look heavily at health startups that take a “software-first approach” towards human biology, medical research and patient care. The firm has always had a list of six to eight “megatrends” that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce… → Read More

November 28th, 2012

David Lee From SV Angel: “Foursquare Is One Of The Most Misunderstood Companies”

foursquare logo

Today at Business Insider’s Ignition conference in New York, David Lee, founder and managing partner at SV Angel commented on Foursquare. As SV Angel is an investor, he had good things to say. “Foursquare is one of the most misunderstood companies,” he said. At 43, Lee isn’t using Foursquare to check in. He uses it in a passive way to find new restaurants, and finds the app very powerful. It goes… → Read More

August 30th, 2012

SV Angel Raising $40 Million For New Fund

SV Angel

According to an SEC filing, SV Angel may be raising another $40 million for a new fund. The filing shows that a fund, titled SV Angel IV, is in the process of raising $40 million, but the sale has not yet taken place.

SV Angel, which was co-founded by angel investors David Lee and Ron Conway, has invested in companies such as Twitter, Zynga, Square, Hipmunk, Fab.com, Path, and Airbnb. The firm… → Read More

July 25th, 2012

You’ve Got Facebook Fans, Now What? Booshaka Raises $1M To Ensure Your Posts Earn You Money

Booshaka Logo Feature

It doesn’t matter if you have one million Facebook fans if they never see your news feed posts. That’s why SV Angel, Founders Fund Angel, and more have backed a $1 million Series A for news feed optimization service Booshaka, which is also launching a big product update today.

The startup helps businesses identify their most active fans — especially the 10% generating 90% of the engagement … → Read More

July 18th, 2012

WillCall Sells You What You’re Doing Tonight, Launches Web App, Raises $850K From SV Angel, 500 Startups

WillCall Logo

“We’re not trying to be the best way to buy last minute tickets. We’re trying to be the best way to buy tickets”, says Donnie Dinch, founder of WillCall. That’s why today’s it’s launching a web version of its event ticket purchasing mobile app, plus adding more shows and cities with the $850,000 it just raised as part of a seed round from SV Angel, 500 Startups, RRE Ventures, RSE Ventures and… → Read More

July 3rd, 2012

With Added Backing From Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan & SV Angel, Quarterly Reopens Its Doors

screen-shot-2012-03-28-at-6-11-54-pm

As we spend more and more time online, as our virtual interactions increase, so too does our appreciation for tangible, real-world experiences — especially those that arrive via the mailbox. Remember how good it feels to receive a letter from a friend in the mail? Now imagine that friend is someone you admire and that letter is an awesome gift, and you have the basis for Quarterly, a… → Read More

June 28th, 2012

Practice Fusion Pulls In $34M Series C Led By Artis To Crush The Other eMedical Record Startups

Practice Fusion Red Cross Logo

Practice Fusion is the frontrunner in the fevered race to become the electronic medical record platform, and today it finished raising a $34 million Series C led by hedge fund Artis Ventures to make sure it wins and lead it towards an IPO. Practice Fusion’s valuation is now around a half a billion dollars, it tells me. Startups trying to compete? “We’re squashing them” founder and CEO Ryan… → Read More

June 26th, 2012

Hail A Fellow Human, Not A Taxi With “SideCar” – The New P2P Uber

SideCar App Logo

You need a ride, someone else has a car and could use the cash, SideCar is the app that will bring you together. New instant peer-to-peer rideshare-finding app SideCar turns anyone into a taxi / Uber driver, and it’s supposedly legal because you technically volunteer to pay at the end. Today it emerges from beta for iOS and Android in its first city, San Francisco.

Punch in your location and… → Read More

February 22nd, 2012

Backed By Lerer And SV Angel, Newsle Launches To Let You Track News About Your Friends

newsle-logo-highres

If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were… → Read More

January 17th, 2012

Trigger Gets $1M From SV Angel, Paul Graham And Others To Make Cross-Platform Mobile Development Effortless

Screen Shot 2012-01-17 at 10.30.28 AM

Mobile development platform Trigger is announcing one million dollars in funding today, from way legit investors SV Angel, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, 500 Startups, Russ Siegelman, Steve Walske, RightVentures, Venture51 and John Taysom. → Read More

August 31st, 2011

Game Closure Quietly Raises Seed Round From SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Greylock, And More

Screen shot 2011-08-31 at 1.58.03 PM

We first covered Game Closure this spring when it opened its private beta to the world to test out its new cross-platform HTML5 game engine and SDK. The startup has since gone on to work with multiple private and public partners to bring cross-platform, multiplayer HTML5 games to the App Store, Android Marketplace, Facebook, and beyond. According to Game Closure Co-founder and CEO Michael Carter… → Read More

July 25th, 2011

Atomico, Conway, And Founders Fund Put $10 Million Into Quid; Max Levchin Joins Board

Quid

Quantitative analysis startup Quid is getting a major vote of confidence and $10 million in a seed round from a raft of serious investors. Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Endeavour Vision, Infocomm Investments, and Korean investor Charles Lho all invested in the series C financing. (Founders Fund and Lho were already investors. Max… → Read More

June 16th, 2011

AppRedeem Rewarded With $700K From SV Angel And Blue Run Ventures

AppRedeem, a Mountain View-based startup that aims to offer mobile app developers innovative, effective solutions to driving app installs and engagement, announced today that it has raised $700K in seed funding from SV Angel and Blue Run Ventures. The startup plans to use its infusion of capital to expand its engineering resources and to accelerate its development onto other mobile platforms.

In… → Read More

May 30th, 2011

Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 Billion+ Valuation

According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.

That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and… → Read More

May 24th, 2011

SV Angel Partners with Lerer Ventures to Cross Syndicate Valley/NYC Deals

Yesterday, Mike broke the news on stage at Disrupt that SV Angel is doubling down with Yuri Milner once again to invest in all willing Y Combinator grads. Today, SV Angel is announcing another partnership, this time Ron Conway & crew are looking east. SV Angel and Lerer Ventures– which also announced a new fund yesterday– will announce today that the two are entering a formal partnership to… → Read More

February 11th, 2011

SEC Watch: Start Fund Raises First Round, Totaling Nearly $6.5 Million

Remember Start Fund, the investment vehicle established by DST’s Yuri Milner (as an individual) and Ron Conway’s angel fund, SV Angel?

A couple of weeks ago, we broke the news that the fund, which is managed by SV Angel partner David Lee, made a gutsy blanket investment offer to every single one of the 40 or so Y Combinator startups in the most recent batch. → Read More

October 19th, 2010

Unvarnished Becomes Honestly.com, Raises $1.2 Million And Opens The Floodgates

Unvarnished is all grown up.

The self-described reputation management site, which allows professionals to anonymously submit reviews on their peers, has just renamed its site to “Honestly.com” and raised $1.2 million from several high-profile firms including First Round Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Charles River Ventures.

Significantly, for the nature of the Honestly community, founder Peter→ Read More

October 15th, 2010

Ron Conway's SV Angel Rakes In Another $9 Million

An SEC Form D filed today revealed a few new things about “Godfather of Silicon Valley” and much lauded angel investor Ron Conway‘s SV Angel fund, namely that it is going after more; The forms show that what the fund is seeking has been raised from $20 million to about $30 million, and that it is also closing in on an almost $9 million update today.

This latest Form D filing is an amendment→ Read More

September 1st, 2010

BankSimple Deposits $3.1 Million From First Round, Ron Conway, And Roger Ehrenberg

New York City startup BankSimple today disclosed that it raised its first venture funding in a round led by First Round Capital, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, and Village Ventures, along with seed investors SV Angel (Ron Conway) and Nauiokas Park, and Jerry Neumann. But it did not disclose how much it raised. I’ve confirmed that the round was $2.9 million, with an additional $190,000 raised… → Read More

July 30th, 2010

Conway: During The Bubble, 77% Entrepreneurs Failed. Now, It's Around 40%

Today, during our Social Currency CrunchUp, angel investor Ron Conway had some interesting data to share for the first time. Conway says that his company, SV Angel, has recently done an audit on the over 500 companies they’ve invested in over the past 12 years. And he was surprised with the results.

Conway expected it would show that about one-third of companies fail, one-third get investors… → Read More

July 30th, 2010

Ron Conway And Paul Graham Talk About Investing

Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, Michael Arrington sat down with investors Ron Conway and Paul Graham. Obviously, these are two of the biggest names in early-stage investing (with SV Angel and Y Combinator, respectively).

Both Conway and Graham had some interesting data to share. Conway, in particular, was able to give some great numbers because he’s recently done an audit… → Read More

July 14th, 2010

PayPal-Backed BillFloat Launches, Secures $4.5 Million Series A Round (Exclusive)

BillFloat, a San Francisco-based startup incubated by PayPal and Venrock, has raised $4.5 million in a Series A round led by First Round Capital, with renewed participation of PayPal and Venrock and joined by early-stage funds and angel investors such as Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Mint.com board member Mark Goines.

The company soft-launched last week with a proper→ Read More

May 26th, 2010

Venture Capitalists Get Grilled (And Pitched At Urinals) At #TCDisrupt

It doesn’t always have to be the venture capitalists grilling the entrepreneurs – at TechCrunch Disrupt, we’ve disrupted that notion (see what I did there?) and hosted an open-mic session for entrepreneurs to challenge VCs, live and uncensored.

The investors in question were Mark Davis (Associate at DFJ Gotham Ventures), Rick Heitzmann (Managing Director, FirstMark Capital), David Lee (General… → Read More

February 26th, 2010

Ron Conway Raising $10 Million Angel Fund To Expand SV Angel

Super-angel Ron Conway, who is one of the most prolific and successful investors in Silicon Valley, is expanding his SV Angel fund to include outside investors (recently he has invested only his own capital in startups). He is raising a new fund of around $10 million, we’ve confirmed.

Conway, who was called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” in a book by Gary Rivlin, is considered by many to be… → Read More

October 19th, 2009

YC-Funded DailyBooth Raises $1 Million From Sequoia, Kevin Rose, Ron Conway Et Al.

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