Aepona, the Belfast-based developer of a software engine that powers the “Network as a Service” (NaaS) business model for mobile operators, has just raised a $10M round, led by new investor BlackBerry Partners Fund, a Toronto-based global fund focused on applications, services and supporting infrastructure for mobile platforms. → Read More
Here’s a list of some of the recent venture capital deals that have been inked in Europe lately which you may have overlooked.
Austrian venture capital house GCP gamma capital partners has sold online trading platform FatFoogoo to NASDAQ-listed e-commerce group Digital River. The exit values FatFoogoo at $10m and GCP has further agreed an earnout provision. → Read More
In my last post, I discussed why the odds of a rookie entrepreneur getting seed financing from a VC are very slim. The reality is that less than 5% of venture money goes to seed-stage startups; VCs typically invest when a company has a working product, a tested business model, and a strong management team. It’s the entrepreneurs who take the risk; not the VCs. They beg and borrow money from… → Read More
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t have a rookie entrepreneur ask for advice on raising money from VCs. They usually have a fancy-looking business plan with detailed spreadsheets showing how their company will be worth billions by capturing just 1% of a market. All they need is some financing, and they’ll take the world by storm. My advice is always the same: ditch the business plan, and buy a… → Read More
Venture capital funding picked up in the first quarter to $4.7 billion, from the year ago period, according to both Dow Jones VentureSource and the MoneyTree Report (PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association). Dow Jones says venture funding rose 12% from $4.2 billion in Q1 2009 (the number of deals jumped to 597 from 522), while MoneyTree noted a 38% increase to $3.4… → Read More
Venture capital firms are having their own problems raising new money from limited partners. Capital inflows in the first quarter were down 31 percent annually to $3.6 billion in the U.S., according to the National Venture Capital Association. Venture funds were also down 11 percent from the fourth quarter.
Only 32 funds were able to raise money in the first quarter, down from 44 last quarter… → Read More
Venture capital is flowing once again to startups at a steady pace. During the first quarter of 2010, the total value of venture funding doubled to $12.8 billion from $6 billion a year before, when it was scraping the bottom of the barrel. However, the funding amount is down 16 percent from the $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, based on an analysis of CrunchBase data.
Some of… → Read More
Two separate reports were released this morning, both bringing upbeat news of increased exit activity (M&A, IPOs) for venture-backed companies in the first quarter of 2010.
We take a look at the most important findings for both the Exit Poll report by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association, and Dow Jones VentureSource’s assessment of IPO and M&A activity in the U.S.… → Read More
A bill introduced today in the Senate by Democrat John Kerry and Republican Richard Lugar proposes a new type of visa for immigrants who create startups and jobs in the U.S. A similar proposal is part of an immigration reform bill in the House. The Startup Visa has been controversial and will no doubt draw fire from anti-immigrant forces and xenophobes. But if we are going to be giving away… → Read More
Some VCs are getting an early Valentine’s Day gift fromTheFunded, the site where CEOs rate venture capitalists and their firms. Below you will find the top-ranked individual VCs, as determined by their ratings in 2009. What makes this ranking particularly useful to entrepreneurs is that it is ratings by other CEOs, often CEOs who have had direct dealings with the VCs they are rating.
While this… → Read More
The way venture capital firms are structured makes it almost impossible for outsiders to see what’s really going on inside those 1970s lodge-like Sand Hill Road offices. It’s an industry perfectly structured for sweeping problems under the rug, and as its fundamentals have declined over the last decade, that’s just what it’s been doing. But those big, lumpy problems are getting harder and… → Read More
With the year—and decade—coming to a close, the business press has been awash with stories about just how lousy the ‘00s were. As Paul Krugman details in the New York Times, it was a decade with a tiny amount of job creation, and the first decade on record where private-sector jobs shrunk. The typical family got no economic boost at all. And when the volatility rollercoaster ended there was… → Read More
After a year when venture funding was in the doldrums, it roared back in the fourth quarter of 2009 to nearly $15 billion, according to a tally of the venture rounds in CrunchBase. The total value of disclosed fundings for the quarter was $14.85 billion, up 113 percent from a year ago (when the total was $6.96 billion), and up 78 percent from the third quarter of 2009 ($8.35 billion).
Some of… → Read More
Editor’s Note: In this guest post, Raj Kapoor gives entreprenuers advice on how to pitch VCs. Kapoor knows both sides of the equation. For the past five years, he’s been a VC at the Mayfield Fund. Before that he founded the photo site Snapfish, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard.
Its been almost five years now that I’ve been in venture capital. I finally know what i don’t know.
The one thing… → Read More
After a decade in Silicon Valley, I’ve learned there’s a difference between what some VCs say and what they do. For instance, there’s the well-worn phrase that nearly every venture firm utters: “We believe downturns are the best time to invest.” And yet, somehow, the investment numbers always go down in recessions.
But University of San Francisco associate professor of entrepreneurship… → Read More
More venture dollars went into startups in the third quarter than the two previous quarters of the year, but was still down 33 percent from a year ago, according to the latest MoneyTree report put out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The report counts 657 venture deals worth a total of $4.8 billion, up 17 percent from the second quarter.
We found a similar… → Read More
In the third quarter of 2009, we saw a slight rebound in venture funding from earlier in the year. But which venture capital firms were the most active in the quarter? One of my favorite new tables in our latest TechCrunch Trends report, which is based on company data we collect in CrunchBase, is the ranking of the most active venture capital firms.
We’ve reproduced that ranking below in two… → Read More
More evidence that venture exits and fund raising are related. We already know that venture exits were anemic in the third quarter of 2009, and now the National Venture Capital Association has released data on how much money venture funds themselves were able to raise. It was not a lot in historical terms.
According to the NCVA’s data, venture funds raised $1.6 billion in the third quarter… → Read More
Despite a couple large IPOs (LogMein and A123Systems) and a steady but tempered flow of mergers and acquisitions, financial exits for venture-backed companies remained anemic in the third quarter of 2009. Data released by both Dow Jones VentureSource and the National Venture Capital Association/Thomson Reuters show declines in both M&A and IPO dollars. VentureSource counts $2.9 billion in… → Read More
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
Everyone seems to be waiting for the next great discovery which will change the world. But, believe it or not, the next Internet… → Read More
What do entrepreneurs want from venture capitalists? A new Cornell study by Ola Bengtsson (now an assistant professor of finance at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Frederick Wang looked at the stated preferences of entrepreneurs as expressed in comments and ratings on VC-ranking site The Funded. The study, which is based on opinions from roughly 1,500 entrepreneurs about 526 U.S. → Read More
High-Tech Gründerfonds and DuMont Venture has joined existing investors Draper Investment Company and the Business Angel Peter Schüpbach in a new round of financing for Plista. The deal is rumored to be in the low seven figures. Today Plista also rolled out OnSite Recommendations, its B2B operations providing businesses with the ability to target their content, products and advertisement… → Read More
Scoreloop has just announced it closed its second financing round, with a $2.8 million / €2 million cash injection from new investors Earlybird and existing investor Target Partners, which was the seed funder for the Munich-based company. The funds will be used to fuel the growth of the company and to establish (or solidify) its position, especially in the realm of the iPhone. Since launching… → Read More
Online TV startup Konbini just raised €3M in its second round of founding from NextStage, one of the most active French venture capital firms (NextStage manages a €220m fund). The startup, which already raised €700k in the occasion of its launch in october 2008, aims at a younger internet generation which likes producing and broadcasting videos. The final objective of the company is to… → Read More
Venture capital dollars going to startups in the U.S. stabilized in the second quarter at $3.7 billion, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The venture money invested in the quarter is still only about half of what it was a year ago (when it was $7.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008), but is 15 percent above the … → Read More
Venture capital keeps getting squeezed as an asset class. The second quarter of 2009 saw the lowest level of capital going into VC funds since the first quarter of 2003, according to the National Venture Capital Association. During the second quarter, VC funds in the U.S. raised only $1.7 billion, an 82 percent drop from the second quarter of 2008, when $9.3 billion was raised. The amount… → Read More
After four quarters in which venture-backed IPOs have been dead in the water, a handful finally poked their heads up in the second quarter. The National Venture Capital Association counted five IPOs during the quarter, including DigitalGlobe ($279 million raised), SolarWinds ($152 million), and OpenTable ($60 million). A total of $721 million was raised. Just for a little context, two years… → Read More
Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads.
Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader… → Read More
VCs are feeling the heat from the recession. Money, both outgoing and incoming, isn’t drying up completely, but the numbers keep going down. And now we are waiting to find out how much money VCs put into startups during the first quarter. Mind you that VC investing for the fourth quarter of 2008 already hit a low, with the total dollar amount invested in venture financings at $5.4 billion, down… → Read More
The first quarter of 2009 wasn’t just a dry one for venture-backed exits, very little money went into the coffers of VC funds as well. According to data released today by the National Venture Capital Association, only 40 funds raised new money during the quarter, down from 71 the year before (1Q08) and 47 the previous quarter (4Q08). Out of the 40 funds, only three were brand new
In dollar… → Read More
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