Ace Metrix, a startup promising brands and agencies a smarter, faster approach to testing their TV ads, has raised $8 million in new funding.
CEO Peter Daboll, whose resume includes time as Chief of Insights at Yahoo and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, says the idea behind Ace Metrix is to “apply what we’ve learned in digital targeting and evaluation to television, which is the big kahuna in terms of spending.” → Read More
There’s a lot of talk these days about what you can do with “big data.” Here’s one of the more eye-catching uses: A startup called Recorded Future pulls data from around the Web to give customers a better handle on — that’s right — the future.
The company just announced that it has raised $12 million in Series C funding from Balderton and Google Ventures. Balderton partner and former Business Objects CEO Bernard Liautaud is joining the board. → Read More
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Just a day after a gender discrimination suit was filed against one of Silicon Valley’s most storied firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an all-male panel of VCs at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference said that sexism isn’t that much of an issue in the industry.
“This business is a meritocracy by and large,” said Greg McAdoo, who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, noting that the firm has female partners. “I have no doubt that there are pockets of issues, because in humanity you’re going to have that.”
He added, “We look for folks who can help companies become great businesses over time and we don’t ask a lot of questions about gender or what have you.” → Read More
Last month, I wrote about Y Combinator-backed Firebase and its ambitious vision to reinvent the infrastructure of real-time apps. Now the company is announcing that some big investors have signed on to that vision, with a $1.1 million round led by Flybridge Capital Partners.
Other investors in the round include Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Data Collective, Founder Collective, Cloudera CTO Amr Awadallah, early Facebook engineers Brian Shire and Lucas Nealan, former LinkedIn VP Adam Nash, and XDegrees founder Michael Tanne. Combined with an unannounced round last year (from YC/Start Fund/SV Angel, Ken Thom, and Inspovation Ventures), the company has now raised $1.4 million. → Read More
DotLoop, a startup trying to bring real estate negotiations online, has raised a $7 million Series A from Trinity Ventures.
The company says its software is already used by more than 200,000 real estate agents who serve more than 6 million buyers and sellers. To accelerate its growth, DotLoop is now releasing a free version of its product, DotLoop Now, which should make its services accessible to individual agents, not just the ones who work at large real estate companies (though the big companies will presumably still want to pay for the premium version). → Read More
In very sad news, Mike Moritz, who has led top-tier venture firm Sequoia Capital through the very beginnings of the web until now, is stepping back because of an incurable disease. His firm has backed many of the home runs of the last two decades including Google, PayPal and Yahoo.
In a letter to limited partners this morning, he wrote, “We have always tried to be straightforward with you and, in that spirit, I need to share something. Unfortunately, I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable.” → Read More
Lately we’ve seen the rise of e-commerce and online retailer stertups disrupting the relationship between distributors and the consumer. Etsy comes to mind of course. Meanwhile, Made.com in the UK is leading the charge, and lately Llustre (also UK) has hit on a model of re-connecting designers with consumers.
That trend continues today as Urbanara, an online retailer for “high quality home textiles and home wares” supplied direct from the people who make them, secures a significant funding round. TA Venture, together with a group of international investors, including Blumberg Capital and Brain-to-Ventures, has participated in a €3.5 million series A investment round in the startup.
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Xfire, which offers social networking tools for gamers, just announced that it has raised $3 million in new funding.
The round was led by Singapore-based IDM Venture Capital. It’s apparently targeted specifically at expanding Xfire’s presence in Asia — the company recently announced that it’s partnering with China Youth Goyor Technology company to bring its services into the Chinese market. → Read More
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Trading has now begun on Facebook after a bit of a hiccup with NASDAQ, and while the numbers are nowhere near the heady heights of $70-$100 that some people were murmuring earlier, the $42.05 opening figure is still 10 percent higher than the $38-per-share price set by Facebook yesterday.
At the time of this writing, it is trading a bit lower, at $40.75, which gives the company about a $111 billion valuation. In Facebook’s S-1, the company listed how many shares main players were set to sell at listing time. Based on the originally sale price of $38 and then Facebook’s current price at $40.75, here are how the values are coming out. The first number is the value of the shares they sold, and the second is the value of their remaining stake in the company: → Read More
Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company’s insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the first photos are starting to trickle in. There was a standing ovation for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a talk before several long-time engineers bounced in while wearing capes or bringing boomboxes.
Tonight Facebook is having its 31st Hackathon to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. Some of the big products that have come out of earlier Hackathons include Facebook chat and an early version of Timeline. → Read More
Freshdesk, the makers of cloud-based help desk software that allows companies to support their customers through email, phone, website, Facebook and Twitter, are on a mission to compete with the big boys of the space, like Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com. Though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering a unique brand of cloud-based customer support to the enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well.
That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through $10 million-worth of services which includes free support for one year. Any startup with less than $1 million in annual revenue qualifies, but to get thing started, Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made. → Read More
Tiger Pistol, an Australian startup offering social media marketing tools that it describes as both “small business friendly” and “enterprise powerful”, is coming out of its closed beta test today and launching to the public. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in angel funding.
Co-founder and CEO Stephen Hibber says that the goal was to create something that could take most of the difficulty and uncertainty out of creating marketing campaigns on social networks. You can start off with pre-built campaigns and templates, so you don’t have to create anything from scratch, and you’re tapping into Tiger Pistol’s knowledge about best practices. → Read More
The rush of interest around crowdfunding is spawning many variations on the theme, and one of the more original of them — Crowdtilt, part of the most recent crop of Y-Combinator startups — is today announcing a funding round of $2.1 million for its platform that lets groups of friends come together to fund an event or project, like a house party or group vacation.
The company tells us that the seed round is coming from SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Y Combinator partners Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan, and DCM and Felicis Ventures, and it follows on from a very impressive three months of growth. James Beshara, the CEO and co-founder, tells us that it has now seen nearly $1 million of events funded since launching in February 2012.
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Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures. The startup previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding from most of the same backers — Battery is the only addition. → Read More
One of the things I wish I had done in both of my companies (Excite.com and JotSpot) was to take a piece of advice that I now give most entrepreneurs I meet. That advice is: “Right after you sign your term sheet for your Series A, write the fantasy deck for your Series B (complete with whatever metrics, graphs and customer lists you would love to have).”
I say this because of the way I’ve both done fundraising and seen it done. Whether we like to admit it or not, the way it’s usually done tends to be very haphazard and bottom’s up. It starts with… → Read More
Can early-stage tech startups be financed the way that Disney might fund a Pixar film? We’re about to find out.
New York’s betaworks is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to do a deal with design collective Fictive Kin. It’s pretty unusual because it resembles the way a producer might bankroll a movie or a game publisher might work with a developer. In this deal, betaworks is paying Fictive Kin, a design collective, a lump sum every year to create three or four concepts. Those concepts will be the basis for companies that are majority owned by Betaworks. If one or two of them happens to take off, betaworks will jump in and figure out how to scale it with the help of Fictive Kin. → Read More
Two of the top venture capital firms have written a big check for Qualtrics, a 10-year-old company offering online data collection and analysis.
The $70 million round is Qualtrics’ first institutional investment — the company says it has been profitable since it was founded in 2002. The money comes from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, which both have growth funds targeting investments like Qualtrics — mature companies that have already achieved some success but have bootstrapped thus far. Apparently it’s the largest investment the two firms have ever made together. (Past joint investments include AdMob, the mobile ad network acquired by Google for $750 million.) → Read More
EyeTrackShop, a startup that develops eye-tracking technology for measuring ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million from Northzone.
The company says its technology works through a regular webcam, allowing market researchers to gather data quickly and affordably. You can run the test before you spend money on a campaign, or test how well the advertising works once it’s live, and how it performed in different formats and sites. Customers include big tech companies such as Google, AOL, and Microsoft, as well as P&G and JCDecaux. → Read More
At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. Speaking to a crowd at the Grind work space in New York last week, Fred Wilson addressed this ongoing shift, saying, “there’s two times as much capital in the venture capital business today than we, the professional investors who make up the venture business, can actually put to work intelligently.” Bad for VCs, Wilson says, but good for entrepreneurs.
Of course, the fact of the matter is that the top investors are custodians of an equally valuable currency — information. With the noise and hype growing, it’s becoming even more essential to understand what it is about the anatomy of startups that makes them appealing to the right investors — or perhaps more importantly — why some of the best fail in spite of themselves.
In a new book, called Venture Capitalists at Work, Tarang and Sheetal Shah set out to provide entrepreneurs with real insight into how some of the top investors in the game evaluate, invest in, and mentor their startups — information that can be extremely powerful if put to use correctly — and that has thus far remained, they say, in a “black box.” → Read More
Stipple, the advertising startup that helps Web publishers monetize their images, just announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding.
The company already raised a $2 million seed round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Maples’ Floodgate, Justin Timberlake, and others. Floodgate and Relevance Capital led the new round, and there’s a long list of other investors. → Read More
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