Event registration and ticketing service Eventbrite announced earlier today that it has raised $60 million in new funding.
The round was led by Tiger Global Management, which previously led Eventbrite’s $50 million Series E. New investor T. Rowe Price also participated. In the funding press release, CEO Kevin Hartz argues that “live experiences are the new luxury good” and describes the round… → Read More
A year ago, Dave Girouard left his position as the president of Google Enterprise to start a new company, Upstart, that allows users (mostly recent college graduates) to raise money for the pursuit of entrepreneurial goals — they pay their lenders back with a percentage of their income.
And today, lining up with the anniversary of his departure, Girouard is announcing that he has raised $5.9… → Read More
During the summer of 2012, while working in venture capital, one of the early-stage companies I stumbled upon was founded by a trio of guys based in Singapore. We met a few times in the Valley and quickly became friends, and I informally helped them, from time to time, navigate the waters of moving to the Valley and getting situated here. I hadn’t talked to them in a while but we recently… → Read More
Earlier this month, we wrote that High Fidelity, the virtual world startup led by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, had raised $2.4 million of a $3.4 million round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, we didn’t know who had actually made the investment — until today.
Tony Conrad of True Ventures just announced that his firm led High Fidelity’s Series… → Read More
Last month, we posted a bit of a rumor: that Finland’s Supercell — likely the most lucrative iOS gaming company in the world — had raised about $100 million in funding in a round led by Index Ventures, Atomico Partners and Institutional Venture Partners. Now we have confirmation today that the deal did happen, according to a flashy Forbes feature. The tiny Helsinki-based company… → Read More
Breakout Labs, a Peter Thiel-backed effort that supports startups doing cutting-edge research that might still be too risky to get traditional venture backing, just put capital into another two companies. They’re funding a Siri-like natural language processing startup called SkyPhrase and another biotech company called Stealth Biosciences, which is creating “nanostraws” that make… → Read More
Action.IO, a startup promising to make it easier to create, configure, and share development environments, just announced a new name — Nitrous.IO — and $1 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, TIBCO Software, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures, and Peanut Labs… → Read More
Chile’s not the only South American country with a serious startup accelerator program anymore. Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation said today that it’s willing to invest up to $78 million in 100 local and foreign startups that apply for a new “Start-Up Brasil” program. The idea is to lure both domestic and foreign talent to build tech companies… → Read More
Bitcoin’s record highs and the ensuring surge in hacking attempts and thefts may be grabbing headlines. However, beneath the chaos, Silicon Valley’s best-known venture firms are finally starting to make real bets around the crypto-currency. → Read More
Sticky, a startup using eye-tracking technology to measure ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million in new funding.
The company is a rebranding of EyeTrackShop, a webcam-based eyetracking service which spun out of Tobii Technologies. The big selling point is the ability to determine not just whether an ad was served and rendered on a consumer’s screen, but whether they actually saw it. → Read More
Optimizely, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that helps companies A/B test different versions of their website, has raised $28 million in Series A funding.
That would be a sizable Series A for most startups, but it’s a particularly big step for Optimizely, which had only raised $3.2 million thus far. The last round was announced a year ago, but the company didn’t disclose the amount at the… → Read More
Angel investing in Europe is getting another boost: DFJ Esprit, a UK-based member of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson network of VCs, is preparing to close its second EIS Angel Co-Investment fund, up to £10 million ($15 million) that will be used to help angels invest as syndicate partners alongside DFJ Esprit’s larger investments from its institutional funds, with the latest of these valued at £90… → Read More
Brian Pokorny, who led photo-sharing service Daily Booth and Batch into a talent acquisition by Airbnb, is returning to SV Angel as a general partner. He has a long history with the firm. He’s been a strategic partner of SV Angel since 2009, before he left to be CEO of DailyBooth. He has also worked with Ron Conway on angel investing since 2006. Pokorny personally has stakes in companies… → Read More
While the number of seed financing deals has ballooned over the last few years as the cost of starting a company has fallen, the pace of Series A venture deals hasn’t kept up. Now it looks like the bottleneck between the seed stage and the Series A level has gotten even tighter, according to a survey from Fenwick & West, one of the best-known law firms for startups in Silicon Valley. In… → Read More
Sitting in Snobar, a cool bar shaded by fir trees in deepest Ramallah, George Khadder is practically thumping the table as he speaks. A Palestinian who has worked in Silicon Valley, he talks passionately about his desire for Palestinian entrepreneurs to control their own destiny. “I came back from Silicon Valley because I believed I could affect change,” he tells me. It’s a sentiment that has been… → Read More
Sherpa, a personal assistant app that launched initially in the Spanish-speaking world, just announced that it has raised $1.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.
Sherpa users can speak or type their requests, and the app answers them by collecting information from around the web. The company has also partnered with PayPal and other services, so that users accomplish tasks like… → Read More
“In the Studio” opens the spring of 2013 by welcoming one of the most well-known “super angels,” who arrived to Valley, by way of Boston, Philadelphia, and Istanbul, in the mid-1990s, held early product management stints at Silicon Graphics and a little startup called Google, which ultimately catapulted his career into what it is today. → Read More
Accel Partners has just this morning announced another hefty fund of $475 million. It’s the company’s fourth fund for Accel London and will be used for investments across a wide range of technologies — consumer Internet, big data, cloud, SaaS and mobile among them – and primarily companies in Europe and Israel, at all stages of investment but focusing mainly on its “sweet spot” of Series A. → Read More
Realty Mogul, a site where accredited investors can can pool their money to back real estate deals, is going live today.
Co-founder and Jilliene Helman argued that in the current financial landscape, real estate is “one of the ways that people can still get yields.” She also acknowledged that there’s a lot of excitement right now about equity crowdfunding for startups, but she noted that… → Read More
NewsCred, a company that licenses content from publications like The New York Times and The Economist for use in brand marketing campaigns, announced that it has raised $15 million in new funding.
The company was founded by Shafqat Islam, Iraj Islam, and Asif Rahman in 2008, and it has shifted focus a number of times, from a credibility rating score for publishers, to a “Ning for newspapers,”… → Read More
Late last year, former Googler Gabor Cselle had a problem. He’d launched a fun app called DrawChat, and it was starting to see some real usage — which would be great, except Cselle told me that DrawChat was always meant to be “a palate cleanser” and that he wanted to pursue a “billion-dollar thing.” So he auctioned off DrawChat (it was purchased by OneLouder, a division of Handmark) and got to… → Read More
Emergence Capital Partners, an enterprise-focused venture firm that has backed Salesforce.com, Yammer and Box, just took on a new operating partner with the hiring of Alison Berkley Wagonfeld. She comes from Harvard Business School’s California Research Center down in Menlo Park. Before that, she co-created QuickenLoans at Intuit, which eventually became one of the biggest online home loan… → Read More
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham just published a blog post suggesting a new way to handle handshake deals, i.e. verbal commitments for investments and other transactions.
That kind of commitment can be a necessary prelude to a more formal agreement. Graham writes: “Things can happen fast in the startup world … so both investors and founders need a way to reserve space in a transaction.”… → Read More
500friends, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that helps retailers manage their customer loyalty programs, is announcing that it has raised $5 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by existing investor Intel Capital and new investor Fung Capital. Previous backer Crosslink Capital also participated. (Intel’s Carey Lai and Fung’s Michael Hsieh are both joining the 500friends board.) The… → Read More
Startupi, a site covering the Brazilian startup scene, has raised a $300,000 seed round of its own.
The team was pitched to me as the “TechCrunch of Brazil,” and in fact it has attracted the backing of Roi Carthy, who covers Israeli startups for TechCrunch. (Carthy invested through his firm Initial Capital, which backs early-stage Israeli and Brazilian companies.) Other investors in the round… → Read More
“In the Studio” welcomes a co-founder of a company which went public, a native Texan who studied engineering in Silicon Valley and business on the east coast, and who, upon returning to the Valley to begin investing, encountered a different path than he originally anticipated. → Read More
Jared Fliesler, who oversaw growth and user acquisition at Square, is crossing over to the venture side from the startup world and joining Matrix Partners as a general partner. A firm that has been around for more than 30 years, Matrix does Series A rounds in the enterprise and consumer space. It’s bi-coastal with offices in both Boston and Palo Alto. They are in companies like ZestFinance… → Read More
Pathjoy, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that makes it easy and affordable to have your home cleaned, is announcing that it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding. It’s taking on a new name that sounds like a better fit for its mission — goodbye Pathjoy, hello Homejoy.
The funding came from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Mike Hirshland/Resolute.VC, Max Levchin, Paul Buchheit… → Read More
TripleLift is a New York City-based startup aiming to help advertisers embrace what Chief Strategy Officer Ari Lewine calls “the rise of the visual web.”
“The web is increasingly dominated by images, and images are quickly becoming the primary currency with which brands communicate with their potential customers,” CEO Eric Berry told me in an email. “TripleLift identifies how consumers engage… → Read More
Update: And in true old media fashion, the investment has now been formally announced by Conde Nast itself, some 15 hours after the news broke. The investment will be used for Farfetch to enter into new markets (geographical and otherwise). José Neves, founder and CEO of Farfetch notes: “This investment will fuel our entry to new markets while assisting our growth in existing ones. Our goal to… → Read More
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