4 min read · 09 September 2010
You wouldn’t know the IPO market remains so sluggish -- not by the new $39 million Series C just closed by Livescribe, the Oakland-based maker of two so-called smartpens, the Echo and Pulse. The round -- led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from Scale Venture Partners, Qualcomm, TransLink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital and existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lionhart, and Aeris Capital – not only enticed an almost ridiculous number of investors; it brings the company’s total funding to a stunning $100 million. Livescribe is just three years old.
4 min read · 09 September 2010
3 min read · 08 September 2010
8 min read · 07 September 2010
Beginning today, in an effort to collect and return some free information about the PE industry, Pepperdine University in Malibu is inviting “senior lenders, asset-based lenders, mezzanine funds, private equity groups, venture capital firms, angel investors, factors, privately held businesses and business appraisers” to complete its 25-minute online questionnaire. For what it’s worth, contributors to the school’s fourth annual study, which aims to gauge current investor behavior—from how much capital is typically accessible right now for a particular kind of financing event, to what benchmarks must be met to qualify for that capital -- receive a
1 min read · 03 September 2010
2 min read · 03 September 2010
Yesterday, after unveiling an anticipated upgrade of its Apple TV set-top box at an event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs surprised attendees by introducing Apple’s new social network, Ping. The service, made immediately available to iTunes’ 160 million users, enables those who opt in to it to view their friends’ music purchases, along with which shows they plan to attend and what songs they most like -- along with other features, like concert tour information. On the heels of the announcement, numerous comparisons were made to the social network MySpace, which has ceded virtually everything but music to Facebook and now looks well-positioned to get clobbered by Ping. Yet a smaller startup may struggle even more to coexist peacefully with Ping: 9-month-old social buying site Blippy, which has raised nearly $13 million from VCs and angels, principally August Capital and Charles River Ventures. While in one sense, Ping validates the startup’s raison d'être -- clearly Jobs has observed that people like discussing the music they've bought –- it could potentially slow the number of new registrants to Blippy, where iTunes purchases are shared far more frequently than any other types of purchases. As of today, for example, Blippy users have let the service track 389,217 800,565 of their iTunes purchases, compared with 249,112 348,389 Netflix rentals, 55,148 34,225 Amazon purchases, 1,459 1,290 Zappos purchases, and just 900 199 Macy’s purchases. Philip Kaplan, co-founder of Blippy, hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment, but in a tweet after yesterday’s Ping announcement, he acknowledged the impact of Ping. “Apple's new thing, Ping, mainstreams the idea of sharing your purchases,” he wrote, adding, “Which is both good and bad (I liked when Blippy was crrraazzy ).” (UPDATE: Kaplan just emailed to say that a small bug in Blippy's interface rendered the numbers we published earlier today wrong. In fact, you can see from the new numbers in the text above that Blippy is even more reliant on iTunes' purchases than we'd initially reported. Kaplan also writes that: "We admit there was something nice about being on the edge, 'that startup where crazy people talk about what they're buying.' But we love Apple and hope they're able to help take the idea of sharing one's purchases to a wider, more mainstream audience. Fortunately for Blippy, unlike Apple, Blippy isn't limited solely to iTunes purchases.")
4 min read · 02 September 2010
It’s easy to laugh off a $30 million Series A round for two largely unproven young entrepreneurs, in a space where there are a great many small players as well as large ones. But then, you might make the same mistake that industry observers first made about Google and Facebook. And Brian and Matthew Monahan, the 23- and 26-year-old brothers behind 4-year-old Inflection, don’t want you to feel silly years from now if their company accomplishes what it’s setting out to do: transform the public records industry and become the go-to place for people search. While you can find out plenty about people via search giants like Google and Yahoo -- and despite a succession of other sites like PeopleFinders.com and PublicRecordFinder.com that make it easier to find public records online -- the Monahan brothers say they’ve already compiled so many public records that any firm that tries to catch up now will be eating their dirt. It's a claim that Matrix Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures plainly agree with. Matrix led the company’s Series A, giving it $15.25 million, while Sutter Hill Ventures chipped in another $14.75 million. (The company isn’t disclosing its pre-money valuation, though the brothers say they are “happy with it” and that they raised as much capital as they did because they didn’t want to seek out a second round any time soon.)
3 min read · 02 September 2010
Sunny Gupta thinks he has discovered an entirely new business category, and he’s apparently having little trouble making his case to customers -- or investors. Today, his Bellevue, Wash.-based SaaS startup, Apptio, announced that it has raised a $16.5 million round of funding -- its third in just three years -- bringing the company’s total funding to $37.5 million. Shasta Ventures led the round, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group. All are previous investors. Ignition Partners, which had participated in Apptio’s Series A round, was not included in what Gupta characterized as an “oversubscribed” round that attracted term sheets from numerous outside investors, all of which he says were turned down. “In all honesty, I screwed up in B round, as I thought deal was too expensive, given the opportunity,” says Ignition Managing Director John Connors. He adds, “Sunny is doing a great job of building this company, and I missed opportunity … that we should have participated in.”
3 min read · 31 August 2010
I'll let you decide if this is pure genius or purely disgusting, but for $19.99, exhausted entrepreneurs and their overstretched teams have a new option to layer into their revolving late-night diets of skinny lattes and Diet Coke. Behold the caffeinated marshmallow, each injected with more than 100 milligrams of caffeine. How much caffeine is that, exactly? To put it into perspective, that's roughly the same amount of caffeine as you'd consume in a Starbucks frappuccino blended coffee beverage; more than twice as much caffeine as you'd down with one standard 12 oz. can of Coke, Dr. Pepper, or Pepsi; and about a fifth more caffeine than you'll find in an 8.3 oz serving of Red Bull.
1 min read · 30 August 2010
