Private Equity
There are all kinds of puns one could make up about a company developing treatments for irritable bowel syndrome that just pulled off a somewhat disappointing initial public offering. For negative spin, one could talk about how no one seems able to unclog the life sciences IPO market. Or, for a more positive take, how a bowel company’s market debut, though priced below expectations, offers some signs of relief for the blocked-up pipeline of initial public offerings.
2 min read · 04 February 2010
Heartened by big prices paid for AdMob and Omniture, VCs continue to pour money into analytics startups
8 min read · 01 February 2010
Hope springs eternal for a surge in IPOs, with nine more VC-backed companies registering to go public in December
3 min read · 01 February 2010
2 min read · 28 January 2010
As an entrepreneur, Gary Kremen knows something about growth industries. In the early 1990s, he had enough foresight about the porn industry's online potential to register the domain Sex.com. Later, he moved into online dating, founding dating site Match.com. These days, however, the San Francisco-based serial founder is all about solar. Clean Power Finance, which Kremen founded in 2006 several months after selling Sex.com for a reported $14 million, last week closed a $6.9 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by venture firms Claremont Creek Ventures and Clean Pacific Ventures. Sand Hill Angels, an angel investment group in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Kremen also participated.
2 min read · 12 January 2010
The VC-backed IPO market is improving, but it has a long way to go to get back to historical levels
8 min read · 01 January 2010
Investment plummeted last year, but VCs expect deal making to heat up
4 min read · 01 January 2010
Investment and fund-raising declined in 2009, but China boosters already see signs of improvement
4 min read · 01 January 2010
I had an interesting conversation this week with Peter Relan, the founder of YouWeb, the shoestring-budget Silicon Valley incubator that spawned social gaming hitmaker CrowdStar. Relan, YouWeb and CrowdStar are interesting for a number of reasons. One is that Crowdstar, a social gaming startup that launched by an Armenian physics major named Suren Markosian, has gained phenomenal traction in the last couple of months. The 17-person company’s biggest hit, Happy Aquarium, a virtual fish-raising game, now has 27.5 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AllFacebook.com. Across all games, CrowdStar has just shy of 40 million monthly Facebook users.
3 min read · 23 December 2009
2 min read · 17 December 2009
