Private Equity
In this week's installment of Job Moves, we look at Kleiner Perkins' latest hire and the firm he left; a key private equity appointment for the nation's largest pension fund; a new fund for two former Insight GPs; a Brazilian expansion; and another very large pension fund that looks to be hiring. KP HIRES HUANG FROM VIVO Just a few days after Vivo Ventures announced the promotion of a partner to head its China operations, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced that it has hired former Vivo partner James Huang to advise on life science investments as a partner in its Shanghai office. Huang was a managing partner at Vivo and, previously,
4 min read · 04 June 2011
Onswipe, a tablet publishing company said Friday that it had raised $5 million in a series A or "Awesome" round. Spark Capital led the round.
3 min read · 03 June 2011
We’re trying out a new service run by Tweetminster that tracks content shared on Twitter by experts in various fields. In our case those experts are focused primarily on venture capital, technology and entrepreneurship. Long term, we hope to track content shared by private equity pros, but there just aren’t that many PE experts on Twitter at this moment. We’re not making the Tweetminster service live just yet. We want to give the company’s algorithm more time to identify experts and analyze their tweets to identify key trends. If you’d like to check out the service and share your feedback with us, please let me know and I will shoot you a password. I’m at Lawrence.Aragon@ThomsonReuters.com or you can DM on Twitter @laragon. In the meantime, here are the top 5 most popular links being shared by our experts right now. Let us know what you think. 1. Spark, Lightbank And Yuri Milner Get In On OnSwipe’s $5M ‘Series Awesome’ (TechCrunch) 2. Slideshow: Top 10 Winners in pre-IPO Cash-Out at Groupon (peHUB) 3. Windows 8: The Beginning of the End of Windows (MobileOpportunity blog) 4. Let's Not Get Too Cocky About the Bubble (TechCrunch) 5. Pandora Sets IPO Terms; VC Shares Are Potentially Worth Over $950M (peHUB)
1 min read · 03 June 2011
Investors may have poured $950 million into Groupon earlier this year. But that didn’t snag any of the newcomers so much as 5% of the fast-growing discount deal site. That’s the takeaway from an initial reading of Groupon’s IPO filing. The document lists only two of the company’s venture investors -- New Enterprise Associates and Accel Partners -– as principal shareholders. NEA, which backed Groupon’s first venture round in 2008, holds a $14.7% stake in the company. Accel, which invested in Groupon’s second round in 2009, among others, according to Thomson Reuters, owns 5.6 percent. Among those not listed as principal shareholders are the firms that participated in Groupon’s last financing round of $950 million. The backers for that round, announced in January, included Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group, Maverick Capital, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures. At the time of that announcement, my colleague, Connie
2 min read · 02 June 2011
2 min read · 02 June 2011
Robert May has been appointed CFO and Chief Compliance officer of Industry Ventures. May was most recently a venture partner at Standish Management but was previously the CFO at Founders Fund and at Thomas Weisel Venture Partners. Also, Jay Ganatra has joined Industry Ventures as an associate working on secondary direct investment transactions.
4 min read · 01 June 2011
Cycle Capital Management has invested another C$3.5 million into Enerkem, a Quebec company that specializes into converting waste into clean fuel. Cycle Capital, a Canadian VC firm, has so far invested C$7 million in Enerkem.
3 min read · 01 June 2011
1 min read · 01 June 2011
This is the first installment of a new feature that looks at who’s moving in, up (or out) in venture capital and private equity circles. In this week's column, Vivo Ventures promotes two doctors to managing partner, BlackRock makes the first three of an expected 20 new appointments, TA associates announces its first hire for a new Hong Kong office, Venrock adds a partner for health care IT, and a U.S. Venture Partners staffer joins a startup. VIVO ADDS TWO Vivo Ventures, a life science-focused venture firm based in Silicon Valley, announced promotions of two to managing partner this week, one of whom will be based in Palo Alto, Calif., and the other in China. The first is Chen Yu, who joined Vivo as a partner in 2007. Prior to Vivo, Yu was an early employee at aQuantive, which listed on Nasdaq in 2000 and ultimately was acquired for $6.5 billion by
5 min read · 31 May 2011
San Francisco-based mobile game developer TinyCo has launched a $5 million fund, dubbed the TinyFund, to support mobile game developers, providing capital and resources. TinyCo develops games for the iOS and Android platforms and recently closed an $18 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
2 min read · 25 May 2011
