The #1 request I hear when talking to founders in San Francisco is: “We are hiring engineers. Know any?” We all know this is a big issue that’s only getting worse, and so do most of the investors. But, I’m now starting to hear this so often, I’m beginning to worry that all the conventional tactics simply won’t work. Early-stage startups that don’t start experimenting with new ideas to source… → Read More
“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a successful founder, entrepreneur, and angel investor, who happened to amass a truly eclectic set of experiences in the Valley, from running a venture-backed company to an acquisition, from investing in some of the most iconic and bold consumer-technology companies in the past decade, and going back to the well again to run his current startup… → Read More
Nomi, a startup led by former executives from Salesforce.com and Buddy Media, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital.
Additional investors in the round include Greycroft Partners, SV Angel, Forerunner Ventures, Ralph Mack, Dave Tisch, Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, and Mass Relevance CEO Sam Decker. → Read More
Snapchat, the impermanent messaging app that won “Fastest Rising Startup” at the 2012 Crunchies, has finalized a $13.5 million Series A round led by Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky.
According to The New York Times, Snapchat is now valued between $60 and $70 million. → Read More
For years, Peter Platzer was pretty close to a stereotypical rocket scientist on Wall Street — he was trained as a high-energy physicist, but he spent most of his professional career in finance. But he told me he’s always had an interest in space exploration, and now he’s working on an aerospace startup called NanoSatisfi, which just raised $1.2 million in seed funding.
Platzer said he… → Read More
“In the Studio” opens up February by hosting a former Wall Street derivatives trader turned early-stage venture investor in San Francisco. Renee DiResta, an Associate with O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), is relatively new to the West Coast startup scene. After finishing a CS degree in college, she worked in the fast-paced world of trading derivatives on Wall Street. During that time, DiResta… → Read More
DataXu, a startup that sees itself at the head of a “programmatic marketing revolution,” has raised $27 million in new funding.
DataXu was founded by MIT aeronautics and astronautics engineers who teamed up with tech entrepreneurs to create software that optimizes ad buying across multiple exchanges, which they launched at the TechCrunch 50 conference in 2009. → Read More
Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Q&A network Stack Exchange, announced today via blog post that he’s launching a new startup called Discourse, which offers an open source platform for running discussion forums.
The full name of the company is actually Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., and its aim is indeed to improve the quality of online discussion. However, Atwood writes that he’s… → Read More
“In The Studio” rolls on this week by welcoming an experienced international venture capitalist who has spent time within the storied firms of Wall Street while also participating on a three-time national tennis championship team in college before helping guide his current firm into some of the best growth-stage deals in the Valley and guiding many companies as they expand into China. → Read More
As companies have stayed private for longer, CEOs and founders have gotten savvier about letting early employees liquidate or diversify their holdings in their companies. With several of the heavily anticipated consumer IPOs savaged over the last year in public markets, later-stage companies might be more conservative in the near future about when to go public. That might be frustrating to… → Read More
PlayHaven, the gaming service provider that helps studios monetize their players better, just grabbed Google AdMob’s Charles Yim as COO. He’ll oversee the company’s international expansion, developer relations and business development. He had a similar role at Google where he managed the ad network’s key relationships with the biggest game developers like Rovio. He joined… → Read More
Scott Hartley, a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow, decided to completely overhaul his investment strategy today after returning from a trip to New York. Hartley, who is originally from Palo Alto, spent a few days in New York for meetings and an interview on Bloomberg TV. When he unlocked his Sand Hill Road office today, he found that his colleague Abhas Gupta had cheerfully Bieberized his new… → Read More
Extole, a startup offering tools for brands to manage their “social advocacy” programs, has raised $7.5 million in new funding.
The round is a follow-on to the $10 million Series C that Extole raised about a year ago, and it comes from existing investors, including Shasta Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Trident Capital. The company has now raised a total of $29.9… → Read More
The life of a founder isn’t an easy one — at least, initially. There’s no time for love, fun, or even sleep. The product, the users, the servers and the investors use up every available second of the day and night.
But entrepreneurs choose this difficult path in life, and they usually love it.
Runa Capital, a $135M technology-focused venture capital firm, appreciates the hard-working… → Read More
Optimal, a startup offering technology and data for social media marketers, just announced that it raised $7 million in Series B funding.
The company was previously known XA.net, but it changed names back in April, embracing the term that it was already using for its optim.al social ad campaign manager. The company is part of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Director program, and it offers both a… → Read More
At the DLD conference in Munich today, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz took the stage to discuss why he and his firm Andreessen Horowitz invests in a company and its founders. Last year, he said, Andreessen Horowitz found 2,355 companies that were potentially worth investing in that passed the company’s initial screen. In the end, Andreesen Horowitz only closed 24 deals (excluding seed deals). The… → Read More
“We could go public,” SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg says, “but the cost of going public — of running a public company — outweighs the benefits.” As the founder of LAUNCH Media, which he took public before selling to Yahoo! (where he stayed for six years), Goldberg is familiar with the IPO process and isn’t in any hurry to repeat it. → Read More
Telcentris, the maker of “unified communications” app VoxOx, says it has raised $5.3 million in its first institutional funding.
The VoxOx desktop and iPhone apps combine features like VoIP calling, texting, chatting, faxing, as well as aggregated contact info from Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, plus Google Voice-style support for calling multiple phones with one number. Back in 2008, … → Read More
“In the Studio” welcomes a quiet, unassuming early-stage company veteran who has been through the ups and downs of Valley startups before landing at a certain search engine around the year 2000, after which he spent nearly seven years in various finance leadership roles and helped steer the company to its blockbuster public offering.
Pietro Dova, now a Managing Partner at XG Ventures, is not a… → Read More
Celtra, a company offering tools for rich media ad creation, mobile ad serving, and analytics, just announced that it has raised $4 million in new funding.
The round was led by SoftBank Capital, and SoftBank’s Ron Fisher is joining the board. Existing investors GrandBanks Capital and Fairhaven Capital also participated in the new funding. → Read More
Doug Ludlow, formerly the CEO of AOL-acquired photosharing startup Hipster, is leaving the company’s mobile team (where he was a senior director) to become the first innovation partner at AOL Ventures.
Since this is a new role, it sounds like a lot of the details are going to be figured out on-the-job. Ludlow said the position arose from discussions he had with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and AOL… → Read More
Social advertising startup Moontoast just announced that it has raised $5 million in Series B funding.
CEO Blair Heavey told me that the company currently works with about 50 clients. It’s not an enormous list, but one that includes names like Universal, Lexus, Nike, Ford, Lady Antebellum, Time, and Simon & Schuster. Advertisers use Moontoast to create custom, interactive ads for social… → Read More
InstallMonetizer is an ad network for desktop software developers, a group that co-founder and CEO Vince Mundy says he once belonged to himself.
“We looked really really hard to find legitimate sources of income [from free downloads],” Mundy said. “We found that there were other developers facing the exact same problem, so we created InstallMonetizer.” → Read More
Every week, it seems, a new marketplace or services business is born. Some of the hottest companies of 2012 — after photo-sharing apps, of course — were online and/or mobile marketplace- or services-based companies, pioneered by the likes of Uber, for instance, and all the way to a newer company (with a common investor) to help you find someone to watch your four-legged friends while you’re… → Read More
Mobile ad company Pontiflex has raised $7.7 million in new funding. The news was revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and confirmed by Geoff Grauer, Pontiflex’s CIO, COO, and co-founder.
In an email statement, Grauer said the round was led by Blackstone, and is intended to grow AdLeads, a self-serve mobile ad platform where advertisers only pay after someone viewing… → Read More
Almost a year ago, an exodus on the Google Wallet team sent former members running away to companies like Square and other stealth projects. We wrote about one such stealth startup called Tappmo, co-created by the founding engineer and product lead on Google Wallet. The company is inching closer to launch, and they’ve renamed themselves Index. The team includes seven of the original members… → Read More
“Smart parking” platform Streetline just announced that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding.
The round was led by True Ventures, with participation from new investors Qualcomm Ventures and Citi, as well as past backers Sutter Hill Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners, and Fontinalis Partners. The company has now raised a total of $40 million, and it says it recently obtained a $25… → Read More
As CES 2013 gets underway, it finds the Quantified Self movement to be a far more crowded market than a year ago, but as Matt Burns pointed out recently, the market is still hungry for smarter devices and “plenty of room” remains for startups for startups to push the envelope with innovation and press beyond movement and weight.
With digital health data proliferating, wearable health-tracking… → Read More
A new report from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association released today finds that U.S. VC firms raised $20.6 billion from 182 funds in 2012, representing a 10 percent increase in dollar commitments when compared with 2011, which saw 18.7 billion raised from 187 funds. This is the most capital that VC firms have raised since 2008, which saw $25.6 billion raised, but from a… → Read More
Clipboard – the web clipping service that is a little like a cross between Evernote and Pinterest, racking up 1.7 million clips since opening for private beta in October 2011 – has taken a strategic investment from ed-tech company Scientia — backing that will result in joint product development between the two to target the education market with online collaboration tools. → Read More
New York City
