Venture Capital

GitHub raises $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz

Geeks love GitHub, an online tool for organizing programming projects and communicating about them. And now GitHub-the-company, which has been bootstrapped so far, is getting a $100 million input from Andreessen Horowitz. It's the venture company's largest investment to date.

GitHub is the online interface for Git, a fine-grained tool for managing software development. Git was created by Linus Torvalds.

GitHub was designed to organize open-source projects but can be, and is, used for all types of projects. The service is free for open-source users, but makes money by selling licenses for commercial and corporate use. Enterprise buyers … Read more

Corporate VCs still have love for the Golden State

Corporate venture capital investments are down from last year but more than half of that money has stayed in California, according to an investment trends study released last night by CB Insights.

The report -- which tracked more than 220 corporate VCs, including Google Ventures, Intel Capital and Dow Venture Capital -- found that corporate VCs contributed to 11 percent of all venture deals in the first quarter of this year, but the $1.09 billion total invested is the lowest amount in the last five years.

The money was spread over 84 deals, the number is down from last … Read more

Institutional Venture Partners closes $1 billion fund

Institutional Venture Partners has secured $1 billion for a new investment fund.

The company broke the news to TechCrunch earlier today, telling the startup blog that it's calling the fund IVP XIV. The $1 billion raised is the largest fund the company has ever had and brings its total committed capital to $4 billion.

"Essentially it's going to be the same strategy," IVP General Partner Jules Maltz told TechCrunch in an interview. "We're a late-stage firm, we're very focused. We only do tech investing. We don't do China, we don't do … Read more

Index Ventures raises 350M euro early-stage fund

Venture capital firm Index Ventures announced today it has closed a new 350 million euro ($442 million) fund to invest in early-stage technology companies.

The new fund, the firm's sixth that focuses on early-stage technology investments, will concentrate its resources heavily on Europe, while also making investments in Israel and the U.S.

The new fund is very similar to the firm's fifth early-stage fund, which it raised in the summer of 2009, with some small differences.

"One surprise on our last fund was that we did a much higher percentage of deals in the U.S. … Read more

Why I had it all wrong about Boston's high-tech scene

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- I'm at a crowded tech schmoozefest, and Tim Rowe, the pied piper of local startups, is giving me a serious talking-to about my blase attitude toward the local tech industry.

"I'd like you to think about what you're saying and look at the facts," Rowe says with growing intensity. "I think you're going to see your perception and the facts don't add up."

No startup culture? Look around here in the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, ground zero for New England startups, Rowe says. There are about … Read more

Mark Cuban leads funding of video startup Switchcam

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is leading a round of seed funding in a new video startup called Switchcam that has technology that can be used to stitch together different videos of the same event so viewers can switch camera angles as they wish.

Other investors in the $1.2 million round, raised via AngelList, include Dave McClure's 500 Startups, Turner Media Camp, Vikas Gupta, Niket Desai, Reed Morse, David Beyer and Jeffrey Schox, Switchcam announced today.

Switchcam CEO Brett Welch told CNET that he got the idea while using his phone to take video of live music concerts. Unlike … Read more

Dear startups: Don't treat money like toilet paper

Having lots of money isn't a reason to spend it, especially if you're a startup that has yet to prove itself as a viable, sustainable business.

There have been a lot of early-stage startups raising monster rounds in recent months. Ark ($4.2 million seed), Viddy ($30 million), and Gumroad ($7 million) are just a few prominent examples.

The funding party may be over though, at least according to Paul Graham, a prominent investor and founder of Y Combinator.

"Jessica and I had dinner recently with a prominent investor," Graham said in a letter to Y … Read more

Facebook's IPO will hurt startups, warns Y Combinator founder

One of the most prominent people in Silicon Valley's startup world is warning that Facebook's disastrous IPO performance will lead to hard times for startups.

Paul Graham, the co-founder of the first and most influential startup incubator anywhere, sent an e-mail to his portfolio companies warning them that Facebook has made it a lot harder to raise money. Graham wrote that "the startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones that have easy money built into the structure of their company: the ones that raise a lot on easy terms, and are then led … Read more

How Facebook's Zucked-up IPO just killed the tech bubble

You didn't really want to start partying again like it was 1999, did you? Good thing, too. Because you aren't going to get the chance -- not just yet, at least.

Before last Friday, many thought that Facebook's much-hyped IPO might trigger a reprise of the Internet mania unleashed by Netscape's 1995 public offering, when "companies" -- some with little more than a dot-com suffix and marketing spiel -- were able to lure investors en masse.

And just as in the run-up to the great tech bust, some saw history repeating itself, what with … Read more