Venture Capital

Editor's note: This is a guest column by Andy Rachleff, whose bio is below.

Like everyone else here in Silicon Valley, I'm excited to see Facebook going public. No, I don't own a piece of the company, and I don't believe a blockbuster IPO will revive the entire global stock market, as some commentators have hyped.

What I do think--or certainly hope--is that a successful offering by Facebook will help young entrepreneurs understand why Silicon Valley embraced IPOs in the first place. And, importantly, why we need to revive the culture of the IPO.

When I … Read more

Facebook isn't the only one.

Brightcove today filed its amended S-1 with the SEC, setting the price range for shares of its upcoming IPO at $10 to $12. If its 5 million shares sell at the midpoint of its asking price, the company stands to raise around $55 million.

Brightcove is an 8-year-old online video distribution company that boasts 3,872 customers in more than 50 countries, but 66 percent of its $63.6 million in 2011 revenue came from the U.S. And despite its solid customer base, Brightcove also has a number of healthy competitors, including Castfire … Read more

The team of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, a duo since the go-go Netscape days of the mid-1990s, is on fire.

Today, their 3-year-old venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, announced that it has closed its third fund--this one, $1.5 billion, brings the total amount they've raised to $2.7 billion, which isn't bad for a time when VC returns have been lackluster, at best.

Andreessen Horowitz now has stakes in 90 consumer and enterprise businesses, including some of the hottest names in tech: Zynga, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Foursquare, Box, Groupon, Fab, Uber, and on and on. … Read more

A decade ago, on March 10, 2000, it seemed almost difficult to find someone skeptical about the dazzling future of dot-com stocks.

An undeniably prescient strategist at Warburg Dillon Read, now part of UBS, told the New York Times that "I don't see the end in sight." The Los Angeles Times quoted a Banc of America Securities analyst as saying that, before "too long," the Nasdaq index would double.

It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close … Read more

Despite a failed deal with Take-Two Interactive, and a Spore DRM backlash, Eidos Interactive signed an agreement on Monday with Electronic Arts announcing exclusivity to multiregional distribution and licensing rights to selected titles from the their catalog for EA Mobile.

Now, Eidos will provide licenses to EA across all existing mobile channels and mobile devices for four key titles: Tomb Raider Underworld, Just Cause 2, California Games X, and Minesweeper, with a future option on the mobile versions of the majority of Eidos videogames for three years.

According to a news release, Javier Ferreira (VP of European Publishing for EA … Read more

Open-source Web conferencing provider Dimdim has raised $6 million in Series B funding, the company is set to announce on Wednesday.

The funding round, which was led by current investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards, will enable Dimdim to introduce enhancements to the free service and expand its market reach.

Dimdim competes with fee-based services like Webex. Because it is open source, it could become a platform for real-time communications if it garners enough developer support, my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman predicts.

Since its private launch 10 months ago, Boston-based Dimdim has attracted more than 500,000 … Read more

Video surveillance firm VideoIQ is set to announce on Wednesday morning a $10 million Series B funding round.

Lehman Brothers Venture Partners is leading the round, and current investors Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture are participating.

The funding will be used to help VideoIQ expand to new markets and continue product development of its IP video surveillance and video analytics products, the company says.

Bedford, Mass.-based VideoIQ was spun out of GE Security in 2007 and is headed by Scott Schnell, a former RSA executive.

Update at 10:08 a.m. PDT, with additional statistics on IPO market.

U.S. venture-backed companies failed to launch a single initial public offering in the second quarter of 2008, a dire situation not seen since early 2003, according to the Quarterly U.S. Liquidity Report released Tuesday by Dow Jones VentureSource.

That's nada, zero, zilch.

And the mergers and acquisitions market for U.S. venture-backed companies did not fare much better in the second quarter, dropping 42 percent in the number of deals completed compared with the same time last year.

In the second quarter, 56 transactions … Read more

Parascale said Monday that it raised $11.37 million in Series A venture funding from Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, the latest in a string of cloud computing investments.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based Parascale, which provides storage in a networking "cloud" for digital content providers, said it plans to use the money to develop and market its upcoming Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS). PCS is an application that "aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud," according to the company.

Charles River partner Bruce Sachs and Menlo's John Jarve … Read more