venture funding

AVOS Systems, the Internet venture started by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has closed a Series A venture capital financing round with some help from old friends.

Google Ventures led the Series A round, along with New Enterprise Associates, according to AVOS. Madrone Capital and China-based Innovation Works also participated in the financing. AVOS did not divulge how much it raised in the round.

Hurley and Chen made a name for themselves in the Web community back in 2006 when they sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion. In their new role as leaders of AVOS, they've bought social-bookmarking site Delicious from Yahoo. … Read more

Here's an upbeat tidbit to end the year: 2011 is on track to the biggest year in venture capital deals in a decade.

Big years make for daring bets, and for this year I've chose a dozen influential investors to single out for their role in fueling startups of all sorts.

If the final quarter shapes up as it looks like it will, venture capital deals will total $30 billion for the year, a 25-percent jump from 2010, according to Anand Sanwal, whose firm, CB Insights, tracks investment activity among VCs and some big angel investors.

"I … Read more

Social learning startup Grockit has raised an additional $7 million in venture funding to expand its online test-preparation services.

Although not related to the funding, Grockit also recently launched a new service called Grockit Answers that can turn any YouTube video into a Q&A session. (Here's a company-supplied example on the credit crisis.)

Grockit's tools draw on social networking and online gaming to personalize learning outside of the classroom--ideally, to help students conquer their academic weaknesses and ace test preparation. The company's tag line is "Test Prep Made Fun." Grockit claims one million … Read more

An unlikely pairing has emerged in the online space.

A new start-up called Backplane has raised over $1 million in venture funding, The New York Times is reporting. The company's investment is led by Tomorrow Ventures, the venture firm that Google Executive Chairman (and former CEO) Eric Schmidt founded.

By investing in Backplane, Schmidt has a new partner: Lady Gaga. The pop artist owns 20 percent of Backplane, according to The New York Times.

Backplane, which has yet to launch, is designed to build and expand online communities around musicians and sports teams. According to the Times, the service … Read more

Reductive Labs, creator of the popular open-source IT automation project Puppet, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from True Ventures, the firm that also invested in (then) open-source marketing automation vendor Loopfuse.

Reductive plans to use the funding, which was announced Tuesday, to build out the functionality of Puppet, a move that won't win it any friends among competitors like Hewlett-Packard's OpsWare.

It's a good time for the company to be raising money. Counting such heavyweights as Google, Digg, Twitter, the New York Stock Exchange, Barclays Capital, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Harvard Law School, … Read more

While some entrepreneurs seek to protect their ideas with nondisclosure agreements, investor Mark Cuban has a different idea: open-source your business plan.

What does this mean? As Cuban explains, it means that start-ups should openly post their business plans online. Yes, this means that a competitor could take a plan and run with it, but given that the quality of execution often differs markedly from the quality of an idea, the risk may be lower than you think.

You must post your business plan here on my blog, where I expect other people can and will comment on it. I … Read more

Correction at 9:10 a.m. PDT: The size of the average M&A deal is lower than originally reported.

Israel's high-tech merger activity fell last year, but it's IPO market took a far greater hit, according to a report released Wednesday.

The country exited the year without a single high-tech initial public offering, a first since 2003, according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center report.

With the global economy taking a beating and the markets leaving investors running for cover, it's not surprising to see companies pulling back on IPO plans, in hopes of … Read more

E-marketing firm SmartReply has acquired mobile-advertising specialist MSnap in an effort to increase its presence on wireless devices.

SmartReply, which distributes advertisements via voice messages, e-mail, and text messages, is seeking to create the largest U.S. mobile-messaging ad network through the acquisition, according to a post on MSnap's Web site.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and MSnap and SmartReply were not immediately available for comment, but according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, MSnap's shareholders will receive a minority stake in SmartReply.

MSnap, founded in 2006, has received investments from Partech International and … Read more

Y Combinator on Monday announced that it has raised a $2 million venture fund with the aid of Sequoia Capital and angel investors.

In making the announcement, Y Combinator noted that it plans to increase the number of start-ups it funds to 60 a year, up from 40.

For Web services and software start-ups, that may bode well. Y Combinator focuses its investments on those two sectors and funds companies that are in their early stages.

As it notes, one unusual twist to this venture firm is its reliance on the strength of entrepreneurs' ideas, rather than on their business … Read more