Wow. There is money out there: a retail deals site called Groupon has raised a whopping $30 million Series B funding round led by Accel Partners, one of Facebook's early backers. Existing Groupon investor NEA, which led the company's $4.8 million Series A round in January 2008, also contributed.
Here is the gist of Groupon: there are currently editions for 26 U.S. cities. The site advertises a deal each day from a selected local establishment like a restaurant, nail salon, or gym. There's a heavy discount involved. But enough members have to opt into the deal in order for any of them to get it. Groupon takes a cut of earnings if the deal hits the "tipping point" and goes live; otherwise, the featured merchant does not have to pay.
They've been profitable since June, founder and CEO Andrew Mason told CNET. So why raise $30 million? "We want to roll out to another 50 cities or so next year," he said, adding that early in 2010 it hopes to expand to Canadian cities, "so it's just going to help us increase the rate of customer acquisition and focus on building new technology." He wouldn't say what that new technology is, but he did add that the company went from 10 to 120 employees in the past year and planned to continue to grow at that rate.
The company grew out of an existing start-up called ThePoint, which applied a similar "collective" model to community and activism projects, before switching entirely to the retail model.
Venture firm First Round Capital has led the Series A funding round for start-up SimpleGeo, a buzzed-about new company that has built a product for easy integration of "location" features into Web and mobile apps, according to multiple sources familiar with the deal.
Also contributing to the round, sources say, are Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and many of the usual suspects from Silicon Valley's merry band of angel investors: among them are Ron Conway, Digg founder Kevin Rose, ex-Googler Chris Sacca, ubiquitous personality Gary Vaynerchuk, and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. One detail we weren't able to nail down was exactly how much money was raised, but one source says it's a "small" amount, probably in the low seven figures.
SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan declined to comment, but when we spoke to him earlier this month about SimpleGeo's official launch, he had said that the company was working on closing a round.
Some background on SimpleGeo: The company, based in Boulder, Colo., and co-founded by Galligan and former Digg engineer Joe Stump, originally planned to make location-aware augmented reality games. When they found out how difficult it was to make each game from scratch, they refocused the company on making a set of location-aware features for clients. They sell that in three versions ranging from free to $2,499/month.
Meanwhile, the location-aware market continues to heat up, with game-like services Foursquare and Gowalla poking into the mainstream, as well as the first appearance of Twitter's geolocation feature in the latest version of iPhone client Tweetie. Once Twitter members turn that on, their messages can be tagged with the exact location from which they were broadcast.
UPDATE (10:52 a.m. PT): The company has confirmed the round of funding via Twitter, and added the detail that it's a total of $1.5 million.
Yes, Twitter's megacash infusion is real. CEO Evan Williams confirmed on the company blog Friday that Twitter has raised a new round of investment from Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Benchmark Capital.
Williams says it's "a significant round." He didn't say just how close it was to the roughly $100 million that The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Nor did he say whether this values Twitter at $1 billion.
"It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value," Williams wrote in the blog post. "Twitter's journey has just begun, and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I'm proud of the team we've built so far, and I'm confident in the future we'll build together."
Before the end of the year, Twitter is expected to start rolling out paid corporate accounts to businesses that use the service for marketing, promotion, and customer service.
If any class of financial-services firm should have become extinct in 2008, it's the hedge fund. Hedge funds bled $154 billion in 2008, according to Lipper Hedgeworld, with 1,500 hedge funds closing shop, as reported by The New York Times.
Amazingly, however, 659 new hedge funds launched amid this financial bloodbath, and these new hedge funds are looking to build high-performance trading platforms on the cheap, a trend that bodes well for Marketcetera.
Hedge funds need to save money. Who knew?
It's important to remember that today's aren't yesterday's spendthrift hedge funds. I spent the morning with a friend who left a large financial-services firm to join a small, $250 million hedge fund in June. He represents a new demographic in the hedge fund world, one that cares about fund performance and cutting fund costs.
A lot of hedge funds still in business saw their top traders leave when the economy imploded, only to set up new funds. These new independents couldn't make money at the old firms because their performance was so underwater, it would take years to get back enough in positive gains to start cashing in on performance fees. Meanwhile, fund sizes under management began shrinking, with redemptions and fees getting slashed in the process.
This means a new breed of leaner hedge fund is rising, hedge funds that arguably could spend lavish sums on trading platforms but learned enough from the market implosion to save money wherever possible.
Marketcetera fills this need, particularly now, with its hosted offering. I've covered the company before but continue to be impressed by its speed of innovation.
The company launched Marketcetera 1.0 in January 2009, then hit version 1.5 in April 2009 (adding support for multiple traders and some key data feeds and real-time analytics), and now, in June 2009, the company's open-source trading platform is sitting on the NYSE's high-performance cloud.
Pretty impressive.
Equally impressive is where the company expects to take open source next, as can be seen in this YouTube video. The proprietary-software industry serving hedge funds and other financial services companies just got a wake-up call.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. Perhaps if enough people follow me, I'll be able to afford to lose an investment in a hedge fund.
Facebook has unveiled a list of 18 applications--for the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and Facebook Connect for the iPhone--that have been awarded investments from its FBFund seed funding program and invited to participate in a summer incubator workshop in its hometown of Palo Alto, Calif.
The workshop, called FBFund REV 2009, will run for ten weeks from June through August, according to a post on the Facebook developer blog by company representative Cat Lee. The post also contains a full list of winners, which range from a paintball game app to a dating service to an e-mail management program.
"Already planned are sessions with speakers from our fbFund Advisory Council, business luminaries, and our Facebook Platform team focused on everything from operating lean startups and metrics for success to marketing and monetization," Lee wrote. "The days will be packed with opportunities to get together, learn from one another, brainstorm and iterate on applications and business models. At the end of the summer, all of the startups will present to Silicon Valley angel and venture capital investors to get feedback and explore investment opportunities."
Facebook announced a chunk of finalists for this year's FBFund earlier this month.
Two nonprofits, a developer assistance program called Samasource and a student microloan project called Vittana, will also participate in the incubator program but can't receive funding due to the terms of FBFund.
Last fall, Facebook's fbFund had a successful grant competition where it shelled out $25,000 in seed funding each to 25 promising Facebook Platform developers. fbFund is following up that effort by starting a Facebook Platform incubator in Palo Alto, Calif., this summer. fbFund will pick 50 finalists out of the applicants and choose "a few lucky start-ups" to get up to $100,000 in funding and spend the summer in Palo Alto (Facebook's hometown), participating in tech talks and developing applications.
Those who get to spend the summer in Palo Alto will also have access to an impressive list of mentors, including Facebook itself, Accel Partners, Flixster, Founders Fund, RockYou, SGN, Slide, Tapulous, and Zynga. The program lasts from early June through late August and there's no word if there are plans to extend the incubator past the summer.
It sounds like a pretty sweet deal for aspiring Facebook Platform developers who need the funding and mentoring to take their business to the next level. The hope is that it will also spark more interest in developing for Facebook Platform since the iPhone and other platforms have been stealing all the buzz lately.
For the developers out there who are interested in applying for fbFund's incubator, the application is here.
Auditude, a video advertising company best known for technology that can identify clients' video content and run ads against it, has raised a $10.5 million Series B funding round from Redpoint Ventures and existing investor Greylock Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $23 million.
Last time we checked in with Auditude, the company had inked a deal with News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV Networks to detect both official and user-uploaded MTV content on the social network's MySpaceTV platform. It was seen by many as a savvy antipiracy measure. Since then, Auditude has started powering a broader variety of video ads on MySpace and its MySpace Music product, as well as partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment. More content deals are on the way, CEO Adam Cahan told CNET News.
"From our perspective, we are looking to work with everybody," Cahan said. "We are trying to tackle what I think is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges on the Internet right now, which is (that) tons of people are watching video, 80 percent of folks out there, and yet very few people are really making a business of this yet."
Redpoint partner Chris Moore will join Auditude's board of directors, which also includes former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta. A member of the short list for the top post at MySpace Music, Van Natta instead took the CEO role at rival streaming service Project Playlist.
Forget flowers and chocolate. Valley darling Twitter is going to have a really sweet Valentine's Day. The company announced Friday that it has added some more cash to its most recent round of funding, thanks to an infusion from Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners.
The deal just closed on Thursday night, according to a post on Twitter's official blog. But the team at Twitter, which has not yet put forth a business model, hopes to make it clear that they weren't desperate for cash.
"We weren't actively seeking more funding because significant capital from last year's partnership with Bijan (Sabet) and his team at Spark (Capital) is still in the bank," the post by co-founder Biz Stone read. "Nevertheless, our strong growth attracted interest and we decided to accept a unique opportunity to make Twitter even stronger with a very attractive offer."
Financial terms weren't disclosed in the blog post. The Silicon Alley Insider said they've heard $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners. We're looking into this; we heard that the company's valuation, meanwhile, may be as high as $250 million.
But wait! It sounds like money's on the way, even though Twitter just keeps raising more venture capital. "We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products," Stone's blog post read. "Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead."
Twitter raised its third funding round, led by Spark Capital, last spring.
This post was updated at 11:33 a.m. PT.
Mobile advertising start-up AdMob announced on its blog on Thursday that it has added $12.5 million to the Series C funding round that it began amassing last fall.
The money comes from the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund and Northgate Capital, adding to the round's existing lead investor Sequoia Capital and repeat investor Accel Partners. The funding brings its Series C total to $28.2 million.
AdMob recently launched a business unit specifically to handle advertisements on Google's Android platform. The reason for the Series C round, the company said, is to keep up growth, even as the advertising industry takes a hit. It'll be focusing on some new international markets, as well as expanding its sales and business development teams in the United States.
"We believe that now is a critical moment for us to cement our leadership position by making the investments that will help us to come out of this challenging economic environment even stronger than when we went in," AdMob's blog post read. "As mobile Web and application usage continues to grow rapidly worldwide, and smartphones--from the iPhone to the G1--gain in market share, we see a real opportunity to expand the mobile-advertising market."
Yodle, a New York-based company that helps small businesses generate leads and power local advertisements, on Monday announced that it has raised a $10 million Series C funding round.
Led by Jafco Ventures, the round was completed with contributions from the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund, and previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The reason for raising the money? According to a release, it's because Yodle is growing fast and plans to expand further. At the end of 2008, the company had 250 employees and 5,000 customers, and reported 700 percent revenue growth from 2007.
"It's been a watershed year for Yodle, and thanks to our incredible team working hard to deliver for our customers, we expect that growth to continue in 2009," CEO Court Cunningham said in the release. "While our competitors retrench in the face of financial adversity, we are stepping up investment in our customers' success. This new funding round will accelerate product and technology development to provide increased online exposure and even stronger results for our local business owner clients."
