• Bubba Murarka: DFJ’s Newest Whiz

    bubba_headSteve Jurvetson has always been DFJ’s boy wonder, a polymath whose interests range from nanoscience to space travel and who received his electrical engineering degree from Stanford in two-and-a-half years (then he nabbed his master’s, then an MBA).

    Now, the Sand Hill Road venture firm appears to have found a new whiz in Bubba Murarka, who was brought on as a managing director last May and has some pretty impressive credentials of his own.

    The son of a scientist and an engineer, Murarka grew up in San Jose and Cupertino before heading off to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Ca., “mostly because I wanted to go somewhere my parents couldn’t drive to see me by surprise,” he tells me over coffee at San Francisco’s Epicenter Café.

    As he was graduating, Microsoft recruited him to Seattle, where in 2001, Murarka was among a group of graduates to invent one of the earliest versions of social networking, an online application called Three Degrees. Eighteen months after Murarka arrived at Microsoft, however, his group was reorganized, its resources cut, and Murarka headed back to Cal Poly and earned his master’s degree.

    Again, Microsoft came knocking, this time offering Murarka the chance to run all product for Bing in the Bay Area. He happily stayed another three years. But by 2008, like a lot of top talent, Murarka — who speaks fast and smiles often — found himself at Facebook, where he talked his way into a business development role. He says he wanted to learn something new. What he discovered was how to handily outmaneuver traditional biz dev people. “I’d built Web software and desktop software and I understood the product and the engineering side of things,” he says. “The business person would have to bring in the engineer or product manager and I’d just start negotiating directly with that person and all of a sudden, we’d have an awesome deal for Facebook. It was sort of like a superpower.”

    It became too rote, in fact, so in early 2011, Murarka asked to switch to product management. With the move, he became the third product manager at Facebook to focus on mobile, and the first to zero in on Android specifically, eventually leading more than 50 people in the creation of Facebook’s Android app. (Given Android’s adoption, it’s probably the most-used interface for Facebook at this point.)

    Whether all of that experience will translate into success at DFJ is an open question, though it’s easy to see how it might.

    Murarka, for example, recently led the Series A round of CircleCI, a “continuous integration platform” that basically takes code sitting on a developer’s GitHub repository and quickly runs tests on it on Amazon’s Web services, pushing out what’s working to end users. The company has plenty of competitors, including CloudBees and Semaphore. But CircleCI has “built the best product out there,” says Murarka, “and as one of the few VCs who has written and shipped desktop, Web, and mobile software, I think I uniquely get it. I really see the power of the future they’ve created.”

    In the meantime, Murarka, a nut for all things mobile, can’t resist developing a still-stealth mobile company in parallel. “The agreement I had with DFJ was that I’d finish the company building, so I’m chairman but I got out of an operational role at the end of 2013.”

    Murarka replaced himself as CEO with a former COO of Virgin Mobile. “So, it’s like, going to be a thing,” he says excitedly.

    I ask the newly minted VC if his startup has raised any capital. “None so far,” he says with a slight smirk. “We’re still debating.”

    Connie

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  • StrictlyVC: March 21, 2014

    Good morning!

    Top News in the A.M

    Poor Blackberry can’t catch a break. It looks like even the White House is moving on to Samsung phones.

    —–

    A Small Entrepreneur Takes On, Gulp, Uber

    Across the U.S., new car-sharing services Lyft and Sidecar are spreading fast, while Uber, which now manages a ride-share service as well as connects passengers with career drivers, seems destined for world domination.

    In short, it doesn’t sound like a great time to launch a new car service. Yet that’s exactly what Yamandou Alexander has done with GoGreenRide, a New York-based startup that Alexander has bootstrapped with $2.5 million of his own capital. (GoGreenRide is currently halfway through raising a new, $5 million outside round of fundraising.)

    Oddly, Alexander may have had the idea of an alternative transportation fleet first. As the French-born entrepreneur tells it, he moved to New York City at 19, bussing tables at famed Upper East Side restaurant Daniel and selling Motorola Startacs to his coworkers, many of them fellow immigrants. He eventually began exporting the handsets to Africa, creating one telecom company and selling a second for enough money in 2012 to bring to life a concept he wanted, but couldn’t afford, to pursue in 2006 – a nicer, greener, more affordable version of a black car service.

    We chatted recently about how that vision is coming together and why GoGreenRide makes sense now, even in a ride-sharing economy.

    Your business differentiates itself in two key ways. For one thing, GoGreenRide owns or leases dozens of Prius cars. You also have 40 full-time employees, rather than contractors. You’re like the anti-Uber, except that Uber is so profitable precisely because it has so little overhead. Why does your strategy make sense?

    With contractors, there’s a lack of control in presentation, quality, and customer service. We want our drivers to wear a uniform; to work on a schedule, rather than when they feel like it; to open doors; and to understand when it isn’t time to talk. We want to provide good, consistent customer service. We’re also concerned with Uber’s model from a liability standpoint.

    As for the cars, based on plans to increase our fleet to 50 cars by summer, the company should reach break-even by December. Next year, the car should see a 13 percent EBITDA…and by 2018, 26 percent EBITDA.

    Where are you turning to fund those plans?

    We’re talking with VCs. Investors on the West Coast are more interested in less capital-intensive businesses, but we’re getting good traction with East Coast people who know and live the experience of trying to find transportation in New York. We’re also going out to AngelList for additional investment, and inviting GoGreenRide members to participate.

    Uber gets a lot of flack for its surge pricing. Is your pricing flexible, too?

    Pricing does fluctuate based on traffic conditions. But you always know how much you’ll pay before you get in a car via our mobile app, which sends you detailed information about your trip, including when the driver will arrive. Our metering is calculated based on the estimated time [it will take to transport a passenger from A to B], which we know based on historical data about traffic patterns.

    As an alternative to black car service, what percent of your business comes from corporate partnerships?

    About 40 percent. We cater to both customers taking long trips, who might otherwise take a black car service to the airport, and short trips, where we’re competing more directly with taxis. Our average fare is $34, which is the same as a yellow cab, but you’re getting a much nicer experience with GoGreenRide.

    Beyond expanding your fleet, what’s on your road map, so to speak?

    The short-term growth opportunity is for us to grow our model in New York, then move into L.A. or San Francisco. We’re also starting a franchising program, including [helping launch] a GoGreenRide in China.

    We glad for Uber’s success and the acceptance it has gained in New York. But we also see a lot of people coming to us from them because of pricing, level of service, reliability, and safety.

    300x250_Static

    New Fundings

    Chatwala, a year-old, New York-based messaging app, has raised $625,000 in seed funding for its two-way video chat mobile app that lets users engage in staggered conversations VentureBeat has more here.

    Crowdtap, a 4.5-year-old, New York-based startup that helps brands connect with their fans and reward them, has raised $5 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor Foundry Group. Other participants in the round included Tribeca Venture Partners, Alta Communications, and The Mustang Group. The company has now raised $15 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    Elevate Digital, a three-year-old, Chicago-based interactive digital advertising and software company, has raised $3 million in funding from SFX Entertainment, a live event and festival promoter that plans to incorporate Elevate’s technology it into its events. The money brings Elevate’s Series A fund to a total of $7.2 million. Its other backers include Partners Path Investments and Advantage Capital Partners.

    Faraday, an 18-month-old, Middlebury, Vt.-based cloud software provider aimed at helping housing contractors and handymen find new business, has raised $880,000 in Series A round of financing led by FreshTracks Capital. Renewable energy services provider 3Degrees, seed-stage venture investor LaunchCapital, environmental-opportunities-focused investor ARB, and a number of individual investors also participated.

    Gigwalk, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that asks people to use their smartphones to gather and submit to Gigwalk information about retailers they visit, has raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Nokia Growth Partners. Other participants in the funding includedRandstad Holding and earlier investors August Capital, Harrison Metaland SoftTech VC.

    Invendo Medical, a 6.5-year-old, Garden City, N.J.-based maker of endoscopy products, has raised $28 million in financing led by Xeraya Capital. Other participants in the round included TVM Capital, Wellington Partners and 360° Capital.

    Procured Health, a two-year-old, Chicago-based company whose software helps hospitals with their internal workflow, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by FCA Venture Partners. The company had previously raised $1.1 million in seed funding from Zimmerman Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, and Blueprint Health Accelerator.

    Saffron Technology, a 15-year-old, Cary, N.C.-based company whose data analytics platform claims to unify and learn from structured and unstructured data in real time from a large variety of sources, has raised $7 million in Series B funding from unnamed sources. The company tells the Triangle Business Journal that it plans to use some of that funding to move to Silicon Valley.

    Stir, a months-old, L.A-based creator of so-called “learning” height-adjustable desk, has secured $1.5 million in seed investment led by Vegas TechFund. Numerous angel investors also participated in the funding.

    Testbirds, a 2.5-year-old Munich, Germany-based mobile and web app that lets companies outsource their app testing, has raised $2.9 million in Series A funding led by Seventure Partners. The company had previously raised roughly $1.8 million in seed funding, reports TechCrunch.

    YouNoodle, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that builds platforms for entrepreneurship competitions all over the world, has raised $1.1 million in a new financing round, including from VegasTechFund,Lars-Henrik Friis Molin of Sweden, The Amicus Group of Korea, and Kolind A/S.

    —–

    New Funds

    Flybridge Capital Partners, the 13-year-old, Boston-based venture capital firm, is raising $125 million for its fourth venture capital fund, according to an SEC filing that was first spied by Fortune. As Fortune’s report notes, the fund is far small than its immediate predecessor, a $280 million pool closed in 2008. It says the difference reflects numerous changes, including that the firm is no longer focused on healthcare deals. (In fact, the firm’s cofounder and primary healthcare investor, Michael Greeley, left Flybridge last fall to join another firm, Foundation Medical Partners. You can read an interview with him about the move here.) The new, more focused Flybridge is also reportedly backing out of Latin America as a focus area, with general partner Jon Karlen becoming an advisor to the firm, while New York-based principal Math Witheiler is promoted to general partner in New York.

    Lightspeed Venture Partners, the 14-year-old, Sand Hill Road venture capital firm, has closed its tenth fund with a total of $1 billion in capital commitments, reports Fortune, which say the firm raised two separate funds: a $650 million early-stage fund, and a $350 million late-stage vehicle. The fund invests in consumer and enterprise deals, along with energy tech. Fortune has more here.

    Qiming Venture, the 10-year-old, Shanghai-based venture capital firm cofounded by Gary Rieschel, has raised about $500 million for its fourth fund, according to China Money Network. The firm, which funds early- to growth-stage companies across China in the media and internet, IT, consumer and retail, healthcare, and clean technology sectors, raised its last, $450 million, fund in the spring of 2011.

    Simon Property Group, a publicly traded, Indianapolis, In.-based commercial real estate giant, has announced a new, dedicated venture fund called Simon Venture Group that will look to invest in “retail innovation,” from seed-stage to high-growth companies, says the firm. The new venture group will be led by J. Skyler Fernandes, who was previously a partner at Centripetal Capital Partners, a multi-stage venture capital fund.

    Technology Crossover Ventures, the 19-year-old growth equity firm, has officially closed on TCV VIII, a $2.23 billion fund. TCV began marketing the fund in the summer of 2012 with a $2.5 billion target.

    —–

    IPOs

    Rubicon Project, the nearly seven-year-old, L.A. based ad tech company, priced its IPO yesterday at $17 a share, valuing the company at more than $450 million. The company has raised $51 million in funding from Mayfield Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, IDG Ventures, and News Corp. Its biggest shareholders are Clearstone, which owned 21.7 percent going into the offering; News Corporation, which owned 19.3 percent; and Mayfield, which owned 14.2 percent. (All three had plans to sell part of their stake in the IPO.) Rubicon today becomes the first L.A. tech company to go public since Demand Media‘s IPO in 2011.

    —–

    Exits

    Mindbloom, a 5.5-year-old, Seattle-based mobile health firm, has been acquired by Welltok, a five-year-old health optimization company in Denver. No financial terms were disclosed. Mindbloom had raised $3.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed sources; Welltok has raised $48 million, including from New Enterprise Associates, IBM, Qualcomm Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Partners andMiramar Venture Partners.

    Nervogrid Oy, a 10-year-old, Helsinki, Finland-based company that delivers IT infrastructure as a managed cloud service, has been acquired by the publicly traded Swiss company Also Holding for undisclosed terms.

    —-

    People

    Steve Bennett, who was hired as the CEO of computer-security giant Symantec in July 2012, was fired yesterday, the company announced, saying it had appointed board member Michael Brown to lead while the company seeks a replacement. As you might suspect, the Mountain View, Ca.-based company didn’t elaborate on why it was terminating Bennett, though Bloomberg notes the company’s shares have fallen 15 percent in the past year amid declining revenue.

    Mayfield India has named Vishal Dixit as a partner. Dixit was previously a director at Zephyr Peacock, where he was a founding team member of four India-focused funds. 

    Ferenc Huszar has joined Balderton Capital as a data scientist. Huszar, who recently completed his PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge, joins the firm from PeerIndex, a startup that aims to evaluate and understand the “social capital” that a person has built online.

    Pat McGovern, who became a billionaire as the founder and majority owner of Boston-based technology publisher International Data Group, died on Tuesday. He was 76. No reason was given for this death. IDG publishes dozens of print publications and hosts hundreds of conferences each year.

    Google CEO Larry Page suggested at the TED conference this week that rather than hand his fortune over to a traditional philanthropic organization, he’d rather give it entrepreneur genius Elon Musk, who has big ideas for changing the world.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Oracle is looking for a corporate development associate at its Redwood Shores, Ca., headquarters.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Just after he was named CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella got a visit fromYahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Re/code sources say the meeting was friendly “except when the topic got to the long-fraught search advertising and technology partnership between the companies, which Mayer has been agitating to change for some time now. Mayer’s basic message to Nadella has remained the same as it has been for a while now — Yahoo wants out of the deal, and sooner than later.”

    Not all is lost, apparently. Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange that collapsed and filed for bankruptcy last month, said it had found 200,000 Bitcoins that were held in a digital storage file. Dealbook has more here.

    —–

    Detours

    Director David Fincher says Oscar winner Christian Bale is his one and only choice to play Steve Jobs in an upcoming Jobs biopic.

    Darkly funny photos of the San Francisco rental market.

    Santa Monica is the new Silicon Valley, and the Times is on it.

    “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner talks with The Atlantic about going to casinos and pretending to be Tunisian, Russian, or Armenian.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Neat – a bike whose frame and rims are coated in a specially formulated powder that makes it shine under light (including car headlights).

    StrictlyVC made the mistake of showing this to the kids this morning. Looks like we’re getting a new robot.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

    , , ,

  • A Small Entrepreneur Takes on, Gulp, Uber

    GoGreenRideAcross the U.S., new car-sharing services Lyft and Sidecar are spreading fast, while Uber, which now manages a ride-share service as well as connects passengers with career drivers, seems destined for world domination.

    In short, it doesn’t sound like a great time to launch a new car service. Yet that’s exactly what Yamandou Alexander has done with GoGreenRide, a New York-based startup that Alexander has bootstrapped with $2.5 million of his own capital. (GoGreenRide is currently halfway through raising a new, $5 million outside round of fundraising.)

    Oddly, Alexander may have had the idea of an alternative transportation fleet first. As the French-born entrepreneur tells it, he moved to New York City at 19, bussing tables at famed Upper East Side restaurant Daniel and selling Motorola Startacs to his coworkers, many of them fellow immigrants. He eventually began exporting the handsets to Africa, creating one telecom company and selling a second for enough money in 2012 to bring to life a concept he wanted, but couldn’t afford, to pursue in 2006 – a nicer, greener, more affordable version of a black car service.

    We chatted recently about how that vision is coming together and why GoGreenRide makes sense now, even in a ride-sharing economy.

    Your business differentiates itself in two key ways. For one thing, GoGreenRide owns or leases dozens of Prius cars. You also have 40 full-time employees, rather than contractors. You’re like the anti-Uber, except that Uber is so profitable precisely because it has so little overhead. Why does your strategy make sense?

    With contractors, there’s a lack of control in presentation, quality, and customer service. We want our drivers to wear a uniform; to work on a schedule, rather than when they feel like it; to open doors; and to understand when it isn’t time to talk. We want to provide good, consistent customer service. We’re also concerned with Uber’s model from a liability standpoint.

    As for the cars, based on plans to increase our fleet to 50 cars by summer, the company should reach break-even by December. Next year, the car should see a 13 percent EBITDA…and by 2018, 26 percent EBITDA.

    Where are you turning to fund those plans?

    We’re talking with VCs. Investors on the West Coast are more interested in less capital-intensive businesses, but we’re getting good traction with East Coast people who know and live the experience of trying to find transportation in New York. We’re also going out to AngelList for additional investment, and inviting GoGreenRide members to participate.

    Uber gets a lot of flack for its surge pricing. Is your pricing flexible, too?

    Pricing does fluctuate based on traffic conditions. But you always know how much you’ll pay before you get in a car via our mobile app, which sends you detailed information about your trip, including when the driver will arrive. Our metering is calculated based on the estimated time [it will take to transport a passenger from A to B], which we know based on historical data about traffic patterns.

    As an alternative to black car service, what percent of your business comes from corporate partnerships?

    About 40 percent. We cater to both customers taking long trips, who might otherwise take a black car service to the airport, and short trips, where we’re competing more directly with taxis. Our average fare is $34, which is the same as a yellow cab, but you’re getting a much nicer experience with GoGreenRide.

    Beyond expanding your fleet, what’s on your road map, so to speak?

    The short-term growth opportunity is for us to grow our model in New York, then move into L.A. or San Francisco. We’re also starting a franchising program, including [helping launch] a GoGreenRide in China.

    We glad for Uber’s success and the acceptance it has gained in New York. But we also see a lot of people coming to us from them because of pricing, level of service, reliability, and safety.

    Connie

    , , ,

  • StrictlyVC: March 20, 2014

    Good Thursday morning, everyone!

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    Airbnb is reportedly in “advanced talks” to raise more funding at a $10 billion valuation. (That’s major league. HomeAway, the now publicly traded vacation rental site, is valued at $3.9 billion.)

    A month after Fitbit issued a recall of its fitness-tracking bracelet following complaints of blisters and rashes, the startup now faces its first class-action lawsuit, reports the WSJ. At the time of the recall, Fitbit reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission that it was aware of about 9,900 cases of consumers having a skin reaction after wearing its product.

    —–

    At Six Months, Syndicates is Maturing, Without Some Big Names

    When AngelList launched its “syndicates” program last September, AllThingsD anointed one investor, Kevin Rose, as its “million dollar man.” The reason: within a week of AngelList making it possible for backers to put their money behind one individual, Rose collected more than $1.1 million in commitments.

    Rose, a Google Ventures partner, told his 245 backers that he planned to participate in five seed investments per year on the platform. But six months later, he hasn’t invested in any. Both MG Siegler of Google Ventures and Path cofounder Dave Morin, who also quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of dollars to syndicate deals, haven’t pulled the trigger on anything, either.

    Neither Google Ventures nor Morin responded to a request for comment. But AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant has a theory based on his own investing experience. “I think some [investors] assembled syndicates but didn’t know what to do with them. I think some are scared because the platform is very transparent. [An investment] is going to be tracked. People will see the deal in detail. There’s no hiding anything, and it causes people to freeze up a bit.”

    Some have painted another picture of why Rose may not be syndicating deals on the platform. One source cites a low volume of high-quality deals, while another says that if there’s enough demand for a startup’s seed round, there’s no reason to include a syndicate.

    It seems entirely possible, too, that it’s harder for full-time VCs to justify their involvement with the platform until it’s better understood. Google Ventures, as a single LP fund, might also be struggling with whether to essentially create a separate management company around of its partners.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ravikant rejects each one of these ideas, noting that both venture firms and LPs are showing increased interest in syndicates, including Maiden Lane, a new fund backed institutional investors that will invest both directly in syndicates and in direct investment opportunities found elsewhere on AngelList’s platform.

    Ravikant further insists the quality of the deals being syndicated is “actually quite good.” He points to AltSchool, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s creating a brand-new network of schools. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Among AltSchool’s other, earlier investors is former Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, who syndicated the investment on AngelList.

    Ravikant also notes that syndicate leads can choose whether information about a deal will be made available to the general AngelList investor community or to specific backers only, suggesting that some of the program’s best startups are being funded under the radar. He highlights Ben Davenport, whose mobile messaging startup, Beluga, was acquired by Facebook and turned into Facebook Messenger. Davenport recently syndicated an investment in NYBX, a New York-based company focused on cryptocurrencies. By design, his backers are serious Bitcoin investors only, and “unless you were one of Ben’s LPs,” says Ravikant, you didn’t see it.

    I ask Hunter Walk of the venture firm Homebrew about his experience with the platform. Last September, his firm led a $2.1 million investment in the shipping startup Shyp, some of which came from a syndicate led by entrepreneur-author Tim Ferris. It created a lot of press at the time or Shyp, but in retrospect, was it worth it? Walk says it was. “Tim was able to assemble a great set of angels – some known, some new to investing – but we saw his participation as strategic.”

    AngelList’s syndicates program is “still very much in beta, so going slow,” says Ravikant. “I don’t think [the program] will be hitting its stride until next year.”

    In the meantime, he says, there’s “a lot more demand than we can run. Fundamentally, something is working.”

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    New Fundings

    Base, a 4.5-year-old, Chicago-based company behind a CRM tool for sales teams, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by RRE Ventures and earlier investors Index Ventures and OCA Ventures. Other participants in the round included earlier investors Social+Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners, I2A Fund and numerous angel investors. The company has raised roughly $23 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    Choozle, a two-year-old, Denver-based media platform for marketers, has raised $1.8 million in seed funding led by Great Oaks Venture Capital. The company has raised $2.3 million altogether.

    Ezetap, a three-year-old, Bangalore-based mobile payment company focused on emerging markets (it makes a dongle that turns phones into point-of-sale terminals), has added an undisclosed amount of funding to its Series B round from American Express. Last month, the company announced it had raised $8 million for its Series B, from Helion Advisors,Social+Capital and Berggruen Holdings. That February funding had brought the company’s total funding to $11.5 million.

    Invenias, an 8.5-year-old, U.K.-based company that sells cloud software for the executive search and recruitment industry, has raised $500,000 in expansion funding from MMC Ventures, which led the company’s $1.5 million Series A round last July.

    Gem Pharmaceuticals, a 13-year-old, Birmingham, Al.-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that develops proprietary anthracycline derivatives, has raised $4.5 million in funding. The investors were current board members Diane Hendricks and Karl Leo.

    LeanData, a two-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based business data startup, has raised $5.1 million in Series A funding. Shasta Ventures led the round with participation from Felicis Ventures, Correlation Ventures and the Funders Club.

    NinePoint Medical, a 4.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based medical device firm that aims to give doctors a better picture of patients’ organs, has raised $34 million in Series B funding led by Corning, along with founding investors Third Rock Ventures and Prospect Venture Partners. The company has raised $67.6 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

    Oculeve, a two-year-old, South San Francisco-based medical device company that spun out of Stanford University to treat dry-eye condition, has raised more than $16.6 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. Oculeve had raised $7.6 million in Series A funding in October 2012 fromKleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Versant Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

    Verdasys, an 11-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based advanced data protection company, has raised $12 million from earlier backers GE Pension Trustand Fairhaven Capital, with participation from Brookline Venture Partners.

    What3words, a 10-month-old, U.K-based startup that makes it easier to pinpoint and share a location, has raised $1 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors, reports TechCrunch. The company had announced a separate, $500,000 in seed funding last November from angel investors.

    Tango, a 4.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based social networking app, has raised $280 million in Series D funding led by Chinese e-commerce and Internet giant Alibaba Group, which contributed $215 million. The company has now raised a total of $367 million in venture funding, including from DFJ, Qualcomm Ventures and former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

    —-

    New Funds

    Accel Partners, the 31-year-old venture capital and growth equity firm, has raised two new funds totaling $1.475 billion: Accel XII, a $475 million fund to concentrate primarily on early-stage investments, and Accel Growth III fund, a $1 billion pool for later-stage deals. The firm also announced that longtime managing director Jim Breyer would be scaling back his role, a process that appeared to begin around the May 2012 IPO of Facebook, which Accel famously backed early on. (I asked Breyer about it nearly two years ago, as it became clear that he was becoming more focused on his own personal investment vehicle, Breyer Capital.)

    Top Tier Capital Partners, the three-year-old, San Francisco-based investment firm has raised roughly $445 million for its first venture capital funds of funds, according to regulatory filings and a source close to Dow Jones. Top Tier Venture Capital VI and Top Tier Venture Capital VI-Bwere reportedly targeting $400 million. Top Tier spun out of Paul Capital, which is winding down its business after a planned sale fell through.

    —–

    IPOs

    Alder BioPharmaceuticals, a 12-year-old, Bothell, Wa.-based biotech that develops antibodies to treat migraines and arthritis, filed yesterday with the SEC to raise up to $115 million in an IPO. Its biggest shareholders include Sevin Rosen, which owns 23.7 percent of the company; Novo A/S, which owns 12.1 percent; H.I.G. Venture Partners, which owns 11.8; Delphi Ventures, which owns 11.4 percent; and TPG Biotechnology Partners II, which also owns 11.4.

    Versartis, a 5.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based startup working on treatments for growth hormone deficiency, boosted the expected size of the IPO it’s planning for Friday by nearly 50 percent. Its biggest shareholders are New Leaf Venture Partners, which owns a 24.4 percent stake; Index Ventures, which owns 22.4 percent; Advent Life Sciences; which owns 16.3 percent; Aisling Capital, which owns 11.9 percent; and Sofinnova Ventures, which owns 6.8 percent.

    —–

    Exits

    GPS Global, a 6.5-year-old, Kfar Saba, Israel-based research, development, and services firm, has been acquired by SecureAlert, a Sandy, Ut.-based maker of digital monitoring software. No terms were disclosed.

    Knotice, an 11-year-old, Akron, Oh.-based digital marketing company, has been acquired by IgnitionOne, a cloud-based digital marketing technology company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Knotice had raised $500,000 from the Cleveland-based venture development organization JumpStart.

    TagMan, a six-year-old, London-based tag management and marketing data platform, has been acquired by Ensighten, a 4.5-year-old, Cupertino, Ca.-based rival. Terms were not disclosed. TagMan had raised $13.5 million from investors, including Greycroft Partners, iNovia Capital, and Cambridge Business Angels. Ensighten has raised $55.5 million from investors, including Insight Venture Partners, Volition Capital, LeadEdge Capital, the Halo Fund, and Floodgate.

    Webedia, a 1.5-year-old Paris-based digital publishing company, has been acquired by Diwanee, a Dubai-based digital media company, for undisclosed terms. The outlet Wamda has much more.

    —–

    People

    Zulily CEO Darrell Cavens is officially a billionaire, observes Bloomberg. Shares of the retailer, which went public in November, closed at $62 in New York yesterday; Cavens’ 17 percent stake in the business is right now valued at roughly $1.4 billion.

    Inside Philanthropy doesn’t like to name names, but it just published a list of the 12 most generous tech leaders, and 6 of the the least generous, based on the size of their charitable gifts relative to their fortune.

    Andy Hunt has been promoted from principal to partner at Highland Capital Partners. Hunt cofounded Warby Parker; he also spent several years as an investment banker after graduating from Wharton.

    Y Combinator alums Justin Kan and Aaron Harris are Y Combinator’s newest partners, according to TechCrunch. More here.

    Yesterday, in conversation with interviewer Charlie Rose at the TED conference, Google‘s Larry Page reportedly said of the U.S. government, which hasn’t been very transparent with Google: “I don’t think we can have a democracy if we have to protect you and our users from stuff that we’ve never had a conversation about.” (Here’s more of the interview, if you’re interested.)

    Billionaire Alisher Usmanov is dumping U.S. tech companies for China-based tech investments. “Chinese companies account for about 70 percent to 80 percent of the portfolio of our foreign Internet investments,” the head of Usmanov’s asset-management company tells Bloomberg. “Most of the investments are in “Alibaba, JD.com and some other companies with great potential,” he says.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Lab IX, the months-old accelerator business of hardware giant Flextronics, is looking for an associate. The job is in San Jose, Ca.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    SecondMarket hopes to open up its private bitcoin investment fund to ordinary investors as soon as the fourth quarter, potentially beating a rival offering by the Winklevoss twins, who’ve applied to create an exchange-traded fund specializing in bitcoin. The WSJ has more here.

    In November, news leaked that Twitter had started work on encrypting direct messages in order to prevent unauthorized snooping by hackers or the state. As The Verge now reports, that project was dropped earlier this year without explanation — not even to the employees who were working on it.

    —–

    Detours

    A floating coworking space that is rusty, drafty, encrusted with birds’ nests, and laden with fish carcasses is luring some of the brightest minds in the Bay Area, says 7×7.

    A weatherman gets punked.

    Spiderman’s Biggest. Battle. Yet. Is Coming. This Summer. (Here’s the trailer.)

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Two words: banana holder.

    Two more words: Body Dryer.

    [Takes bow.]

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

  • At Six Months, Syndicates is Maturing, Without Some Big Names

    AngelList.logoWhen AngelList launched its “syndicates” program last September, AllThingsD anointed one investor, Kevin Rose, as its “million dollar man.” The reason: within a week of AngelList making it possible for backers to put their money behind one individual, Rose collected more than $1.1 million in commitments.

    Rose, a Google Ventures partner, told his 245 backers that he planned to participate in five seed investments per year on the platform. But six months later, he hasn’t invested in any. Both MG Siegler of Google Ventures and Path cofounder Dave Morin, who also quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of dollars to syndicate deals, haven’t pulled the trigger on anything, either.

    Neither Google Ventures nor Morin responded to a request for comment. But AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant has a theory based on his own investing experience. “I think some [investors] assembled syndicates but didn’t know what to do with them. I think some are scared because the platform is very transparent. [An investment] is going to be tracked. People will see the deal in detail. There’s no hiding anything, and it causes people to freeze up a bit.”

    Some have painted another picture of why Rose may not be syndicating deals on the platform. One source cites a low volume of high-quality deals, while another says that if there’s enough demand for a startup’s seed round, there’s no reason to include a syndicate.

    It seems entirely possible, too, that it’s harder for full-time VCs to justify their involvement with the platform until it’s better understood. Google Ventures, as a single LP fund, might also be struggling with whether to essentially create a separate management company around one of its partners.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ravikant rejects each one of these ideas, noting that both venture firms and LPs are showing increased interest in syndicates, including Maiden Lane, a new fund backed institutional investors that will invest both directly in syndicates and in direct investment opportunities found elsewhere on AngelList’s platform.

    Ravikant further insists the quality of the deals being syndicated is “actually quite good.” He points to AltSchool, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s creating a brand-new network of schools. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Among AltSchool’s other, earlier investors is former Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, who syndicated the investment on AngelList.

    Ravikant also notes that syndicate leads can choose whether information about a deal will be made available to the general AngelList investor community or to specific backers only, suggesting that some of the program’s best startups are being funded under the radar. He highlights Ben Davenport, whose mobile messaging startup, Beluga, was acquired by Facebook and turned into Facebook Messenger. Davenport recently syndicated an investment in NYBX, a New York-based company focused on cryptocurrencies. By design, his backers are serious Bitcoin investors only, and “unless you were one of Ben’s LPs,” says Ravikant, you didn’t see it.

    I ask Hunter Walk of the venture firm Homebrew about his experience with the platform. Last September, his firm led a $2.1 million investment in the shipping startup Shyp, some of which came from a syndicate led by entrepreneur-author Tim Ferriss. It created a lot of press at the time for Shyp, but in retrospect, was it worth it? Walk says it was. “Tim was able to assemble a great set of angels – some known, some new to investing – but we saw his participation as strategic.”

    AngelList’s syndicates program is “still very much in beta, so going slow,” says Ravikant. “I don’t think [the program] will be hitting its stride until next year.”

    In the meantime, he says, there’s “a lot more demand than we can run. Fundamentally, something is working.”

    Connie

    ,

  • StrictlyVC: March 19, 2014

    Good Wednesday morning! We know some of you didn’t receive yesterday’s email; we’re not sure why but here’s a link with our apologies in case you missed it.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    The hedge fund Fortress Investment Group, along with venture firmsBenchmark and Ribbit Capital, are buying a stake in Pantera Bitcoin Partners, a hedge fund that buys and sells virtual currencies. San Francisco-based Pantera Capital was founded in 2003 by Tiger Management veteran Dan Morehead, who tells Dealbook that in recent months, his 16-person firm has shifted its attention entirely to work on investments in the virtual currency world.

    —–

    Google Glass Meets Healthcare with Augmedix

    It’s early days for Google Glass, and an almost absurd minefield of challenges lie ahead of it. But that’s not stopping a small number of startups from springing up around healthcare-related applications that can arguably cut costs, provide doctors more time with patients, and improve health outcomes.

    Augmedix — a 20-month-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s announcing this morning that it has raised $3.2 million led by DCM and Emergence Capital Partners — calls itself the “first and largest Google Glass startup” focused on healthcare. Its complicated task put simply: It beams electronic health record information to doctors while they’re meeting with patients, so doctors can, say, query someone’s white blood cell counts in real-time without having to traipse back to their computers in the middle of that patient’s visit or in between patient visits.

    Whether or not Augmedix is the biggest company focused on turning Glass into a physician’s tool “by every metric,” as its CEO, Ian Shakil tell me, its claims can’t be far off. According to the research firm Datafox, only a handful of startups are dabbling in any kind of Glass-related healthcare applications at the moment, partly because there’s still too much uncertainty about Glass’s widespread uptake, and largely because Glass isn’t protected under federal information privacy rules, meaning that each patient has to give his or her written consent – an effective but inelegant workaround.

    So why is Augmedix treading where few startups are ready to go yet? Shakil, who cofounded Augmedix a few weeks after graduating from Stanford Business School (which is also where he met his cofounders), talked with me about it the other day.

    You’re announcing new funding but you closed it in August. Why share the news now?

    We just wanted to be out of the media’s eye and focus on execution and on hitting more milestones and making more progress before talking to media.

    What sorts of milestones can you share? How many doctors are using Augmedix?

    We’re selling to large groups of doctors, rather than doctor to doctor, and so far we have several health systems and doctors groups [as customers] and we’re generating revenue. As healthcare continues to consolidate, our job becomes easier because there are fewer people to sell to. Enterprise sales is also the bread and butter of Emergence Capital, so it’s great to have them [as an investor].

    How do you address privacy concerns?

    Patients don’t walk in the door to see their doctor wearing Google Glass. They’re handed a laminated FAQ and are educated about [the process] and can opt out of having the doctor wear it.

    We’ve also created an entirely separate [from Google] cloud-based service that’s on pipes that we control, and we’ve signed business associate agreements with customers, saying, “We’re doing all the [protected health care information] just like other electronic healthcare companies.” We’ve hardened the device in lots of ways, too, such that it’s even more secure than a smart phone in a health care environment.

    As a third-party developer, you’re always at the mercy of the platform. How do you mitigate that risk?

    I don’t think the risk is as great as some people think. Also, though our materials are all about Google Glass, we’re hardware agnostic; [our tech] also runs on [the Android-based] Vuzix M100. And there are many other smart glass technologies out there, some operating in stealth mode; it’s becoming a competitive space.

    I think Glass is the best right now and that it has the best software environment and hardware, so it’s our go-to. But over the long run, I think we’ll be protected no matter what happens.

    You have 36 employees working on creating this technology and getting it into physician offices. Is it safe to say you’ll be raising money again soon?

    Yes, actually, we’ll look to raise another round, bigger than the amount we’ve raised thus far, later this year.

    300x250_Static

    New Fundings

    Aquantia, a 10-year-old, Milpitas, Ca.-based high-speed Ethernet connectivity solution for data centers, mobile and enterprise infrastructure, has raised $16 million in Series G financing led by the programmatic integrated circuit maker Xilinx. The company has garnered roughly $160 million altogether, from investors that include New Enterprise Associates, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and Rusnano.

    Blue River Technology, a three-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based robotics company that’s using computer vision techniques in agriculture (including to identify and kill unwanted weeds), has raised $10 million in Series A-1 funding led by Data Collective, with participation fromInnovation Endeavors and return backer Khosla Ventures. The company has now raised $13.4 million altogether.

    Cloud4Wi, a year-old, San Francisco-based Wi-Fi services company that spun out of WiTech, an Italian company offering managed solutions and services in the telco market, has raised $4 million in Series A funding from the Italian venture firm United Ventures.

    Cobrain, a year-old, Bethesda, Md.-based “cross-merchant personalization engine” that aims to present shoppers with the goods of various retailers at once, has raised $3 million in seed funding from a group of unnamed angel investors. Cobrain was founded by CareerBuilder.com founder Rob McGovern.

    CorTechs Labs, a 13-year-old, San Diego-based company that develops and markets brain imaging software designed to diagnose a variety of brain disorders, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding from Dragasac, a company incorporated in the Isle of Man.

    Glo, an 8.5-year-old, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based LED product developer, has raised $30 million in Series D funding, led by an unnamed new investor. Other participants in the round included earlier investors Wellington Partners, Teknoinvest, Nano Future Invest, Energy Future Invest, Foundation Asset Management, and others. Glo, spun out of Lund University in Sweden, has raised roughly $115 million to date.

    Heyo, a three-year-old, Blacksburg, Va.-based social marketing platform designed to help small businesses, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from Valleys’ Ventures, a Radford, Va., investment firm.

    Integrated DNA Technologies, a 27-year-old, Coralville, In.-based company that calls itself the world’s largest manufacturer of custom nucleic acid products, has raised a slug of funding from Summit Partners. No terms were disclosed, but the company’s founder, Joseph Walder, remains its majority shareholder.

    Nitrous.IO, a 1.5-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based cloud-based developer platform, has raised $6.65 million in Series A funding. Earlier investor Bessemer Venture Partners led the round with participation from investors that included 500 Startups, Crunchfund, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Golden Gate Ventures. Nitrous.IO has raised a $1 million seed round last April.

    Parchment, an 11-year-old, Scottsdale, Az.-based education credentials technology company, has raised $10 million in fresh funding led by The Raine Group. Earlier investors, including Novak Biddle Venture Partners, Salmon River Capital, GSV Capital and ICG Holdings, also participated. The company has raised $45 million altogether.

    Percolate, a three-year-old, New York-based a startup that helps brands figure out what content to create and share on social neworks, has raised $24 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital. Earlier investors GGV Capital, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, and ad agency WPP also participated in the new funding. The company has raised $34.5 million to date.

    Platfora, a three-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based that promises to “mask the complexity of Hadoop,” making it easy for enterprises to understand facts in their business across events, actions, behaviors and times, has raised $38 million led by Tenaya Capital. Citi Ventures, Cisco Systems and Allegis Capital, also participated in the round, alongside earlier investors Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and In-Q-Tel. The company has raised $65 million to date.

    RadPad, a 14-month-old, L.A.-based apartment rental search app, has raised $1 million in financing, including from Deep Fork Capital and Post Investments. The funding brings RadPad’s total funding to $2 million, according to Crunchbase.

    Reonomy, a year-old, New York-based commercial real estate technology company that provides investors and lenders with data and analytics, has raised $3.7 million in Series A funding led by SoftBank Capital. Earlier investors Resolute Ventures, High Peaks Venture Partners, KEC Ventures, and FinTech Collective also participated in the round. The company has raised roughly $4.8 million to date.

    Simply Measured, a four-year-old, Seattle-based company whose software helps its customers analyze conversations and marketing efforts across major social media platforms, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Trinity Ventures with earlier investors Bessemer Venture Partners and MHS Capital participating. The company has raised $28.8 million altogether.

    SummitIG, an 18-month-old, Dulles, Va.-based company building a new 170-mile dark fiber route in Virginia, has raised a “large term loan” of unspecified size ORIX Ventures and an equity investment (whose size wasn’t disclosed either) from earlier investor Columbia Capital.

    Wedpics, a three-year-old, Raleigh, N.C.-based online and mobile platform that encourages wedding participants to share photos, has raised $1 .5 million in Series A financing led by IDEA Fund Partners. Other participants in the round included Great Oaks Venture Capital, the angel group TAP, and numerous other individual investors.

    —–

    New Funds

    Australian technology investor and former Microsoft executive Daniel Petre is preparing to launch a $50 million Australia-focused technology investment fund, reports Business Review Weekly. Petre is co-founding the fund with Craig Blair, CEO of Zeebox Australia and a former managing director of Expedia Australia. According to the outlet, the duo plan to invest between $2 million and $5 million in each startup they back.

    Ysios Capital, a six-year-old, Barcelona-based venture capital firm, is looking to raise a new, 100 million Euro fund to back early-stage life sciences companies, the firm says in a release. The fund will target companies in Europe and North America and will be the firm’s second vehicle. Its first, the 69 million Euro Ysios BioFund I, was launched in 2008 and has already distributed capital to its investors in each of the last three years, says the firm.

    —–

    IPOs

    Let the games begin. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will hold the kickoff meeting for its planned U.S. initial public offering on March 25, setting in motion the most high-profile listing since Facebook’s offering nearly two years ago, sources told Reuters yesterday. (The WSJ is reporting that the NYSE is the front-runner right now.)

    —–

    Exits

    It’s a bit premature to include this in “exits,” but Kior, a publicly traded operator of the first U.S. commercial-scale cellulosic biofuel plant, dropped 39 cents to 65 cents per share at the market close yesterday, after telling regulators it has serious doubts about staying in business. The company, which went public in June 2011 (its shares priced at $15 a piece), just raised $100 million in October from Khosla Ventures and Gates Ventures. Bloomberg has much more here.

    AdMobius, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based mobile ad startup, has been acquired by Lotame, an independent data management platform, for undisclosed terms. AdMobius had raised $5 million in the fall of 2012 fromOpus Capital and Storm Ventures. Still-private Lotame has raised roughly $50 million over its 7-year history, including from Battery Ventures,Betaworks, Emergence Capital Partners, Hillcrest Management,TrueBridge Capital Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and Sozo Ventures.

    Cameo, a video-making app that launched last fall, has been acquired byIAC, with its 14 employees headed over the IAC subsidiary Vimeo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the company’s CEO tells Re/code Vimeo will continue running Cameo as a standalone app. If Cameo raised outside funding, it never reported it.

    Cenzic, a 14-year-old, Campbell, Ca.based company that makes application security testing technologies, has been acquired by 19-year-old, Chicago-based Trustwave, a broader security testing platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cenzic had raised $15 million in equity, according to Crunchbase, including from Mohr Davidow Ventures,Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, JK&B Capital and Advanced Technology Ventures.

    Vega-Chi, a five-year-old, London-based bond trading platform, has been acquired by the institutional trading network Liquidnet for undisclosed terms. Vega-Chi had raised $3.2 million from Octopus Investments in 2011.

    —–

    People

    Sam Altman, the newly appointed head of Y Combinator, talks, a lot, notes Re/code in new profile of the 28-year-old. Writes reporter Liz Gannes: “If you ask anyone who knows Altman, from former employees to investors to mentors to mentees to friends, they’ll mention his perpetual availability — the way he seems to reach out every day, multiple times per day, on the phone or email or text or instant messenger. Altman estimates he keeps in close touch with ‘low hundreds’ of people on a daily basis.”

    Venture capitalist John Doerr has cashed out more off his Googleholdings. On Monday, while you were eating Irish soda bread, he was unloading 3,497 shares on the open market for a total haul of $4.2 million. In late February, Doerr, who reportedly now directly owns just 2,522 shares in the company (value: approximately $3 million), sold 11,774 shares of the stock for a total value of $14.2 million. He also sold roughly $4 million worth of shares in mid-December.

    Marc Whitten, chief product officer of Microsoft‘s Xbox division, is leaving to become the chief product officer of the 12-year-old, wireless audio company Sonos. Geekwire looks at what the move means.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Facebook is looking for a director of global mobile partnerships at its Menlo Park, Ca., headquarters.

    —–

    Data

    Inspired by investor Hunter Walk’s post, “New Grads: Midstage Startups Are Your Best First Job in Tech,” Datafox has compiled a list of 45 companies that are Series B and C funded, less than 10 years old, and experiencing what the research firm calls “significant traction.” You can check out its findings here.

    How hot are investors on the Internet of Things ecosystem? CB Insights says financings in related startups grew each successive quarter of last year, hitting an eight-quarter high in the fourth quarter. Altogether, VCs plowed $1.1 billion into 153 deals, according to the firm.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Fund of funds Paul Capital is winding down its portfolio and shuttering all but its San Francisco office after a planned sale to Hamilton Lane collapsed. As much as $300 million of open commitments will be returned to investors, sources tell the WSJ.

    Google is in hot water for scanning millions of students’ email messages and allegedly building “surreptitious” profiles to target advertising at them.

    —–

    Detours

    More than a dozen neurotoxins cause behavioral and cognitive problems. Eek. Here they are.

    Night-vision contact lenses might be a thing soon.

    What the world eats for breakfast.

    GQ meets the people at Buzzfeed who curate all those super adorable pet slideshows you occasionally click through. (We won’t tell anyone.)

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Woolpower sweaters. Good enough for the Swedish army.

    We also love Oliver Gal, for affordable wall art that won’t remind you of your (fun but gross) college apartment.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

     

    Connie

    , , , ,

  • Google Glass Meets Healthcare in Augmedix

    Ian ShakilIt’s early days for Google Glass, and an almost absurd minefield of challenges lie ahead of it. But that’s not stopping a small number of startups from springing up around healthcare-related applications that can arguably cut costs, provide doctors more time with patients, and improve health outcomes.

    Augmedix — a 20-month-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s announcing this morning that it has raised $3.2 million led by DCM and Emergence Capital Partners — calls itself the “first and largest Google Glass startup” focused on healthcare. Its complicated task put simply: It beams electronic health record information to doctors while they’re meeting with patients, so doctors can, say, query someone’s white blood cell counts in real-time without having to traipse back to their computers in the middle of that patient’s visit or in between patient visits.

    Whether or not Augmedix is the biggest company focused on turning Glass into a physician’s tool “by every metric,” as its CEO, Ian Shakil tell me, its claims can’t be far off. According to the research firm Datafox, only a handful of startups are dabbling in any kind of Glass-related healthcare applications at the moment, partly because there’s still too much uncertainty about Glass’s widespread uptake, and largely because Glass isn’t protected under federal information privacy rules, meaning that each patient has to give his or her written consent – an effective but inelegant workaround.

    So why is Augmedix treading where few startups are ready to go yet? Shakil, who cofounded Augmedix a few weeks after graduating from Stanford Business School (which is also where he met his cofounders), talked with me about it the other day.

    You’re announcing new funding but you closed it in August. Why share the news now?

    We just wanted to be out of the media’s eye and focus on execution and on hitting more milestones and making more progress before talking to media.

    What sorts of milestones can you share? How many doctors are using Augmedix?

    We’re selling to large groups of doctors, rather than doctor to doctor, and so far we have several health systems and doctors groups [as customers] and we’re generating revenue. As healthcare continues to consolidate, our job becomes easier because there are fewer people to sell to. Enterprise sales is also the bread and butter of Emergence Capital, so it’s great to have them [as an investor].

    How do you address privacy concerns?

    Patients don’t walk in the door to see their doctor wearing Google Glass. They’re handed a laminated FAQ and are educated about [the process] and can opt out of having the doctor wear it.

    We’ve also created an entirely separate [from Google] cloud-based service that’s on pipes that we control, and we’ve signed business associate agreements with customers, saying, “We’re doing all the [protected health care information] just like other electronic healthcare companies.” We’ve hardened the device in lots of ways, too, such that it’s even more secure than a smart phone in a health care environment.

    As a third-party developer, you’re always at the mercy of the platform. How do you mitigate that risk?

    I don’t think the risk is as great as some people think. Also, though our materials are all about Google Glass, we’re hardware agnostic; [our tech] also runs on [the Android-based] Vuzix M100. And there are many other smart glass technologies out there, some operating in stealth mode; it’s becoming a competitive space.

    I think Glass is the best right now and that it has the best software environment and hardware, so it’s our go-to. But over the long run, I think we’ll be protected no matter what happens.

    You have 36 employees working on creating this technology and getting it into physician offices. Is it safe to say you’ll be raising money again soon?

    Yes, actually, we’ll look to raise another round, bigger than the amount we’ve raised thus far, later this year.

    Connie

    , , , ,

  • StrictlyVC: March 18, 2014

    Good morning, and happy Tuesday!

    A quick, enormous thank you to the thousands of you now reading StrictlyVC, which I’m realizing is six months old this week! (Thanks especially to those of who signed up before it launched.) If you enjoy it, feel free to spread the word about what we’re doing here. StrictlyVC’s strong suit isn’t promoting StrictlyVC. It’s giving you the news you need to start your day. And dancing to the edge of insanity. And tacos.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    The parent company of Institutional Shareholder Services, agreed this morning to sell the business to the private equity firm Vestar Capital Partners for $364 million. Dealbook has the story.

    —–

    Early-Stage Infrastructure Valuations “Up 30 Percent” in Last Year, Says Amplify Founder

    In 2011, Sunil Dhaliwal was named to the Forbes Midas List. In 2012, he left Battery Ventures to start his own venture firm, Amplify Partners.

    It hasn’t been a walk in the park, says Dhaliwal, who joined Battery in Boston almost straight out of college at Georgetown University and ultimately stayed 15 years, backing companies like Netezza, acquired by IBM, and CipherTrust, acquired by Secure Computing.

    Yet today, after 18 months of on-again, off-again fundraising – Amplify has just closed its new micro fund with $49.1 million — Dhaliwal has a new home base in the Bay Area, where he moved his family in the summer of 2012. He has a strong partner in David Beyer, a cofounder of Chartio who joined as a principal in January. And Dhaliwal has lots of insights about nascent infrastructure startups, a world he has immersed himself in completely at Amplify, backing 11 startups so far, including Continuuity andKeen.io.

    To learn more about what Dhaliwal is seeing in his particular niche of the market, StrictlyVC recently sat down with him at one of San Francisco’s many newer hipster hangouts, Sightglass Coffee, in SOMA. Our chat has been edited for length.

    Why Amplify, why now?

    If you look at Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Dell – that universe of companies in and of itself is a trillion dollars of market cap. If you trace what that market cap looked like before the bubble of 2000, go back to 1998, it was still a trillion dollars. So these guys have basically failed to grow… and I feel like they’ll be more pressured to reinvent themselves.

    Meanwhile, for [Battery’s ninth fund], I think I made five investments over two-and-a-half years, and the largest one was $2.8 million. The others were $1.1 million, $700,000, $300,000 [in that range]. What I learned is that you can get meaningful results from infrastructure startups with small checks.

    Why are the startups you want to back –distributed computing and developer-centric and data analytics companies — so much cheaper to launch?

    In enterprise IT and in software, the transition is actually happening in stages. There’s the cost that it takes to develop, there’s the cost that it takes to acquire initial customers, then there’s the cost that it takes to scale enterprise buyers. The first and second stage have come down dramatically; our ability to get alpha and beta produced, reduce technical risk, and get basic validation of product-market fit off initial dollars has gone up a lot (to the point where it can be done for $1 million to $2 million). More, a lot of today’s tools allow technical buyers to discover things of interest to them, validate that they work with them, then begin using them without your sitting on top of them with an enterprise sales guy who makes $300,000 a year.

    But it does cost money to ramp up.

    When you want to go out and grow deal sizes, dramatically ramp up sales and expand your business, that takes more capital. In enterprise infrastructure, you’re still basically acquiring customers one at a time. But they don’t consume $10 million or $15 million or $25 million to get there. We have a lot of companies that have consumed less than $5 million that are thinking about how they go do the big scale-up round.

    For us, as early investors, we find we suffer dramatically less dilution as result. And the value of the companies we’re able to develop, when we walk into the B round, C round, or expansion-stage financing, is markedly higher, not because it’s frothy or bubbly — though there’s some of that, too — but these companies are so much further ahead than companies were five or six years ago.

    You raise a good point. When you conceived of Amplify in 2012, not a lot of people were focused on infrastructure deals. Now they are. How has that impacted your work?

    It’s a big issue. I’ve seen safely 30 percent inflation on early-stage deals in the last year. And we continually ask ourselves, “How big can this get?” And for a lot of things that don’t seem like they can get that big, it’s not a rational conversation to have with the entrepreneur to say, “We think you’re worth less,” when someone else thinks [he or she is] worth more.

    It’s not only uncomfortable for us, but I fear for what some entrepreneurs are going to have to deal with when they set really high expectations for their seed or A round and have to go back and deliver, in theory, some sort of appreciation to their early investors. There’s no way around that ending badly.

    300x250_Static

    New Fundings

    AltSchool, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s creating a brand-new network of schools, has raised $33 million in Series A financing led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, with follow-on investment from First Round Capital and Harrison Metal. Other investors in the company, which has now raised $36 million altogether, include John Doerr, Jonathan Sackler, Learn Capital, and Omidyar Network. TechCrunch has much more on what has drawn widespread interest to the company, which plans to operate as a B Corp.

    AbilTo, a five-year-old, New York-based provider of behavioral health programs designed to help adults overcome mild and moderate depression associated with major medical events, has raised $6 million in new funding from undisclosed investors. Last May, the company raised a $3 million Series A led by .406 Ventures.

    Ataxion, a year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based discovery-stage biopharmaceutical company that’s developing therapies for rare neurologic diseases, has raised $17 million in Series A financing from Atlas Venture and Biogen Idec.

    Bluestone, a three-year-old, Bangalore-based e-commerce company that produces and sells jewelry, has raised $10 million from the India-focused fund Kalaari Capital. The Times of India has more here.

    Boxfish, a four-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based video discovery startup, has raised $7 million in new funding led by the Dublin, Ireland-based firm Atlantic Bridge Ventures. Other investors in the round include T-Ventures, Naya Ventures, and Samsung. The latest financing brings the total capital raised by the company to $10 million.

    C3 Jian, an 8.5-year-old, L.A.-based, clinical-stage biotech company that’s developing drugs focused on improving oral healthcare, has raised $60.5 million in Series D funding led by Renaissance Holding Company, a national dental insurance holding company. The latest financing brings the company’s total capital raised to roughly $105 million, shows Crunchbase.

    Cloudera, a 5.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based maker of open source database software, is raising at least $200 million at a valuation of $2 billion, say Bloomberg sources. The funding is reportedly coming from Intel, among others. Cloudera has raised roughly $140 million from investors to date, including Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Ignition Partners. Its last round closed in December 2012.

    FunPlus, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile social games company, has raised a whopping $74 million in Series B funding from Orchid Asia Group, GSR Ventures, and Steamboat Ventures. Among the company’s hits to date are the Facebook games “Family Farm” and “Royal Story” and “Family Farm Seaside” on iOS, Google and Amazon. FunPlus previously closed a $13 million Series A round in 2012.

    Isto Technologies, a 17-year-old, St. Louis, Mo.-based orthobiologics company whose products regenerate and restore function to damaged cartilage and bone, has raised $8 million in debt and options, according to a new SEC filing. The funding appears to bring the company’s total capital raised to $28 million. Its investors include Ascension Ventures, Alafi Capital, Life Sciences Partners, and Mid-American Transplant Services.

    LiveMinutes, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based collaboration platform, has raised $1.8 million in a partial close, shows an SEC filing. The company has raised roughly $3.1 million altogether, shows Crunchbase, including from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and entrepreneur and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan.

    Personal Genome Diagnostics, a three-year-old, Baltimore, Md.-based company that engages in patient-specific analyses of cancer genome using digital characterization and monitoring technologies, has raised $2 million in funding, as part of a round that’s targeting $3.5 million, shows an SEC filing. The company had previously raised $100,000 in seed funding.

    Qualtré, a six-year-old, Marlborough, Ma.-based maker of next generation silicon MEMS inertial sensors, has raised $8 million in Series C funding from a new, unnamed strategic investor and earlier investors Matrix Partners and Pilot House Ventures. The company has raised around $38 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Wise.io, a two-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based machine learning startup, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Voyager Capital. GigaOm has more on the company here.

    —–

    New Funds

    The California Public Employees’ Retirement System yesterday announced that it will allocate an additional $200 million to its emerging manager program and that it will use a new fund-of-funds to deploy the capital. The new allocation comes on the heels of a $100 million commitment made in 2012. CalPERS’ investment staff will select a manager to lead the new fund of funds later this year, says the pension giant, which has more than $280 billion in assets under management.

    —–

    IPOs

    Agile Therapeutics, a 17-year-old Princeton, N.J.based specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of new prescription contraceptive products, filed to go public yesterday. Its biggest shareholders include ProQuest Investments, which owns 30.4 percent of the company; Care Capital Investments, which owns 26.6 percent; Investor Growth Capital, which owns 26.6 percent; and Aisling Capital, which owns 8.9 percent.

    Akebia Therapeutics, a 6.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of proprietary therapeutics based on HIF biology, is expected to begin trading publicly on Thursday. Its biggest shareholders include Novartis Bioventures, which owns 23.9 percent of the company going into the offering; Venture Investors Early Stage Fund, which owns 11.0, percent; Kearny Venture Partners, which owns 9.9 percent; Novo A/S, which owns 9.9 percent; and Triathlon Medical Ventures, which owns 8.3 percent.

    Paylocity, a 17-year-old, Arlington Heights, Il.-based provider of cloud-based payroll and human capital management software for medium-size organizations, is expected to go public tomorrow. Adams Street Partnersis among the company’s biggest outside shareholders.

    —–

    Exits

    KitLocate, a three-year-old, Israel-based maker of low-power mobile geolocation technology. has been acquired by the Russian search giantYandex for “several million euros,” reports TechCrunch. KitLocate offers an SDK for iOS and Android developers to make their apps location aware; Yande will use it to improve its mobile search app.

    Zulip, an 18-month-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company that’s been quietly working on workplace chat applications, both desktop and mobile, has been acquired by the growing file-sharing giant Dropbox, reports TechCrunch. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

    —–

    People

    Aneesh Chopra, the country’s first chief technology officer, is now an advisor to the cloud storage company Box. As the Washington Post notes, Box announced last year that its service is HIPAA compliant, paving the way to help doctors and other medical professionals to access their records in the cloud. Chopra is part of that effort as is Glen Tullman, the former CEO of electronic health record company Allscripts, who was also just brought in to advise the company.

    Richard Hall has left his role as head of the $14 billion Teacher Retirement System of Texas to become the head of Harvard Management Co., which manages the university’s $32.7 billion endowment. Hall succeeds Lane MacDonald, who left after just four months on the job to oversee the family fortune of the Johnsons, who runFidelity Investments. The Boston Globe has much more here.

    Bryan Roberts of Venrock is healthcare venture capital’s “billion-dollar man, ” with six(!) billion-dollar outcomes, including Castlight Health, which went public on Friday and is currently valued at $4 billion. Fortune asks him what his secret is.

    D.E. Shaw is apparently bringing the Hamptons to Hudson Valley. According to the New York Times, the computer-scientist-turned-hedge-fund mogul and his wife are building a “contemporary structure and accompanying pool house [that] together measure more than 30,000 square feet” in Westchester County, N.Y. (Naturally, a guesthouse is also in the plans. And a garage measuring 3,572 square feet.)

    —–

    Job Listings

    New Leaf Venture Partners, a New York-based healthcare-focused venture firm, is looking for an analyst.

    —–

    Data

    U.S. venture capitalists completed 31 fundraising deals for consumer-electronics makers in 2013 — including Jawbone, Roku, and Lytro — beating the previous high of 29 in 1999, according to DJX VentureSource. Collectively, they pumped $848 million into hardware startups, nearly twice the prior record of $442 million set in 2012. The WSJ has much more here.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    YouTube is going younger, says The Information, reporting that the online video destination is now developing a version of the site for kids under age 10 that would “wall off racier videos and comments and be deemed a safe place by parents.”

    According to the WSJ, Amazon will begin shipping its long-awaited video-streaming device early next month, thrusting Amazon into an intensely competitive market in set-top boxes, which include the Roku device, Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. TechCrunch sources say the gadget will be a stick or dongle as opposed to something bigger like the Apple TV.

    In a decision that cities around the country are undoubtedly watching, Seattle’s city council voted yesterday to enforce a cap on the number of cars that app-based transportation companies — including UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar — can have in use at any one time. The new legislation limits each service to 150 cars on the road at any one time, the outcome, said the city council, of the services requiring more regulatory oversight.

    —–

    Detours

    Wes Anderson’s films are even more perfectly symmetrical than you realized.

    Nate Silver is back.

    Gwyneth Paltrow singing “Happy.”

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Clever tea infusers.

    Cheap, over-the-ear headphones for the budding DJ in your family.

    Cloak, a new, free iOS app, arms you with the location data of Foursquare and Instagram users so that you can avoid all human contact with people you actually know.

    —–

    Corrections

    Yesterday, we reported that Meican, a 3.5-year-old, China-based online food ordering site, had raised $10 billion in Series B funding, but that would be “million” with an “m.” We regret the error.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

    , ,

  • Early-Stage Infrastructure Valuations “Up 30 Percent” in Last Year, Says Amplify Founder

    S.Dhaliwal-B&W-093new copyIn 2011, Sunil Dhaliwal was named to the Forbes Midas List. In 2012, he left Battery Ventures to start his own venture firm, Amplify Partners.

    It hasn’t been a walk in the park, says Dhaliwal, who joined Battery in Boston almost straight out of college at Georgetown University and ultimately stayed 15 years, backing companies like Netezza, acquired by IBM, and CipherTrust, acquired by Secure Computing.

    Yet today, after 18 months of on-again, off-again fundraising – Amplify has just closed its new micro fund with $49.1 million — Dhaliwal has a new home base in the Bay Area, where he moved his family in the summer of 2012. He has a strong partner in David Beyer, a cofounder of Chartio who joined as a principal in January. And Dhaliwal has lots of insights about nascent infrastructure startups, a world he has immersed himself in completely at Amplify, backing 11 startups so far, including Continuuity andKeen.io.

    To learn more about what Dhaliwal is seeing in his particular niche of the market, StrictlyVC recently sat down with him at one of San Francisco’s many newer hipster hangouts, Sightglass Coffee, in SOMA. Our chat has been edited for length.

    Why Amplify, why now?

    If you look at Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Dell – that universe of companies in and of itself is a trillion dollars of market cap. If you trace what that market cap looked like before the bubble of 2000, go back to 1998, it was still a trillion dollars. So these guys have basically failed to grow… and I feel like they’ll be more pressured to reinvent themselves.

    Meanwhile, for [Battery’s ninth fund], I think I made five investments over two-and-a-half years, and the largest one was $2.8 million. The others were $1.1 million, $700,000, $300,000 [in that range]. What I learned is that you can get meaningful results from infrastructure startups with small checks.

    Why are the startups you want to back –distributed computing and developer-centric and data analytics companies — so much cheaper to launch?

    In enterprise IT and in software, the transition is actually happening in stages. There’s the cost that it takes to develop, there’s the cost that it takes to acquire initial customers, then there’s the cost that it takes to scale enterprise buyers. The first and second stage have come down dramatically; our ability to get alpha and beta produced, reduce technical risk, and get basic validation of product-market fit off initial dollars has gone up a lot (to the point where it can be done for $1 million to $2 million). More, a lot of today’s tools allow technical buyers to discover things of interest to them, validate that they work with them, then begin using them without your sitting on top of them with an enterprise sales guy who makes $300,000 a year.

    But it does cost money to ramp up.

    When you want to go out and grow deal sizes, dramatically ramp up sales and expand your business, that takes more capital. In enterprise infrastructure, you’re still basically acquiring customers one at a time. But they don’t consume $10 million or $15 million or $25 million to get there. We have a lot of companies that have consumed less than $5 million that are thinking about how they go do the big scale-up round.

    For us, as early investors, we find we suffer dramatically less dilution as result. And the value of the companies we’re able to develop, when we walk into the B round, C round, or expansion-stage financing, is markedly higher, not because it’s frothy or bubbly — though there’s some of that, too — but these companies are so much further ahead than companies were five or six years ago.

    You raise a good point. When you conceived of Amplify in 2012, not a lot of people were focused on infrastructure deals. Now they are. How has that impacted your work?

    It’s a big issue. I’ve seen safely 30 percent inflation on early-stage deals in the last year. And we continually ask ourselves, “How big can this get?” And for a lot of things that don’t seem like they can get that big, it’s not a rational conversation to have with the entrepreneur to say, “We think you’re worth less,” when someone else thinks [he or she is] worth more.

    It’s not only uncomfortable for us, but I fear for what some entrepreneurs are going to have to deal with when they set really high expectations for their seed or A round and have to go back and deliver, in theory, some sort of appreciation to their early investors. There’s no way around that ending badly.

    Connie

  • StrictlyVC: March 17, 2014

    Happy St. Patty’s Day, everyone! Don’t forget to wear something green today, lest you rightly get flak from someone at some point for being all old-timey rather than fun and sassy.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    Apple Designer Jonathan Ive gives what’s being characterized as his first in-depth interview, in Time.

    Reversing earlier assertions, officials this morning said that they couldn’t pinpoint whether the missing Malaysia jet’s communication system was turned off before or after the cockpit’s last radio contact.

    —–

    With Six Tech IPOs Coming This Week, Whispers of Others Grow Louder

    On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that GoDaddy, which provides domain-name registration and Web hosting services to millions of customers, is “preparing for an initial public offering” and that in “coming weeks [GoDaddy] plans to interview banks” to underwrite its offering. The source was “people familiar with the matter.”

    For better or worse, such whisperings have now become the new normal, and we can expect to see much more of the same as a result of the JOBS Act and the changes it has brought to tech IPOs. (The JOBS Act permits companies to submit confidential draft registrations to the SEC and go public within 30 days of their acceptance.)

    Before the JOBS Act, filing an S-1 was much more public. Competitors knew a company was planning to go public, and any revisions by the SEC caused costly delays that could cause a company to miss its “window” to go public.

    GoDaddy was just one company that suffered through this process. In 2006, it tried to go public but later pulled its offering. Former CEO Bob Parsons, who was replaced as CEO in 2012, said at the time that he yanked the offering because he found the quiet period that came along with it “suffocating” as it prevented him for doing radio, TV, or his-then weekly Internet radio show. (The company was also losing money, according to its S-1.)

    Today, the JOBS Act gives companies much more flexibility in timing their offering, and leaking their supposed IPO plans has become a big part of the process.

    For now, the situation seems to be a win-win for everyone involved. Companies can test the public waters while simultaneously chumming for strategic acquirers, while reporters can feast on “scoops” that are hard to disprove.

    If there’s any downside, it’s that not going public after all can be, well, awkward, says Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida who studies the I.P.O. market. “One of the reasons companies like confidential filings is that if they start the process then pull back because the market isn’t as receptive to their business model as they thought, it can be embarrassing for a company, just as it might be embarrassing for someone who broadcasts that they’ve applied for a new job and gets turned down. People like to wait until the good outcome is about to occur before they announce things.”

    Conceivably, employee morale could take a hit, too, if staffers become convinced that an IPO is nearer than they thought based on press reports.

    But John Fitzgibbon, founder of the research firm IPO Scoop, says the advantages far outweigh any potential downside.

    “Before the Jobs Act,” says Fitzgibbon, “companies had to hang it out there and hope to God the market didn’t fall apart. But [the nearly two-year-old law] created market timing.”

    Now, says Fitzgibbon, “You prime the pump, get the guns lined up and, like Bunker Hill, you don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

    300x250_Static

    New Fundings

    Gravie, a year-old, Minneapolis-based health insurance marketplace, has closed a $10.5 million Series A round led by Aberdare Ventures, with participation from exiting investor FirstMark Capital. The round brings the company’s total funding to more than $13 million.

    i.am.plus electronics, a year-old, L.A.-based company, has raised $6 million, according to an SEC filing that shows a target of $40 million. The company doesn’t appear to have a site live. Notably, it’s being led (or co-led) by Chandrasekar Rathakrishna, whose last startup, Fusion Garage, tussled with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington after a deal to co-create a tablet called the Crunchpad went south. Fusion Garage eventually produced the tablet on its own, calling it the JooJoo. (Then Apple’s iPad came out. So.)

    ID.me, a four-year-old Tysons Corner, Va.-based company that authenticates military and public safety personnel to access online discounts and benefits at retailers, has raised $10.3 million in new funding, shows an SEC filing. Last September, ID.me received a $1.2 million grant from National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop and test online identification technology. The company had earlier raised seed funding from BoxGroup, the New York-based seed fund founded by David Tisch and Adam Rothenberg.

    InVenture, a 2.5-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based startup that helps so-called unbanked and underbanked people in India and Africa get access to financial services, has raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Lowercase Capital. Other participants in the round includedCollaborative Fund, Google Ventures and Mesa+, the CEO told VentureWire on Friday.

    Meican, a 3.5-year-old, China-based online food ordering site, has raised $10 million in Series B funding to expand into more cities across the country, reports Tech In Asia. The round was led by new investor Nokia Growth Partners and included participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which had earlier provided the startup with an undisclosed amount of funding.

    OKCoin, a China-based bitcoin exchange that claims to be the country’s largest by trading volume, has raised $10 million in funding, reports Coindesk. Investors include Ceyuan Ventures, Mandra Capital,VenturesLab, and other undisclosed angel investors. According to an earlier Technode report, OKCoin had raised $1 million in angel funding last November from venture capitalist Tim Draper and VenturesLab.

    Sand 9, a 6.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based developer of tiny timer and frequency control technology for wireless devices, has raised $4.4 million, shows an SEC filing. The funds appear to bring the company’s total capital raised to around $75 million. Its investors include General Catalyst Partners, Vulcan Capital, Intel Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, andEricsson.

    Synthesio, a 7.5-year-old, New York-based social analytics platform designed to monitor and analyze conversations about brands on social media and elsewhere on the Web, has raised $20 million in Series B funding from the European private equity firm Idinvest Partners. The company has raised $22 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

    TeaBox, a three-year-old, Siliguri, India-based e-commerce startup that sells numerous variants of tea, has raised around $1 million in seed funding led by Accel Partners India. Horizon Ventures also participated in the round.

    Three Twins Organic, a nine-year-old, Petaluma, Ca.-based maker of organic ice cream, has raised $1.8 million from angel investors, according to an SEC filing that shows a target of $3 million. According to the company’s site, its ice cream is sold in hundreds of groceries stores, including the Whole Foods chain, and it has four standalone stores in Northern California.

    VoltDB,a 4.5-year-old, Billerica, Ma.-based company whose database technology performs analytics on high-velocity data, has raised $8 million in new funding, shows an SEC filing. The round brings the company’s funding to close to $19 million. Co-founded by database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, VoltDB’s backers include Sigma Partners and Kepha Partners.

    YeahMobi, a 4.5-year-old, Shanghai City, China-based mobile CPA affiliate network that’s helping Chinese mobile apps expand to overseas markets, has raised $15 million in Series A funding from three unnamed Chinese investors, reports TechNode.

    —–

    New Funds

    Expa Capital, a nearly year-old, San Francisco-based company that describes itself as a “startup studio,” has raised $50 million from investors including David Bonderman, Sir Richard Branson, Li Ka-Shing, Ram Shriram, and Meg Whitman. Expa was created by Garrett Camp, chairman and co-founder of StumbleUpon and Uber.

    Uprising, a two-year-old San Francisco-based social impact firm, has raised $3.2 million for a sixth pool of capital, shows an SEC filing. Uprising was cofounded by Tabreez Verjee, a serial entrepreneur who seed-funded the non-profit lending organization Kiva.org.

    —–

    IPOs

    The Alibaba Group, China’s online commerce giant, confirmed early yesterday that it planned to begin the process of becoming a public company in the United States.

    Castlight‘s IPO shares shot skyward on Friday. As the WSJ notes, those who invested $181 million in the company look poised to win big if its share price holds or rises, including Venrock, which owned 20 percent of Castlight before the offering and 18 percent afterward. The company’s other principal shareholders include Oak Investment Partners, which own 13.8 percent of the company’s stock post-IPO; Maverick Capital, which owns 8.9 percent; Fidelity Investments, which owns 8.6 percent; and Wellcome Trust, which owns 7.6 percent.

    Just Eat, the 13-year-old, London-based online fast food ordering company, is looking to raise $166 million from the IPO, with an expected valuation in the range of $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion, according the FT (and flagged by TechCrunch). Just Eat has raised at least $90 million over the years, including from Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Vitruvian Partners, Axon Partners Group, Forum Synergies.

    Ignyta, a San Diego-based precision medicine developer, priced its IPO late last week, offering 5,245,000 shares of its common stock at $9.15 a share. The shares, a quarter of which are owned by the CEO’s investment firm, City Hill Ventures, remained mostly flat in their debut on Friday, closing at $10.20 per share.

    Weibo, the major Chinese microblogging company often called the country’s Twitter, filed on Friday for its own stock sale. (Business Insider has published a handy guide to Weibo’s finances), if you’re interested.)

    —–

    Exits

    Corkbin, a 4.5-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile and social platform for wine enthusiasts, has been acquired by Hello Vino, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based startup behind a wine recommendation app, for undisclosed terms. Corkbin hadn’t disclosed any outside funding.

    Dhingana, a 6.5-year-old, Pune, India-based music streaming site, has been acquired by Rdio, a San Francisco-based digital services company for undisclosed amount. The deal marks the entry of Rdio in India,according to Deal Curry. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Dhingana had reportedly shut down its operations in February after the biggest music label in India, T-Series, decided not to renew its contract with the company. Dhingana had raised at least $7 million in funding, including from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Inventus Capital Partners, and Helion Venture Partners. Rdio, meanwhile, raised $17.5 million in 2011 from Mangrove Capital Partners, along with earlier investors Skype, Atomico Ventures and the co-founder of both outfits, Janus Friis.

    Mochi Media, a distribution and monetizing platform for Flash-based games that was acquired in 2010 for $80 million by the China-based games publisher Shanda Games, is closing down by month’s end,reports TechCrunch. “If Mochi had a more meaningful position today beyond Flash, then there may have been a different path for the company going forward,” writes CEO Josh Larson in a blog post.

    Ono, a Spanish cable company, is being acquired by the British telecommunications company Vodafone for about $10 billion, reports Dealbook. The move is part of a wave of consolidation in the Continent’s telecommunications sector as companies look to offer bundled services like mobile, fixed-line, broadband and pay TV offerings, notes the report.

    —–

    People

    Last year, Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway paid Bill Gates and many of its other directors in the neighborhood of $2,000 for their service — a pittance compared with what most public company directors pocket. As the WSJ notes, the median retainer among S&P 1500 companies hit $168,270 in 2012. It’s probably much higher today, too. According to that same research, by the firm Equilar, director compensation increased nearly 30 percent from 2008 through 2012.

    Alan Patricof and crew just landed what sound like nice new digs on Madison Avenue. According to the Observer, Greycroft Partners just leased 6,000 square feet south of Grand Central in a spot that commercial brokers, at least, are calling Tech-Creative Corridor.

    Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has been elected to Salesforce‘s board of directors. The retired four star general is also a strategic limited partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t skipping on office hours, despite a net worth right now of roughly $28 billion. According to a Facebook employee who last week answered the question of how much time Zuckerberg logs at headquarters on Quora, Zuckerberg is “often in every morning before me and is around after dinner working as well. I would say he’s in the office roughly 9-10 hours a day, 5 days a week…I should say that it’s great to have him around with regularity and that he chooses to have the same desk set up as everyone else. He takes his job very seriously not just as a businessman but as a leader; he has helped keep our company culture what it is.”

    An unnamed Silicon Valley billionaire has purchased the world’s most valuable life insurance policy, according to Dovi Frances, the financial advisor who says it took him seven months and 19 insurance companies to put it together. (It surpasses the $100 million policy sold to Hollywood mogul David Geffen in 1990, attests the Guinness Book of World Records, which reportedly spent three months reviewing Frances’ records.) Frances called it “worse than any audit you can think of.”

    —–

    Happenings

    The Game Developers Conference kicks off today in San Francisco.

    The GigaOm Structure Data event gets underway this week in New York. More information here.

    And get ready to watch your Twitter feed fill with insights gleaned at TED 2014, the invite-only event getting underway today in Vancouver.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Open Innovation Center, the recently opened Samsung Electronics organization based in San Jose, Ca., is looking for a director of corporate development and M&A.

    —–

    Data

    Roughly 67 percent of investor-backed tech exits in 2013 came after the company raised just a seed or Series A round of financing, shows CB Insights research.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Meet Healthbook, Apple’s major first step into health & fitness tracking.

    An ugly situation spills out of Github and into view, as a female engineer very publicly quits, citing discrimination and other bizarre happenings. The company, a social network for programmers that has raised more than $100 million, almost all of it from Andreessen Horowitz, says it’s taking appropriate action, including a “full investigation.”

    —–

    Detours

    You really can predict the “marrying type,” sort of, says a new study.

    A developer has transformed a 19th century Brooklyn bank into a grand event space called Weylin B. Seymore, after a fictionalized Gatsby-esque character. The New York Times has the details, including a slideshow.

    The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane is truly smitten with actress Scarlett Johansson.

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    A standing desk that won’t break the bank.

    The desk caddy for the Renaissance man.

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    Connie

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