• StrictlyVC: July 24, 2014

    It’s Thursday! Whoo-hah! Hope you have a great one, everyone. Here’s an email version of today’s newsletter in case you missed it in your inbox.

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    Top News in the A.M.

    HP will reportedly announce a strategic partnership today under which it will invest $50 million in Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that spun out of Yahoo in 2011. Recode has the story here.

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    A Nifty Product Launch, with Poor Disclosure

    James Proud, a former Thiel Fellow who sold his first company, is back with a new company and sleep-tracking product called Sense that’s “part-Nest thermostat, part-Fitbit,” as Forbes describes it.

    In a story about Sense’s launch yesterday, Forbes portrays the company as bootstrapped, too, writing that Proud “seeded the company with earnings from selling his first startup,” and that the company’s “unmanufactured product” is now “subject to the whims of backers on Kickstarter,” where it launched a campaign yesterday morning. Forbes added that Sense “will be available later this winter contingent on” the success of that effort.

    Turns out Proud needn’t worry. He set a fundraising goal of $100,000 for his new product on Kickstarter and has effortlessly blown past it, raising nearly $400,000 as of this morning, with 28 days left to raise more.

    Forbes’s characterizations struck me as odd for a separate reason, though: Earlier this year, Hello, the parent company of Sense, had raised at least $10.5 million as part of an $18 million round. So shows an SEC filing I’d stumbled across in May.

    Forbes wasn’t the only outlet that didn’t report on Hello’s backing. The Verge, Buzzfeed, The Next Web, Ubergizmo and others to write about its Kickstarter campaign didn’t mention anything about it, either. Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported that Proud “didn’t disclose external venture funding, but you could assume there’s probably some significant round given that they’ve been working secretly on the product for about a year.”

    Proud didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about why Hello’s funding hadn’t come up in reports about the company. But last night, on Twitter, Proud wrote me that “[A]lways when asked about funding, [we] simply said we’re not talking about it right now, but acknowledged we had raised money.” He added, “[T]oo many companies launch with a focus that isn’t product. I did not want that to be the case for us.”

    I see Proud’s point, but it’s hard to think of any truly great products that have been overshadowed by their backers, no matter who they are or how much money is involved. Disclosing its funding might also have undermined the organic appeal that has made Kickstarter such a success with consumers. (In the end, I sent a link of Hello’s fund filing to Forbes, which updated its story, including to add that “Proud did not discuss Hello’s previous fundraising and was only willing to talk about Kickstarter.” TechCrunch also updated its piece to reflect the details of the fundraising round.)

    For what it’s worth, I think it’s smart for venture-backed startups to test out their products on Kickstarter and other crowd-funding platforms. For Sense, which enters new territory with its sleek sleep management device, it seems like an especially canny approach. But companies that turn to the public for support should be up front about their financial picture, both with reporters and with the people who might contribute to their campaigns.

    Kickstarter may not care much whether companies on its platform are venture-backed or publicly traded or what they choose to share with the public. (The company tells me it doesn’t require either to tell potential donors anything about their financials.)

    I, on the other hand, do care. Maybe it isn’t sporting of me, but if a company is going to go to such great lengths to tell me its creation story, why leave out something so significant?

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    New Fundings

    Activehours, a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that looks to pay hourly workers in as little as one day’s time, has raised $4.1 million in seed funding from Ribbit Capital and Felicis Ventures.

    Augmenix, a six-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based company that’s developing minimally invasive hydrogel products to improve outcomes following cancer radiotherapy, has raised $10.8 million in Series D funding. Participants in the round included new investor Excelestar Ventures and unnamed individuals. Existing investors CHV II, Catalyst Health Ventures and Sparta Group also joined the round.

    Intelomed, a nine-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based developer of noninvasive medical devices and technology for monitoring cardiovascular stability, has raised $3.8 million in new funding, shows an SEC filing. The company has now raised around $10.6 million altogether, shows Crunchbase

    Kumo, a year-old New York-based startup that reportedly hopes to provide a la carte television content to users, is raising a $50 million round of funding, reports TechCrunch. Kumo’s founder and CEO, Neil Davis, previously spent a year as the head of strategic development at Rhapsody International, and another five years as the head of corporate and digital development at DISH Digital.

    LifeNexus, a San Francisco-based consumer health company whose iChip product puts personalized health information on a card, has raised $12.7 million in new funding, according to a new SEC filing. The company’s investors include Camden Partners, Frazier Healthcare,Cambia Health Solutions, and Mosaic Health Solutions.

    Quandoo, a 1.5-year-old, Berlin-based online reservation platform, has raised $25 million in Series C funding led by Pilton Capital. Earlier investors DN Capital, Holtzbrinck Ventures and the Sixt family, along with new investor Texas Atlantic Capital, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s funding to roughly $40 million.

    QuarterSpot, a 2.5-year-old, Wayne, N.J.-based online lending platform that offers small businesses working capital, has been trying to stockpile some fresh capital, judging by recent SEC filings. As of May, the company had raised $21.3 million in debt; a filing shows it was targeting $100 million. Yesterday, another filing processed by the SEC shows that the company has separately raised $3.8 million in equity.

    PumpUp, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose popular social network app combines photo sharing, fitness tracking, and community for members focused on healthy and active lifestyle, has raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst Partners. Azure Capital Partners, Relay Ventures, Freycinet Investments, and numerous other angel investors also participated in the round. The company had previously raised roughly $230,000 in seed funding, shows Crunchbase.

    Synapsify, a two-year-old, Bethesda, Md.-based company that produces text analytics software, has raised $850,000 in seed funding, including $145,000 from the Maryland Venture Fund. Also participating in the round were ICG Ventures, Middleland Capital, Standup Capital and unnamed angel investors. The company previously raised $600,000 in seed funding,reports the Washington Business Journal.

    Trello, a new, New York-based project management tools company whose digital representation of a whiteboard aims to make it easier for groups to work together, has raised $10.3 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures and Spark Capital. The company is the second spin-out of 14-year-old Fog Creek Software. Venture Capital Dispatch has much more here.

    VenueBook, a four-year-old, New York-based event management and booking platform, has raised more than $2 million in seed funding, including from earlier investor Joanne Wilson and new investors Cayuga Venture Fund, I2BF Global Ventures, Kindler Capital, MI Ventures and Victoria Grace.

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    New Funds

    Palo Alto Venture Science, a new firm trying to raise a $200 million “quantitative” venture capital fund, is using SecondMarket for its general solicitation effort, says managing director Matt Oguz. If you’re an accredited investor, you can ask for more information here. (You can also learn more about Oguz from this Forbes piece published last month.)

    New venture firm PointGuard Ventures of Menlo Park, Ca., has closed on $50 million of what it expects to be a $150 million debut fund, reports VentureWire. PointGuard, founded by ATA Ventures co-founder Pete Thomas, reportedly began its fundraising back in January. According to VentureWire, it’s looking to fund startups that have been recapped, along with companies seeking Series B funding. Among its three portfolio companies so far is Movius Interactive, a 15-year-old, Duluth, Ga.-based mobile software firm focused on converged communications like voicemail, video mail, visual voicemail, and unified messaging. Movius closed its newest round of funding last month.

    Sofinnova Ventures has raised $500 million for its latest biotechnology fund, pool, Sofinnova Venture Partners IX LP, says the firm. Venture Capital Dispatch notes that the new pool is one of the largest health-care funds raised of late. Others include a $735 million fund that OrbiMed Advisors closed last year and a $516 million fund closed recently by Third Rock Ventures.

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    Exits

    Admeta, a two-year-old, Gothenburg, Sweden -based digital programmatic sell-side platform, has been acquired by the advertising management software company WideOrbit. The deal marks WideOrbit’s third acquisition in recent months. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Admeta had raised at least $5 million in funding, shows Crunchbase, which doesn’t list Admeta’s backers. WideOrbit has meanwhile raised at least $35 million in its 15-year history. Its investors include Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Greycroft Partners, and Hearst Ventures.

    Fullscreen, a YouTube network, is about to sell a majority stake to Otter Media, a joint venture between AT&T and The Chernin Group, reports Recode. The deal that will reportedly value Fullscreen at between $200 million and $300 million. The Chernin Group knows Fullscreen fairly well; a year ago, it was part of a syndicate that, along with WPP Digital and Comcast Ventures, invested $30 million investment in the company.

    Together Games, a year-old, Orlando, Fla.-based company that provides developers with tools to simplify cross-platform game development, has been acquired by seven-year-old, San Francisco-based GameSalad, which also makes game development tools. Together Games doesn’t appear to have raised funding; GameSalad has raised at least $7 million, including from Greycroft Partners and Steamboat Ventures, shows Crunchbase.

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    People

    Yves Béhar, founder and CEO of design firm fuseproject, is closing a deal to sell up to 75 percent ownership of the business to China’s fastest-growing marketing group, BlueFocus Communication Group. Fast Company has much more here.

    Benchmark has brought on a new general partner, Eric Vishria, the firm announced yesterday. Vishria is a “smartypants” who graduated from Stanford at age 19, notes Recode. He then joined enterprise software company Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware) as its VP of Marketing and more recently cofounded the social media Web browser Rockmelt, acquired by Yahoo last August for $70 million. Given Vishria’s ties to Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Loudcloud and bet heavily on Rockmelt, you might think Vishria would eventually land instead at their venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz. But he tells Fortune of the kind of services model that Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures operate: “When I spoke to entrepreneurs about what they wanted from a VC, not a single on of them said services. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work for others, but building a company is super hard. The highs are high and the lows are low. What entrepreneurs want most is to be able to tap into the partners, the decision-makers.”

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    Job Listings

    Electronic Arts is looking for a director of corporate development and strategy. The job is in Redwood City, Ca.

    San Francisco-based Zynga is also in the market for a corporate development manager.

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    Essential Reads

    Apple executives have discussed launching a mobile “wallet” as soon as this fall for people to use their iPhones to pay for goods in physical stores, reports The Information.

    Facebook reported its second-quarter earnings, trouncing expectations. Much more here.

    In news you already knew deep down, Twitter is mostly white (72 percent) and mostly male (79 percent). Venturebeat has more here.

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    Detours

    The New Yorker profiles Vice President Joe Biden, whose “smile has been rejuvenated to such a gleam that it inspired a popular tweet during the last campaign: ‘Biden’s teeth are so white they’re voting for Romney.’”

    It’s finally summer in the office!

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    Retail Therapy

    Plan ahead for your next off-site.

    The Chillsner, for people who drink beer very s-l-o-w-l-y.

     

    Connie

  • Sense, a New Sleep Tracker with a Kickstarter Campaign, Has Raised at Least $10.5 Million from Investors

    SenseJames Proud, a former Thiel Fellow who sold his first company, is back with a new company and sleep-tracking product called Sense that’s “part-Nest thermostat, part-Fitbit,” as Forbes describes it.

    In its original story, Forbes makes the company sound bootstrapped, saying Proud “seeded the company with earnings from selling his first startup,” and that the company’s “unmanufactured product” is now “subject to the whims of backers on Kickstarter,” where it launched a campaign this morning.

    If that’s true it’s a little odd, given that Hello, the parent company of Sense, raised at least $10.5 million from 44 investors as part of an $18 million round back in January. So shows an SEC filing we’d stumbled across earlier this year.

    Maybe the company used up that capital to develop the company’s slick prototype. Hello hasn’t yet responded to a request for more information this afternoon. [Update below.]

    Even if it was short the $100,000 it needed to ship its product, it seems like it would have made sense to disclose the funding to Forbes. Instead, I did, asking the Forbes reporter in a tweet if the company was bootstrapped and sending him a link to its Form D. He later thanked me and updated the story, writing that “Forbes uncovered documents that Hello Inc. raised funds prior to launching its Kickstarter campaign. Details on that fundraising round have been included in the above story.”

    Forbes added elsewhere that “Proud did not discuss Hello’s previous fundraising and was only willing to talk about Kickstarter.”

    Forbes wasn’t the only outlet that didn’t report on Hello’s backing. The Verge, Buzzfeed, The Next Web, Ubergizmo and others to write about the device and its Kickstarter campaign, didn’t mention anything about it, either. TechCrunch meanwhile reported that Proud “didn’t disclose external venture funding, but you could assume there’s probably some significant round given that they’ve been working secretly on the product for about a year.”

    For what it’s worth, I think it’s smart for venture-backed startups to test out their products on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms. But if those companies want to turn to the public for support, they should be up front about their financing situations, both with reporters and with the people who might contribute to their campaigns.

    Kickstarter may not insist on knowing about its customers’  balance sheets. (I’m still waiting to hear back from the company about whether publicly traded or venture-backed companies need to provide it — or campaign contributors —  with salient information about their financial picture.)

    I happen to care, though. Maybe it isn’t sporting of me, but if a company is going to go to such great lengths to tell people its creation story, why leave out something so significant?

    UPDATE: Last night, Proud wrote me on Twitter that “always when asked about funding, simply said we’re not talking about it right now, but acknowledged we had raised money.” He then added, “[T]oo many companies launch with a focus that *isn’t* product. I did not want that to be the case for us.” Kickstarter has also responded to my questions this morning, saying that neither venture-backed nor publicly traded companies need to provide disclosures to potential campaign donors.

    Connie

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  • StrictlyVC: July 23, 2014

    Good morning, everyone! We ran out of time to write a column today, but we’ll see you back here tomorrow. (Email version is here. Sign up is here.)

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    Top News in the A.M.

    Apple is now growing faster in China than anywhere else in the world.

    Deaf advocacy groups to Verizon: Stop invoking us to kill net neutrality.

    Flipkart will announce “possibly as early as next week” that it has raised more than $1 billion in new funding — the biggest round ever raised by an Indian e-commerce company, says the Economic Times. (As Quartz is noting this morning, the round would be second biggest round ever, after Uber’s recent $1.2 billion round of funding.) According to the Economic Times report, half the funding is coming from the company’s earlier backers, including Tiger Global, DST Global and Accel Partners; the rest is flooding in from new investors. As Quartz observes,  the Economic Times has been “overenthusiastic” in its reporting of Flipkart fundings in the past, so stay tuned.

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    New Fundings

    Airware, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of a hardware, software, and cloud services platform for commercial drone development and operation, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Earlier investors Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital also participated in the round, which brings Airware’s total funding to $40 million.

    Anomo, a two-year-old, Bellevue, Wa.-based location-based social discovery app, has raised $800,000 in seed funding in a round led by Maveron and Orca Bay Capital. The company has raised $1.4 million to date.

    AvantCredit, a two-year-old, Chicago-based company offering personal loans and lines of credit products online, has raised $75 million in Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management. The company also secured $200 million credit facility led by Victory Park Capital. To date, AvantCredit has raised $129 million in equity funding, including from August Capital and QED Investors, shows Crunchbase. VentureWire has much more here.

    Beanstalk, a months-old, Salt Lake City, Ut.-based online tax platform for small-to-medium sized businesses and their advisors, has raised $2 million in seed funding led by New Enterprise Associates. EPIC Ventures, Deep Fork Capital, and former Wall Street executive Jim Engebretsen also participated in the round.

    BEW Global, a 12-year-old, Denver-based company that provides managed security services to protect business-critical information, has raised $14 million from Frontier Capital.

    bitFlyer, an eight-month-old, Tokyo-based site that allows anyone with a Japanese bank account to buy and sell bitcoin, has raised $1.6 million from an unnamed Japanese venture firm. The outfit, founded by former Goldman Sachs trader Yuzo Kano, is currently looking to raise more cash from overseas investors so it can expand the service beyond Japan, Kano tells Bloomberg.

    Crowdcube, a four-year-old Exeter, England-based crowdfunding platform, says it just used its own platform to raise roughly $2 million from 141 investors in a record 16 minutes. The company announced last week that it raised $6.5 million from Balderton Capital, adding that it planned to turn to its community of users for the rest of the round. Growth Business has more here.

    Daoxila, a four-year-old, Shanghai-based Chinese wedding e-commerce platform, has raised “tens of millions” of dollars in Series B funding led bySequoia Capital and earlier investor Fidelity Asia Ventures, according to China Money Network. The company received “tens of millions” of dollars in Series A funding from Fidelity and New Access Capital in 2012, says the outlet.

    EdgeWave, a 19-year-old, San Diego-based cybersecurity firm, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from TVC Capital, a San Diego-based growth equity firm.

    FreshBooks, an 11-year-old, Toronto-based maker of cloud-based accounting software for small businesses, has raised $30 million in its first outside funding. Oak Investment Partners led the round. Atlas Venture and Georgian Partners also participated.

    iCix, an 11-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that makes software to automate food safety, has raised $25 million in new funding from Vertical Venture Partners, previous investors DFJ and Starfish Ventures, and Wesfarmers, a diversified holding company in Australia. iCix has raised $59.2 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    NextImmune, a 2.5-year-old, Gaithersburg, Md.-based developer of immuno-therapeutics for a variety of cancers and other diseases, has raised $3 million in venture funding from New Enterprise Associates, Pfizer Venture Investments, and Amgen Ventures. The company had previously raised $300,000 in seed and debt financing.

    Privacy Analytics, a seven-year-old, Ottawa-based company that sells software that protects the privacy of personal data used for analysis and research, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Vanedge Capital, with earlier investor BDC Capital and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research participating. The company has raised $4.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Social Point, a seven-year-old, Barcelona-based mobile games developer, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Highland Capital Partners Europe, with earlier backer Idinvest participating. The company has now raised $44.7 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    SimpleReach, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based content marketing platform, has raised $9 million in Series A funding led by MK Capital. Atlas Venture, along with earlier investors Village Ventures and High Peaks Venture Capital, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $10.6 million.

    SmartZip, a five-year-old, Pleasanton, Ca.-based company behind a predictive marketing platform, has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Crest Capital Ventures of Houston, with participation from existing investors Claremont Creek Ventures and Intel Capital. The company has raised $18.6 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Synlogic, a 10-month-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotechnology company focused on the development of therapeutic microbes, has raised $29.4 million in Series A funding led by Atlas Venture and New Enterprise Associates.

    Sunrise, a 1.5-year-old company that makes a free calendar app, is raising $6 million in Series A funding from Balderton Capital and earlier investors, reports TechCrunch. When the round is closed, the company will have raised $8.2 million altogether.

    Supersonic, a five-year-old, San Bruno, Ca.-based mobile advertising platform technology company, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by the China-based venture firm SAIF Partners in order to expand its business into China, Japan and India. Earlier investor Greylock Partners also participated in the round, which brings Supersonic’s total funding to roughly $23 million. The Globes has more here.

    Timehop, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based app that aggregates updates, statuses and photos of from social networks and sends them to users’ email, has raised $10 million in new fund led by Shasta Ventures. Earlier investors, including Spark Capital, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures and numerous angel investors, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $14.1 million.

    VisiQuate, a five-year-old, Santa Rosa, Ca.-based enterprise software company, has raised $6 million in Series C funding led by First Analysis. The company has raised $10.1 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    WHILL, a two-year-old, San Carlos, Ca.-based company that creates personal mobility products that look an awful lot like modern wheelchairs but are meant to be used by anybody, has raised $6 million as part of an $11 million round, shows a new SEC filing. The company had earlier raised $1.9 million in seed funding, including from Bridge Global Ventures, 500 Startups, Itochu Technology Ventures, KAMIA, MUFJ Capital, and VegasTechFund. It also ran a small, successful campaign on Kickstarter, which you can still see here.

    Yuantiku, a two-year-old, Beijing-based question-and-answer education site designed to help students pass various tests, has raised $15 million in Series C financing from existing investors Matrix Partners China and IDG, at a valuation of roughly $125 million, says TechNode. The company had previous raised roughly $10 million.

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    New Funds

    Australian investor Mark Carnegie has teamed up with fixed income dealerFIIG to create Alternate Debt Services, which will link privately held high-growth companies with debt from investors ­chasing yield. More here.

    Leading Edge Ventures, a new, Newark, De.-based early-stage venture fund, has announced that it will begin making investments in young startups in Delaware and the Mid-Atlantic region. Leading Edge is backed by First State Innovation, an organization whose mission is to accelerate entrepreneurial activity in Delaware and the surrounding region.

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    Exits

    Bizo, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based market platform that helps B2B marketers identify and reach their target audiences online, has been acquired by LinkedIn for $175 million in cash and stock (90 percent cash; 10 percent stock). The company had raised $28.5 million from investors, including Venrock, Crosslink Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners,Vulcan Capital, and Ascent Venture Partners.

    DrawElements, a six-year-old, Helsinki-based computer graphics company, has been acquired by Google for undisclosed terms. More here.

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    People

    Prince Harry is down on Twitter, as in, “I really quite hate Twitter.”

    LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman sits down with Charlie Rose to talk about his new book and answer a host of questions, including how he’d characterize the maturation of social networking. “I’d say it’s still in the first three innings,” says Hoffman.

    Chris LaRosa, YouTube’s product manager in charge of music, is leaving Google at week’s end to join a startup, reports the WSJ. It’s a “huge loss,” a colleague of LaRosa tells the outlet. More here.

    David Rubin, who spent the last 13 years at Unilever, has left his VP job with the consumer goods giant to head up global brand marketing forPinterest. It’s a newly created post, reports AdAge.

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    Job Listings

    CalPERS, the pension fund giant, is still looking to fill a whole bunch of openings, including several investment officer roles.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Engadget reviews the Amazon Fire and concludes that you’re “better off waiting for the sequel.”

    Apple delivered a snooze of an earnings report yesterday. Here’s what you might have missed.

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    Detours

    We meant to tell you sooner: The tendency to procrastinate may be genetic.

    A new study shows that people are “perceived as selfish when they advocate for someone who looks like them, unless they’re a white man.”

    Eek. June was the hottest month on record, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (May was the hottest on record, too.)

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    You can now spend $1,260 for a pair of sunglasses. Who says you have to  wear Glass to look like a glasshole? (Kidding!) H/T: InsideHook.

    Fuut hammocks.

    Connie

  • StrictlyVC: July 22, 2014

    Hello, dear readers, happy Tuesday! (Pst, here’s the email version of today’s newsletter; it’s easier to read.)

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    Top News in the A.M.

    In China, more people now access the Internet from a mobile device than a PC.

    —–

    More Startups Seek Out “Step-Up” Candidates, Hike Pay

    Venture capitalists poured $13 billion dollars into startups in the second quarter of this year, the most money they’ve parted with since the first quarter of 2001.

    That wave of cash — part of a years-long buildup– is having a major impact on jobs. To better understand what’s going on with the high-tech employment market, we talked yesterday with Joe Riggione, cofounder of the executive recruiting firm True Capital. Our conversation has been edited for length.

    What’s the latest and greatest in high-tech hiring?

    We’re starting to see a lot of companies get fatigued in their [ongoing battle] to attract executives and keep them excited. There’s just so much noise. The number of VP of Marketing searches in the Valley right now is absurd, with everyone calling the same people. So people who are working a step below VP level are [becoming very attractive]. They maybe get a little less comp and a little less equity, but their incentive is the title and responsibility.

    And there’s no shortage of good people at the director level from which to choose?

    There are a lot of good senior directors or VPs of Product Marketing who right now report to the CMO, so there’s not a shortage, but it’s definitely competitive among search firms to find the best talent. A top-tier [venture] firm just retained us for about six months to make introductions to top product and marketing and CEO talent. It isn’t about specific opportunities . . . it’s about taking those people out for coffee.

    Is there a danger that companies are promoting people into roles for which they’re not equipped?

    Most of the time, these are people who’ve been with a company as it has scaled, so they might be at a director level but they’ve already run a team. Think of a director of product marketing at [the online storage company] Box or [the cloud telecom company] RingCentral. In many cases, these are people who work at companies that have already gone public or are about to, so it’s a much lower-risk hire than maybe a director who hasn’t led a team.

    What other trends are you tracking right now?

    The equity conversation is changing substantially; it’s moving from talk about percentages to value. Deals are more competitive than ever, and [recruits are better educated], so you can’t get away with a tricky cap table any more. Employees know the difference between 1 percent of a company that’s worth one thing and .75 percent of another company [that could prove to be more valuable].

    Is it harder to hire people into growth companies whose shares are already richly priced?

    Frankly, it’s easier than [recruiting at earlier-stage companies]. VCs are so well-networked that they know everybody already [to recruit into a young company]. When you’re in the growth-equity stage of things, they don’t, so it’s easier to get them excited about a good candidate versus [their] having a bias. They’re more open-minded.

    How has compensation changed over the last year? Have any stats for us?

    Our compensation data for 2013 versus 2014 so far shows that compensation is flat for VP of Engineering jobs. CEO pay has risen 11 percent in the last year; CFO pay has risen 14 percent; and VP of Sales jobs are up 13 percent.

    Why is CFO pay up so markedly?

    There’s a lot of demand for CFOs with public company experience. A lot of startups are getting out [onto the public market] or hope to.

    And CEOs? Same story?

    We recently had a CEO opportunity at a growth-stage company where the execs were trying to recruit a finalist candidate from one of the top four publicly traded software companies. The [hiring company] was willing to give this person a $1 million signing bonus, which isn’t commonplace. But his employer gave him even more to stay.

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    New Fundings

    AppDynamics, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company application performance management and monitoring software company, has raised $170 million in equity and debt at a valuation of more than $1 billion, reports Venture Capital Dispatch. Silicon Valley Bank has provided $50 million in venture debt; meanwhile the equity portion of AppDynamic’s round was led by Battery Ventures, ClearBridge Investments and Sands Capital. Earlier investors Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners also participated. The company has now raised $206.5 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    Cardiac Insight, a six-year-old, Bellevue, Wa.-based maker and distributor of cardiac monitoring equipment, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by the medical device manufacturer Welch Allyn. As a part of the deal, Welch Allyn will be the sole global distributor of certain Cardiac Insight products and technologies. The company has now raised $10.5 million to date.

    Cotopaxi, a year-old, Cottonwood Heights, Ut.-based outdoor e-commerce company that ties a portion of every sale to a cause and does business as Global Uprising, has raised $3 million in funding from Forerunner Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Lerer Ventures and numerous individual investors. More here.

    Dealflicks, a three-year-old, Oakland, Ca.-based company that partners with theaters to sell movie tickets and concessions at a discount to help them fill empty seats, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding from a long list of investors; they include 500 Startups, Archer Gray, Be Great Partners, Mogility Capital, RosePaul Ventures, Rubicon Venture Capital, Sierra Maya Ventures and Wavemaker Partners.

    EGym, a four-year-old, Munich, German-based connected fitness company, has raised $15 million in funding led by Highland Capital Partners Europe, with participation from earlier investors Bayern Kapital and High-Tech Grunderfonds.

    Graphene Frontiers, a 3.5-year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based advanced materials and nanotechnology company, has raised $1.6 million in Series B funding led by a group affiliated with Trimaran Capital Partners. R2M Investments and return backers WEMBA 36 Angels also participated in the round.

    Intent Media, a six-year-old, New York-based ad server for travel companies, has raised $22.7 million in Series C funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Earlier investors Matrix Partners and Redpoint Ventures also participated in the round, along with First Analysis, a Chicago-based private growth-equity investor. Intent Media has now raised roughly $51 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    LogRhythm, an 11-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based maker log management, security information and event management software, has raised $40 million inner funding, led by Riverwood Capital, with participation by existing investors Adams Street Partners, Access Venture Partners and members of senior management, along with new investor Piper Jaffray. The company has raised roughly $76 million to date.

    Miyabaobei, a Beijing, China-based e-commerce company that specializes in infant care products, has raised $20 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital, reports Tech In Asia. Earlier investors Zhen Fund and China Renaissance K2 Ventures also participated in the round. Reportedly, the company had previously raised $1.6 million in Series A funding.

    Solexel, a nine-year-old, Milpitas, Ca.-based company that makes solar cells with silicon gas, has raised $31 million in Series D funding from new investor GAF, a large roofing materials manufacturer, along with earlier investors SunPower, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Technology Partners, DAG Ventures, Gentry Ventures, Northgate Capital, GSV Capital, Jasper Ridge Partners, and Spirox. Greentech Media has morehere.

    Taulia, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based company that provides cloud-based invoice, payment and discount management software to large buying organizations, has raised $27 million in Series D round at a valuation around $200 million, according to Venture Capital Dispatch. QuestMark Partners led the round; earlier investor Trinity Ventures, Matrix Partners, Lakestar and DAG Ventures also participated. To date, the company has raised $62.7 million, shows Crunchbase.

    XMOS, a nine-year-old, Bristol, England-based chip designer, has raised $26.2 million from three global chip partners, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Huawei, and Xilinx Technology Ventures, reports the EE Times. The company has raised $57.4 million thus far, shows Crunchbase, including from Amadeus Capital Partners, DFJ Esprit, Prelude Trust andFoundation Capital.

    —–

    New Funds

    Tango, the five-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-company behind the popular mobile messaging app of the same name, has announced a new, $25 million fund dedicated to games, reports The Next Web. In March, Tango raised $280 million in fresh funding, led by China’s Alibaba. The company has raised roughly $370 million altogether and says its new fund will mostly be used to pay for marketing and promotions for companies that build games for the Tango platform.

    A new fund getting underway has called itself Unicorn Venture Capital. (It was just a matter of time, wasn’t it?) The outfit focuses on early-stage technology deals in India, Singapore and Southeast Asia and its cofounders include Vispi Daver, who’d previously spent eight years with Sierra Ventures in Silicon Valley and in India, and Murli Ravi, who was the head of South Asia investments for JAFCO Asia for the last five years. (StrictlyVC had interviewed Ravi last fall on the scene in Singapore.) You can learn a bit more here.

    —–

    IPOs

    Mobileye, a 15-year-old, Har Hotzvim, Israel-based company whose software algorithms and camera-based technology helps drivers see and manage traffic risks, said yesterday that it has launched a road show for its U.S. IPO of around $500 million. Some of the company’s biggest shareholders include Goldman Sachs, which owns a 17.5 percent stake; Fidelity, which owns 7.8 percent; Enterprise Holdings, which owns 7.1 percent; and Blackrock, which owns 5.7 percent. Reuters has more here.

    —–

    Exits

    Flurry, a nine-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile app analytics company, is being acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount thatTechCrunch sources peg at between $200 million and $300 million. Kara Swisher of Recode calls the deal “an interesting one for Yahoo, which has been trying to up its mobile efforts, in the face of a quickly declining display advertising and PC-based business.” Flurry had raised $73.3 million, shows Crunchbase; its investors include Borealis Ventures, Crosslink Capital, DFJ, Draper Richards, First Round Capital, InterWest Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Union Square Ventures.

    Gentris Corp., a 13-year-old, Morrisville, N.C.-based provider of pharmacogenomic testing and biorepository services, has been acquired for $4.75 million by the publicly traded company Cancer Genetics, a provider of DNA-based cancer diagnostics focused on developing genomic-based oncology tests and services.

    —–

    People

    An Airbnb host can’t get a squatter out of her Palm Springs condo.

    Omid Kordestani, who has just temporarily replaced Nikesh Arora as Google’s chief business officer, is joining the board of Spotify, reports Recode. More here.

    Ousted Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam finally speaks, telling a reporter that he’s writing a book (sans clothing) and plans to invest the proceeds in bitcoin.

    Bradford Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, is reportedly “one of the most influential voices inside Microsoft, partly because he has been in his job since 2002, which makes him the longest serving member of the senior leadership team.” The New York Times profiles him here.

    —–

    Job Listings

    AMD, the semiconductor giant, is looking for a senior associate or principal to join its venture unit in Sunnyvale, Ca.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Facebook has introduced a read-it-later option.

    Google might be bringing WiFi to New York City pay phones.

    —–

    Detours

    Researchers have published a fascinating tool that shows how gender, weight, and state of mind alter the way we walk. (H/T: New York magazine.)

    The 10 richest counties in America, per newly released IRS data.

    Why the Citroën DS is collectable.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    The driven executive’s nap tie.

    A yoga mat that’ll confirm that you are, in fact, doing it wrong.

    —–

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

    Connie

    ,

  • More Startups Seek Out “Step-Up” Candidates, Hike Pay

    step-up candidatesVenture capitalists poured $13 billion dollars into startups in the second quarter of this year, the most money they’ve parted with since the first quarter of 2001.

    That wave of cash — part of a years-long buildup — is having a major impact on jobs. To better understand what’s going on with the high-tech employment market, we talked yesterday with Joe Riggione, cofounder of the executive recruiting firm True Capital. Our conversation has been edited for length.

    What’s the latest and greatest in high-tech hiring?

    We’re starting to see a lot of companies get fatigued in their [ongoing battle] to attract executives and keep them excited. There’s just so much noise. The number of VP of Marketing searches in the Valley right now is absurd, with everyone calling the same people. So people who are working a step below VP level are [becoming very attractive]. They maybe get a little less comp and a little less equity, but their incentive is the title and responsibility.

    And there’s no shortage of good people at the director level from which to choose?

    There are a lot of good senior directors or VPs of Product Marketing who right now report to the CMO, so there’s not a shortage, but it’s definitely competitive among search firms to find the best talent. A top-tier [venture] firm just retained us for about six months to make introductions to top product and marketing and CEO talent. It isn’t about specific opportunities . . . it’s about taking those people out for coffee.

    Is there a danger that companies are promoting people into roles for which they’re not equipped?

    Most of the time, these are people who’ve been with a company as it has scaled, so they might be at a director level but they’ve already run a team. Think of a director of product marketing at [the online storage company] Box or [the cloud telecom company] RingCentral. In many cases, these are people who work at companies that have already gone public or are about to, so it’s a much lower-risk hire than maybe a director who hasn’t led a team.

    What other trends are you tracking right now?

    The equity conversation is changing substantially; it’s moving from talk about percentages to value. Deals are more competitive than ever, and [recruits are better educated], so you can’t get away with a tricky cap table any more. Employees know the difference between 1 percent of a company that’s worth one thing and .75 percent of another company [that could prove to be more valuable].

    Is it harder to hire people into growth companies whose shares are already richly priced?

    Frankly, it’s easier than [recruiting at earlier-stage companies]. VCs are so well-networked that they know everybody already [to recruit into a young company]. When you’re in the growth-equity stage of things, they don’t, so it’s easier to get them excited about a good candidate versus [their] having a bias. They’re more open-minded.

    How has compensation changed over the last year? Have any stats for us?

    Our compensation data for 2013 versus 2014 so far shows that compensation is flat for VP of Engineering jobs. CEO pay has risen 11 percent in the last year; CFO pay has risen 14 percent; and VP of Sales jobs are up 13 percent.

    Why is CFO pay up so markedly?

    There’s a lot of demand for CFOs with public company experience. A lot of startups are getting out [onto the public market] or hope to.

    And CEOs? Same story?

    We recently had a CEO opportunity at a growth-stage company where the execs were trying to recruit a finalist candidate from one of the top four publicly traded software companies. The [hiring company] was willing to give this person a $1 million signing bonus, which isn’t commonplace. But his employer gave him even more to stay.

    Connie

    ,
    ,

  • StrictlyVC: July 21, 2014

    Hi, everyone, welcome back! Happy Monday.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    The Seoul city government said today that it will seek a ban on Uber’s car-hailing smartphone app, joining a global battle by municipalities and traditional taxi services against the service.

    —-

    A VC for Hard-Core Developers to Love

    StrictlyVC recently visited General Catalyst Partners in Palo Alto, Ca., as readers who’ve caught our interviews with Niko Bonatsos and Neil Sequeira know. Today, we conclude our General Catalystorm™ with Steve Herrod, a managing director who joined the firm last year after spending a dozen years with VMWare, the software giant that specializes in virtualization.

    Herrod was VMWare’s chief technology officer for his last five years with the company; he also has a PhD in computer engineering from Stanford. Thankfully, he can also speak plainly when seated opposite an English major. Here’s a bit of our chat, edited for length:

    You invest solely in companies that sell products to enterprises. What’s your primary focus right now?

    Mobile-first infrastructure. Everyone talks about apps in the consumer world, but enterprises still don’t think about every one of their customers accessing their information through a mobile device. Knowing that all enterprises will move to mobile in a very aggressive way, [I think a lot about] what are the second and third order changes that have to happen.

    What’s among the biggest of those changes?

    How companies actually write applications. Every company has a Web application; it’s what you use when you ask for help or your HR report. But when creating new mobile applications, companies and vendors quickly realize that they have to do something different with all the data and systems behind it — that more formal APIs [or side doors for developers into their machinery] are essential. To create a formal way that a mobile app and a Web app can access customer data is a pretty big transition, so I’m focusing on tools that help people create and use these APIs for the first time.

    What’s a portfolio company that illustrates your point?

    Runscope is helping companies formalize how they create and test and make these APIs safe for the rest of the world.

    I think all the core assets of companies are going to be things they can monetize or [otherwise make more accessible to external parties], so it’s a bet that formal APIs are the future for all companies.

    Who are Runscope’s customers?

    It just signed a great deal with Adobe as Adobe becomes a cloud company that provides a lot of access to things [on a subscription basis]. [The wearable device company] Fitbit uses Runscope. Target is another example [of a customer]. All are trying to formalize access to use of their data safely and securely. In the traditional world, you own an application and are responsible for it working. When you move to an API world, you have all these external people who are accessing your stuff, and if you do something that breaks it, you’ve now broken a bunch of other people’s stuff. So it’s almost more important that you use new tools on these APIs to prevent the external world from falling apart.

    You were with VMWare for many years. Has it been easier or more difficult than you’d imagined to transition into VC?

    My first few months [as a VC] was a tour to meet other VCs and ask [their advice], and everyone was very collaborative and helpful. [But] I definitely wanted to take a different angle to venture than I’d seen in my own work on the M&A side at VMWare. I come from a very technical background . . .I don’t think too many [other VCs] come from that background . . so [I] end up bringing hopefully something unique to the table . . . In the enterprise world, it’s amazing how many people make investments without actually trying out products.

    —–

    New Fundings

    Aspire, a 10-month-old, Washington, D.C. -based startup that allows employees to select their own company perks and benefits from an online marketplace, has raised $400,000 in seed funding from K Street Capital, Acceleprise and other unnamed investors, reports the Washington Post.

    Beehive Industries, a three-year-old, Lincoln, Ne.-based company that makes asset and infrastructure management software for state and local government, utilities, construction, telecommunications and other industries, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Advantage Capital Partners. The JournalStar has more here.

    Cerecor, a three-year-old, Baltimore-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing treatments for patients suffering from nervous system disorders, has raised the first tranche of a $32 million Series B round led by New Enterprise Associates, Apple Tree Partners, and MPM Capital.

    DesignMedix, an eight-year-old, Portland, Or.-based biotech startup that develops drugs to treat diseases caused by drug-resistant pathogens, has raised $1.5 million in angel funding from the Portland Seed Fund and numerous angel investors. According to Crunchbase, the company has now raised $12.7 million in venture and angel funding and federal grants.

    Epion Health, a three-year-old, Roseland, N.J.-based company that has developed a software-as-a-service patient engagement platform that begins with the patient check-in process, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Deerfield Management Company.

    Essence Group Holdings, a seven-year-old, Maryland Heights, Mo.-based developer of cloud-based technologies for the health care industry, has raised $71 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Camden Partners, and Sandbox Industries, among others. The company, which operates as Lumeris, has now raised $141 million, shows Crunchbase.

    GeneCentric Diagnostics, a three-year-old, Durham, N.C.-based company that develops and commercializes molecular diagnostic tests for oncologists and patients, has raised $5 million in Series A funding, according to an SEC filing that lists earlier investor Hatteras Venture Partners.

    Igetui.com, a four-year-old, Beijing-based third-party push notification service provider, has raised “tens of millions” of dollars in Series B funding led by SAIF Partners, according to a company announcement picked up China Money Network. Earlier investors, including WI Harper, also participated in the round.

    ParkWhiz, a seven-year-old, Chicago Heights, Il.-based startup whose site enables people to find and reserve parking spaces, has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Jump Capital. Earlier investors Hyde Park Venture Partners, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, former Nokia CTO Amreesh Modi, and former Technology Crossover Ventures partner Henry Feinberg also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $12 million.

    PuzzleSocial, a four-year-old, New York-based gaming studio, has raised $1.1 million in new funding, including from former HBO and Time Warner Cable president Thayer Bigelow, shows an SEC filing. PuzzleSocial had raised at least $600,000 in seed funding last year.

    Resy Network, a months-old New York-based company whose app invites users to pay for restaurant reservations (yes, another one), has raised $1.9 million in debt, shows an SEC filing that lists co-founder Ben Leventhal and investor-entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. Business Insider had written about the company in May.

    Secoo, a six-year-old, Shanghai, China-based online consignment store for luxury goods, has raised more than $100 million in Series D funding led by CMC Capital Partners, with the participation of earlier investors that include IDG, Ventech China, Crehol Meaningful Capital, and Vangoo Capital Partners. Silicon Valley Bank also reportedly provided an “eight-digit” credit line to the company, which has now raised $150 million altogether. TechNode has the story here.

    Swoon Editions, a 2.5-year-old, London-based designer and seller of furniture that offers members one chance a day to pre-order items before they’ve left the workshop, has raised $6.8 million in Series A funding,reports TechCrunch. Octopus Investments led the round, with the participation of Index Ventures. The company had earlier raised a $1.8 million seed round with Index leading and Octopus filling out the funding.

    Threadflip, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based online consignment marketplace for women’s clothing, has raised $13 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. Earlier investors Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $21.1 million.

    Unbabel, a year-old, Lisbon, Portugal-based online translation service that combines artificial intelligence with crowd post-editing, has raised $1.5 million in seed capital from about 20 investors, including Matrix Partners, FundersClub, Google Ventures, and Digital Garage.

    Urban Compass, a two-year-old, New York-based marketplace for renting and buying apartments, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Advance Publications and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Other participants in the round included Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, .406 Ventures and American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault. The company has now raised $73 million altogether. Bloomberg has the story here.

    Yo, a months-old, L.A.-based notification app (that just says “yo”), has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by the founders of China’s Tencent, who chipped in more than $250,000; Mashable founder Pete Cashmore; Betaworks; and other angel investors. Business Insider has more here.

    —–

    IPOs

    Sage Therapeutics, a four-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biopharmaceutical company that’s developing a drug for a life-threatening seizure condition, went public at $18 per share on Friday and its shares closed the day up 67 percent, at $30.10 per share.

    Trupanion, a 14-year-old, Seattle-based company that provides medical insurance for dogs and cats, went public on Friday with its shares trading at $10 initially; they closed the day at $11.40.

    TubeMogul, a 6.5-year-old, Emeryville, Ca.-based video ad platform whose shares went out at $7 a piece on Friday, saw them close at $11.50. As noted in the WSJ, in an unusual twist, the company’s longtime backers Trinity Ventures and Foundation Capital spent $5 million and $20 million, respectively, to acquire shares in the offering, boosting their holdings to 21 percent and 18 percent.

    —–

    People

    A look at 14 countries’ richest tech tycoons, care of Business Insider.

    NBA star Carmelo Anthony has partnered with long-time family friend Stuart Goldfarb, former chief executive of Bertelsmann Direct North America, to form a seed-stage fund called M7 Tech Partners. The WSJ says the two were introduced to the startup scene by investor Ben Horowitz. You can learn more here.

    Adam Besvinick has joined Deep Fork Capital, a 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm, as a principal. Besvinick previously led partnership efforts at Wanelo, a two-year-old digital “mall.” Besvinick also worked part time for Lowercase Case Capital and a couple of startups while getting his MBA from HBS last year. Besvinick tells StrictlyVC that he’ll be based in New York City but returning to San Francisco on a monthly basis.

    Nakul Mandan has quietly joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a “principal partner.” Mandan, who’s been with the firm since June, is focused on early and growth stage software-as-a-service investments. Mandan was previously a vice president at Battery Ventures, which he joined in 2009; earlier in his career, he was an associate with the India-focused fund Blue River Capital.

    Last Thursday night, Insight Ventures Partners managing director Deven Parekh and his wife, Monika, reportedly hosted an “intimate fund-raiser” for President Obama in their New York home. They also gave plum seating to Tumblr founder David Karp, who was placed next to the president but “remained largely quiet in the discussion, which started after Obama took a private phone call from Secretary of State John Kerry about Malaysia Airlines Flight 17,” reports Page Six.

    Y Combinator has beefed up its ranks yet again, announcing a number of appointments late last week. Among them: Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who was formerly Y Combinator’s “ambassador to the East,” is now a partner. So is App.net founder Dalton Caldwell, who was already a part-time partner, and Talkbin founder Qasar Younis, who was also previously a part-time partner. Meanwhile, HomeJoy founder Adora Cheung has signed on with the organization as a part-time partner.

    On Saturday, a group of bitcoin backers, include RRE Ventures and Tally Capital, announced they’ve formed a trade association to represent the industry’s interests in Washington.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Lyft, the San Francisco-based ride-sharing company, is looking for a government relations manager. To apply, you need at least five years of biz dev experience and a law degree from a top school.

    —–

    Data

    Everything you need to know about Apple, the day before its earnings call.

    In the second quarter of 2014, Israeli tech startups raised a record-breaking $930 million in venture capital, says the IVC Research Center.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    The biggest beneficiary of Y Combinator‘s success isn’t Y Combinator; it’s Sequoia Capital, argues the Priceonomics blog.

    Buzzfeed cracks the Pinterest code.

    How Google hopes to speed up the Web, one image at a time.

    —–

    Detours

    This is why your Comcast rep is yelling at you.

    Detroit’s stunning evolution in 19 GIFs.

    Here’s what $4,000 in monthly rent will get you in New York City.

    Fun with optical illusions.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    “Startup Guy” is now an official line of business casual attire at Banana Republic.

    As of today, there are 147 potato-salad-related projects to fund on Kickstarter, including a video of someone destroying potato salads. “Because I really hate them.”

    Connie

  • A VC for Hard-Core Developers

    Steve HerrodStrictlyVC recently visited General Catalyst Partners in Palo Alto, Ca., as readers who’ve caught our interviews with Niko Bonatsos and Neil Sequeira know. Today, we conclude our General Catalystorm™ with Steve Herrod, a managing director who joined the firm last year after spending a dozen years with VMWare, the software giant that specializes in virtualization.

    Herrod was VMWare’s chief technology officer for his last five years with the company; he also has a PhD in computer engineering from Stanford. Thankfully, he can also speak plainly when seated opposite an English major. Here’s a bit of our chat, edited for length:

    You invest solely in companies that sell products to enterprises. What’s your primary focus right now?

    Mobile-first infrastructure. Everyone talks about apps in the consumer world, but enterprises still don’t think about every one of their customers accessing their information through a mobile device. Knowing that all enterprises will move to mobile in a very aggressive way, [I think a lot about] what are the second and third order changes that have to happen.

    What’s among the biggest of those changes?

    How companies actually write applications. Every company has a Web application; it’s what you use when you ask for help or your HR report. But when creating new mobile applications, companies and vendors quickly realize that they have to do something different with all the data and systems behind it — that more formal APIs [or side doors for developers into their machinery] are essential. To create a formal way that a mobile app and a Web app can access customer data is a pretty big transition, so I’m focusing on tools that help people create and use these APIs for the first time.

    What’s a portfolio company that illustrates your point?

    Runscope is helping companies formalize how they create and test and make these APIs safe for the rest of the world.

    I think all the core assets of companies are going to be things they can monetize or [otherwise make more accessible to external parties], so it’s a bet that formal APIs are the future for all companies.

    Who are Runscope’s customers?

    It just signed a great deal with Adobe as Adobe becomes a cloud company that provides a lot of access to things [on a subscription basis]. [The wearable device company] Fitbit uses Runscope. Target is another example [of a customer]. All are trying to formalize access to use of their data safely and securely. In the traditional world, you own an application and are responsible for it working. When you move to an API world, you have all these external people who are accessing your stuff, and if you do something that breaks it, you’ve now broken a bunch of other people’s stuff. So it’s almost more important that you use new tools on these APIs to prevent the external world from falling apart.

    You were with VMWare for many years. Has it been easier or more difficult than you’d imagined to transition into VC?

    My first few months [as a VC] was a tour to meet other VCs and ask [their advice], and everyone was very collaborative and helpful. [But] I definitely wanted to take a different angle to venture than I’d seen in my own work on the M&A side at VMWare. I come from a very technical background . . .I don’t think too many [other VCs] come from that background . . so [I] end up bringing hopefully something unique to the table . . . In the enterprise world, it’s amazing how many people make investments without actually trying out products.

    Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

    Connie

    ,

  • StrictlyVC: July 18, 2014

    Woot! It’s Friday. Hope you have a stellar summer weekend, everyone!

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    The New York Department of Financial Services has released a long-anticipated list of proposed rules and regulations for New York-based bitcoin businesses.

    —–

    TubeMogul Investor Knows When to Get Out of the Way

    When in 2004, college friends of Michael Berolzheimer asked him to invest in their prepared foods company, the former investment banker wrote them a $200,000 check. When that company was acquired for $122 million in 2007, Berolzheimer plowed his roughly $2 million in proceeds into seed-stage investments. By 2011, he’d decided to formalize his process, raising a $7 million fund from friends and family and naming his San Francisco-based firm Bee Ventures.

    Today, Berolzheimer has invested in 32 startups, including the video advertising software company TubeMogul, which goes public today. In fact, Berolzheimer was the company’s first investor. He says he was sold on the team after meeting them in 2007 at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he was getting his MBA.

    Whether TubeMogul is another home run for Berolzheimer remains to be seen. While he believes the eight-year-old startup “has a long way to go in terms of its growth cycle,” institutional investors seem to think otherwise. At least, yesterday morning, TubeMogul revealed that it was dropping its price range from $11 to $13 per share to between $7 and $8 per share. And Scott Sweet, the founder of IPO Boutique, says that “even with that haircut, I’m not sure we have an ‘up’ deal.”

    Sweet doesn’t think the company should be going public right now at all, given that the public market performance of ad tech companies has been poor of late. “If this IPO breaks,” Sweet says, “it’ll further tarnish a niche that needs good news. It would be a lose-lose.”

    Berolzheimer acknowledges that today — and the coming months — may prove an uphill battle for TubeMogul. “There’s a chance that it gets misunderstood by investors,” he says.

    He’s also quick to note that Bee Partners holds stakes in numerous other promising startups. Tradesy, a consignment site, is among them. Bee Partners wrote the company its first check in 2012; in May, it raised a $13 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

    Bee Partners was also the first investor in the aerial robotics platform Skycatch, which raised a $13.2 million Series A round in May that was led by Avalon Ventures and included Google Ventures, ff Ventures, and renowned investor Ram Shriram.

    Indiegogo, the global crowdfunding platform, is another of its investments. Bee participated in both the company’s seed and Series A fundings.

    I ask Berolzheimer to characterize his firm’s style. “We find opportunities to support the company in any way we can, and if we can’t, we get the heck out of the way.”

    He adds, “We’ve had some small wins and a few losses but we’re generally happy with how the portfolio is maturing.” It’s a “starter fund,” he says. “Just like founders, you have to start somewhere.”

    —–

    New Fundings

    Amcure, a three-year-old, Baden-Württemberg, Germany-based spinoff from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology that develops treatments for metasizing tumors, has raised $6.7 million in Series A funding from a consortium headed by LBBV Venture Capital, reports VentureWire.

    Dicom Grid, an eight-year-old, Phoenix, Az.-based healthcare IT company whose platform makes digital medical imaging accessible to medical facilities and physicians, has raised $6 million in funding from earlier investors Canaan Partners, CHL Medical Partners, Mayo Clinic, and numerous individuals. The company has now raised $30.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Dough, a Chicago-based company that encompasses two properties — Tastytrade, which produces online broadcasts aimed at teaching individuals how to trade options, and Dough.com, a mobile platform for options trading and education aimed at millennials — has raised $25 million in new funding from Technology Crossover Ventures. The company had received earlier backing from Lightbank. Crain’s Chicago Business has much more here.

    Edico Genome, a 1.5-year-old, San Diego-based genome sequencing analysis company, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Qualcomm, with Axon Ventures and Life Technologies CEO Greg Lucier participating.

    Expect Labs, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose MindMeld app app called MindMeld listens to users’ conversations and produces relevant data based on its analysis of those calls, has raised an undisclosed amount of financing from In-Q-Tel. Last year, the company raised another round of funding whose sum it didn’t disclose, from IDG Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Intel Capital,Telefonica Ventures, and Google Ventures. The company raised its first, $2.4 million, round in the fall of 2012, including from Greylock Partners, KPG Ventures, and Quest Venture Partners.

    FullStory, a months-old, Atlanta-based Web analytics founded by ex-Googlers, has raised $1.2 million in funding from Google Ventures and Tom Noonan, a former CEO of Internet Security Systems. GigaOm has more details.

    Health Warrior, a three-year-old, Richmond, Va.-based health food company that sells chia seeds and chia-based snacks, has raised $3.3 million in Series B funding led by New Richmond Ventures, along with a group of professional athletes from the MLB and NFL.

    InflaRx, a 6.5-year-old, Jena, Germany-based developer of therapeutics to treat acute and chronic inflammation, has raised a “double digit million Euro” Series B round led by bm|t. FinSMEs has more here.

    Jobr, a six-month-old, San Francisco-based mobile job-discovery and matching platform, has raised $2 million in seed funding investors, including Lerer Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Lowercase Capital, The Hive, Tekton Ventures, Structure Capital, Tim Draper, and Fabrice Grinda. As part of the funding, TJ Nahigian, who has worked as an investor at Coatue Management, Accel Partners, and Summit Partners, is joining the company as its new CEO. TechCrunch has more here.

    Manzama, a four-year-old, Bend, Or.-based provider of social media listening and monitoring platforms for legal professionals, has raised $1.3 million to expand into new markets. Gold Bench Capital led the Series A round, joined by Seven Peaks Ventures and Cascade Angels.

    Sensoria, a four-year-old, Redmond, Wa.-based wearable technology developer, says it has signed a term sheet with the publicly traded consulting company Reply SpA for a Series A investment round of undisclosed size. The company’s products include socks with embedded sensors, as well as sports bras and shirts.

    Speaktoit, a nearly four-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that makes a virtual assistant technology, has raised $2.6 million in Series B funding led by Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures and earlier investors Intel Capital andAlpine Technology Fund. The company has raised $5.8 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Trice Medical, a three-year-old, King of Prussia, Pa.-based company whose camera-enabled technologies offer an alternative to X-rays and MRIs, has raised $11.6 million in Series B funding from Safeguard Scientifics and earlier investor BioStar Ventures. The company looks to have raised roughly $15 million to date.

    Vision Critical, a 14-year-old, Vancouver-based customer intelligence platform company, has raised $16 million in growth funding from Georgian Partners, Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund and Kensington Global Private Equity Fund. According to Crunchbase, the firm has raised $42.5 million to date, including from OMERS Ventures and Wellington Financial.

    Workspot, a two-year-old, Cupertino, Ca.-based company that provides easy access to enterprise apps and data through a single sign-in, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Helion Ventures. Translink Capital and Qualcomm Ventures also participated in the round.

    —–

    New Funds

    Multiplier Capital, a three-year-old venture debt firm with offices in L.A., New York, and Washington, D.C. has raised $227 million for its debut fund, led by anchor investor Liberty Peak Capital. According to the firm, other investors include a college endowment, a publicly traded bank, family offices, and high net worth individuals in the U.S. and Canada.

    New Science Ventures, a 10-year-old, New York-based venture fund that backs both early and late-stage companies, has raised $23.8 million as part of a third fund that’s targeting up to $100 million, shows its latest SEC filing. (We first told you about this fund last month.) Svelte Medical Systems, a 6.5-year-old, New Providence, N.J.-based maker of expandable coronary stents, is among its portfolio companies

    NextView Ventures, a four-year-old, Boston-based seed-stage investment firm that focuses primarily on East Coast companies, has raised $40 million for its second fund — almost double its $21 million debut fund, closed in 2011. One of firm’s newest portfolio companies is Farmeron, a Columbus, Oh.-based company whose software allows dairy and cattle farmers to update and manage their data online. Boston Business Journal has more here.

    —–

    IPOs

    Alibaba has reportedly pushed its IPO out to September.

    And more on that Line IPO: Japan’s most popular mobile messaging service has reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO in the U.S., taking a step closer to a dual-listing in New York and Tokyo.

    —–

    Exits

    CardSpring, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based platform that helps developers write applications for credit cards and other types of payments, has been acquired by Twitter for undisclosed terms. The company had raised $10 million, shows Crunchbase. Its investors include Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Morado Venture Partners, SV Angel, Data Collective, John Hering, Felicis Ventures, and Webb Investment Network.

    Citrus Lane, a 3.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based e-commerce subscription service that sells products to families with kids, has been acquired by the childcare marketplace company Care.com, which is paying $31 million in cash and stock, with an additional $17.6 million up for grabs dependent on certain milestones being met over the next two years. According to Crunchbase, Citrus Lane had raised $6.6 million from Greylock Partners and GGV Capital. For more on the deal, check outRecode.

    Open Scan Technologies, a 16-year-old, Denver-based company that helps companies process complex payments, has been acquired by BillTrust for an undisclosed amount. Open Scan doesn’t appear to have raised venture backing; BillTrust has raised roughly $30 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Edison Partners.

    —–

    People

    After 17 years, Bill Campbell has stepped off the board of Apple. The one-time Apple executive will be replaced by BlackRock co-founder Sue Wagner. Fortune has much more here.

    Google attorney Jack Halprin bought a century-old, seven-unit Victorian in San Francisco last year, then began evicting residents. Now those moves are attracting national attention.

    Google announced yesterday that its chief business officer, Nikesh Arora, is leaving the company to become CEO of Softbank Internet and Media. Omid Kordestani, who was Google’s 12th employee and led the sales team for many years before becoming a senior advisor at the company, will take over.

    HP has named its CEO, Meg Whitman, as board chairman. She replaces Ralph Whitworth, who stepped down on Tuesday for health reasons.

    —–

    Job Postings

    Weebly, a New York-based company that lets people create a site, blog or online store (and that raised $35 million from Sequoia Capital and Tencent in April) is looking for a business development manager in New York.

    —–

    Data

    Why Google is killing it, in two charts.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Dear Mr. Murdoch, save yourself 80 billion bucks.

    —–

    Detours

    What happens if your child has a condition that’s new to science?

    Dutch artist Telmo Pieper revives his childhood drawings.

    Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ a capella.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Go pro with the McLaren 650S.

    GoTenna. (You might not need it but you’ll want it.)

    Cool watch.

    —–

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

    Connie

    ,

  • TubeMogul Investor Knows When to Get Out of the Way

    TubeMogul IPOWhen in 2004, college friends of Michael Berolzheimer asked him to invest in their prepared foods company, the former investment banker wrote them a $200,000 check. When that company was acquired for $122 million in 2007, Berolzheimer plowed his roughly $2 million in proceeds into seed-stage investments. By 2011, he’d decided to formalize his process, raising a $7 million fund from friends and family and naming his San Francisco-based firm Bee Ventures.

    Today, Berolzheimer has invested in 32 startups, including the video advertising software company TubeMogul, which goes public today. In fact, Berolzheimer was the company’s first investor. He says he was sold on the team after meeting them in 2007 at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he was getting his MBA.

    Whether TubeMogul is another home run for Berolzheimer remains to be seen. While he believes the eight-year-old startup “has a long way to go in terms of its growth cycle,” institutional investors seem to think otherwise. At least, yesterday morning, TubeMogul revealed that it was dropping its price range from $11 to $13 per share to between $7 and $8 per share. And Scott Sweet, the founder of IPO Boutique, says that “even with that haircut, I’m not sure we have an ‘up’ deal.”

    Sweet doesn’t think the company should be going public right now at all, given that the public market performance of ad tech companies has been poor of late. “If this IPO breaks,” Sweet says, “it’ll further tarnish a niche that needs good news. It would be a lose-lose.”

    Berolzheimer acknowledges that today — and the coming months — may prove an uphill battle for TubeMogul. “There’s a chance that it gets misunderstood by investors,” he says.

    He’s also quick to note that Bee Partners holds stakes in numerous other promising startups. Tradesy, a consignment site, is among them. Bee Partners wrote the company its first check in 2012; in May, it raised a $13 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

    Bee Partners was also the first investor in the aerial robotics platform Skycatch, which raised a $13.2 million Series A round in May that was led by Avalon Ventures and included Google Ventures, ff Ventures, and renowned investor Ram Shriram.

    Indiegogo, the global crowdfunding platform, is another of its investments. Bee participated in both the company’s seed and Series A fundings.

    I ask Berolzheimer to characterize his firm’s style. “We find opportunities to support the company in any way we can, and if we can’t, we get the heck out of the way.”

    He adds, “We’ve had some small wins and a few losses but we’re generally happy with how the portfolio is maturing.” It’s a “starter fund,” he says. “Just like founders, you have to start somewhere.”

    Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

    Connie

    ,
    , ,

  • StrictlyVC: July 17, 2014

    Good morning, everyone, happy Thursday! For the email version of the newsletter (it’s easier to read), click here.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    Ouch. Microsoft just announced plans to cut up to 18,000 jobs this year, which is nearly 15 percent of its workforce.

    —–

    Alibaba Banker: Better to Price Your Offerings Low (Natch)

    Earlier this week, at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference, a trio of industry luminaries — Jimmy Lee, the vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase; Jim Breyer, CEO of Breyer Capital; and Josh Kopelman, founder of First Round Capital — talked with Fortune’s Dan Primack about the booming tech M&A market and what happens when we invariably see another downturn.

    As you might expect, each stuck to their knitting. Breyer, known for making an early bet on Facebook, raved about the number of billion-dollar-plus digital currency companies he expects to see five to ten years from now. Seed-stage investor Kopelman talked about the Series A crunch and why, if he had to start a new firm from scratch, he’d zero in on that underserved segment of the startup market.

    Lee, meanwhile, focused on IPOs, arguing that the investors and entrepreneurs in the audience should aim for opening share prices that have room to grow, even if that means leaving money on the table.

    JPMorgan has an obvious interest in shares that are priced to move: underwriters who deliver shares that rocket out of the gate are a lot more likely to secure more trading business. Still, Lee sounded like someone who has experienced his share of flops (Chegg comes to mind) in highlighting the “super asymmetrical” fallout that ensues when shares fall on opening day.

    “The typical banker on the typical IPO wants to tell management, ‘You’re handsome, you’re beautiful, you’re spectacular, your company is amazing’ … all of which may be true. [But] what happens is you can get this momentum that looks positive but can then be negative …”

    “If you price the deal too high, and the stock falls out of bed,” Lee continued, “management is unhappy, the employees are unhappy, the shareholders are unhappy…” It can also “do damage to your brand.” And “you just don’t know how long it’s going to take [to turn things around],” he warned.

    Indeed, after Facebook’s so-called “flop” of an IPO, it took the companyroughly a year to regain the trust of public shareholders.

    On the flip side, said Lee, “If you price the deal too low …you can still increase the size of the deal, the price of the deal, and so on and still get the deal done . . .”

    Ultimately, he said, startups “really have to think about what [they] want at 4 pm. EST on Day One” of life as a public company and manage to that outcome.

    Paradoxically, Lee also advised entrepreneurs not to dwell on going public.

    “You can’t let the IPO define the company, define the brand, define the vision; that’s what the management team does,” said Lee, whose firm is among half a dozen lead underwriters who will be pricing Alibaba’s high-profile stock sale. “An IPO is a sale of securities. That’s all it is.”

    —–

    New Fundings

    Boomerang Commerce, a two-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based startup that helps companies manage their frequently changing online prices, has raised $8.5 million million in Series A funding from Madrona Venture Group and Trinity Ventures.

    Conversocial, a nearly five-year-old, New York-based software company that helps businesses to manage social media as a large-scale customer service channel, has raised $5 million in Series B funding led by earlier investors Octopus Ventures, DFJ Esprit and angel investor Matt Arnold. The company has raised roughly $12 million to date.

    Crowdcube, a four-year-old, Exeter, England-based crowdfunding platform, has raised $6.5 million in new funding led by Balderton Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

    Elliptic Enterprises, a year-old, London-based bitcoin storage company, has raised $2 million from Octopus Investments. Coindesk has much more here.

    Funding Circle, a five-year-old, London-based peer-to-peer lending network, has raised $65 million in new funding led by Index Ventures. The company has raised $123 million to date, including from Accel Partners, Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital. Dealbook has more here.

    Immatics Biotechnologies, a 14-year-old, Tuebingen, Germany-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on immunotherapies that fight against cancer, has raised $29.7 million in Series D funding, including from dievini Hopp Biotech holding, Wellington Partners, AT Impf GmbH and others.

    Nosto Solutions, a three-year-old, Helsinki-based company whose SaaS offering helps retailers personalize their online stores, including through on-site recommendations and personalized emails, has raised $5.5 million in new funding led by Wellington Partners. Earlier investors Open Ocean Capital, SanomaVentures, and Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, also participated.

    OpenEd, a two-year-old, Los Gatos, CA-based company that provides teachers and parents with a free tool to find videos, games and assessments that help students in class or at home, has raised $2 million in seed funding led by PivotNorth Capital.

    Patience, an eight-month-old, Berlin-based company whose white-label solution allows educators to create and manage their own online learning applications and sell their courses through their own websites, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Holtzbrinck Digital, RI Digital Ventures, and others, reports Venture Village. More here.

    Pond5, an eight-year-old, New York-based online marketplace for video footage and stock media, has raised $61 million in funding from Accel Partners and Stripes Group.

    PredictionIO, a 1.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company whose open source machine learning server helps software developers create predictive features, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from QuestVP,Azure Capital, CrunchFund, StartX Fund, Kima Ventures, IronFire,Sood Ventures and XG Ventures. (If you’re interested, here’s a product video showing how its technology works.)

    PropelAd, a two-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based company that helps e-commerce merchants advertise their products on Facebook and track the sales each ad generates, has raised $650,000 in seed funding led byColm Long, a former Facebook vice president of global operations. The Irish venture capital firm Tribal.vc and Enterprise Ireland also participated in the round. The Irish Times has more here.

    Relcy, a year-old, Bay Area startup that’s building a mobile-only search engine which indexes the content inside apps, has raised $9 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. You can read more about it here.

    Señor Pago, a nearly four-year-old, Mexico City, Mexico-based mobile point of sale service, has raised $1 million in seed funding from investors, including Silicon Valley serial entrepreneurs Jay Adelson and Barrett Lyon.

    Singular, a months-old, San Francisco-based SaaS mobile marketing platform, has raised $5 million in seed funding from General Catalyst Partners.

    Tado, a three-year-old, Munich-based company whose heating app controls residential heating and cooling temperatures, has raised $13.6 million in Series A funding from earlier investors Target Partners and Shortcut Ventures GmbH. The company has raised $16.2 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    TradeBlock, a 1.5-year-old, New York-based online cryptocurrency data company that aggregates data and sells products for analyzing pricing trends and other research tools, has raised $2.8 million in funding led byAndreessen Horowitz. Other investors in the round include Devonshire Investors, FinTech Collective, and SecondMarket founder Barry Silbert. The WSJ has more here.

    Urban Ladder, a two-year-old, Bangalore-based online furniture company, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by Steadview Capital, along with existing investors SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital. The company has raised $27 million to date. The Business Line has more here.

    Virobay, an eight-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based clinical-stage pharmaceutical company that’s developing treatments for neuropathic pain, autoimmune disease and fibrosis, has closed an expanded Series B second tranche financing of $8 million, bringing its Series B round (raised over the last four years) to $18 million. Its investors include Perceptive Advisors, TPG Biotechnology Partners, Alta Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, and AbbVie.

    XMarket, a months-old, Brazilian online marketplace for real estate, vehicle and second hand items, has raised $850,000 in seed funding from individual investors, including Dror Efrat, Marc Green and Yoram Yaeli.

    —–

    New Funds

    Coent Venture Partners, a new, Japan-based, micro VC firm is announcing a $10 million fund that’s backed solely by its founders, Japanese businessmen Shuhei Morofuji and Hideki Fujita. Morofuji founded SMS, a 13-year-old, publicly traded healthcare information service for the elderly. Fujita comes out of the social mobile company Gree, where he was the head of M&A; he worked previously at the investment firm Jafco. Tech In Asia has more here.

    Plymouth Ventures, an Ann Arbor, Mi.-based investment firm, has raised more than $60 million for a new growth-stage fund focused on companies in the Great Lakes region. Among the firm’s newest investments: five-year-old 365 Retail Markets of Troy, Mi., which has created a self-checkout vending technology and that raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Plymouth earlier this year.

    SherpaVentures, the San Francisco-based venture firm launched last year by entrepreneur-investor Shervin Pishevar and former Goldman Sachs banker Scott Stanford, has officially closed its first fund with $154 million. Some of its bets so far include the shipping services company Shyp; the visual storytelling app Storehouse; and Munchery, a company offering same-day food delivery services.

    —–

    Exits

    InnoPharma, a nine-year-old, Piscataway, N.J.-based pharmaceutical company, has been acquired by Pfizer for $225 million in cash, with the potential for another $135 million, contingent on certain milestones. InnoPharma had raised at least $43 million from investors, shows Crunchbase, including Athyrium Opportunities Fund, Comerica Bank,NXT Capital, and Thomas, McNerney & Partners.

    Mezeo, a six-year-old, Houston-based software company that provides secure file sharing and cloud storage capabilities for its customers, has been acquired by Zimbra, the Palo Alto, Ca.-based unified collaboration software company, for undisclosed terms. Mezeo had raised $4 million in venture funding, including from Helion Venture Partners.

    Retsly, a year-old, Vancouver, B.C.-based startup that helps developers access real-estate data from multiple listing services, has been acquired by Zillow for undisclosed terms. The company had raised $540,000 in seed funding, including from BDC Venture Capital and individual investors Eric Stegemann and Klaas Lameijer. TechCrunch has more here.

    —–

    People

    Kamran Ansari has just been promoted to principal at Greycroft Partners. Ansari had joined the firm in 2012, after serving as head of corporate and business development for MyYearbook/MeetMe, the social networking platform. Ansari has also logged time at Oak Hill Capital and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, where he was also on the founding team of its successor fund, Tenaya Capital.

    Venture capitalist Jim Breyer thinks Google could have a market capitalization of $1 trillion in 10 years, he said at a conference in New York yesterday. Bloomberg has more here.

    Since 2009, 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki and her estranged husband, Sergey Brin, have been quietly sprucing up downtown Los Altos, Ca., through a real estate company called Passerelle Investment Co. Now, she’s going public with more of the details.

    Maria Zhang, the Yahoo executive sued for sexual harassment by one of her female employees, has filed a cross-complaint against her accuser, Nan Shi, alleging defamation and claiming Shi was trying to “extort” Yahoo. Valleywag has more here.

    The 100 best-paid general counsels—and what they make.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Square 1 Bank is looking for a new venture banker to evaluate lending opportunities to startups. The job is in Boston.

    —–

    Data

    Y Combinator has published its latest portfolio stats.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Airbnb showed off a redesign yesterday that, erm, had everyone talking.

    Yahoo is wary of startups backed by corporate venture funds, says its M&A chief. “When we look at companies backed at those funds we always ask, ‘Why are they selling and why not selling to their own sibling?’”

    Inside the artificial brain that’s remaking the Google empire.

    —–

    Detours

    Apparently, eating sugar doesn’t make kids hyper after all.

    The rise of the non-working rich.

    The trouble with Floyd Mayweather.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Luggage for globe-trotters.

    The iPad of vacuums.

    A zombie, just for you.

    —–

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

     

    Connie

StrictlyVC on Twitter