By Semil Shah Scalus, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of workflow and collaboration software, was born out of necessity, says founder and CEO, Kristen Koh Goldstein, a former investment analyst turned entrepreneur. We recently caught up with her to learn more. With Scalus and a company you founded previously, BackOps, you seem to have developed […]
Google Ventures
Bill Maris on Rising Valuations, Biggest Misses, and More
At Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference yesterday, senior editor Dan Primack hosted a panel of investors who were asked to share their thoughts on the current – and future – state of the venture market. The VCs covered a lot of ground. We happened to focus in on what Bill Maris of Google Ventures had to say. […]
Bill Maris Addresses Sensational Headlines at Disrupt
Bill Maris of Google Ventures gave a thoughtful performance yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. Interviewed by the outlet’s co-editor, Alexia Tsotsis, the two covered a range of high-profile stories that have been published in the last year and relate either to Google Ventures’s portfolio companies or to controversial – even seemingly […]
Duo Security Raises $30 Million More, Led by Redpoint
Duo Security, a five-year-old, 100-person company that sells its cloud-based two-factor authentication software to thousands of organizations, including Facebook, Twitter, NASA and Uber, has just raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Benchmark, Google Ventures, Radar Partners and True Ventures. (The Ann Arbor, Mi.-based startup has now raised […]
CircleUp Carves Out a Niche, as the AngelList of Private Equity
CircleUp isn’t a household name. But the three-year-old, San Francisco-based crowdfunding site has become well-known to consumer and retail companies that are too small to interest private equity firms yet growing too fast for a bank loan. So far, 70 businesses with yearly revenue of between $1 million and $10 million have raised an average […]
DataFox Aims to Disrupt Company Intelligence, Upset Michael Bloomberg
Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters had better watch their backs – or else get out their checkbooks. The financial information giants suddenly face a spate of startups ready to take a big bite of their businesses, with DataFox, a year-old, nine-person team in Palo Alto, Ca., among the newest. So far the company, run by Stanford […]
Upstart Takes a Turn Into a Bigger Market
Two years ago, Upstart, a two-year-old, Palo Alto-based company debuted a newfangled funding platform that pairs accredited investors with students or recent graduates who are looking to finance their ideas. The idea, essentially: investors lend their own capital against the future earnings of the borrower, capital that is expected to repaid with interest within 10 years. […]
For Nest Investor Shasta Ventures, Persistence Pays
Google’s plans to acquire the smart home appliance maker Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash should translate into a tidy return for the half dozen firms that invested $80 million in the three-year-old company. Kleiner Perkins may have the most reason to kick up its heels, having led Nest’s Series A round in early […]
Don Dodge on Indoor Marketing: VCs Missing a “Huge” Opportunity
Don Dodge – a Google Ventures advisor who helps developers build new applications on Google platforms and technologies – says VCs are still outsiders when it comes to indoor mobile location services. He likens the moment to the earliest days of maps and GPS, which are now integrated into just about every application on the Web, but […]