Yipes sold for $300 million — finally
Sometimes, if you keep plugging away, you can pull something off — even if its daunting during the low points along the way.
Two years ago, we wrote about San Francisco’s Yipes, which provides “managed ethernet services” for corporate customers. At the time, it was raising yet another $24 million more in venture capital. The funding cycles seemed endless. Launched in 1998, it had gone through bankruptcy had raised a whopping $385 million — a seeming impossible amount to generate a profit from. One more symbol of the excess of the Bubble.
We called the company “Yikes.”
Today we learn the company has just been acquired for $300 million by Reliance Communications. Groups like NEA, Focus and Sprout kept investing in the company through the years and probably didn’t make much, if anything. But newcomer Crosslink Capital, which led the turnaround beginning 2005, has apparently done very well — because it’s stake wasn’t watered down by the restructuring, and it held a major chunk of the company. At least someone is a winner in the saga.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
