New York investor/incubator Betaworks raises new fund

September 17, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

Betaworks is a small but well-connected New York investor/incubator firm that’s making a name for itself. It has put money into a number of well-hyped (and incidentally, also New York-based) startups including dating service turned social gaming site Iminlikewithyou, local news site Outside.in, joke e-greeting card company Someecards and music recommendation service Songkick.

Most prominently, it backed Summize, the search engine for Twitter — that Twitter bought this summer for $15 million. Betaworks, which uses the buzzword-laden phrase “business accelerator platform” to describe itself, has just raised another $10 million to $15 million from prominent angel investors, Silicon Alley Insider reports.

The firm will use the new funding to increase the size of its investments from $75,000 to $150,000, according to the report.

If you want to get an idea of how connected Betaworks is, here’s the list of its investors in this round, via SAI:

Jean-Marie Messier, last seen trying to transform Vivendi from a water utility into a media company during the last bubble.

Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group*

Henry “Hank” Vigil, Steve Ballmer’s chief dealmaker at Microsoft

Former Dow Jones publisher Gordon Crovitz*

Taavet Hinrikus, an early and current Skype employee

Paul Cappuccio, general counsel at Time Warner

* Both Pilot and Gordon are investors in SAI parent Silicon Alley Media

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Didn't Iminlikewithyou drop the dating service model and switch to just being a social gaming platform? Or are they still considered (and attempting) to be one?
  • Sorry, I wasn't clear about the change. Added a link to our previous coverage.
  • It wans't a correction as much as an actual question as to whether they were still attempting to be a dating site. I guess the link answers as much as anyone knows on that though ;).
  • bob
    Big names but not a lot of venture sucess from those names, looks a little like the big name investors in pay by touch.
  • john
    what a crappy portfolio of companies... not sure how this guy will EVER make money for his investors