Velocity starts fund with Best Buy, gets new name
Velocity Interactive Group has already invested in a wide range of digital media companies, and it’s going to be doing more of that with the help of retailer Best Buy. The two are starting a fund together, targeting the same mobile, gaming, video, and other media-related startups as Velocity has been. Best Buy is going to be using its brick-and-mortar clout to help with the investment.
Separately, Velocity is changing its name to Fuse Capital due to a possible copyright issue. For venture industry trivia experts, the new name comes from Fuse+Media, a subsidiary of the firm that invests in Indian media companies, according to the The New York Times.
Fuse is run by Ross Levinsohn, a former digital media executive at News Corp. His former Fuse partner is Jonathan Miller, who recently left to become the top digital media executives at the media conglomerate.
The current Fuse fund is worth $300 million, although the firm also manages some ComVentures investments, a firm that partially folded into it in 2007. Fuse has a total of more than $1.4 billion under management, according to The Wrap, although terms of the Best Buy investment were not disclosed.
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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.
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