Bay Area companies: Meet with Kleiner Perkins Thursday – Last chance to apply!
If your company is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you want to meet with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers on Thursday, this is your last chance to sign up.
We’ll be heading down to the KPCB Menlo Park offices in three days to meet with 10 local companies as part of our global DEMO tour. If you’d like to be one of those 10, fill out this form by Tuesday at noon, … Continue Reading
Freelance marketplace Elance secures $16M in funding
Elance, a freelance marketplace that connects clients and freelancers, announced Tuesday it has raised $16 million in funding. Stripes Group led the funding, with participation from New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
“Elance has experienced tremendous growth over the past two years by enabling access to a flexible and independent online workforce,” CEO Fabio Rosati said in statement to VentureBeat, ”The additional funding will allow us to continue to build our platform … Continue Reading
DeanBeat: Game companies raised a record-breaking $1.54B in 2011
Game fundings destroyed the record book for fundings this year as 145 companies raised more than $1.540 billion in 2011, not counting initial public offerings.
In 2011, games took center stage. Game investment changed fundamentally during the year, as investors shifted their money into social, mobile and online games as they chased after users who were embracing the newest platforms for games.
The total game investment number is up more than 47 percent from the … Continue Reading
Battery-saving chip startup SuVolta raises $17.6M
SuVolta, a chip startup that says it can cut power consumption by 50 to 90 percent when coupled with other techniques for lowering voltage, said today it has raises $17.6 million in a new round of funding.
The company’s technology is a fundamental breakthrough, and a rare one, since most venture investments go into applications these days, not core technology.
The funding came from new investor Bright Capital as well as existing investors Kleiner Perkins … Continue Reading
Klout confirms “strong round” of funding, won’t talk price or value
While it’s been talked about for some time, Klout today finally confirmed that it raised a “strong” third round of funding — though it won’t say how much.
Klout CEO Joe Fernandez confirmed the funding with All Things D, and said that the round was led by Kleiner Perkins. In October, the company was said to be raising around $30 million at a massive $200 million valuation with Kleiner at the head.
As VentureBeat’s Tom … Continue Reading
Headset maker Jawbone raises another $40M, bringing its total to $210M raised
Jawbone, the maker of Bluetooth headsets for cell phones and other cool hardware, announced today that it has raised $40 million.
That amount is one of the biggest raised by a mobile hardware company, but San Francisco-based Jawbone has always been ambitious. As we noted when the company raised its $49 million round earlier this year, you could say that “over-engineering” a headset has gotten Jawbone pretty far.
The company makes wireless Bluetooth headsets for … Continue Reading
eRecyclingCorps receives $35M to reward you for recycling your old phones
eRecyclingCorps, a company that rewards customers for recycling cell phones and e-waste, announced Tuesday that it received $35 million from Kleiner Perkins’ Green Growth Fund. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
In order to keep as many cell phones out of landfills as it can, eRecyclingCorps not only makes recycling easy, it makes it worthwhile by offering rewards. The company has formed partnerships with Sprint and Verizon Wireless to create “incentivized … Continue Reading
Kleiner Perkins picks up Twitter’s former VP of engineering
Mike Abbott, the former vice president of engineering who flew the Twitter coop in mid October, has joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner and is now a part of the illustrious venture capital firm’s digital team.
The KPCB new hire spent less than a year-and-a-half at Twitter, but grew the engineering team from 80 to 350 employees and helped mastermind the rebuild of Twitter’s infrastructure. Prior to joining Twitter, Abbott worked at … Continue Reading
Kleiner Perkins raises $250 million China II Fund
Venture firm Kleiner Perkins has raised a $250 million fund to invest in Chinese companies, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The KPBC China Fund II filing documents list chief financial officer Susan Biglieri as the company’s signatory.
This follows a recent trend of Asia-focused venture funds, but it is very small when compared to the $6 billion raised by venture firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in October.
Companies in the Kleiner … Continue Reading
Vinod Khosla: Freedom to fail is key ingredient in success
The willingness to fail is the key ingredient in success, billionaire investor Vinod Khosla told the audience at the Failcon conference in San Francisco today.
Failcon is an annual event where people gather to talk about failing their way to success, a unique forum that celebrates mistakes.
Khosla (pictured) has had may successes, but he also knows about failure first hand. He was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, as well as a partner … Continue Reading
Fast-talking internet sage Mary Meeker predicts a mobile revolution — yet again (video)
Mary Meeker knows how to pack a lot of facts into a 66-slide PowerPoint deck. Fortunately, the Kleiner Perkins partner is also quite good at decipering what all of those facts mean for our mobile computing future.
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, Meeker returned to talk about internet trends at a pace that was faster than I could type. So I recorded her talk on video (see below).
Her first … Continue Reading
InMobi raises massive $200M to overtake Google in mobile ads (video)
InMobi, the four-year-old company that is second place globally in mobile advertising, has raised an astonishingly large $200 million round of funding from Softbank Corp.
The company’s goal is overtake Google as the world leader in the category.
InMobi, which is based in Bangalore and San Francisco, has only 350 employees, but its growth has been frenetic. Its mobile advertisements reached 332 million unique phone users in August, up from just 1.5 million uniques in … Continue Reading
John Doerr: Cleantech will suffer unless U.S. can “put partisan bulls–t behind us”
A wave of anti-science sentiment in the U.S. government — through the lens of ignoring global warming and a reliance on fossil fuels — could hamper innovation in the clean technology space, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr (pictured right) said.
“We have to put this partisan bulls–t behind us,” Doerr said at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference on Wednesday. “We need new leadership and public pressure, it will not happen with business … Continue Reading
Kenandy raises $10.5M for cloud “social manufacturing”
Kenandy is taking the old world of industrial manufacturing into the new world of the cloud with its “social manufacturing” platform. And today, the company is coming out of stealth and announcing it has raised $10.5 million in a first round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Sitting atop Salesforce.com’s Force.com cloud software, Kenandy is creating a service that combines the nuts-and bolts of manufacturing software with cloud technology and social media. … Continue Reading
Kleiner Perkins partner: Loan guarantees could be next government cut
The next victim of the United States debt crisis could be conditional loan guarantees, says a prominent venture capitalist.
The loan guarantees are one of the financial engines powering many cleantech investments in Silicon Valley.
“I think the loan guarantee programs could go away,” Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers partner Ray Lane told VentureBeat. “I think everybody is concerned about the loan guarantee program, fewer are concerned about (the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program) … Continue Reading
Nebula aims to enable every company to implement cloud computing
Cloud-infrastructure startup Nebula envisions a day when every company will be able to implement cloud computing as easily as plugging into a an electrical utility.
By taking advantage of open source technologies, the company hopes to create hardware appliances with all of the necessary software for companies to create their own low-cost data center computers.
It fits with the revolution happening in big data, where the amount of data generated by applications such as Facebook … Continue Reading
Real-time traffic firm Inrix raises $37M from Kleiner Perkins
Real-time car traffic startup Inrix has raised $37 million in a fourth round of funding led by high-profile venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and August Capital.
Inrix is one of the leaders in crowdsourced real-time traffic information that helps drivers skirt traffic jams and plan their routes in advance. Inrix supplies this information to auto manufacturers, mobile developers, transportation agencies, fleet operators, and internet companies.
Inrix collects information from more than 10 million … Continue Reading
Former DoubleClick team raises $6M for comparison-shopping engine
DoubleClick cofounder Kevin O’Connor has a new startup, FindTheBest, aimed at helping you compare everything from air purifiers to venture capitalists.
Now, with a $6 million funding round from Kleiner Perkins that closed Tuesday, FindTheBest should be in a good position to build out its “data driven content platform,” which combines computer-driven semantic analysis with human-powered tagging to build data sets quickly and efficiently.
“‘Human’ is dirty — it’s not scalable,” O’Conner (above, left) said … Continue Reading
Reputation.com to spend $41M on “math” to control your online profile
Consumers will be able to charge advertisers to access their personal data.
The company making it possible is Reputation.com, an online privacy company that just picked up a $41 million round led by August Capital.
However, the details of the product, still under development, are unclear.
Michael Fertik says it’s designed to put consumers in control of their own data. “It’s like a vault where they can put data and get paid for it themselves,” … Continue Reading
SEC filing cracks the egg on Chegg’s Notehall purchase
New details on Chegg’s June acquisition of Notehall came through SEC filings yesterday.
We do not know how much cash the textbook renting company paid for Notehall, a provider of lecture notes, but according to the form D, Notehall received $3.7M in equity.
Chegg declined to comment on the filing.
It is no wonder that rumblings of a Chegg IPO are surfacing. The company has matured faster than a freshman after his first keg stand. … Continue Reading
