Stripe attracts $18M in funding at $100M valuation

Stripe, an online-payment system company going after PayPal, is said to have raised $18 million at a $100 million valuation from Sequoia Capital and other investors, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

The deal has not been finalized but a few unnamed sources revealed that Sequoia was responsible for $17 million of the funding. Lawyer Michael J. Patrick from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West LLP was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “There must be something red hot … Continue Reading

Jack Dorsey, Ron Conway to attend The Crunchies Awards

It’s time to get excited for The Crunchies Awards. The final line-up of notable guests has been released, making us all the more excited to co-host this star-studded event.

Harris Wittels, “Parks and Recreation” writer and all-around funny guy, will take the stage as the host of the 2011 Crunchies Awards next Tuesday night, January 31. VentureBeat, GigaOm, and TechCrunch are hosting the event, awarding the best tech innovation of 2011.

The event is chock-full … Continue Reading

Silicon Valley luminaries protest SOPA in downtown San Francisco

Angel investor Ron Conway, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Craiglist founder Craig Newmark, and rapper MC Hammer spoke to a crowd of more than a hundred people today at an anti-SOPA protest in San Francisco.

One speaker who garnered a lot attention was MC Hammer, who spoke out as a content producer and artist. He emphasized that legislators should not create laws which would stifle creativity.

“This SOPA bill, on the surface they say it’s to … Continue Reading

BestVendor is the utility belt for small business apps

Being successful in business is about knowing what your competitors know and being able to act on it. If you could find out what kinds of work tools are helping your competitors stay lean and mean, it could be a real leg up. You can’t just call up a competitor and ask. But a new startup called BestVendor is creating a Yelp-like recommendations network around work apps to make that kind of tool discovery possible.… Continue Reading

Want to know what Ron Conway got up to in 2011? Here’s his full list of investments

Someone close to SV Angel, the investment firm headed by Silicon Valley living legend Ron Conway, has leaked the firm’s entire list of investments to date.

Altogether, according to the SV Angel spreadsheet, the firm placed 75 bets on various startups during the first 10 months of 2011 and counts a total of 290 startups in its portfolio.

The leaked documents also include a list of liquidity events, numbering 71 to date. For you non-math … Continue Reading

Andreessen-Horowitz to give $50K to all Y Combinator startups through Start Fund

Venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz announced today that it is participating in startup incubator Y Combinator‘s Start Fund, alongside venture capitalists Ron Conway and Yuri Milner.

“We’ve been working with Paul [Graham, founder of Y Combinator] for awhile and we’ve just been really impressed,” said Margit Wennmachers, partner at Andreessen-Horowitz in an interview with VentureBeat. “So when we had a chance to join the program we said ‘absolutely.’”

The Start Fund awards $150,000 to each startup … Continue Reading

Develop on Twilio, get cash from super angels Dave McClure and Ron Conway

Twilio announced today 500 Startup‘s Dave McClure (pictured left) and SV Angel‘s Ron Conway (pictured below, right) started a second $250,000 seed fund for startups built on top of Twilio.

“We’re giving access to some of the best angels in Silicon Valley,” Twilio chief executive Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat. “Getting a seed investment from Ron Conway and Dave McClure speaks a lot and gets entrepreneurs up and running.”

Finding funding in Silicon Valley can be … Continue Reading

Tech news owes a lot to Arrington, conflicts and all

A lot has changed since I first made it to Silicon Valley a little more than a year ago.

But one thing has remained constant: the ruthless competition for discovering and reporting the best news stories. Among those competitors is TechCrunch, one of the most efficient and tenacious tech news publications in the valley.

Michael Arrington stands — or, stood, rather — at the center of that team. His personality and potential conflicts of interest … Continue Reading

TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington is raising his own venture fund

Michael Arrington, founder of the influential technology blog TechCrunch, is raising a $20 million fund to invest in early-state tech startups.

According to Fortune, the primary partner in the fund will be TechCrunch parent company Aol.

UPDATE: An Aol spokesperson confirmed to VentureBeat that the TechCrunch founder will indeed be a partner in “CrunchFund,” as the investment fund will be called. The rep also stated that Arrington will be replaced by a new managing editor … Continue Reading

Incubator AngelPad will drop extra $100k in participating startups

Startup incubator AngelPad will offer applicants an additional $100,000 in funding when they enter the program, bringing the incubator’s total investment in each of its 15 or so startups up to $120,000.

Startups entering AngelPad have to decide whether they want to accept the additional funding right after they are accepted to the program. An investment that early could take advantage of a startup that doesn’t fully understand its own value. But AngelPad founder Thomas … Continue Reading

Lolapps merges with 6waves to build social gaming powerhouse

Two leading social game companies — 6waves and Lolapps — are merging today in order to form a more powerful challenger to market leaders such as Zynga and Electronic Arts.

It’s a sign of the inevitable consolidation in social games, where the reach to a large number of users matters the most. In this case, the combination could create an entity that has a versatile business strategy, publishing both internally-produced social games as well as … Continue Reading