Index Ventures infuses biotech and cleantech with $438.8M
Index Ventures just announced the closure of a $438.8 million fund intended to finance young biotechnology and cleantech portfolio companies. This is the sixth seed and early-stage fund the London-based firm has raised. Perhaps best know for its prescient investments in technologies like Skype, MySQL (sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion) and Betfair, Index has been relatively insulated from the economic downturn and is looking to expand its reach in the health care and… Continue Reading
Roundup: MyHeritage raises funding, news feed psychology, Bell drops “basic research,” and more
Here’s the latest action:
Genealogy site MyHeritage raises $15 million — The Israel-based company has grown from 17 million to 25 million registered users over the past year. Investors include Index Ventures and Accel.
High-imaging satellite GeoEye-1 launches — It claims to take the highest-resolution images of any commercially-available satellite — enough to “show home plate on a baseball diamond.” Google has an exclusive contract to this satellite’s images. [Image of GeoEye launch site, using GeoEye.]
The psychology of news… Continue Reading
Sun plans to acquire MySQL for $1B, Oracle to buy BEA for $8.5B
Sun said today it will acquire open source database company MySQL for about $1 billion, a deal that would keep Sun at the center of the thriving open source software industry (see the announcement here).
The deal is for $800 million cash and $200 million in stock.
Simultaneously, in big news for the corporate “enterprise” industry, database software giant Oracle said it had reached an agreement to acquire middleware giant BEA for $8.5 billion, a few months… Continue Reading
Roundup: Scribd hype, Stockpickr, Red Herring, Cozmo and lots more
Here’s the latest action:
Scribd hype — Maybe because it calls itself the “YouTube for documents,” the young Scribd is getting a lot of interest from Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. We’ve talked to some eager to invest. Rumors are leaking out, including at Gigaom and Techcrunch that the round is almost done, with GigaOm saying it is done and citing a large $10 million valuation. We talked with Scribd’s Trip Adler today, and he didn’t want to say… Continue Reading
Roundup: Bombs, don’t do Delaware, MySQL IPO & more
The latest Silicon Valley round-up:
Correlation between bomb building and entrepreneurship? — Former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel reportedly says four of six founders of the online payment service built bombs while in high school. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson designs rockets.
MyYearbook.com, a social networking site for teens, raises $4.1M – The site looks like a Facebook knock-off. It raised the first round of finance from U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and First Round Capital. The… Continue Reading