Cendana Capital is a “next generation funds-of-funds” founded by Michael Kim. Before starting Cendana, Kim was an original partner at Rustic Canyon Partners and currently serves as a member of the limited pattern advisory boards for a slew of well-known firms, including Accerlator Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Founder Collective, Freestyle Capital, K9 Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and SoftTech VC. Kim, clearly, is an active figure within the venture capital community.

With Cendana, he exclusively invests in seed-stage or ‘micro-cap VC’ funds, which then put their money into young startups. Seed-stage investing is a hot button issue right now. The entrepreneurial community is all flutter with discussions of the legendary ‘Series A’ crunch. The cost of launching and operating an Internet startup is fairly low and as a result, the ecosystem is saturated with early-stage companies looking for capital. However, the number of seed-financed startups greatly outnumbers the amount of venture capital firms willing to invest in an institutional round, which means that unless these companies can quickly establish a revenue stream or get acquired (or raise an A round), they go under.

The main cause of this ‘crunch’ is the sheer number of seed-stage startups, which Cendana is helping to fuel. That said, a robust support system for early stage startups is a key driver of innovation and it is important to create an environment that promotes entrepreneurship. A current trend in the tech world right now is venture capital firms investing more in seed stage companies. Earlier this week, Maveron announced an initiative to fund and foster seed startups, and Sequoia recently confined existence of its Scout Seed Fund.

Cendana is a part of this movement. The initial $60 million was filed in June 2012 and today the fund closed at $88 million, as first reported by Pando Daily. Read the SEC filing. 

Global Founders Capital, headquartered in Munich, Germany, lists the three above as partners and will invest from a €150 million fund provided by unknown “various successful Internet entrepreneurs.” It will be “stage-agnostic,” providing anything from seed to late-stage funding to businesses with the potential to become very large in one or multiple markets.

The new fund will be location-agnostic too – although, given Rocket Internet’s recent flurry of activity in Africa, southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, it wouldn’t surprise if those locations are of particular interest.

Rocket Internet, founded by the three Samwer brothers Oliver, Alexander, and Marc in 2007, spans over 50 portfolio companies in 40 markets and is especially known for large-scale eCommerce ventures, including copycats of Amazon, eBay, and Zappos.

The new fund, according to German online magazine Gründerszene, will operate separately from Rocket Internet.

Siegel, who appears to be the first contact point for the new fund, stepped down from Delivery Hero, the global online food ordering platform he co-founded, late last year. In a statement today, he pledged Global Founders Capital would be “fast, pragmatic, and fair” in its dealings with entrepreneurs.

The new fund has yet to announce any investments. Past investments made by its partners, as listed on its website, include Delivery Hero and a selection of companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, HomeAway) backed by the Samwers’ pre-Rocket European Founders Fund.

Image credits: via Global Founders Capital 

[This story originally appeared on Venture Village, VentureBeat's Germany-based syndication partner.]

Palihapitiya is a former executive at Facebook. In 2011, he formed the Social+Capital Partnership to invest in companies that stand to have a lasting impact. Many of the portfolio companies operate in the health and education technology sectors, and the goal is to make a difference as well as money. Previous investments include InstaEDU, Lemon, Yammer, Alltuition, and FlatIron Health.

With this fund, Palihapitiya said on stage that he plans to make a combination of “crazy” and safe investments. Fund II first surfaced on January 2013 when Palihapitiya filed a form with the SEC marking his intent to raise $325 million. The Social+Capital Partnership is one of the main sponsors of Launch.

Today, Point Nine Capital announced its new $53.8M fund (€40M) to support early-stage European companies. The firm’s approach is to be “the angel VC.” The partners are focusing on mentoring entrepreneurs in areas such as Software-as-a-Service, eCommerce, marketplaces, and mobile.

Most of the investments are in consumer Internet technology, although it’s also done a slew of business-to-business product and enterprise management platform deals. Portfolio companies include Delivery Hero, Couchsurfing, Shiftplanning, Vend, Westwing, and Zendesk.

Berlin is setting itself up as a European hub for startups. Along with Point Nine, Rocket Internet is a well-known startup incubator and seed fund based in the German capital that makes investments around the world. Global venture capital fund e.ventures has offices in Berlin, and last year, Index Ventures made the city a priority as a startup hub.

The thriving art scene in Berlin means that large pool of creative talent and success stories have generated excitement about the possibilities for local startups. Well-known companies like SoundCloud and Etsy are either headquartered or have offices there, and Rally.org recently launched its European platform and incubator out of Berlin.

Mayor Klaus Wowereit said, “Berlin is poor, but sexy” back in 2004. Now, it is poor, sexy, and filled with entrepreneurs.

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Accel London IV will be dedicated to companies in the IT, software, Internet, and consumer sectors, with three-quarters allocated to early-stage companies and the remainder for later-stage deals. According to unnamed source, it will invest 80 percent of the pool in Europe and Israel and the rest in the U.S.

Accel is perhaps most well known for being an early investor in Facebook. The firm has also made investments in big name companies like Spotify, Rovio, Dropbox, Cloudera, Etsy, Trulia, Groupon, and Kayak, which went public last year and sold to Priceline for $1.8 billion.

The firm has offices around the world in Silicon Valley, New York, London, China, and India. The latest London fund is expected to officially close in March, but Accel has not yet responded to request for comment.

While buzz exists here in the U.S. about emerging markets and the potential for European startups, there is less access to venture capital across the pond and many entrepreneurs prefer to come to Silicon Valley to seek out funding and connections.

Bloomberg cited data from the London-based research group Preqin Ltd. Fundraising that there are 26 Europe-focused funds, as opposed to 84 North American-focused funds, and that venture investing in Europe fell by almost 55 percent in 2011.

But some exciting things are happening in Europe. Sweden and Germany are hot spots for tech, design, and innovation, and the Prime Minister and Major of London unveiled a plan into December to build a £50 million ($78 million) coworking space in London.

Accel has made some good bets over the years and in 2011 carved out a $100 million “big data” fund, correctly anticipating that enterprise tech, IT infrastructure, cloud computing, and big data would be a hot sector in the years to come.

With this latest fund, Accel seeks to cement its position as a premier venture capital firms on the continent. Other notable players include Index Ventures, which announced its sixth fund of $473.8 million (€350 million) in July and e.Ventures.

The investments will focus on new platforms in the mobile, cloud, and social sectors; next generation entertainment technologies and delivery systems; big data infrastructure and applications; and enterprise-class cloud and mobile infrastructure.

According to the statement issued this morning, the past two years have been good to Redpoint. Portfolio companies HomeAway, Qihoo, Intermolecular, and Responsys went public, and StorSimple, NextG Networks, Efficient Frontier, and Heroku were acquired. In total, there were 14 exits totaling more than $10 billion in aggregate market value. Last year, Redpoint teamed up with BV Capital eVentures to form the largest early-stage venture capital fund dedicated to Brazil.

Redpoint now manages over $3.3 billion across its end and has made investments in over 350 technology companies. Other notable investments include Zendesk, Sonos, Juniper Networks, Netflix, Path, and Stripe. Read the press release.  

Mailman is a social media and digital advertising company based in China. Companies and their brands use its services to “engage and embrace” social media technology in order to strengthen their relationships with customers.

Now, Mailman Group is rolling up its sleeves and getting more involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem by forming a start up fund. This $1 million pool will be used to make small investments- between $100K and $150K- over the next three years. The ultimate goal is to build a portfolio of 10 companies. As a seed investor, Mailman will pass along the wisdom of its experience and its extensive network to young companies that are trying to expand.

“We’ve been involved with over 15 online ventures with multinational brands, private equity firms and incubated several initiatives,” said CEO Andrew Collins. “We’ve successfully launched and sold online businesses in China within a short time frame which has given us a unique blend of hands on experience.  We’re moving away from taking large client work on and looking to use our skills to drive entrepreneurship for a greater return on time and investment.We see the brand of Mailman in innovation, pushing boundaries, passion and a willingness to take big steps forward to rub off on our backed ventures and we expect to attract those types of entrepreneurs.”

For the past 13 years, Mailman was first and foremost a digital marketing agency. It worked with clients around the world, such as American Airlines and English football (soccer) clubs, and it recently launched Fanstang, a platform that connects international celebrities to their Chinese fan base.

Asia is becoming hotbed for startups as venture groups like SingTel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures, and Jungle Ventures lay their roots in the region and Western firms send their glances (and dollars) to the East. However, the investor infrastructure still has a long way to go and many entrepreneurs struggle to find the seed or angel funding they need to then attract the attention of larger investment entities. Mailman seeks to address this gap with money, expertise, and its professed connection to Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg — known supporters of technology innovation.

406 Ventures, whose name derives from Boston Red Sox player Ted Williams impressive batting average, pooled together a new $175 investment fund to invest in enterprise startups.

.406 is based in Boston and provides support for early stage companies, primarily on the East coast.  It compares its investment strategy to successful batting technique, which involves being a “selective hitter” and “only swinging at pitches within the specific areas of the strike zone he knew he could hit best.”

This is .406 Ventures’ second fund and will focus specifically on IT security, healthcare IT, and web infrastructure companies. Existing portfolio companies include Adtuititve, ambient, Bit9, Chosen Security, Mashery and Veracode. Read the press release.

Quantum Wave Fund (QWave) has pooled $30 million to create the first fund dedicated to companies developing quantum technologies. Quantum mechanics is futuristic stuff. It is a branch  of physics that studies matter and energy at the microscopic scale (to put it simply). Aside from stretching the limits of reasoning and consciousness and raising questions about the nature of the universe, quantum physics potentially has commercial applications.

QWave will invest in companies that are applying quantum materials and technologies  to solve real-world problems. Serge Haroche and David Wineland won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum computing, which could dramatically up the processing capabilities of computers.

So far, QWave has invested in startups tackling quantum encryption security, new materials, and quantum devices. According to a release, the potential results of research in this area are “safe data transmission networks, new materials with superior properties, optical sub-micron transistors, high-frequency optical electronics, new systems for ultrasensitive imaging of the brain, and compact and accurate clocks for navigation systems.”

Serguei Beloussov is one of the partners of the Quantum Wave Fund, as well as at the venture firm Runa Capital. He said in a statement that the venture community stopped investing in “sophisticated capital intensive projects” and shifted to focus on software. While there was intensive research going on at universities and scientific centers, many of the scientists had no idea how to turn their work into a business. However, anticipation runs high for the impact quantum computing could potentially have on the technology industry, and QWave strobes to be one of the “pioneers to drive this opportunity.”

QWave is headquartered in Boston with outposts in New York and Moscow and is seeking to ultimately close the fund at $100 million. Read the press release. 

Naya Ventures has pooled a $50 million fund dedicated to early-stage companies in the mobile and cloud markets. Naya’s motto is “leading by collaboration.” At the helm is Dayakar Puskoor, a former senior director at Microsoft  and founder and CEO of JP Mobile. The firm was founded in 2011 by serial entrepreneurs who wanted to apply their industry experience to building an investment portfolio, creating a network of resources, and providing guidance to startups.

The current portfolio consists of eight companies: GlobalOutlook, Glympse, Zoomingo, Motivity Labs, SinglePoint, M2 Junction, nfluence, and Boxfish. Co-investors in Naya portfolio companies include Menlo Ventures, Benaroya Capital, Seapoint Ventures, Intel Capital, Deutshe Telecom Ventures, Ignition and Rally Capital.

Naya is headquartered in Dallas with offices in Silicon Valley, Seattle and Hyperabad, India. It focuses its investments on US and India-based companies .

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Jungle Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Singapore, released $10 million into the startup wilderness today as part of a “super angel” fund that will support entrepreneurs all across Asia.

Jungle Ventures invests in seed to early-stage startups, primarily in Southeast Asia. Its portfolio consists mostly of consumer Internet, software-as-a-service, and media startups. Companies include Cinemacraft.tv, a developer of video platforms; health startup DocDoc; Mobikon Technologies, which offers digital marketing tools for the hospitality industry; and travel social marketplace Travelmob.

In its current incarnation, Jungle Ventures has been active for about two years, making four to five investments a year. It announced this latest pool today at TechVenture2012, a three-day event held in Singapore that connects entrepreneurs with executives, investors, and other influencers.

Investors in the fund include Peng T. Ong (Founder- Match.com, Interwoven, and Encentuate), Dan Neary (VP & GM Global Market Development, Skype), Anurag Srivastava (CEO, Spacematrix), Jayesh Parekh (Co-founder, Sony Entertainment Television), Toivo Annus (former Head of Engineering at Skype), Lim Der Shing (Founder-CEO, JobsCentral) amongst other angels and institutional investors.

500 Startups and Accel India are also participating in this initiative, which can bolster their own portfolios.

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SV Angel, Ron Conway and David Lee’s investment firm, is in the process of raising a new fund, “SV Angel IV.”

According to an SEC filing made by Lee, the fund is worth $40 million, the same size as the most recent fund announced in May 2011. Conway has taken a step back (but maintains a vested interest), with Lee solely running and managing the day-to-day operations of the fund. The filing was first reported by TechCrunch.

This summer, the San Francisco-based firm has poured investment into almost a dozen startups, including web-based electronic health site, PracticeFusion, and new ride-sharing service, Sidecar. According to CrunchBase, it typically funds one to four startups per month. The firm also offers mentorship and claims to help startups with business development and acquisition strategy. Lee is one a growing number of investor / bloggers — read his musings on startups and tech here.

Since launching its first over-subscribed fund in 2010, notable investments include Branchout, Airtime, and Airbnb.

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Big Data, a mega-trend that is showing no signs of slowing down, now has its own dedicated venture fund. “Data Collective” launches today, and is head up by storied investors, Zachary Bogue and Matt Ocko.

The fund’s cofounders plan to invest in about 40 early stage and seed startups in the IT infrastructure, Big Data, and analytics space, which they see as a several hundred billion dollar market opportunity. I caught up with them on the eve of the announcement to chat about the hype surrounding Big Data, and their decision to go rogue with a new fund.

The partners told me they plan to take an active role in the day-to-day operations of their portfolio companies, more so than traditional venture firms. It will likely differentiate them from established VC firms from Accel Partners (who carved out a $100 million Big Data fund in 2011) to Andreessen Horowitz, who are also angling for a piece of the Big Data pie.

Both investors are still knee deep in the process of raising capital, and so would not yet disclose a figure.

The founders are confident they have right team for the challenge. Ocko has been an investor and adviser on the startup circuit for 30 years, with investments in Zynga, BranchOut and CrowdMob. Bogue, (pictured, above) an analytics expert, is an early investor in Square and cofounder of San Francisco-based office space for entrepreneurs, Founders Den.

The fund’s extended team is comprised of 35 “equity partners,” who will have a significant material share in the investments. The equity partners are all experienced technical types — data experts, CTOs and chief scientists — currently or formerly at tech giants like VMware and Facebook.

“They range from rising star female principal engineers of name brand companies who haven’t yet made a giant pile to grizzled veterans of two or three IPOs,” Ocko explained. ”What they all have in common is the opportunity to work collectively with each other and be part of a unified elite club.”

Jacob Rosenberg, formerly a lead systems architect at Zynga, is a founder of one of the fund’s portfolio companies. He told me the managing directors have a rare “nitty-gritty of what a hacker, especially a data hacker, does every day.”

Gaining access to the partners’  network doesn’t hurt either. Rosenberg said that in 48 hours, Bogue was able to pull some strings to get him a meeting with Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom. Bogue, a Bay Area-based investor and philanthropist, is currently expecting his first child with wife, Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer.

By joining the Data Collective club, the startups will also gain a head start in the painful customer acquisition process. According to Ocko, this will help them scale quickly and “punch outside of their weight class.”

This may be Data Collective’s first micro-VC fund, but the team has been working quietly in “stealth mode” for several years. They have already made seed investments in promising, early-stage Big Data startups like Kaggle, Citus Data, and Continuuity.

Data Collective’s cofounder, Matt Ocko, said: “I may wear a jacket but I still write code.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I may be wearing a nice jacket, but I still write code,” said Ocko, formerly a managing partner at Archimedes Ventures. “Zack and I have been at this for a long time and were evangelizing Big Data when no one knew what it meant.”

Ocko defines Big Data, a rapidly emerging tech segment, as “the set of technologies and practices for dealing with an exponential increase in the amount of data being accumulated, stored, and prepared for analysis from terabytes per month to potentially pedabytes per day.” It’s a mouthful, I know. In a nutshell, Ocko and Bogue are investing in startups that can make sense of extremely large volumes of messy data within the enterprise, and use it to derive new insights. In the right hands, data can be a highly valuable commodity.

The cofounders said they like to think of the space as layers of a wedding cake. The bottom layer is infrastructure (storage, cloud management, networking, and security), the middle layer is analytics, and the top layer is the application layer, which is closest to the end-user, the person who actually uses the product.

For Data Collective, the middle layer is the sweet spot. “We’re looking for startups that are doing analytics at scale, at speed, or better yet, both,” said Bogue.

The core team will also include two data experts: Bradford Cross, Prismatic’s technical cofounder; and Michael Driscoll, Metamarkets’ CEO, who will retain their existing full-time roles. Bogue and Ocko will not reveal the exact equity breakdown for the partners, but they stressed that the terms are simple and transparent. They did reveal, however, that the equity partners will not be offered seat on the company’s board.

Before wrapping up our interview, I asked the managing directors about the trend for young talent to build new geo-located, social mobile apps, and not enterprise technology. “I welcome them, the future customers of our companies,” joked Ocko. “It means more data for us to crunch.”

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Amid sweeping accusations that Silicon Valley venture capital firms have failed to attract female talent, one women-only firm has been quietly raising millions for its first institutionally-backed fund.

If you haven’t heard of Forerunner Ventures, you probably will soon. This firm has been making its mark in the fashion world. In its first year, Forerunner made strategic investments in companies like Bonobos, Birchbox, Warby Parker, Hotel Tonight, Snapette, and Threadflip. And today, Forerunner announced it had closed a cool $40 million to continue funding up-and-coming digital commerce startups.

The firm has only been around since 2010, and already Forerunner Ventures has made some promising-looking investments. The secret ingredient is Kirsten Green, the firm’s managing partner, who has a clear vision for success, one that has been almost a decade in the making.

“I realized when I was in finance that it would be more interesting to identify early trends in retail, and young companies with big IPOs ahead of them,” she said.

Green is primarily looking for consumer-facing companies (although Forerunner has recently stepped up its investment in business-to-business) with a clear-cut plan for making money. It’s not enough to gain millions of users now, and figure out how to make money once the startup hits a certain threshold — Green wants to see monetization built in.

For instance, Green told me that Birchbox is gaining name-brand recognition with its subscription service for beauty products, but she is most excited by its potential to launch an e-commerce platform, similar to Amazon or eBay.

Green is sharp, but also personable. “If I wasn’t doing this, I would have gone to school for psychology and been a therapist,” she said. “I am the friend that people want to tell their problems to.”

Green said she has built up relationships with entrepreneurs over years, even during her career in banking and hedge funds, and is known for providing honest feedback from the outset. “It’s a personal business, so when you connect, you are more likely to get out of your chair with enthusiasm,” she said.

When asked about the benefits of partnering with a women-only firm, she treads lightly. ”Having started my career in banking, I have always thought about myself in business…not as a woman in business,” she said. Forerunner Ventures isn’t the first of its kind (Golden Seeds is a popular network for female angel investors), but it is inspiring that the three women — two partners and one analyst — raised funds and forged their own firm in the male dominated world of venture capital.

E-commerce is a booming space that is flooded with young companies seeking investment. Her advice for budding entrepreneurs is to stand out from the pack.

Before approaching Forerunner, be aware that they will call you out on whether you’ve done your homework and truly understand the target market. For instance, before deciding whether to invest in one e-commerce site, the firm’s analyst, Elyse Colen, hot-footed it around San Francisco to interview dozens of boutique store owners.

Green is looking for founders with this kind of smarts and dedication, who can build a company from the ground up.

Forerunner Ventures will fund about 25 digital commerce and retail companies in the seed and series A stage, and will invest between $250,000 and $500,000.

The raise of the firm’s 14th fund brings NEA’s total committed capital to more than $13 billion. The size of the fund speaks to a bullish environment among investors and the firm’s own track record. NEA has had more than 175 initial public offerings and 290 acquisitions among its portfolio companies.

“NEA is deeply grateful for the continued support of many longtime limited partners, as well as some new ones, who believe that a diversified, global strategy is the path forward for venture capital,” said Peter Barris, the NEA managing general partner. “Our industry has been profoundly transformed in recent years, and a new model has quietly gained traction where more dollars are being committed to large funds that are global and diversified in nature.”

NEA said the 10 largest VC firms account for a third of all dollars coming into the venture industry. The concentration of capital has doubled over the last decade as the overall market has thinned out. This is the third consecutive time NEA has raised more than $2.5 billion for a single fund.

“The venture capital ecosystem needs both large and small firms to thrive,” said Barris. “But companies are scaling earlier and faster than ever before in a highly competitive global landscape, and they need partners with a global footprint and deep pockets to succeed.”

NEA has offices in India and China, as well as in the U.S. Dollars raised from international investors in this fund are up 10 percent over the level from more than a decade ago.

The firm will invest in information technology, healthcare, and energy technology. Within information technology, the focus is on enterprise software and systems, education, consumer technology, and digital media. With healthcare, NEA will invest in the biopharmaceutical, healthcare services, and medical device sectors.

Two NEA founders, Dick Kramlich and Chuck Newhall, are stepping down as general partners. Mark Perry is retiring from a general partner role. NEA promoted Tony Florence and Peter Sonsini to general partners.

Late-stage venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) has raised a new $1 billion fund, the firm announced today.

IVP doesn’t typically get a ton of coverage, but the firm is responsible for investing in tons of successful companies (over 300), with 90 of them reaching IPOs. Some of its investments include ArcSight, Buddy Media, ComScore, Dropbox, HomeAway, Kayak, LegalZoom, LifeLock, LivingSocial, Marketo, MySQL, Netflix, Shazam, Twitter, and Zynga.

The fund is the firm’s 14th and largest to date. It also brings the cumulative committed capital to $4 billion total. With the new fund, IVP will invest $10 to $100 million in just 10 to 12 companies a year, and continue to focus on three main tech sectors: Internet/ Digital Media, Enterprise IT, and Mobile/Communications.

Check out the infographic below for a look at IVP’s investment history. (Click image to enlarge)

This sixth-generation fund for the firm will focus on consumer technology, with some enterprise investments. The firm has done well investing in marketplaces, payments, gaming, mobile, and social startups, Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi told VentureBeat in an interview. Index Ventures’ past investments in these areas include Flipboard, Etsy, Path, and Moo.

“There are more companies started by more people in Europe. Right now, there are more people disillusioned by their big company jobs,” said Volpi.

Venture capital firms do well in Europe, according to Volpi. Large companies are hesitant to invest, so VC firms have an advantage. They also act as a support system, because European startups often don’t have access to lawyers and financial advisors that specialize in startups. Because the entrepreneurs have less experience, VCs take on a mentorship role.

Index’s sixth fund will primarily go towards startups in Berlin, London, Stockholm, and Tel Aviv, with some investments made in the U.S. in New York City and San Francisco. The early-stage fund has dedicated $20 million to seed financing.

Mobile platform-as-a-service startup Urban Airship and 4tiitoo, a German tablet operating system developer, are the first two companies to secure financing through the AppUp fund.

The AppUp fund is named after Intel’s AppUp app store and is intended to enhance the selection of availalbe applications and content. The AppUp store is currently for Windows users only and includes more than 5,000 applicaions, but the company plans, by way of the fund, to expand the marketplace, make it globally accessible and offer applications for all mobile and desktop platforms.

Intel Capital has invested more than $10.4 billion in around 1,100 companies across 51 countries. The organization has a made a strong commitment to mobile, and finances startups across the ecosystem, from application and consumer-centric companies to cloud computing technologies and businesses tackling infrastructure needs. It also recently created a $300 million fund as an investment vehicle for the Ultrabook.

So far in 2011, Intel Capital has invested $472 million in more than 70 startups. The organization has seen six IPOs and 25 M&A exits this year, Intel Capital president Arvind Sodhani said.

More to come…

RapLeaf’s data collection methods have raised privacy concerns in the past. The company came under fire in October 2010 for linking Facebook user ID information collected from banned Facebook apps into its own database of internet users. Rapleaf sells data to clients seeking personalization for ads, content and more.

“We have a great responsibility to protect privacy and data with all of our customers, and startups participating in the fund will be subject to the same data protections as our largest customers,” a RapLeaf spokesperson told VentureBeat.

The fund is part of RapLeaf’s strategy to grow the number of companies using its data.

The company said it hopes to fund 50 to 100 startups with the new initiative. The new fund provides up to $15,000 in cash grants, free data, and services to entrepreneurs. RapLeaf said there are many advantages for those who are chosen, such as access to RapLeaf’s network of partners, access to its customers and joint marketing opportunities.

The fund is being launched in conjunction with several partners, including North Bridge Venture Partners, Rembrandt Ventures, Founders Fund, Highland Capital Partners, SoftTech VC, MIT Entrepreneurship Center, Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum, Stanford BASES and others.

The San Francisco-based company has a total of $15 million in funding.

The fund is managed by five Greylock partners, including Moshe Mor, Erez Ofer, Yoram Snir, Laurel Bowden and Arnon Dinur.

The firm has invested in over 20 startups in Israel, but the newly raised capital will be sure to bring in a whole heap of new investments over the next few months. At a time when hubs outside of Silicon Valley are beginning to make their mark, Europe and Israel are considered hotspots. Greylock Israel last raised a round in 2006.

Greylock is one of Silicon Valley’s oldest investment firms, having been founded in 1965. With $2 billion of capital under management, the firm has invested in 300 companies. In March, it expanded its early stage startup fund to $1 billion.

(Pictured: Greylock Partner Frank Slootman at Times Square)

Bessemer Venture Partners

But to put that in perspective, that amount is only enough to buy a 3.2 percent stake in Facebook at its last known valuation of $50 billion. Luckily for the Larchmont, N.Y.-based fund, its strategy is to avoid the big deals in overheated sectors. Instead, the company plans to put its money in early-stage companies around the world. Rob Chandra, a partner at Bessemer, told the New York Times that the fund invests in “road-map” areas before they become really hot, not markets that are already crowded.

About a quarter of the money is intended for companies based in India. Bessemer added several new limited partners with the new fund, including large endowments and corporations. Others that have moved into the billion-dollar fund game include late-stage investors Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Others include Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Accel Partners. Accel closed a $1.3 billion fund today with its Chinese partner, International Data Group (IDG).

Bessemer is about 100 years old and is one of the oldest funds in the country. It is an offshoot of Bessemer Securities, created by steel tycoon Henry Phipps, a co-founder of Carnegie Steel. One of its investments, the LinkedIn business social network, is poised to go public soon.

Since 2000, Bessemer has made investments in emerging markets such as India, Israel, Latin America and Europe. Bessemer’s office in Mumbai, India, now almost as many people as its sizable office in Menlo Park, Calif., in the midst of Silicon Valley. The fund has made 31 investments in India, including Shriram EPC, an engineering services company that has grown to $400 million in revenues.

[image credit: cpcml.ca]

Partners Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero were among Europe’s most prolific angel investors, in companies such as social micropayments startup Flattr and courier-bidding service Shutl, before they started investing together informally and decided to launch their own fund. They will invest in digital media and technology startups.

Passion plans to make around 50 investments, on average in the range of $170-227,000 per deal. Burbridge told me that the fund will look for very early stage companies with a PowerPoint (a pitch via a slide set) or a prototype. Any verticals, from cleantech to retail, where online software makes a certain process or workflow more efficient for that market will be considered.

Passion’s partners are something of a European investment dream team. Collectively they have been involved in 4 of the 10 most successful exits of recent years, including companies like Skype and Last.fm.

Stefan Glaenzer was the first investor and executive chairman of Last.fm, seeing that company through to its sale to CBS in 2007 for $270 million. American transplant Eileen Burbidge was investment director for private early stage VC firm Ambient Sound Investments, founded by the Skype founding engineers. Robert Dighero was the CFO of QXL/Tradus which sold to Naspers in 2008 for $1.6 billion.

London has emerged as one of Europe’s top startup hubs, and the U.K. government is making strenuous efforts to encourage high-tech startups in the U.K. with plans announced last year to provide $325 million in equity finance for businesses with high growth potential and $320 million for new technology and innovation centers. It also recently introduced an entrepreneur visa, long called for in the U.S.