With its new $250 million investment fund, the venture capital firm wants to make it easier for growth-stage companies to make headway in counties like China and Japan, which expansion is often tough.

SoftBank Capital’s Matt Krna, told me that SoftBank is in a unique position to give companies the edge they need.

“We can do everything from give introductions to help companies work out strategic partnerships with Asian companies that actually make sense,” he said.

That focus on Asia is an obvious one given SoftBank’s status as a Japanese company, but Krna says there are macro trends behind the move as well. While companies have traditionally made Europe the first step in their international expansions, they’re increasingly skipping over the continent and targeting high-growth Asia first.

The problem? Asia is a very different kind of beast from Europe, and growing companies often have a hard time adjusting.”The business climate over there can be quite different,” Krna said.

SoftBank Captial itself is coming off a particularly strong year. Investments in Buddy Media and OMGPOP paid off big time when the companies were acquired by Salesforce and Zynga.  More recently, Twitter picked up Bluefin Labs, which SoftBank helped invest $12 million in last January.

Obviously, SoftBank aims for its new fund to add to that track record, only more internationally.

Photo: Flickr/MIKI Yoshihito (´･ω･)

Longtime Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital has just raised a massive $700 million fund called the Sequoia Capital Global Growth Fund.

That’s a hefty fund, considering that Sequoia’s recent funds have all been under $500 each, including a $200 million fund focused on Israel (its fifth fund aimed at that country) in August, 2012, and a pair of China-focused funds and a U.S.-focused one that combined added up to about $1 billion in May, 2012.

Sequoia declined to comment for this story, but a source familiar with the matter suggested that the firm would use its new, big fund to invest in more mature companies alongside big, late-stage players. In later-stage rounds, the amount of dollars required to invest can easily approach nine digits ($100 million), so Sequoia needed a deeper pocket to reach into for these kinds of big investments.

The “global” designation indicates that this fund will permit investment in any part of the world where Sequoia currently invests, including the U.S., our source told us.

According to the fund’s SEC filing, the new fund is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which should be convenient when its returns start rolling in. However, the fund will be managed from Sequoia’s headquarters on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif.

Photo credit: gholzer via photopin cc

It was only a matter of time before MESA, a NYC-based investment bank focusing on middle-market media deals, launched a fund of its own. Today the bank is announcing MESA+, a new $10 million seed and Series A venture fund aimed at media-focused startups.

The launch is yet another sign that investors are paying attention to NYC’s fast-growing technology community. MESA was founded in 2008 based on boutique banking initiatives — basically, working on smaller, more specialized deals than traditional investment firms.

“We would never go out and raise a traditional fund that competes with sponsors of our core clients,” said Mark Patricof, managing partner at MESA in an interview with VentureBeat. MESA+ is a fund concept that will “connect the dots, but not compete with” top 25 funds, he added.

Staying true to MESA’s boutique focus, the firm chose to stick with a $10 million fund size, even though it could have easily bumped it to $20 to $30 million, Patricof said. The smaller size forces the firm to think more carefully about the startups it’s investing in and allows MESA to spend more individual time helping its portfolio companies.

Other partners in MESA+ include Jacob Brody, MESA’s man on the ground seeking out startup talent, and MESA vice president Andrew Montgomery. (Full disclosure: Brody was also a contributor to VentureBeat prior to joining MESA.)

MESA+ will also serve to connect startups with large media partners, something the firm has been doing for a while now. “Sometimes the startup people don’t understand what media companies are looking for … who will be their internal champion, we can help put those two together,” said Montgomery. Conversely, MESA+ will also serve big corporations by trendspotting startups.

The partners expect MESA+ to invest in 50 to 70 companies with a focus on New York (though they say they’re still considering global investments). The fund’s portfolio currently includes the ad company Bread and image analytics firm TripleLift. MESA+ has invested in seven companies in New York and California together with Google Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and other big firms.

Photo via Shutterstock

Today, we offer you a happy story about getting your funds locked down in PayPal. No, seriously.

According to All Things D, David Marcus, PayPal’s new president, is stepping in where his customers service fails. He sent out a personal e-mail to Build Conference creator Andy McMillan after the distraught PayPal user nearly lost $62,000 when two of his accounts were locked down. After many attempts to get on the phone with customer service, he finally consulted the Twitterverse and received a call from PayPal the next day, informing him that his funds went bye-bye and he wouldn’t get access to his account.

That’s a pretty big bummer when there are tens of thousands of dollars involved.

Marcus then stepped in with this letter:

Andy — the team will reach out between now and Monday, and they will lift all holds/limitations, and release all of your funds. If anything, please know that I’m not going to use your story to radically change how we deal with holds, and communicate with our customers. I’m driving a lot of changes at PayPal (I took over 5 months ago), and I hope that over time we will earn your turst again. Not with words, but with delightful products, and amazing service.

If you believe in this, I’d like to enroll you to help me out. I’d like you to keep accepting PayPal for payments, and now that you have a direct channel with me, give me feedback so I can get it directly from the outside. If you accept to do this (I would completely understand if by now you wouldn’t want to deal with PayPal ever again), you have my commitment that I’ll look after you account personally, and ensure this will never happen to you again. Again — would completely understand if you didn’t want to do this. I’m just trying to leverage the issues you went through to radically change our approach, and fix this for all of our customers for good.

Please confirm when you have access to your funds again so I know you’re good on that front. And again, don’t hesitate to contact me anytime. You now have my mobile number.

Have a great weekend.

David.

Sent from my iPad

I had to include that last part.

PayPal tapped Marcus to become president in March. He was previously the vice president of mobile, who released PayPal’s “Here” product, a competitor to Square. At the launch he told VentureBeat that PayPal is looking to change a lot of things, including the fact that design isn’t associated with the name PayPal.

“When you think about PayPal two years ago, the first thing you think about is not design. We want to change that,” he told VentureBeat at the time. “We want to go down to the last little pixel and make sure the UI is perfect.”

Even if this was a PR stunt — which it may not have been — Marcus obviously wants “good customer service” to be associated with his company. What president wouldn’t?

via All Things D; hat tip The Next Web; David Marcus image via Robert Scoble/Flickr

Superstar investor Peter Thiel launched a new fund today called Mithril Capital Management that’s already raised $402 million for late-stage investments in private companies.

Mithril (yes, it is named after the light-but-strong substance from the Lord of the Rings) will focus on companies that want to remain private as they grow into big businesses. Thiel’s involvement brings extra attention to Mithril, having co-founded PayPal, invested early in Facebook, and created both Clarium Capital and Founders Fund.

“Technology holds the solution to most of the world’s most pressing challenges, from resource scarcity to disease. A great achievement may require a decade of work, but a lifetime of vision,” Thiel said in a statement. “Mithril will play a patient, focused, and pivotal role in helping the world’s most outstanding creative minds solve vexing problems and build lasting companies.”

While Thiel is Mithril’s founding and largest individual investor, the Mithril team will be headed up by co-founder Ajay Royan, who has worked with Thiel on various projects since 2003, including a stint as managing director at Clarium. Royan sees Mithril as a chance to invest in companies that change the format of how things are done.

“Many great inventions are driven by a spirit of dissent and curiosity,” said Royan. “That spirit defines and pervades Silicon Valley, but it can be found everywhere in the world. Just as Sony inaugurated the age of personal media, Skype made peer communications compete with telecoms, and ARM redefined efficient mobile computing, Mithril companies, if we’re right, will foment changes that will seem inevitable after they happen.”

Mithril shirt photo: Lord of the Rings

Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm, is raising new money for a number of different funds in the U.S. and China, that in aggregate would be around $1 billion.

Fortune is reporting these new funds may be used for a China-focused fund, growth equity for later stage companies, and traditional investing. The company closed its last round at the end of 2011 for its U.S. Growth Equity Fund V. The firm also raised around $1.3 billion for a number of similar funds in 2010.

The life of a venture capital fund generally lasts around 10 years. The first three to four years are spent investing the money, with reserves being paid out to those portfolio companies over the remaining years. A firm may introduce around three or four new funds within that 10 years, to keep capital flowing to new companies.

Sequoia has invested in a number of well-known technology companies since 1972. Currently the company has investments in China, Israel, India, and the United States. These companies include Apple, Instagram, Dropbox, Oracle, LinkedIn, and others. The New York Times recently reported that the firm is looking to expand into Brazil as well.

The fund comes soon after managing partner Michael Moritz announced that he is stepping down from his position at Sequoia due to a rare medical condition. Moritz assured employees that he will still be involved in Sequoia as chairman, but will no longer continue managing the day-to-day activities of the venture firm.

via Fortune

Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture capital firms, has closed its fifteenth investment fund.

The company announced today that it has raised $525 million for KPCB 15, which will invest in “early-stage digital consumer and enterprise, green tech, and life sciences companies.” Kleiner Perkins notes that it has been investing in enterprise technologies for decades, but it’s emphasizing this sector even more with the latest fund.

The fund’s 10 managing partners will be Mike Abbott, Chi-Hua Chien, Amol Deshpande, John Doerr, Bing Gordon, Wen Hsieh, Randy Komisar, Matt Murphy, Beth Seidenberg, and Ted Schlein.

KPCB’s press release touted its recent successful investments, including Zynga, RPX, Flipboard, One Kings Lane, Path, and Nest. The fund is not KP’s only pool of cash, however, as it also has the $1 billion Digital Growth Fund (for later-stage investments), the $1 billion Green Growth Fund, the $250 million sFund (focused on social networking), and the $200 million iFund (focused on the iOS ecosystem and other mobile app platforms).

Kleiner Perkins was founded in 1972 and has invested in some of the tech industry’s biggest success stories, including Google, Amazon.com, Intuit, AOL, Genentech, and Netscape.

Photo credit: Ken Wilcox/Flickr

ATP Capital, the firm that manages the BlackBerry Partners Fund, Clairmont Capital, and JLA Ventures, is today re-branding itself as Relay Ventures to sex up its image. (And let’s face it, anything is better than three capital letters.)

Relay Ventures is also announcing a new $150 million early-stage mobile fund, dubbed the BlackBerry Partners II fund, which will be platform agnostic and independently managed. The fund will be led by Canada’s Northleaf Capital Partners and will see participation from Blackberry maker Research in Motion (obviously), Corus Entertainment, and Thomson Reuters.

“This re-branding initiative finally unifies the three brands that we’ve been operating under and the more than $800MM in capital that we’ve raised,” said Kevin Talbot, Relay Ventures’ co-managing partner, in a statement today. “Our new brand brings unity and clarity to our mandate as an early stage venture investor.”

Explaining the issue with the firm’s old name, Talbot wrote on the Relay Ventures blog:

In addition to ATP being an acronym for the Association of Tennis Professionals and Adenosine Triphosphate (a coenzyme AND the name of a Japanese alternative rock band fronted by a guy named “Mug”), it stood for Albright Talbot Partners. Clearly, it was not our most creative moment and the name never took hold as an umbrella brand for the various funds that we manage, largely because we never knew or understood when to use it rather than one of the other brands we managed.

Relay Ventures has been ranked as the third most active fund in mobile and wireless by Ridgecrest Capital Partners, behind Sequoia Capital and Intel Capital. The firm has backed 32 mobile companies (28 of those in the last three years), six of which have been acquired, according to co-managing partner John Albright.

Coinciding will all of its new announcements, Relay Ventures will also open an office in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park. Talbot recently moved to the Bay Area, and he’ll be joined by new  partner John Occhipinti, formerly a partner with Woodside Fund.

Overall, Relay Ventures has made 84 investments since 1996, 42 of which have exited through mergers, acquisitions, and by going public. The firm has raised over $800 million so far.

Accel, which already has 34 companies in its portfolio in India, said the fund would be focused on hot opportunities like mobile, digital media, enterprise and software-as-a-service companies, and Internet services. The firm already manages $80 million in India across two earlier funds — this latest addition brings its total funds in India to $235 million.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Investment firm DCM, which launched its $100 million A-Fund for Android startups back in April, today announced its first round of investments with seven promising startups.

The A-Fund is the first dedicated entirely to Android, and it competes directly with Kleiner Perkins’ $200 million iFund for iOS startups. DCM said it chose to focus on the Android platform primarily because of its massive growth. (Google said last week it has activated a total of 190 million Android devices, with 600,000 new activations daily.)

Given its global presence, DCM is eyeing startups from all over the world for the A-Fund. It’s also stage-agnostic, so the startups the A-Fund is investing in are all over the map in terms of their maturity. The fund’s investors include Japanese mobile social gaming network GREE, Japanese mobile carrier KDDI, and Chinese Internet company Tencent.

Here are the first round of A-Fund investments:

Appia: Formerly known as PocketGear, the company relaunched earlier this year as Appia and helps carriers create mobile app stores of their own. It now processes over one million app downloads per day for its partners, including mobile operators, handset companies, and more.

Billing Revolution: A mobile payments company that offers single-click mobile payments.

PapayaMobile: The top Android mobile social gaming network in the US and China. It has over 30 million users, and developers have integrated its engine into more than 350 games.

Happy Elements: A social game maker that has taken the non-English Facebook market by storm. It has 2.5 million daily active users, the most popular game on the Kaixin001 network in China, and the second and third most popular games on Japan’s Mixi service.

Kanbox: A leading cloud storage and sharing service in China.

Loki Studios: Pioneering location and environment-aware smartphone games, Loki has launched the Pokemon-esque game Geomon.

Kakao Corp: Creator of cross-platform mobile messaging app KakaoTalk, which has over 25 million users globally.

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson

New York City-based Union Square Ventures, investor in Twitter and Zynga, is planning to raise another $150 million to $200 million for a fourth startup fund, reports the Wall Street Journal.

If all goes well with the fund, it would be yet another major win for Union Square, and a reminder of New York’s increasingly prominent role in the startup world. Union Square has also invested in major NYC startups like Foursquare and Tumblr.

Union Square has declined to comment on the report.

There’s little reason to think the firm would have trouble raising more funding. As one investor tells the WSJ, “They just have to call their [investors], and that’s all the marketing that they have to do. … Everyone wants in.”

The firm’s knack for choosing hot properties appears to be going strong: It most recently led a $7.5 million round in the hot social music startup Turntable.fm, which piqued investor interest (not to mention everyone else’s in the tech world) after its May launch.

Unlike some Silicon Valley titans, Union Square has never been tempted by the idea of raising a massive fund, which the WSJ points out can lead to significant management fees. “We will never raise a large fund. We like the small fund model and are completely and totally committed to it,” USV partner Fred Wilson told peHub last year in regards to rumors about its third fund.

Both Arianna Huffington, head of AOL’s media group, and AOL spokesperson Mario Ruiz confirmed to Business Insider this morning that Arrington was no longer employed by the company.

The news makes Arrington’s venture fund seem like less of a conflict of interest, since he no longer has any official capacity at TechCrunch. Still, while Arrington may no longer be attached to TechCrunch officially, I have a hard time believing that his influence over the site and the companies that it covers will disappear overnight.

Previously, it was thought that Arrington would step down as TechCrunch’s managing editor but still be involved with writing. Speaking to Business Insider, Huffington clarified the situation, saying that Arrington could contribute to AOL’s blogs without being paid, as long as he follows AOL’s blogging guidelines. (The latter point is interesting, since AOL CEO Tim Armstrong previously gave Arrington leeway to invest in companies he was covering, while other AOL writers were banned from doing so.)

AOL acquired TechCrunch last year, and it offered Arrington an earn out of over $10 million if he stayed on for three years. It’s unclear if his move to the venture world will affect that.

Update: AOL SVP of corporate communications Maureen Sullivan tells Business Insider that ”AOL is not comfortable with TechCrunch being used as an access point for deal flow.” Score one for journalistic integrity, though Arrington’s CrunchFund partners may not be so enthusiastic.

Update 2: Even Mike Arrington seems confused by the news. “I have no idea what AOL’s final position on this will be,” he told the New York Times this afternoon. “I look forward to hearing it. I’ll respond once Arianna has made her last statement.”

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 for day-to-day writing and editorial duties but will remain onboard as an occasional contributor and founding editor.

In our brief conversation with the spokesperson, we could not determine whether CrunchFund is a venture of Arrington, TechCrunch, Aol or some combination of the three; we are therefore unable to determine what ethical difference removing Arrington from daily blogging will make.

Arrington will run the fund together with his college friend Patrick Gallagher, a VantagePoint Venture Partners investor. Other partners are rumored to include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley venture capital, including Kleiner Perkins, Greylock and Sequoia Capital.

Aol acquired TechCrunch about one year ago.

Arrington’s past investment activity has raised some eyebrows. As an executive of an ostensibly journalistic publication, he might be expected to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest.

One of the funds in which Arrington invests, led by Ron Conway, puts $150,000 of convertible debt into every startup in Y Combinator, an influential and successful San Francisco incubator. As we’ve heard from many Y Combinator startups, a “TechCrunch launch” is an unwritten goal for every company the incubator graduates.

For startups, this is a sweet deal: Any of them lucky enough to get into Y Combinator get guaranteed money and a high likelihood of coverage in a large tech blog.

But from a journalistic point of view, it’s a conflict of interest, since TechCrunch has an incentive to inflate the importance of the incubator and its fledgling companies.

“I don’t claim to be a journalist,” Arrington told the New York Times, which pointed out that he nevertheless writes many news stories. “I hold myself to higher standards of transparency and disclosure.”

While the ethics of the situation are debatable, Arrington’s actions are not illegal and would only be so if he were investing in publicly traded companies. If one of the companies in which he invests were to IPO or be acquired by a publicly traded entity, TechCrunch would no longer be able to write about that company without first divesting.

We can’t wait to see whether this new fund turns out to be a reality, and if so, how Arrington walks the ever-thinner line between journalism and investment.

We are reaching out to the parties reportedly involved and will update you with any further details.