Silver Lake buys stake in Conduit, giving Israeli investors 200x return

Yozma Venture Capital is in talks to sell its share of Conduit, an Israel-based company that creates user engagement tools, for more than $200 million, Globes reported Thursday.

A source tells VentureBeat the buyer is Silver Lake, a U.S. private equity firm, which is paying between $200 and $250 million for the stake of the company. Globes describes the firm as a “large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars in assets … Continue Reading

Blip chops off its “.tv” branding with a $12M investment sword

Indie streaming video startup Blip.tv announced today that it will ditch the “.tv” from its name in the first of many steps to refresh and improve the company. Blip has also secured a $12 million round of funding to help see those improvement efforts through.

“Our research actually showed that people didn’t really identify web series as associated with television, so dropping the ‘.tv’ from the brand just made sense,” said Blip COO Steve Brookstein … Continue Reading

HBO drops $10M on Australian rental service Quickflix

Premium U.S. television network HBO has agreed to invest $10 million into DVD and streaming video rental service Quickflix, the companies announced today.

Quickflix is one of the largest streaming and physical (DVD and Blu-ray) video rental services in Australia. The company’s streaming video-on-demand subscription service is integrated into a variety of devices, such as Smart TVs, Playstation 3, Blu-ray players, and select Android-based mobile devices. Quickflix customers have access movie and television content from … Continue Reading

Betaworks rewards its investors and looks to the future of real time networks

Digital studio Betaworks is all about the real time web, so how’s this for speed? It took the company less than a year to generate a return on the $20 million it raised last March. Over the weekend PandoDaily reported that Betaworks gave back all invested capital plus a dividend with cash left over for its balance sheet.

Founder and chief executive John Borthwick used his letter to investors to lay out the four trends … Continue Reading

Movie backed by Irish tech investors is nominated for an Oscar

Are you an early-stage, technology investor? Is there a certain lack of glamour and red carpets in your life? Then follow in the footsteps of early-stage tech investors Lough Shore Investments who partly funded a short film called “The Shore”, which has just been nominated for an Oscar.

“The Shore” is directed by screenwriter and director Terry George who was previously Oscar-nominated for his screenplays for “In the Name of the Father” and “Hotel Rwanda“.… Continue Reading

VC investment rose 10% in 2011, & web companies grabbed the lion’s share

While the overall economy in 2011 was still on shaky ground, VCs continued to “make it rain” on startups in need of institutional funding.

According to data from Dow Jones, overall investment in newer companies showed a 10 percent year-over-year hike. For Internet companies, though, the increase was closer to 23 percent between 2010 and 2011.

VC investments in web and mobile companies (classified by Dow Jones as the consumer information services sector) added up … Continue Reading

Samsung to invest a record $41B in 2012, all eyes on mobile

Samsung Group announced today it would invest $41.4 billion in new technologies, more than the company has ever invested in previous years.

The investments will encompass efforts in research and development, mergers and acquisitions, and building new facilities, Samsung reps told reporters. The company also said it will be hiring as many as 26,000 new employees in 2012.

Industry experts expect a good chunk of that change will be spent on logic chips and OLED … Continue Reading

CapLinked wants to modernize startup investment, takes money from new investors

CapLinked, the startup that wants to make it easy to invest in private companies, has just taken in a $500,000 round of from a new group of investors.

“Investing in private companies has depended on outdated technology for too long,” said CapLinked CEO Eric M. Jackson in a release this morning.

“Emails loaded with attachments, spreadsheets for tracking leads and clunky enterprise data rooms are straight out of the 1990s. CapLinked makes the process easier … Continue Reading

Mu Sigma raises $108M to grow its big data services

Big data startup Mu Sigma has raised a new $108 million round of funding, the company announced today.

Mu Sigma helps big companies across several industries — including many Fortune 500 companies — manage massive amounts of online data by translating it into analytics and digestible observations. The new funding is one of the largest raised by a big data startup. The company claims it’s already profitable — with revenue between 2008 and 2010 growing … Continue Reading

LivingSocial closes $176 million round. How far off is an IPO?

Daily deals site LivingSocial has closed a monster $176 million round of financing, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. VentureBeat has learned that the $176 million is the first tranche of  $400 million the company hopes to raise over the next weeks and months to finance continued operations and expansion.

We reported in mid-November that the company was looking to raise $200 million at a $5 billion valuation. Investment bank … Continue Reading

Sean Parker invests in online concert startup StageIt

As if his involvement with Napster and Spotify wasn’t enough to shake up the music industry, Sean Parker has now also invested in music startup StageIt, according to a BusinessInsider report.

StageIt is basically an online platform for live concerts. The company aims to help music artists monetize their live shows by focusing on a truly live experience — meaning the concerts aren’t recorded and/or archived for later viewing. Founder Evan Lowenstein launched the company … Continue Reading

Union Square invests in search engine Duck Duck Go

Alternative search engine Duck Duck Go closed its first round of funding led by Union Square Ventures, the company’s founder Gabriel Weinberg announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Duck Duck Go, which has a tiny percentage of the search engine market share in comparison to Google, doesn’t primarily base its results on algorithms. It also differs from other big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) by not tracking its visitors the way … Continue Reading

WhoSay adds Greylock Partners to its list of investors

WhoSay, a platform that helps celebrities manage their web presence, has added venture capital firm Greylock Partners to its list of investors, the company announced Monday.

WhoSay basically makes interacting with fans via social networks and mainstream media easier for celebrities. The company currently has hundreds of active celebrity clients — including actor Tom Hanks and rocker Steven Tyler — that have over 700 million highly engaged fans, according to the company.

Terms of the … Continue Reading

Betaworks co-founder Andy Weissman jumps ship to Union Square Ventures

In a shakeup for New York’s startup scene, Andy Weissman, co-founder of the NYC startup incubator Betaworks, is leaving to join VC firm Union Square Ventures.

Weissman’s move, first reported by Betabeat, is yet another interesting development for Union Square, which we learned yesterday was raising a fourth investment fund worth between $150 million and $200 million.

Weissman was previously in charge of Betaworks’ investment portfolio. Now the company plans to shift its focus, as … Continue Reading

Demo: Angelsoft relaunches as Gust, a platform of tools for fundraising & dealflow

Angelsoft has been around for quite some time, and today at DEMO, the company is relaunching its global platform for deal flow management. The product is now known as Gust.

“As a serial investor who has founded half a dozen companies and raised tens of millions of dollars in venture and strategic capital, and then as a ‘super angel’ investor who has helped to fund over 80 companies myself, it was clear that the world … 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

Turntable.fm closing $7.5M round led by Union Square Ventures

Music-sharing service Turntable.fm is close to signing a new $7.5 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures, reports BetaBeat.

Turntable.fm has been on a hot streak since its launch in late May and has reportedly denied many interested investors while looking for the best partnership.

The startup decided against Kleiner Perkins and Accel as major investors because of possible conflicts of interest, according to the report. Both venture firms have deep ties to … Continue Reading

GSV’s small stake in Facebook leads to $70B valuation

GSV Capital Corp. has invested a stake in Facebook that values the social network at $70 billion, reports Reuters.

In an official statement Monday, Woodside, California-based GSV Capital said it purchased 225,000 shares in Facebook for a total of $6.6 million ($29.28 per share), according to the report.

Since GSV Capital is an investment fund for high-growth, venture capital-backed companies, it’s not shocking that it would put money down on Facebook. However, it does seem … Continue Reading

Breaking: DAG Ventures raising new $500M fund

Investment firm DAG Ventures is starting a $500 million fund called DAG Ventures V-QP, according to a recent filing with the securities and exchange commission.

DAG Ventures joined the Web 2.0 investment fray around 2006 by backing companies like Podshow, Friendster and Grouper. It has also invested in mobile payments provider Boku and restaurant-discovery site Yelp.

The firm is known for investing in Web 2.0 companies, information technology companies and clean technology companies like Harvest … Continue Reading