Credit Karma takes $2.5M to clarify credit scores
Credit Karma, an online service that helps average people view and parse their credit scores, has brought in $2.5 million in a first round of funding, according to paidContent. Based in San Francisco, the company is backed by QED Investors, SV Angel, Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures founder Aydin Senkut. It has now raised about $4.7 million to date.
Web 2.0: Sean Parker on why Facebook will win, and Google will lose
Sean Parker, a managing partner at Founders Fund and an early president of Facebook, argued that a new breed of “network” companies will overshadow tech giants like Google over the next decade.
At just 10 years of age, Google will decline in importance relative to companies that effectively harness the power of networks like Apple and Facebook, he said during a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today.
What’s a “networked” company? It’s a… Continue Reading
Ooma dials up $18.3M for free landlines via VoIP
Ooma, provider of a voice-over-internet box that lets users make free land-line calls, brought in $18.3 million in a fourth round of venture financing, reports paidContent. It raised $14 million of this sum back in June.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company says it now sells its box, priced at $249.99 a pop, through 5,000 retailers like BestBuy, Costco and others.
Ooma has now raised $61.0 million to date. The recent round came from Worldview Technology… Continue Reading
fbFund’s dating site Thread raises $1.2 million from Sequoia, Founders Fund
Thread, a dating site that uses Facebook’s social graph to suggest potential matches, raised $1.2 million from Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and angel investor Ron Conway.
The site, founded by some of PayPal’s original product managers, helps people find dates through their Facebook friends.
“The best people to date are friends of friends,” said CEO Brian Phillips, who went on a third date with someone he met through the site. “Not all the best… Continue Reading
isocket raises $2M for self-serve advertising
isocket, which has created a commission-free platform for selling online ads, has raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of big-name investors. The round was led by Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, while the other VCs participating including David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, and Dave McClure of Founders Fund.
The Mountain View, Calif. company (the two-man team recently moved out here from the Midwest) says its technology automates… Continue Reading
Mint.com rakes in $14 Million in third round of funding
Personal finance site Mint.com raked in another $14 million in funding, bringing its total to $31 million. The round was led by DAG Ventures, with new financing from Founders Fund and a top-up from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and Sherpalo.
Although the valuation wasn’t released, “it is a decidedly up-round” and it was “pre-emptive,” meaning Mint.com didn’t raise the funding because it was running out of cash. The company now has… Continue Reading
CoTweet raises $1.1M to help companies figure out Twitter
People make a lot of comments, questions and complaints on microblogging service Twitter about companies — if you’re well-known, I imagine it becomes hard to manage pretty quickly. That’s where a startup called CoTweet comes in, helping companies manage their customer relations on Twitter. The San Francisco company just opened the beta test of its service publicly, and also announced $1.1 million in a first round of funding.
Of course, it’s possible for a company to… Continue Reading
Navify lets you see what Wikipedians are reading
Wikipedia is all about words words words. The big arguments at the user-edited encyclopedia are always about the wording of articles — and even a casual user can see that the articles emphasize written over audio or visual content. For those who think that’s a problem, a new web site called Navify wants to deliver a richer Wikipedia experience, with more focus on images, videos and comments. And it just added a continuously-updated list of… Continue Reading
Inigral lands $2.4M to let students swap class schedules
Inigral, maker of applications that let students share their class schedules and other academic infomation with their friends, has brought in $2.4 million of a $3 million preferred-stock offering. It received $580,000 in seed funding from Founders Fund in 2007. It has also gotten support from Retro Venture Partners and several angel investors.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Inigral is the company behind the Facebook application Courses, which lets students view who else is in their… Continue Reading
Twitter search engine Topsy launches with $15M
Topsy.com, launched last week, is a brand new search engine focused exclusively on Twitter content. Like Google, it presents its results based on popularity metrics, namely the popularity or influence of the tweeter in question — a factor determined by how many followers the user has and how many time his or her messages have been re-tweeted.
Based in San Francisco, the company says it plans to branch out from Twitter if it sees initial success,… Continue Reading
UserVoice raises $800K for customer feedback systems
UserVoice, provider of online tools used to gather and organize customer feedback, complaints and product requests, has raised $800,000 in a first round of venture capital from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, Accelerator Group, and several individuals.
Based in Santa Cruz, Calif., the company says it aggregates the data to show what customers want most, and to help developers prioritize the changes they make. When new features are rolled out, UserVoice allows sites… Continue Reading
Overseas Craigslist rival OLX brings in $5M to fuel rapid growth
OLX, a self-styled Craigslist competitor that has gained traction abroad, announced that it’s raised $5 million in a third-round of capital to continue its expansion in 87 countries and 39 languages. It will use the money to improve its site and beef up its marketing efforts (though calling itself “the largest free classifieds site no one’s ever heard of” might not be the best strategy).
It’s likely that New York and Buenos Aires-based OLX will also… Continue Reading
Facebook’s fbFund incubator program looks to cash in on the site’s growth
This year, Facebook and two of its venture investors, Accel Partners and the Founders Fund, are changing up their fbFund incubator-style program from handing out grants to making equity investments. Venture capitalists aren’t generally known as purely altruistic, so the switch suggests these two firms see more money to be made on the platform this year than last. The program is also broadening in scope to include sites that use Facebook Connect for sharing user… Continue Reading
Yammer ups bet on the “Twitter for business” market
This could be the year that micro-messaging makes it big with businesses, Yammer is betting. The company lets employees share 140-character messages about what they’re working on — a simple intranet to help communicate more quickly than through masses of emails and phone calls. It has raised $5 million from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures, founder David Sacks tells TechCrunch.
I’d be interested to hear specific ways that Yammer saves companies time and money… Continue Reading
Raptr raises money and launches public beta of gamer social network
Raptr is unveiling the public beta test of its social network for all kinds of video game players. While it’s a crowded market, the company has a good chance of becoming a central hub for gamers who want to know what their friends are playing online, regardless of game type.
The Raptr social network will be able to access gamer data from a variety of sources. That includes PC games, Mac games, Xbox Live member accounts,… Continue Reading
Friendster raises $20 million, nabs a Googler to be CEO
Friendster, the formative social network of the modern web era that became a verb for rollercoaster failure and then took over large chunks of the Asian market, has some good news this evening.
It has raised $20 million and plucked Richard Kimber, Google’s regional managing director for South Asia, to be its new chief executive.
IDG Ventures led the round, with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Founders Fund participating.
While Friendster is the largest… Continue Reading
SGN, on quest for social gaming revenue, raises $15 million
Social Gaming Network, or SGN, is one of the more promising companies exploiting Facebook’s platform. It builds “social games” — online games that use friend relationships and other social data from social networks to deliver more compelling games.
It’s promising because it wants to straddle the lucrative world of video games and the not-yet-lucrative world of social networks. It is one of many companies with ideas for how to turn social gaming, sometimes called “funware,” into… Continue Reading
OLX, a competitor to classifieds site Craigslist, raises $13M
OLX, a company competing with classifieds site Craigslist, but more popular outside of the U.S. than it is here, has raised $13 million in a second round of financing.
The company, based in New York and Buenos Aires, is like Craigslist in that it focuses on urban centers to ensure mass. To gain visibility, it partnered with social networking company Friendster — which has also has more traction outside of the U.S.
The two-year-old company was started… Continue Reading
YouNoodle offers investors a “start-up predictor”
YouNoodle, a new San Francisco company, says it has developed a “startup predictor,” or a set of analysis tools to help investors place bets on the university entrepreneurs that are the most likely to succeed.
The company, founded by two 20-something entrepreneurs who met at Oxford, will offer its basic technology beginning March 3. Its core analysis stems from work YouNoodle has done over the past 11 months, working with universities to help them organize business… Continue Reading
Alamofire, a stealthy casual gaming company, gets $2M boost
Alamofire, a company bringing professional web design principles to gaming on Facebook, has gotten a recent boost of venture capital coinciding with the release of its first game.
The company is an offshoot of Firewheel Design, an award-winning designer of Web 2.0 sites including IconBuffet, which sells packages of icons to other web designers.
Alamofire’s first game, Packrat, stays close to those design roots. The aim of Packrat is to collect as many items as possible, represented… Continue Reading