VentureBeat

Bambi Francisco, the former MarketWatch columnist who left last month amid a stir to form her own video company, has finished raising a round of capital.

The round includes Richard Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of Intermix, owner of MySpace, Georges Harick, a former Google engineer who helped develop Adsense, and Matthew Hill, early investor of Shopping.com and, as expected Peter Thiel, former chief executive of PayPal. She is keeping the amount confidential, but we expect it is at least several hundred thousand dollars.

Click on the image above for a link to a video showing Bambi talking about her company Vator.TV with Rosenblatt, after he steals the mic from someone else (Andy Plesser, of Beet.TV).

Entrepreneurs will be able to pitch their ideas in video, Powerpoint or other document. They can then upload it to Vator.TV, either password protected (where chosen investors can view the pitch) or publicly. In other words, a video form of RaiseCapital.com (see VB coverage). The site will soft launch next week, with a more formal launch later on. Early videos will feature Francisco and Thiel.

Rosenblatt is chief executive of Demand Media (see our coverage), which is buying up generic Web sites and searching for content to fill them up with. He’s also been marketing the .TV domain category, and Francisco said Vator.TV will likely be participating in that, though specifics haven’t been agreed. She said Rosenblatt is a significant investor.

Francisco said she was able to access Amazon’s EC2 offering, which will lower the costs of streaming the video.

The WSJ and Zdnet have published oddly incomplete stories about Bambi Francisco, a reporter at Marketwatch, who they say “invested” in a side company called Vator.tv.

They suggest scandal, because she reported at Marketwatch about people who also invested in Vator.

Bambi’s employers requested that she not to talk with reporters about this, but we’ve talked with Bambi over the past few months, so know what she’s been up to. Fact is, Vator is Bambi. This was not a side investment, so much as her own company. Her investment was mainly sweat equity. Read the stories above carefully with that in mind, and it becomes largely a non-scandal. If Vator became a success, the understanding was that she would leave and do it full time.

There are clearly issues she could have handled much better though. The one for us, was that she reported on the activities of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who also is an investor of Vator. In those stories, published on Vator itself, she should have disclosed his investment more clearly in the story/video itself (he is listed as an investor elsewhere on Vator). We’ve talked with Bambi this morning, and she agrees now that she should have been clearer, but that the site was so small and had so little traffic she just didn’t think of it. Personally, we think she should take the dive into independence (easier said than done), and break altogether from DowJones/Marketwatch, because of the significant complications caused by staying there.

As for her coverage of LinkedIn, Powerset, and Facebook while at Marketwatch, those are all legitimate stories for anyone to be covering, and we understand that she had an agreement with her employer that she could write stories — even those involving Vator’s investors — once they became legitimate stories in their own right. And it was difficult for her to disclose her Vator activities while reporting at Marketwatch, because the point was to avoid using the Marketwatch platform to publicize Vator. Where the ethical line is crossed is hard to tell under these conditions — another reason Bambi should cut and run.

Update: Later Friday, Bambi resigned. See Mercury News.