VentureBeat

updated

VentureBeat has just raised a seed round, and I wanted to be the first one to let you know. The news is beginning to leak after we filed a regulatory document.

VentureBeat has grown steadily since launching more than a year ago. We’ve been hiring writers and we have record traffic. I’ve bootstrapped the company thus far, and while it’s been rewarding, there’s just so much more we’d like to do. We’ve been pretty much in the black since I launched, and I’ve hired writers as cash afforded. Now that we’ve got our feet on the ground, its time to get to the next phase.

We’ve raised $320,000 cash from a number of angel investors, including Georges Harik, a very early employee at Google and manager of several of its early products; Aydin Senkut, another early Google employee who is now running a small angel fund called Felicis Ventures; Mike Brown, an investor at Foundation Capital, but who invested on his own accord; Philippe Cases, an investor specialized in open source; MHS Capital; Amidzad; and Elliott Donnelly’s White Sand Group among others.

Obviously, with investors come potential conflicts. Each one of the investors is aware of VentureBeat’s determined focus on independent reporting, and we won’t be changing that. If we write about a topic where we feel we have a conflict, or a perceived conflict, we’ll disclose it clearly in a story.

Update: We’ve just seen a piece published by PEHub, which suggests our traffic is falling. The reporter who called me up just now didn’t even bother to ask me about it. Too bad, because our traffic hit a record high last month, and it’s been growing strongly. That’s confirmed by all our direct-measurement stats, from Google Analytics to FM’s page tracker. We’ve got syndication deals, too, plus growing RSS feeds. Alexa and Compete, the sites PEHub cites, are notoriously unreliable, especially for relatively small sites (read this), because they rely on non-direct methods. Wow, now even I know how it feels to be raked over the coals by an aggressive reporter. Though he’s a competitor, so I guess we should expect that.

[Disclosure: Satisfaction is led by Thor Muller, who is an advisor to VentureBeat. ]

Satisfaction, a San Francisco company that aims to improve online customer service by letting the customers effectively take over the process, has raised $1.3 million seed funding.

VentureBeat reviewed the company two months ago. Satisfaction creates customer support pages for companies and their products. But it goes beyond the standard customer support pages. It gives companies a way to provide answers — but also lets customers answer the questions. The more popular answers get voted to the top of the pile. If a newcomer asks a question that is similar to one already asked, Satisfaction gives the answers already provided.

The funding comes from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, and others including Jeff Clavier, Adaptive Path, Mike Brown, Jason Schultz (EFF)

The company also opened up the site so that anyone can create a customer service site for a company or product (until now it had been in testing, and you had to apply).

The company also has two other new offerings. First, it has released a widget of the customer service page for companies to embed if in their own support pages.

Second, it also lets companies embed a more dynamic FAQ page. Satisfaction assesses the questions that are most frequently asked, and updates the FAQ page in real time — as the issues being asked about change. See below for an example of this being done at a handbag site, Timbuk2.

Top Silicon Valley firms continue to beef up on consumer related investments:

New Enterprise Associates has named Mike Ramsay (left), co-founder and former chief executive of TiVo, to venture partner. Ramsay will join NEA’s Menlo Park office to focus on consumer investments. His career speaks for itself. He built TiVo from the ground up. Few practicing venture capitalists can say they’ve founded a company and taken it public. Before TiVo, he worked at HP, Convergent Technologies and Silicon Graphics. He’s an engineer by training.

Mike Brown joins Foundation Capital, another respected Silicon Valley firm, as principal. He’s focused on internet, digital media, mobile application and consumer device companies. He comes from Partech International, where he helped lead investments in RockYou, Wazap, mSnap Interactive, Replay Solutions and others. Before, he was an early employee at Bluefire Systems, an enterprise software company where he helped “take out the garbage,” among other things :) His bio here.