Facebook co-founder’s Asana raises funding — from Facebook angels?
We’re hearing that the business collaboration company co-founded by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein (both formerly of Facebook) has raised funding from the same investors who backed the popular social networking site. When asked about this, Rosenstein acknowledged that the company has raised money (in the form of convertible notes) from angels, but declined to identify them.
Moskovitz (who co-founded Facebook) and Rosenstein left the Palo Alto, Calif., company back in October, saying they wanted to… Continue Reading
The Seasteading Institute encourages floating nations, hosts conference
Peter Thiel, the famous PayPal founder, hedge fund manager and angel investor, has a minor tendency to put money into outlandish concepts.
The early Facebook investor is the leading contributor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an organization dedicated to advancing humanity through the creation of a super-intelligent but friendly AI. He has also given $500,000 to The Seasteading Institute, a less well known but perhaps equally far-out think tank whose mission is to push… Continue Reading
Adroll gets financing boost for co-op ad network
Adroll, a company that seeks to help web site publishers band together so that they’re more attractive to advertisers, has just raised several million dollars in a first round of venture capital funding.
The San Francisco company, run by Jared Kopf (left below), plays in a very crowded industry. Every day, it seems, there’s a new ad network that emerges. With the economy slowing down, there are simply too many networks, and not enough ads to… Continue Reading
YouNoodle’s startup predictor wants to tell you how much your company is worth
YouNoodle, an online community and website for entrepreneurs, just unveiled a feature that’s certain to attract (and anger?) plenty of curious users — a “startup predictor” that scores early-stage companies’ promise and feasibility, and even estimates what their value will be in three years.
The San Francisco startup already drew a fair amount of skepticism when it announced its intentions back in February. But VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall thought the basic idea isn’t totally crazy, and… Continue Reading
Online gambling is illegal, right? Not quite; the poker is still going on PurePlay
It’s pretty rare that venture capitalists will bet on a company that shows a hint of impropriety. Yet happens occasionally, for companies that don’t push the envelope too far.
In March, for instance, soft-porn site Zivity got $7 million from two prominent firms. The latest is PurePlay, a poker and proto-gambling site that today announces $15 million in funding from Bay Partners and prominent investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel and Owen Van Natta.
PurePlay doesn’t do… 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
Redux’s “people discovery” service wants you to make new friends
There’s still a gap between the Match.coms of the world and the Facebooks, says Redux CEO Darian Sharazi, and he thinks his company’s new site can fill it.
While social networking sites like Facebook connect you with existing friends, and dating sites are narrowly focused on romance, Redux is the first “people discovery” service, says Sharazi, an early Facebook employee — in other words, a site that can help you find friends based on your tastes… Continue Reading
Caught up? Here’s everything from Blekko, Dash’s price, to Android sighting
The holiday break felt especially long this time, so here’s a longer roundup than usual — of everything you may have missed over the last few days:
Ebay’s Kijiji tries to tar Craiglist’s reputation — The NYT has a story about Kijiji, a competitor to online classifieds company Craigslist. The remarkable thing about the story is that it lets Kijiji executives associate Craigslist with offers of “sadomasochistic encounters and prostitutes,” without some sort of response from Craiglist…. Continue Reading
Founders Fund raises new fund, aims for more VC disruption
updated
The Founders Fund, a maverick venture firm run by veteran entrepreneurs, has just raised a new fund of $220 million.
The firm will invest money from the fund, officially called Founders Fund II, in 15 to 20 early-stage startups.
The San Francisco firm has made a point of giving power to entrepreneurs in ways that many competing firms don’t. In its view, this focus is fixing the venture business model.
Specifically, it will continue its practice of offering… Continue Reading
PayPal’s Thiel, AOL’s Miller invest in ad management co., Clickable
Clickable, a service that lets small and medium-sized Web site owners manage their advertising, confirmed it has raised a total of $6 million in a first round of financing.
We reported earlier on the funding, which came in two portions (first here, and then here), but today the company named two more investors we didn’t mention earlier.
Aside from Pequot Ventures and Union Square Ventures, Peter Thiel, former CEO of PayPal, and Jonathan F. Miller, former America… Continue Reading
Xoom, money transfer site, raises $20M more
Xoom, a company that lets you go online to transfer money internationally, has raised $20.29 million in a fifth round of funding.
It’s just the latest in a wave of companies using the Web to shake up the payment-lending industry.
This six-year-old San Francisco company has now raised more than $50 million. To use it, you log on to Xoom’s Web site and pay between $3.50 and $12 per transaction, not exactly cheap — but considering the… Continue Reading
OpTrip, online travel company, raises $500,000
OpTrip, a Sunnyvale, Calif. online travel information company that is yet to launch, has raised $500,000 in a first round of financing.
We first mentioned the company here.
Investors include Amidzad Partners and Peter Thiel.
Facebook to sell stake to Microsoft? Oh, and Acebucks
Facebook is reportedly being courted by Microsoft to sell a small portion of itself to the software giant, valuing the network at a whopping $10 billion and upping the stakes for Google and others that will want to stop Facebook from falling into the wrong hands.
Separately, Facebook is also moving toward becoming a full-blown virtual world. Or at least it looks that way when a virtual currency for Facebook, Acebucks (here), gets introduced.
Buddy Media, the… Continue Reading
Mogad gets half a million to build a better recommendation site
Mogad is the latest startup building a peer-recommendation web service, similar to Facebook’s “news feed” feature.
Unlike Facebook’s closed system, however, Mogad wants to be a “news feed” for the whole web, that can give you recommendations from anything they do. For example, if you’re purchasing a book, Mogad will show you what books your friends are most interested in.
This field is a daunting one, because it’s filled with players. Plaxo’s social network, Pulse, Forbes’ newly-purchased… Continue Reading
The top five VCs under 40 — what do you think?
The Mercury News has just run a story listing the top five venture capitalists under the age of 40. Reporter Constance Loizos has done a good job with the selection. Here’s her intro.
Below are the names of the VCs and links to short profiles.
1. Danny Rimer. Hits: Skype, Tellme.
2. Roelof Botha. Hits: YouTube.
3. Peter Thiel. Hits: Facebook
4. Peter Fenton. Hits: Reactivity, JBoss, Wily.
5. Kevin Efrusy. Hits: Facebook
Of these, who do you think is tops? Admittedly,… Continue Reading
Bambi’s Vator.TV, a pitch platform for entrepreneurs, raises round
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… Continue Reading
Bambi Francisco, the star reporter, and her conflicts
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… Continue Reading
Roundup: Bombs, don’t do Delaware, MySQL IPO & more
The latest Silicon Valley round-up:
Correlation between bomb building and entrepreneurship? — Former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel reportedly says four of six founders of the online payment service built bombs while in high school. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson designs rockets.
MyYearbook.com, a social networking site for teens, raises $4.1M – The site looks like a Facebook knock-off. It raised the first round of finance from U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and First Round Capital. The… Continue Reading
Geni aims to build family tree for whole world
Geni, a new start-up in Los Angeles, wants to do for families what LinkedIn does for business contacts: Create one giant tree that shows you who is connected to who.
The world may be getting smaller; Geni, if successful, will make it tinier still.
Geni has just launched, and we found it easy to use. The company is led by co-founder David Sacks, a former chief operating officer at PayPal, who more recently started Room 9 Entertainment,… Continue Reading
Facebook “definitely” not for sale
Facebook, the social-networking Web site courted by Yahoo, isn’t for sale, board member Peter Thiel tells Bloomberg.
“It’s going to remain an independent company,” Thiel said in an interview last week. “The plan is to actually build it, maybe at some point take it public, but definitely not to sell it.”
Thiel said the site is actually worth $8 billion or more, citing the site’s college-aged users, according to Bloomberg. He said the company is… Continue Reading