• StrictlyVC: March 25, 2014

    Good morning! Slightly abbreviated issue today as StrictlyVC is running behind on all kinds of things. Hope you have a great Tuesday, though, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.:)

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    Top News in the A.M.

    The Obama administration is reportedly preparing to unveil a new legislative proposal that would end the N.S.A.’s systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits and allow it to obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order.

    —–

    An Early Bet on Box Looks to Pay Big Dividends

    A few weeks ago, I talked shop with DFJ managing director Josh Stein about everything from Bitcoin (he’s bearish on the digital currency) to which firms are doing the most “fringe” investing (Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Google).

    Naturally, one of the topics we covered was Stein’s very early investment in the online storage company Box. It was a “very risky bet,” as he said at the time. Lucky for DFJ, as it turns out.

    When yesterday afternoon Box publicly revealed its plans to raise up to $250 million in an IPO, many were surprised by the size of DFJ’s stake. Its 25.5 percent of the company is nearly twice the size stake of Box’s next-biggest shareholder, U.S. Venture Partners, which owns 13 percent. It also dwarfs the ownership positions of Box cofounders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, who respectively own 4.1 percent and 1.8 percent.

    Altogether, Box has raised $414 million, including its most recent, $100 million, round, which closed in December at what Levie told reporters was a $2 billion valuation. None of the firms that led Box’s later rounds are listed on its S-1; meanwhile, DFJ, which invested a total of $30 million in the company, could clear roughly $500 million if Box maintains its current valuation.

    When I’d asked Stein what he saw in Levie and Smith seven-plus years ago, he told me that DFJ always looks for two things: “Markets that have the potential to be big, and entrepreneurs who are passionate and driven and kind of unreasonable. They aren’t willing to accept the conventional wisdom. They’re doing things that by their nature are very hard, and most people will tell them they’re wrong, and they’re so committed in their vision that they bull through that.”

    Even though Box had just thousands of users at the time, Stein saw a big market opportunity. It “struck us as a product that could be very horizontal – not just for salespeople or doctors but for everybody,” he said.

    Also, Levie and Smith were appropriately unreasonable. They were “obviously sharp, bright, and hard-working,” Stein observed, noting that when presented with questions they couldn’t immediately answer, they’d often provide long, thoughtful responses within a few hours.

    But Stein also based his investment thesis on something that firm cofounder Tim Draper told him when he first joined the firm. Draper had told Stein to “think why something could work, rather than why it couldn’t.”

    Why not, indeed.

    dropcam_300x250_learn

    New Fundings

    Amplidata, a six-year-old, Lochristi, Belgium-based storage technology company, has raised $11 million in funding led by Intel Capital. Earlier investors including Endeavor Vision, Hummingbird Ventures, Quantum Corp. and Swisscom Ventures also participated in the round. The company appears to have raised roughly $34 million to date.

    Clever, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s been developing a standardized API that makes it easy for K-12 schools to more effectively use their data and for developers to access and build applications on top of it, has raised $10.3 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Y Combinator president Sam Altman and investment banker Deborah Quazzo also participated in the round, which brings Clever’s total funding to $13.3 million.

    Demandbase, a 7.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that develops B2B marketing services, has raised $15 million in new funding led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from Scale Venture Partners, SigmaWest, Altos Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and Adobe Systems. The company has raised roughly $33 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Hired, a nearly two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup aiming to make hiring employees and finding a job easier and more efficient, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Crosslink Capital and Sierra Ventures, with participation from SoftTech VC and Sherpa Ventures. The company, which recently changed its name from DeveloperAuction, has raised roughly $17.7 million altogether, including from New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures, and Haystack.

    Hortonworks, a 2.5-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based Hadoop vendor, has raised a fresh round of $100 million, led by BlackRock and Passport Capital. Earlier investors Dragoneer, Tenaya Capital, Benchmark, Index Ventures and Yahoo also participated in round, which brings Hortonworks’ total venture funding to $198 million. (As GigaOm notes, the raise comes roughly one week after its largest competitor, Cloudera, announced a new, $160 million, round of its own.)

    KinDex Pharmaceuticals, a 10-year-old, Seattle-based biotechnology company that’s developing drugs for people with diabetes, among other things, has raised $5 million in funding led by Polaris Partners, which was joined by numerous individuals. The company hopes to double the size of the round by year end, its CEO, Jeffrey Bland, tells Xconomy in this profile of the company.

    Pley, a year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company that provides subscription services to education toys, has raised $6.75 million in Series A funding led by Allegro Venture Partners, with participation from Floodgate,Correlation Ventures, Maven Ventures and Western Technology Investments.

    Sonendo, a nearly eight-year-old, Laguna Hills, Ca.-based company developing a tool for use in root-canal procedures at the dentist’s office, has obtained $10 million in debt financing from the specialty financing firmOxford Finance. The money follows a $27 million venture round closed last summer from backers that include OrbiMed Advisors, Themes Investment Partners, Fjord Ventures and NeoMed Management.

    Souq.com, the 8.5-year-old, Dubai-based company that is oft-characterized as the Arab world’s answer to Amazon, has raised $75 million in funding from South African media giant Naspers, at a valuation of more than $500 million. The deal is the biggest publicized in the Internet space in the Arab world since Yahoo bought the Arabic Web portal Maktoob in 2009 for $165 million, reports the WSJ. The company has raised $150 million altogether, it says.

    —–

    IPOs

    Box, the eight-year-old, Los Altos, Ca.-based online storage company, has filed its long-anticipated S-1, but revelations that the company’s losses are outpacing its revenue has competitors feeling nervous. “While news of Box’s official filing for IPO brings a lot of excitement to our market, the public release of their financials raises a lot of concern,” says Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain to VentureBeat. “It is public knowledge now that Box has claimed over $360 million in deficits to date, with no solid roadmap to profitability. This seems to have become a trend lately where companies are being rewarded with huge valuations for simply having a large customer list.”

    GrubHub, the 10-year-old, Chicago-based online delivery services company, said in an amended prospectus yesterday that it expects to price its IPO of roughly 7 million shares at $20 to $22 per share, valuing the company at up to $1.72 billion. Reuters has more.

    Vice Media Group, a 20-year-old, New York-based media company known for melding online journalism with punk culture, is poised to double revenue to $1 billion by 2016 and may pursue an IPO, co-founder Shane Smith said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “We’d be stupid not to test what the market would bear,” said Smith. “There’s a lot of money sloshing around in the system, obviously valuations are high.” The company raised $70 million last summer from Fox Interactive Media.

    —–

    Exits

    Cyvera, a 2.5-year-old Tel Aviv, Israel-based security startup, has been acquired by the publicly traded network security firm Palo Alto Networks for roughly $200 million. Cyvera had raised $11 million in funding in August from Blumberg Capital, Battery Ventures, and individuals Ehud Weinstein and Ofir Shalvi.

    It’s official, kind of. Maker Studios, a 4.5-year-old, Culver City, Ca.-based company that develops and publishes YouTube entertainment videos, is being acquired by media giant Disney for $500 million or more, a source tells Reuters, two weeks after Re/code sources suggested it would. The sale will be by far the biggest bet by a traditional media company in a company built on top of YouTube. Maker has raised around $70 million to date, including from Greycroft Partners, Upfront Ventures, Time Warner Investments, and Northgate Capital.

    StatSoft, a 30-year-old, Tulsa, Ok.-based company that specializes in analytics and data visualization software, is being acquired by Dell for undisclosed terms, in an ongoing effort to boost Dell’s software and services, reports ZDNet.

    —–

    People

    A House of Representatives committee has launched an inquiry into whether former Vice President Al Gore attempted to “inappropriately influence” the use of federal grant dollars to acquire electric buses in Long Beach, Ca., in favor of a company in which Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has an interest. (Gore became a partner at Kleiner in 2008.)

    Rick Levin, who served as the president of Yale University, has just joined the Mountain View, Ca.-based online course company Coursera as CEO, reports Re/code. It’s a huge coup for the company and seemingly a perfect fit for Levin, a Stanford grad who received his PhD from Yale and went on to become the longest-serving president in the Ivy League. (He served from 1993 through the end of the 2012 academic school year.) With Levin’s appointment, Coursera, co-CEOs Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, both professors on leave from Stanford, will take different operational roles.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Union Square Ventures is looking for an analyst, a two-year stint that managing director Fred Wilson likens to a “USV MBA.” The deadline toapply is April. (H/T: Mattermark)

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Google has tied up with talian eyewear maker Luxottica SpA, owner of the Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglass brands, which will design, develop and distribute new versions of Google Glass, reports the WSJ.

    On the heels of the news that secondaries specialist Paul Capital is winding down operations after failing to find a buyer for its business, Fortune’s Dan Primack criticized the firm — which has laid off most of its staff — for continuing to collect management fees. Paul Capital didn’t respond to Primack’s requests for comment, but it’s now defending itself in an interview with peHUB editor Chris Witkowsky, arguing that “some of [its stakes] don’t require a lot of attention, but some do.”

    —–

    Detours

    Truly amazing tree houses.

    A little girl and her dog: A photo series.

    “Homeland” actor James Rebhorn, who passed away last week after an extended battle with skin cancer, wrote his own obituary before passing and it’s beautiful.

    A recent study has shown that if American parents read one more long-form think piece about parenting they will go ape ___.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    An update on the piggy bank.

    Cassette tape tables.

    Channel your inner eight-year-old; buy yourself a slingshot!

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

     

    Connie

  • An Early Bet on Box Looks to Pay Huge Dividends

    Aaron Levie and Dylan SmithA few weeks ago, I talked shop with DFJ managing director Josh Stein about everything from Bitcoin (he’s bearish on the digital currency) to which firms are doing the most “fringe” investing (Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Google).

    Naturally, one of the topics we covered was Stein’s very early investment in the online storage company Box. It was a “very risky bet,” as he said at the time.  Lucky for DFJ, as it turns out.

    When earlier today Box publicly revealed its plans to raise up to $250 million in an IPO, many were surprised by the size of DFJ’s stake. Its 25.5 percent of the company is nearly twice the size stake of Box’s next-biggest shareholder, U.S. Venture Partners, which owns 13 percent. It also dwarfs the ownership positions of  Box cofounders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, who respectively own 4.1 percent and 1.8 percent.

    Altogether, Box has raised $414 million, including its most recent, $100 million, round, which closed in December at what Levie told reporters was a $2 billion valuation. Almost none of the firms that led Box’s later rounds are listed on its S-1; meanwhile, DFJ, which invested a total of $30 million in the company, could clear roughly $500 million if Box maintains its current valuation holds up.

    When I’d asked Stein what he saw in Levie and Smith seven-plus years ago, he told me that DFJ always looks for two things: “Markets that have the potential to be big, and entrepreneurs who are passionate and driven and kind of unreasonable. They aren’t willing to accept the conventional wisdom. They’re doing things that by their nature are very hard, and most people will tell them they’re wrong, and they’re so committed in their vision that they bull through that.”

    Even though Box  had just thousands of users at the time, Stein saw a big market opportunity.  It “struck us as a product that could be very horizontal – not just for salespeople or doctors but for everybody,” he said.

    Also, Levie and Smith were appropriately unreasonable. They were “obviously sharp, bright, and hard-working,” Stein observed, noting that when presented with questions they couldn’t immediately answer, they’d often provide long, thoughtful responses within a few hours.

    But Stein also based his investment thesis on something that firm cofounder Tim Draper told him when he first joined the firm. Draper had told Stein to “think why something could work, rather than why it couldn’t.”

    Why not, indeed.

    Connie

    , , , ,

  • StrictlyVC: March 24, 2014

    Hello, and happy Monday!

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    Move over, Amazon. Cisco Systems say it plans to begin offering “cloud” computing service to corporate customers, pledging to spend $1 billion over the next two years to enter the market, reports the Wall Street Journal.

    —–

    Bubba Muraka: DFJ’s Latest Whiz

    Steve Jurvetson has always been DFJ’s boy wonder, a polymath whose interests range from nanoscience to space travel and who received his electrical engineering degree from Stanford in two-and-a-half years (then he nabbed his master’s, then an MBA).

    Now, the Sand Hill Road venture firm appears to have found a new whiz in Bubba Muraka, who was brought on as a managing director last May and has some pretty impressive credentials of his own.

    The son of a scientist and an engineer, Muraka grew up in San Jose and Cupertino before heading off to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, “mostly because I wanted to go somewhere my parents couldn’t drive to see me by surprise,” he tells me over coffee at San Francisco’s Epicenter Café.

    As he was graduating, Microsoft recruited him to Seattle, where in 2001, Muraka was among a group of graduates to invent one of the earliest versions of social networking, an online application called Three Degrees. Eighteen months after Muraka arrived at Microsoft, however, his group was reorganized, its resources cut, and Muraka headed back to Cal Poly and earned his master’s degree.

    Again, Microsoft came knocking, this time offering Muraka the chance to run all product for Bing in the Bay Area. He happily stayed another three years. But by 2008, like a lot of top talent, Muraka — who speaks fast and smiles often — found himself at Facebook, where he talked his way into a business development role. He wanted to learn something new. What he discovered was how to handily outmaneuver traditional biz dev people. “I’d built Web software and desktop software and I understood the product and the engineering side of things,” he says. “The business person would have to bring in the engineer or product manager and I’d just start negotiating directly with that person and all of a sudden, we’d have an awesome deal for Facebook. It was sort of like a superpower.”

    It became too rote, in fact, so in early 2011, Muraka asked to switch to product management. With the move, he became the third product manager at Facebook to focus on mobile, and the first to zero in on Android specifically, eventually leading more than 50 people in the creation of Facebook’s Android app. (Given Android’s adoption, it’s probably the most-used interface for Facebook at this point.)

    Whether all of that experience will translate into success at DFJ is an open question, though it’s easy to see how it might.

    Muraka, for example, recently led the Series A round of CircleCI, a “continuous integration platform” that basically takes code sitting on a developer’s GitHub repository and quickly runs tests on it on Amazon’s Web services, pushing out what’s working to end users. The company has plenty of competitors, including CloudBees and Semaphore. But CircleCI has “built the best product out there,” says Muraka, “and as one of the few VCs who has written and shipped desktop, Web, and mobile software, I think I uniquely get it. I really see the power of the future they’ve created.”

    In the meantime, Muraka, a nut for all things mobile, can’t resist developing a still-stealth mobile company in parallel. “The agreement I had with DFJ was that I’d finish the company building, so I’m chairman but I got out of an operational role at the end of 2013.” Muraka replaced himself as CEO with a former COO of Virgin Mobile. “So, it’s like, going to be a thing,” he says excitedly.

    I ask the newly minted VC if his startup has raised any capital. “None so far,” he says with a slight smirk. “We’re still debating.” (Smart guy.)

    dropcam_300x250_learn

    New Fundings

    Actifio, a five-year-old, Boston-based data storage company, has raised $100 million at a $1 billion, reports Dealbook. The round was led by Tiger Global Management, which participation from earlier investorsAndreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and other venture capital firms. Actifio’s newest round brings its total funding to roughly $212 million. Dealbook takes a look at its place in the data storage universe.

    Avazu, a 4.5-year-old, Shanghai-based programmatic ad platform, has raised $48 million in Series A financing led by Gaorong Capital. Other investors include “domestic and international companies, as well as an experienced U.S. Internet-focused private equity fund,” according to a release.

    CounterTack, a 6.5-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based threat detection software company, has raised an additional $3 million in funding that pushes its Series B round to $15 million. The funding comes from Siemens Venture Capital; CounterTack’s other investors, including Goldman Sachs, Fairhaven Capital, and OnPoint Technologies, have provided the company with $25 million in funding altogether.

    Kolltan Pharmaceuticals, a 6.5-year-old, New Haven, Cn.-based drug developer focused on treatments across breast, lung, and ovarian cancers, has raised $60 million in fresh funding, according to a Form D first flagged by Med City News. The Yale spin-off has raised roughly $150 million to date, including from Purdue Pharma, HBM BioCapital, Celtic Therapeutics Management, Tichenor Ventures and Osage University Partners.

    Leju Holdings, a six-year-old, Beijing-based online-to-offline real estate services and advertising platform, has agreed to sell China’s Tencent Holdings 15 percent of its business for $180 million. The move underscores Tencent’s designs on broadening its services to better compete with Alibaba Group Holding. Leju offers services including mobile apps and payment mechanisms for real-estate buyers and property agents. Earlier this month, it filed with the SEC to go public.

    Off-Grid Electric, a two-year-old, Arusha,Tanzania-based company providing solar lighting services in Africa, has raised $7 million in funding from SolarCity, Vulcan Capital, and Omidyar Network. VentureBeat has much more here.

    Procured Health, a two-year-old, Chicago-based company whose software aims to help control hospital supply spend, has raised $4 million in Series A funding. FCA Venture Partners out of Nashville, Tn., led the round. The company has raised $5.1 million altogether, including from Bessemer Venture Partners, Zimmerman Ventures, and Fidelity Biosciences.

    Vicarious, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that aims to create a machine that can think like humans, has raised $40 million in fresh funding led by Formation 8. Other investors in the round included Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, actor Ashton Kutcher, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Y Combinator president Sam Altman, Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, Khosla Ventures, Good Ventures Foundation, Felicis Ventures, Initialized Capital, Open Field Capital, Zarco Investment Group, Metaplanet Holdings and Founders Fund. Vicarious received $15 million in a first round in 2012. Last month, the WSJ took an extensive look at the company, which has now raised $60 million altogether.

    WelVU, a 15-month-old, Portland, Oregon-based whose software allows doctors and nurses to create and send interactive presentations to patients with such information as their vital signs, scheduling, X-rays, blood results, and notes, has raised $1.25 million in seed financing from undisclosed sources. VentureBeat has more here.

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    IPOs

    Globoforce Group, a 17-year-old, Southborough, Ma.-based software firm, cancelled its planned IPO late last week, citing unfavorable market conditions. PitchBook, the research firm, says the move also suggests that large financial institutions are becoming picky about which stocks to back.

    Hold on to your hats. The IPO of “Candy Crush Saga” maker King Digital is slated for Wednesday.

    —–

    Exits

    Berkeley Design Automation, a 13-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based company focused on nanometer analog, mixed-signal, and RF circuit verification, has been acquired by publicly traded Mentor Graphics for undisclosed terms. Berkeley Design Automation had raised roughly $20 million over the years, including from Bessemer Venture Partners, Panasonic, Woodside Fund, and Western Technology Investment.

    YourBus, a three-year-old, Bangalore, India-based GPS-based bus tracking and analytics platform, has been acquired by the e-commerce and online travel company IbiboGroup for undisclosed terms. IbiboGroup is a joint venture between the South Africa-based media and Internet company Naspers and Tencent.

    —–

    People

    Business Insider has produced one of its famous “lists of the most important people in Silicon Valley.” Here’s who they came up with, laid out on one page.

    Mark Fasciano, a managing director at Canrock Ventures, a four-year-old venture firm in Brookville, New York, is embroiled in a controversy over whether Canrock violated conflict-of-interest rules by investing taxpayer dollars in five startups in which it has stakes — four of them reportedly founded by Fasciano. In 2012, Canrock was among seven venture firms chosen by New York State to invest a total of $35 million in federal funds in tech startups across the state. Newsday has more here.

    Sara Haider, a mobile engineer and technical lead at Twitter for four-plus years, is leaving for the anonymous social startup Secret, where she’ll be responsible for launching an Android version of the app. Twitter’s VP of analytics and business intelligence, Cayley Torgeson, is also leaving the company, which Re/code’s sources characterize as a big loss for the company. As Re/code notes, Torgeson is in charge of Twitter’s internal analytics. “In a nutshell, he’s the guy who can tell top brass if Twitter is ‘working’ or not.”

    Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is reportedly coming to the aid of the publicly traded, advanced biofuel producer Kior, which he personally incubated and that last week warned that liquidity constraints could force a default or even a bankruptcy filing. Khosla and Bill Gates poured $100 million into Kior just last fall; now, “final terms and conditions are currently being negotiated” for a $25 million loan from Khosla, a Kior spokeswoman told The Deal.

    Larry Page, CEO of Google, gave stock in his company valued at roughly $177 million to charity in February, according to SEC documents discovered by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The outlet’s conclusion: that Page is “much more charitable than he let on in a TED conference conversation with interviewer Charlie Rose [last] week.”

    LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner now tops Glassdoor’s list of the 50 highest-rated CEOs, per employee feedback on the jobs site. Weiner steals the slot from Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg, who apparently fell all the way to ninth place. Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs and Intuit CEO Brad Smith are also well-liked by employees, judging by the list. Vator has more here.

    —–

    Happenings

    Y Combinator is hosting its bi-annual Demo Day on Tuesday in Mountain View, Ca., from 10 am. to 5 pm PST.

    The CoinSummit conference also kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco and features an all-star line-up, including Marc Andreessen, Micky Malka of Ribbit Capital, and Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. If you can’t make it, you can watch a live stream here.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Here, a Nokia business unit that brings together Nokia’s mapping and location assets under one brand, is looking for a head of business development in Sunnyvale, Ca.

    —–

    Data

    Ad agencies have become active startup investors; four ad agencies alone have participated in 52 financing deals worth more than $500 million since 2011. CB Insights looks at who has been funding what.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Over the weekend, PandoDaily dug up shocking court documents relating to an ongoing civil suit involving seven tech giants and the many employees whose wages they’ve being accused of conspiring to curb.

    A big fight is beginning to brew over who owns car data, reports The Recorder. (Subscription required.) Last week, Senator Bill Monning of Carmel, Ca., introduced legislation that would give drivers control of their vehicle-generated data — from their locations to their driving habits to even, potentially, their musical preferences. And car makers, tech developers, and privacy advocates are watching closely to see what happens. The data will “implicate the privacy interests of people both inside and outside the car,” Nate Cardozo, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the outlet. “This is definitely new ground.”

    —–

    Detours

    The overprotected kid.

    Silicon Valley’s brutal ageism.

    Airbnb’s first pitch deck.

    The best part of Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s first resume.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Boxed card sets from Thornwillow Press.

    Bill Murray pillows.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

    ,

  • Bubba Murarka: DFJ’s Newest Whiz

    bubba_headSteve Jurvetson has always been DFJ’s boy wonder, a polymath whose interests range from nanoscience to space travel and who received his electrical engineering degree from Stanford in two-and-a-half years (then he nabbed his master’s, then an MBA).

    Now, the Sand Hill Road venture firm appears to have found a new whiz in Bubba Murarka, who was brought on as a managing director last May and has some pretty impressive credentials of his own.

    The son of a scientist and an engineer, Murarka grew up in San Jose and Cupertino before heading off to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Ca., “mostly because I wanted to go somewhere my parents couldn’t drive to see me by surprise,” he tells me over coffee at San Francisco’s Epicenter Café.

    As he was graduating, Microsoft recruited him to Seattle, where in 2001, Murarka was among a group of graduates to invent one of the earliest versions of social networking, an online application called Three Degrees. Eighteen months after Murarka arrived at Microsoft, however, his group was reorganized, its resources cut, and Murarka headed back to Cal Poly and earned his master’s degree.

    Again, Microsoft came knocking, this time offering Murarka the chance to run all product for Bing in the Bay Area. He happily stayed another three years. But by 2008, like a lot of top talent, Murarka — who speaks fast and smiles often — found himself at Facebook, where he talked his way into a business development role. He says he wanted to learn something new. What he discovered was how to handily outmaneuver traditional biz dev people. “I’d built Web software and desktop software and I understood the product and the engineering side of things,” he says. “The business person would have to bring in the engineer or product manager and I’d just start negotiating directly with that person and all of a sudden, we’d have an awesome deal for Facebook. It was sort of like a superpower.”

    It became too rote, in fact, so in early 2011, Murarka asked to switch to product management. With the move, he became the third product manager at Facebook to focus on mobile, and the first to zero in on Android specifically, eventually leading more than 50 people in the creation of Facebook’s Android app. (Given Android’s adoption, it’s probably the most-used interface for Facebook at this point.)

    Whether all of that experience will translate into success at DFJ is an open question, though it’s easy to see how it might.

    Murarka, for example, recently led the Series A round of CircleCI, a “continuous integration platform” that basically takes code sitting on a developer’s GitHub repository and quickly runs tests on it on Amazon’s Web services, pushing out what’s working to end users. The company has plenty of competitors, including CloudBees and Semaphore. But CircleCI has “built the best product out there,” says Murarka, “and as one of the few VCs who has written and shipped desktop, Web, and mobile software, I think I uniquely get it. I really see the power of the future they’ve created.”

    In the meantime, Murarka, a nut for all things mobile, can’t resist developing a still-stealth mobile company in parallel. “The agreement I had with DFJ was that I’d finish the company building, so I’m chairman but I got out of an operational role at the end of 2013.”

    Murarka replaced himself as CEO with a former COO of Virgin Mobile. “So, it’s like, going to be a thing,” he says excitedly.

    I ask the newly minted VC if his startup has raised any capital. “None so far,” he says with a slight smirk. “We’re still debating.”

    Connie

    , ,

  • StrictlyVC: March 21, 2014

    Good morning!

    Top News in the A.M

    Poor Blackberry can’t catch a break. It looks like even the White House is moving on to Samsung phones.

    —–

    A Small Entrepreneur Takes On, Gulp, Uber

    Across the U.S., new car-sharing services Lyft and Sidecar are spreading fast, while Uber, which now manages a ride-share service as well as connects passengers with career drivers, seems destined for world domination.

    In short, it doesn’t sound like a great time to launch a new car service. Yet that’s exactly what Yamandou Alexander has done with GoGreenRide, a New York-based startup that Alexander has bootstrapped with $2.5 million of his own capital. (GoGreenRide is currently halfway through raising a new, $5 million outside round of fundraising.)

    Oddly, Alexander may have had the idea of an alternative transportation fleet first. As the French-born entrepreneur tells it, he moved to New York City at 19, bussing tables at famed Upper East Side restaurant Daniel and selling Motorola Startacs to his coworkers, many of them fellow immigrants. He eventually began exporting the handsets to Africa, creating one telecom company and selling a second for enough money in 2012 to bring to life a concept he wanted, but couldn’t afford, to pursue in 2006 – a nicer, greener, more affordable version of a black car service.

    We chatted recently about how that vision is coming together and why GoGreenRide makes sense now, even in a ride-sharing economy.

    Your business differentiates itself in two key ways. For one thing, GoGreenRide owns or leases dozens of Prius cars. You also have 40 full-time employees, rather than contractors. You’re like the anti-Uber, except that Uber is so profitable precisely because it has so little overhead. Why does your strategy make sense?

    With contractors, there’s a lack of control in presentation, quality, and customer service. We want our drivers to wear a uniform; to work on a schedule, rather than when they feel like it; to open doors; and to understand when it isn’t time to talk. We want to provide good, consistent customer service. We’re also concerned with Uber’s model from a liability standpoint.

    As for the cars, based on plans to increase our fleet to 50 cars by summer, the company should reach break-even by December. Next year, the car should see a 13 percent EBITDA…and by 2018, 26 percent EBITDA.

    Where are you turning to fund those plans?

    We’re talking with VCs. Investors on the West Coast are more interested in less capital-intensive businesses, but we’re getting good traction with East Coast people who know and live the experience of trying to find transportation in New York. We’re also going out to AngelList for additional investment, and inviting GoGreenRide members to participate.

    Uber gets a lot of flack for its surge pricing. Is your pricing flexible, too?

    Pricing does fluctuate based on traffic conditions. But you always know how much you’ll pay before you get in a car via our mobile app, which sends you detailed information about your trip, including when the driver will arrive. Our metering is calculated based on the estimated time [it will take to transport a passenger from A to B], which we know based on historical data about traffic patterns.

    As an alternative to black car service, what percent of your business comes from corporate partnerships?

    About 40 percent. We cater to both customers taking long trips, who might otherwise take a black car service to the airport, and short trips, where we’re competing more directly with taxis. Our average fare is $34, which is the same as a yellow cab, but you’re getting a much nicer experience with GoGreenRide.

    Beyond expanding your fleet, what’s on your road map, so to speak?

    The short-term growth opportunity is for us to grow our model in New York, then move into L.A. or San Francisco. We’re also starting a franchising program, including [helping launch] a GoGreenRide in China.

    We glad for Uber’s success and the acceptance it has gained in New York. But we also see a lot of people coming to us from them because of pricing, level of service, reliability, and safety.

    300x250_Static

    New Fundings

    Chatwala, a year-old, New York-based messaging app, has raised $625,000 in seed funding for its two-way video chat mobile app that lets users engage in staggered conversations VentureBeat has more here.

    Crowdtap, a 4.5-year-old, New York-based startup that helps brands connect with their fans and reward them, has raised $5 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor Foundry Group. Other participants in the round included Tribeca Venture Partners, Alta Communications, and The Mustang Group. The company has now raised $15 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    Elevate Digital, a three-year-old, Chicago-based interactive digital advertising and software company, has raised $3 million in funding from SFX Entertainment, a live event and festival promoter that plans to incorporate Elevate’s technology it into its events. The money brings Elevate’s Series A fund to a total of $7.2 million. Its other backers include Partners Path Investments and Advantage Capital Partners.

    Faraday, an 18-month-old, Middlebury, Vt.-based cloud software provider aimed at helping housing contractors and handymen find new business, has raised $880,000 in Series A round of financing led by FreshTracks Capital. Renewable energy services provider 3Degrees, seed-stage venture investor LaunchCapital, environmental-opportunities-focused investor ARB, and a number of individual investors also participated.

    Gigwalk, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that asks people to use their smartphones to gather and submit to Gigwalk information about retailers they visit, has raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Nokia Growth Partners. Other participants in the funding includedRandstad Holding and earlier investors August Capital, Harrison Metaland SoftTech VC.

    Invendo Medical, a 6.5-year-old, Garden City, N.J.-based maker of endoscopy products, has raised $28 million in financing led by Xeraya Capital. Other participants in the round included TVM Capital, Wellington Partners and 360° Capital.

    Procured Health, a two-year-old, Chicago-based company whose software helps hospitals with their internal workflow, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by FCA Venture Partners. The company had previously raised $1.1 million in seed funding from Zimmerman Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, and Blueprint Health Accelerator.

    Saffron Technology, a 15-year-old, Cary, N.C.-based company whose data analytics platform claims to unify and learn from structured and unstructured data in real time from a large variety of sources, has raised $7 million in Series B funding from unnamed sources. The company tells the Triangle Business Journal that it plans to use some of that funding to move to Silicon Valley.

    Stir, a months-old, L.A-based creator of so-called “learning” height-adjustable desk, has secured $1.5 million in seed investment led by Vegas TechFund. Numerous angel investors also participated in the funding.

    Testbirds, a 2.5-year-old Munich, Germany-based mobile and web app that lets companies outsource their app testing, has raised $2.9 million in Series A funding led by Seventure Partners. The company had previously raised roughly $1.8 million in seed funding, reports TechCrunch.

    YouNoodle, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that builds platforms for entrepreneurship competitions all over the world, has raised $1.1 million in a new financing round, including from VegasTechFund,Lars-Henrik Friis Molin of Sweden, The Amicus Group of Korea, and Kolind A/S.

    —–

    New Funds

    Flybridge Capital Partners, the 13-year-old, Boston-based venture capital firm, is raising $125 million for its fourth venture capital fund, according to an SEC filing that was first spied by Fortune. As Fortune’s report notes, the fund is far small than its immediate predecessor, a $280 million pool closed in 2008. It says the difference reflects numerous changes, including that the firm is no longer focused on healthcare deals. (In fact, the firm’s cofounder and primary healthcare investor, Michael Greeley, left Flybridge last fall to join another firm, Foundation Medical Partners. You can read an interview with him about the move here.) The new, more focused Flybridge is also reportedly backing out of Latin America as a focus area, with general partner Jon Karlen becoming an advisor to the firm, while New York-based principal Math Witheiler is promoted to general partner in New York.

    Lightspeed Venture Partners, the 14-year-old, Sand Hill Road venture capital firm, has closed its tenth fund with a total of $1 billion in capital commitments, reports Fortune, which say the firm raised two separate funds: a $650 million early-stage fund, and a $350 million late-stage vehicle. The fund invests in consumer and enterprise deals, along with energy tech. Fortune has more here.

    Qiming Venture, the 10-year-old, Shanghai-based venture capital firm cofounded by Gary Rieschel, has raised about $500 million for its fourth fund, according to China Money Network. The firm, which funds early- to growth-stage companies across China in the media and internet, IT, consumer and retail, healthcare, and clean technology sectors, raised its last, $450 million, fund in the spring of 2011.

    Simon Property Group, a publicly traded, Indianapolis, In.-based commercial real estate giant, has announced a new, dedicated venture fund called Simon Venture Group that will look to invest in “retail innovation,” from seed-stage to high-growth companies, says the firm. The new venture group will be led by J. Skyler Fernandes, who was previously a partner at Centripetal Capital Partners, a multi-stage venture capital fund.

    Technology Crossover Ventures, the 19-year-old growth equity firm, has officially closed on TCV VIII, a $2.23 billion fund. TCV began marketing the fund in the summer of 2012 with a $2.5 billion target.

    —–

    IPOs

    Rubicon Project, the nearly seven-year-old, L.A. based ad tech company, priced its IPO yesterday at $17 a share, valuing the company at more than $450 million. The company has raised $51 million in funding from Mayfield Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, IDG Ventures, and News Corp. Its biggest shareholders are Clearstone, which owned 21.7 percent going into the offering; News Corporation, which owned 19.3 percent; and Mayfield, which owned 14.2 percent. (All three had plans to sell part of their stake in the IPO.) Rubicon today becomes the first L.A. tech company to go public since Demand Media‘s IPO in 2011.

    —–

    Exits

    Mindbloom, a 5.5-year-old, Seattle-based mobile health firm, has been acquired by Welltok, a five-year-old health optimization company in Denver. No financial terms were disclosed. Mindbloom had raised $3.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed sources; Welltok has raised $48 million, including from New Enterprise Associates, IBM, Qualcomm Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Partners andMiramar Venture Partners.

    Nervogrid Oy, a 10-year-old, Helsinki, Finland-based company that delivers IT infrastructure as a managed cloud service, has been acquired by the publicly traded Swiss company Also Holding for undisclosed terms.

    —-

    People

    Steve Bennett, who was hired as the CEO of computer-security giant Symantec in July 2012, was fired yesterday, the company announced, saying it had appointed board member Michael Brown to lead while the company seeks a replacement. As you might suspect, the Mountain View, Ca.-based company didn’t elaborate on why it was terminating Bennett, though Bloomberg notes the company’s shares have fallen 15 percent in the past year amid declining revenue.

    Mayfield India has named Vishal Dixit as a partner. Dixit was previously a director at Zephyr Peacock, where he was a founding team member of four India-focused funds. 

    Ferenc Huszar has joined Balderton Capital as a data scientist. Huszar, who recently completed his PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge, joins the firm from PeerIndex, a startup that aims to evaluate and understand the “social capital” that a person has built online.

    Pat McGovern, who became a billionaire as the founder and majority owner of Boston-based technology publisher International Data Group, died on Tuesday. He was 76. No reason was given for this death. IDG publishes dozens of print publications and hosts hundreds of conferences each year.

    Google CEO Larry Page suggested at the TED conference this week that rather than hand his fortune over to a traditional philanthropic organization, he’d rather give it entrepreneur genius Elon Musk, who has big ideas for changing the world.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Oracle is looking for a corporate development associate at its Redwood Shores, Ca., headquarters.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Just after he was named CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella got a visit fromYahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Re/code sources say the meeting was friendly “except when the topic got to the long-fraught search advertising and technology partnership between the companies, which Mayer has been agitating to change for some time now. Mayer’s basic message to Nadella has remained the same as it has been for a while now — Yahoo wants out of the deal, and sooner than later.”

    Not all is lost, apparently. Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange that collapsed and filed for bankruptcy last month, said it had found 200,000 Bitcoins that were held in a digital storage file. Dealbook has more here.

    —–

    Detours

    Director David Fincher says Oscar winner Christian Bale is his one and only choice to play Steve Jobs in an upcoming Jobs biopic.

    Darkly funny photos of the San Francisco rental market.

    Santa Monica is the new Silicon Valley, and the Times is on it.

    “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner talks with The Atlantic about going to casinos and pretending to be Tunisian, Russian, or Armenian.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Neat – a bike whose frame and rims are coated in a specially formulated powder that makes it shine under light (including car headlights).

    StrictlyVC made the mistake of showing this to the kids this morning. Looks like we’re getting a new robot.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

    , , ,

  • A Small Entrepreneur Takes on, Gulp, Uber

    GoGreenRideAcross the U.S., new car-sharing services Lyft and Sidecar are spreading fast, while Uber, which now manages a ride-share service as well as connects passengers with career drivers, seems destined for world domination.

    In short, it doesn’t sound like a great time to launch a new car service. Yet that’s exactly what Yamandou Alexander has done with GoGreenRide, a New York-based startup that Alexander has bootstrapped with $2.5 million of his own capital. (GoGreenRide is currently halfway through raising a new, $5 million outside round of fundraising.)

    Oddly, Alexander may have had the idea of an alternative transportation fleet first. As the French-born entrepreneur tells it, he moved to New York City at 19, bussing tables at famed Upper East Side restaurant Daniel and selling Motorola Startacs to his coworkers, many of them fellow immigrants. He eventually began exporting the handsets to Africa, creating one telecom company and selling a second for enough money in 2012 to bring to life a concept he wanted, but couldn’t afford, to pursue in 2006 – a nicer, greener, more affordable version of a black car service.

    We chatted recently about how that vision is coming together and why GoGreenRide makes sense now, even in a ride-sharing economy.

    Your business differentiates itself in two key ways. For one thing, GoGreenRide owns or leases dozens of Prius cars. You also have 40 full-time employees, rather than contractors. You’re like the anti-Uber, except that Uber is so profitable precisely because it has so little overhead. Why does your strategy make sense?

    With contractors, there’s a lack of control in presentation, quality, and customer service. We want our drivers to wear a uniform; to work on a schedule, rather than when they feel like it; to open doors; and to understand when it isn’t time to talk. We want to provide good, consistent customer service. We’re also concerned with Uber’s model from a liability standpoint.

    As for the cars, based on plans to increase our fleet to 50 cars by summer, the company should reach break-even by December. Next year, the car should see a 13 percent EBITDA…and by 2018, 26 percent EBITDA.

    Where are you turning to fund those plans?

    We’re talking with VCs. Investors on the West Coast are more interested in less capital-intensive businesses, but we’re getting good traction with East Coast people who know and live the experience of trying to find transportation in New York. We’re also going out to AngelList for additional investment, and inviting GoGreenRide members to participate.

    Uber gets a lot of flack for its surge pricing. Is your pricing flexible, too?

    Pricing does fluctuate based on traffic conditions. But you always know how much you’ll pay before you get in a car via our mobile app, which sends you detailed information about your trip, including when the driver will arrive. Our metering is calculated based on the estimated time [it will take to transport a passenger from A to B], which we know based on historical data about traffic patterns.

    As an alternative to black car service, what percent of your business comes from corporate partnerships?

    About 40 percent. We cater to both customers taking long trips, who might otherwise take a black car service to the airport, and short trips, where we’re competing more directly with taxis. Our average fare is $34, which is the same as a yellow cab, but you’re getting a much nicer experience with GoGreenRide.

    Beyond expanding your fleet, what’s on your road map, so to speak?

    The short-term growth opportunity is for us to grow our model in New York, then move into L.A. or San Francisco. We’re also starting a franchising program, including [helping launch] a GoGreenRide in China.

    We glad for Uber’s success and the acceptance it has gained in New York. But we also see a lot of people coming to us from them because of pricing, level of service, reliability, and safety.

    Connie

    , , ,

  • StrictlyVC: March 20, 2014

    Good Thursday morning, everyone!

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    Airbnb is reportedly in “advanced talks” to raise more funding at a $10 billion valuation. (That’s major league. HomeAway, the now publicly traded vacation rental site, is valued at $3.9 billion.)

    A month after Fitbit issued a recall of its fitness-tracking bracelet following complaints of blisters and rashes, the startup now faces its first class-action lawsuit, reports the WSJ. At the time of the recall, Fitbit reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission that it was aware of about 9,900 cases of consumers having a skin reaction after wearing its product.

    —–

    At Six Months, Syndicates is Maturing, Without Some Big Names

    When AngelList launched its “syndicates” program last September, AllThingsD anointed one investor, Kevin Rose, as its “million dollar man.” The reason: within a week of AngelList making it possible for backers to put their money behind one individual, Rose collected more than $1.1 million in commitments.

    Rose, a Google Ventures partner, told his 245 backers that he planned to participate in five seed investments per year on the platform. But six months later, he hasn’t invested in any. Both MG Siegler of Google Ventures and Path cofounder Dave Morin, who also quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of dollars to syndicate deals, haven’t pulled the trigger on anything, either.

    Neither Google Ventures nor Morin responded to a request for comment. But AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant has a theory based on his own investing experience. “I think some [investors] assembled syndicates but didn’t know what to do with them. I think some are scared because the platform is very transparent. [An investment] is going to be tracked. People will see the deal in detail. There’s no hiding anything, and it causes people to freeze up a bit.”

    Some have painted another picture of why Rose may not be syndicating deals on the platform. One source cites a low volume of high-quality deals, while another says that if there’s enough demand for a startup’s seed round, there’s no reason to include a syndicate.

    It seems entirely possible, too, that it’s harder for full-time VCs to justify their involvement with the platform until it’s better understood. Google Ventures, as a single LP fund, might also be struggling with whether to essentially create a separate management company around of its partners.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ravikant rejects each one of these ideas, noting that both venture firms and LPs are showing increased interest in syndicates, including Maiden Lane, a new fund backed institutional investors that will invest both directly in syndicates and in direct investment opportunities found elsewhere on AngelList’s platform.

    Ravikant further insists the quality of the deals being syndicated is “actually quite good.” He points to AltSchool, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s creating a brand-new network of schools. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Among AltSchool’s other, earlier investors is former Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, who syndicated the investment on AngelList.

    Ravikant also notes that syndicate leads can choose whether information about a deal will be made available to the general AngelList investor community or to specific backers only, suggesting that some of the program’s best startups are being funded under the radar. He highlights Ben Davenport, whose mobile messaging startup, Beluga, was acquired by Facebook and turned into Facebook Messenger. Davenport recently syndicated an investment in NYBX, a New York-based company focused on cryptocurrencies. By design, his backers are serious Bitcoin investors only, and “unless you were one of Ben’s LPs,” says Ravikant, you didn’t see it.

    I ask Hunter Walk of the venture firm Homebrew about his experience with the platform. Last September, his firm led a $2.1 million investment in the shipping startup Shyp, some of which came from a syndicate led by entrepreneur-author Tim Ferris. It created a lot of press at the time or Shyp, but in retrospect, was it worth it? Walk says it was. “Tim was able to assemble a great set of angels – some known, some new to investing – but we saw his participation as strategic.”

    AngelList’s syndicates program is “still very much in beta, so going slow,” says Ravikant. “I don’t think [the program] will be hitting its stride until next year.”

    In the meantime, he says, there’s “a lot more demand than we can run. Fundamentally, something is working.”

    300x250_Static

    New Fundings

    Base, a 4.5-year-old, Chicago-based company behind a CRM tool for sales teams, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by RRE Ventures and earlier investors Index Ventures and OCA Ventures. Other participants in the round included earlier investors Social+Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners, I2A Fund and numerous angel investors. The company has raised roughly $23 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    Choozle, a two-year-old, Denver-based media platform for marketers, has raised $1.8 million in seed funding led by Great Oaks Venture Capital. The company has raised $2.3 million altogether.

    Ezetap, a three-year-old, Bangalore-based mobile payment company focused on emerging markets (it makes a dongle that turns phones into point-of-sale terminals), has added an undisclosed amount of funding to its Series B round from American Express. Last month, the company announced it had raised $8 million for its Series B, from Helion Advisors,Social+Capital and Berggruen Holdings. That February funding had brought the company’s total funding to $11.5 million.

    Invenias, an 8.5-year-old, U.K.-based company that sells cloud software for the executive search and recruitment industry, has raised $500,000 in expansion funding from MMC Ventures, which led the company’s $1.5 million Series A round last July.

    Gem Pharmaceuticals, a 13-year-old, Birmingham, Al.-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that develops proprietary anthracycline derivatives, has raised $4.5 million in funding. The investors were current board members Diane Hendricks and Karl Leo.

    LeanData, a two-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based business data startup, has raised $5.1 million in Series A funding. Shasta Ventures led the round with participation from Felicis Ventures, Correlation Ventures and the Funders Club.

    NinePoint Medical, a 4.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based medical device firm that aims to give doctors a better picture of patients’ organs, has raised $34 million in Series B funding led by Corning, along with founding investors Third Rock Ventures and Prospect Venture Partners. The company has raised $67.6 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

    Oculeve, a two-year-old, South San Francisco-based medical device company that spun out of Stanford University to treat dry-eye condition, has raised more than $16.6 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. Oculeve had raised $7.6 million in Series A funding in October 2012 fromKleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Versant Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

    Verdasys, an 11-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based advanced data protection company, has raised $12 million from earlier backers GE Pension Trustand Fairhaven Capital, with participation from Brookline Venture Partners.

    What3words, a 10-month-old, U.K-based startup that makes it easier to pinpoint and share a location, has raised $1 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors, reports TechCrunch. The company had announced a separate, $500,000 in seed funding last November from angel investors.

    Tango, a 4.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based social networking app, has raised $280 million in Series D funding led by Chinese e-commerce and Internet giant Alibaba Group, which contributed $215 million. The company has now raised a total of $367 million in venture funding, including from DFJ, Qualcomm Ventures and former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

    —-

    New Funds

    Accel Partners, the 31-year-old venture capital and growth equity firm, has raised two new funds totaling $1.475 billion: Accel XII, a $475 million fund to concentrate primarily on early-stage investments, and Accel Growth III fund, a $1 billion pool for later-stage deals. The firm also announced that longtime managing director Jim Breyer would be scaling back his role, a process that appeared to begin around the May 2012 IPO of Facebook, which Accel famously backed early on. (I asked Breyer about it nearly two years ago, as it became clear that he was becoming more focused on his own personal investment vehicle, Breyer Capital.)

    Top Tier Capital Partners, the three-year-old, San Francisco-based investment firm has raised roughly $445 million for its first venture capital funds of funds, according to regulatory filings and a source close to Dow Jones. Top Tier Venture Capital VI and Top Tier Venture Capital VI-Bwere reportedly targeting $400 million. Top Tier spun out of Paul Capital, which is winding down its business after a planned sale fell through.

    —–

    IPOs

    Alder BioPharmaceuticals, a 12-year-old, Bothell, Wa.-based biotech that develops antibodies to treat migraines and arthritis, filed yesterday with the SEC to raise up to $115 million in an IPO. Its biggest shareholders include Sevin Rosen, which owns 23.7 percent of the company; Novo A/S, which owns 12.1 percent; H.I.G. Venture Partners, which owns 11.8; Delphi Ventures, which owns 11.4 percent; and TPG Biotechnology Partners II, which also owns 11.4.

    Versartis, a 5.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based startup working on treatments for growth hormone deficiency, boosted the expected size of the IPO it’s planning for Friday by nearly 50 percent. Its biggest shareholders are New Leaf Venture Partners, which owns a 24.4 percent stake; Index Ventures, which owns 22.4 percent; Advent Life Sciences; which owns 16.3 percent; Aisling Capital, which owns 11.9 percent; and Sofinnova Ventures, which owns 6.8 percent.

    —–

    Exits

    GPS Global, a 6.5-year-old, Kfar Saba, Israel-based research, development, and services firm, has been acquired by SecureAlert, a Sandy, Ut.-based maker of digital monitoring software. No terms were disclosed.

    Knotice, an 11-year-old, Akron, Oh.-based digital marketing company, has been acquired by IgnitionOne, a cloud-based digital marketing technology company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Knotice had raised $500,000 from the Cleveland-based venture development organization JumpStart.

    TagMan, a six-year-old, London-based tag management and marketing data platform, has been acquired by Ensighten, a 4.5-year-old, Cupertino, Ca.-based rival. Terms were not disclosed. TagMan had raised $13.5 million from investors, including Greycroft Partners, iNovia Capital, and Cambridge Business Angels. Ensighten has raised $55.5 million from investors, including Insight Venture Partners, Volition Capital, LeadEdge Capital, the Halo Fund, and Floodgate.

    Webedia, a 1.5-year-old Paris-based digital publishing company, has been acquired by Diwanee, a Dubai-based digital media company, for undisclosed terms. The outlet Wamda has much more.

    —–

    People

    Zulily CEO Darrell Cavens is officially a billionaire, observes Bloomberg. Shares of the retailer, which went public in November, closed at $62 in New York yesterday; Cavens’ 17 percent stake in the business is right now valued at roughly $1.4 billion.

    Inside Philanthropy doesn’t like to name names, but it just published a list of the 12 most generous tech leaders, and 6 of the the least generous, based on the size of their charitable gifts relative to their fortune.

    Andy Hunt has been promoted from principal to partner at Highland Capital Partners. Hunt cofounded Warby Parker; he also spent several years as an investment banker after graduating from Wharton.

    Y Combinator alums Justin Kan and Aaron Harris are Y Combinator’s newest partners, according to TechCrunch. More here.

    Yesterday, in conversation with interviewer Charlie Rose at the TED conference, Google‘s Larry Page reportedly said of the U.S. government, which hasn’t been very transparent with Google: “I don’t think we can have a democracy if we have to protect you and our users from stuff that we’ve never had a conversation about.” (Here’s more of the interview, if you’re interested.)

    Billionaire Alisher Usmanov is dumping U.S. tech companies for China-based tech investments. “Chinese companies account for about 70 percent to 80 percent of the portfolio of our foreign Internet investments,” the head of Usmanov’s asset-management company tells Bloomberg. “Most of the investments are in “Alibaba, JD.com and some other companies with great potential,” he says.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Lab IX, the months-old accelerator business of hardware giant Flextronics, is looking for an associate. The job is in San Jose, Ca.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    SecondMarket hopes to open up its private bitcoin investment fund to ordinary investors as soon as the fourth quarter, potentially beating a rival offering by the Winklevoss twins, who’ve applied to create an exchange-traded fund specializing in bitcoin. The WSJ has more here.

    In November, news leaked that Twitter had started work on encrypting direct messages in order to prevent unauthorized snooping by hackers or the state. As The Verge now reports, that project was dropped earlier this year without explanation — not even to the employees who were working on it.

    —–

    Detours

    A floating coworking space that is rusty, drafty, encrusted with birds’ nests, and laden with fish carcasses is luring some of the brightest minds in the Bay Area, says 7×7.

    A weatherman gets punked.

    Spiderman’s Biggest. Battle. Yet. Is Coming. This Summer. (Here’s the trailer.)

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Two words: banana holder.

    Two more words: Body Dryer.

    [Takes bow.]

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

  • At Six Months, Syndicates is Maturing, Without Some Big Names

    AngelList.logoWhen AngelList launched its “syndicates” program last September, AllThingsD anointed one investor, Kevin Rose, as its “million dollar man.” The reason: within a week of AngelList making it possible for backers to put their money behind one individual, Rose collected more than $1.1 million in commitments.

    Rose, a Google Ventures partner, told his 245 backers that he planned to participate in five seed investments per year on the platform. But six months later, he hasn’t invested in any. Both MG Siegler of Google Ventures and Path cofounder Dave Morin, who also quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of dollars to syndicate deals, haven’t pulled the trigger on anything, either.

    Neither Google Ventures nor Morin responded to a request for comment. But AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant has a theory based on his own investing experience. “I think some [investors] assembled syndicates but didn’t know what to do with them. I think some are scared because the platform is very transparent. [An investment] is going to be tracked. People will see the deal in detail. There’s no hiding anything, and it causes people to freeze up a bit.”

    Some have painted another picture of why Rose may not be syndicating deals on the platform. One source cites a low volume of high-quality deals, while another says that if there’s enough demand for a startup’s seed round, there’s no reason to include a syndicate.

    It seems entirely possible, too, that it’s harder for full-time VCs to justify their involvement with the platform until it’s better understood. Google Ventures, as a single LP fund, might also be struggling with whether to essentially create a separate management company around one of its partners.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ravikant rejects each one of these ideas, noting that both venture firms and LPs are showing increased interest in syndicates, including Maiden Lane, a new fund backed institutional investors that will invest both directly in syndicates and in direct investment opportunities found elsewhere on AngelList’s platform.

    Ravikant further insists the quality of the deals being syndicated is “actually quite good.” He points to AltSchool, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s creating a brand-new network of schools. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Among AltSchool’s other, earlier investors is former Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, who syndicated the investment on AngelList.

    Ravikant also notes that syndicate leads can choose whether information about a deal will be made available to the general AngelList investor community or to specific backers only, suggesting that some of the program’s best startups are being funded under the radar. He highlights Ben Davenport, whose mobile messaging startup, Beluga, was acquired by Facebook and turned into Facebook Messenger. Davenport recently syndicated an investment in NYBX, a New York-based company focused on cryptocurrencies. By design, his backers are serious Bitcoin investors only, and “unless you were one of Ben’s LPs,” says Ravikant, you didn’t see it.

    I ask Hunter Walk of the venture firm Homebrew about his experience with the platform. Last September, his firm led a $2.1 million investment in the shipping startup Shyp, some of which came from a syndicate led by entrepreneur-author Tim Ferriss. It created a lot of press at the time for Shyp, but in retrospect, was it worth it? Walk says it was. “Tim was able to assemble a great set of angels – some known, some new to investing – but we saw his participation as strategic.”

    AngelList’s syndicates program is “still very much in beta, so going slow,” says Ravikant. “I don’t think [the program] will be hitting its stride until next year.”

    In the meantime, he says, there’s “a lot more demand than we can run. Fundamentally, something is working.”

    Connie

    ,

  • StrictlyVC: March 19, 2014

    Good Wednesday morning! We know some of you didn’t receive yesterday’s email; we’re not sure why but here’s a link with our apologies in case you missed it.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    The hedge fund Fortress Investment Group, along with venture firmsBenchmark and Ribbit Capital, are buying a stake in Pantera Bitcoin Partners, a hedge fund that buys and sells virtual currencies. San Francisco-based Pantera Capital was founded in 2003 by Tiger Management veteran Dan Morehead, who tells Dealbook that in recent months, his 16-person firm has shifted its attention entirely to work on investments in the virtual currency world.

    —–

    Google Glass Meets Healthcare with Augmedix

    It’s early days for Google Glass, and an almost absurd minefield of challenges lie ahead of it. But that’s not stopping a small number of startups from springing up around healthcare-related applications that can arguably cut costs, provide doctors more time with patients, and improve health outcomes.

    Augmedix — a 20-month-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s announcing this morning that it has raised $3.2 million led by DCM and Emergence Capital Partners — calls itself the “first and largest Google Glass startup” focused on healthcare. Its complicated task put simply: It beams electronic health record information to doctors while they’re meeting with patients, so doctors can, say, query someone’s white blood cell counts in real-time without having to traipse back to their computers in the middle of that patient’s visit or in between patient visits.

    Whether or not Augmedix is the biggest company focused on turning Glass into a physician’s tool “by every metric,” as its CEO, Ian Shakil tell me, its claims can’t be far off. According to the research firm Datafox, only a handful of startups are dabbling in any kind of Glass-related healthcare applications at the moment, partly because there’s still too much uncertainty about Glass’s widespread uptake, and largely because Glass isn’t protected under federal information privacy rules, meaning that each patient has to give his or her written consent – an effective but inelegant workaround.

    So why is Augmedix treading where few startups are ready to go yet? Shakil, who cofounded Augmedix a few weeks after graduating from Stanford Business School (which is also where he met his cofounders), talked with me about it the other day.

    You’re announcing new funding but you closed it in August. Why share the news now?

    We just wanted to be out of the media’s eye and focus on execution and on hitting more milestones and making more progress before talking to media.

    What sorts of milestones can you share? How many doctors are using Augmedix?

    We’re selling to large groups of doctors, rather than doctor to doctor, and so far we have several health systems and doctors groups [as customers] and we’re generating revenue. As healthcare continues to consolidate, our job becomes easier because there are fewer people to sell to. Enterprise sales is also the bread and butter of Emergence Capital, so it’s great to have them [as an investor].

    How do you address privacy concerns?

    Patients don’t walk in the door to see their doctor wearing Google Glass. They’re handed a laminated FAQ and are educated about [the process] and can opt out of having the doctor wear it.

    We’ve also created an entirely separate [from Google] cloud-based service that’s on pipes that we control, and we’ve signed business associate agreements with customers, saying, “We’re doing all the [protected health care information] just like other electronic healthcare companies.” We’ve hardened the device in lots of ways, too, such that it’s even more secure than a smart phone in a health care environment.

    As a third-party developer, you’re always at the mercy of the platform. How do you mitigate that risk?

    I don’t think the risk is as great as some people think. Also, though our materials are all about Google Glass, we’re hardware agnostic; [our tech] also runs on [the Android-based] Vuzix M100. And there are many other smart glass technologies out there, some operating in stealth mode; it’s becoming a competitive space.

    I think Glass is the best right now and that it has the best software environment and hardware, so it’s our go-to. But over the long run, I think we’ll be protected no matter what happens.

    You have 36 employees working on creating this technology and getting it into physician offices. Is it safe to say you’ll be raising money again soon?

    Yes, actually, we’ll look to raise another round, bigger than the amount we’ve raised thus far, later this year.

    300x250_Static

    New Fundings

    Aquantia, a 10-year-old, Milpitas, Ca.-based high-speed Ethernet connectivity solution for data centers, mobile and enterprise infrastructure, has raised $16 million in Series G financing led by the programmatic integrated circuit maker Xilinx. The company has garnered roughly $160 million altogether, from investors that include New Enterprise Associates, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and Rusnano.

    Blue River Technology, a three-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based robotics company that’s using computer vision techniques in agriculture (including to identify and kill unwanted weeds), has raised $10 million in Series A-1 funding led by Data Collective, with participation fromInnovation Endeavors and return backer Khosla Ventures. The company has now raised $13.4 million altogether.

    Cloud4Wi, a year-old, San Francisco-based Wi-Fi services company that spun out of WiTech, an Italian company offering managed solutions and services in the telco market, has raised $4 million in Series A funding from the Italian venture firm United Ventures.

    Cobrain, a year-old, Bethesda, Md.-based “cross-merchant personalization engine” that aims to present shoppers with the goods of various retailers at once, has raised $3 million in seed funding from a group of unnamed angel investors. Cobrain was founded by CareerBuilder.com founder Rob McGovern.

    CorTechs Labs, a 13-year-old, San Diego-based company that develops and markets brain imaging software designed to diagnose a variety of brain disorders, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding from Dragasac, a company incorporated in the Isle of Man.

    Glo, an 8.5-year-old, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based LED product developer, has raised $30 million in Series D funding, led by an unnamed new investor. Other participants in the round included earlier investors Wellington Partners, Teknoinvest, Nano Future Invest, Energy Future Invest, Foundation Asset Management, and others. Glo, spun out of Lund University in Sweden, has raised roughly $115 million to date.

    Heyo, a three-year-old, Blacksburg, Va.-based social marketing platform designed to help small businesses, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from Valleys’ Ventures, a Radford, Va., investment firm.

    Integrated DNA Technologies, a 27-year-old, Coralville, In.-based company that calls itself the world’s largest manufacturer of custom nucleic acid products, has raised a slug of funding from Summit Partners. No terms were disclosed, but the company’s founder, Joseph Walder, remains its majority shareholder.

    Nitrous.IO, a 1.5-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based cloud-based developer platform, has raised $6.65 million in Series A funding. Earlier investor Bessemer Venture Partners led the round with participation from investors that included 500 Startups, Crunchfund, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Golden Gate Ventures. Nitrous.IO has raised a $1 million seed round last April.

    Parchment, an 11-year-old, Scottsdale, Az.-based education credentials technology company, has raised $10 million in fresh funding led by The Raine Group. Earlier investors, including Novak Biddle Venture Partners, Salmon River Capital, GSV Capital and ICG Holdings, also participated. The company has raised $45 million altogether.

    Percolate, a three-year-old, New York-based a startup that helps brands figure out what content to create and share on social neworks, has raised $24 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital. Earlier investors GGV Capital, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, and ad agency WPP also participated in the new funding. The company has raised $34.5 million to date.

    Platfora, a three-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based that promises to “mask the complexity of Hadoop,” making it easy for enterprises to understand facts in their business across events, actions, behaviors and times, has raised $38 million led by Tenaya Capital. Citi Ventures, Cisco Systems and Allegis Capital, also participated in the round, alongside earlier investors Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and In-Q-Tel. The company has raised $65 million to date.

    RadPad, a 14-month-old, L.A.-based apartment rental search app, has raised $1 million in financing, including from Deep Fork Capital and Post Investments. The funding brings RadPad’s total funding to $2 million, according to Crunchbase.

    Reonomy, a year-old, New York-based commercial real estate technology company that provides investors and lenders with data and analytics, has raised $3.7 million in Series A funding led by SoftBank Capital. Earlier investors Resolute Ventures, High Peaks Venture Partners, KEC Ventures, and FinTech Collective also participated in the round. The company has raised roughly $4.8 million to date.

    Simply Measured, a four-year-old, Seattle-based company whose software helps its customers analyze conversations and marketing efforts across major social media platforms, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Trinity Ventures with earlier investors Bessemer Venture Partners and MHS Capital participating. The company has raised $28.8 million altogether.

    SummitIG, an 18-month-old, Dulles, Va.-based company building a new 170-mile dark fiber route in Virginia, has raised a “large term loan” of unspecified size ORIX Ventures and an equity investment (whose size wasn’t disclosed either) from earlier investor Columbia Capital.

    Wedpics, a three-year-old, Raleigh, N.C.-based online and mobile platform that encourages wedding participants to share photos, has raised $1 .5 million in Series A financing led by IDEA Fund Partners. Other participants in the round included Great Oaks Venture Capital, the angel group TAP, and numerous other individual investors.

    —–

    New Funds

    Australian technology investor and former Microsoft executive Daniel Petre is preparing to launch a $50 million Australia-focused technology investment fund, reports Business Review Weekly. Petre is co-founding the fund with Craig Blair, CEO of Zeebox Australia and a former managing director of Expedia Australia. According to the outlet, the duo plan to invest between $2 million and $5 million in each startup they back.

    Ysios Capital, a six-year-old, Barcelona-based venture capital firm, is looking to raise a new, 100 million Euro fund to back early-stage life sciences companies, the firm says in a release. The fund will target companies in Europe and North America and will be the firm’s second vehicle. Its first, the 69 million Euro Ysios BioFund I, was launched in 2008 and has already distributed capital to its investors in each of the last three years, says the firm.

    —–

    IPOs

    Let the games begin. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will hold the kickoff meeting for its planned U.S. initial public offering on March 25, setting in motion the most high-profile listing since Facebook’s offering nearly two years ago, sources told Reuters yesterday. (The WSJ is reporting that the NYSE is the front-runner right now.)

    —–

    Exits

    It’s a bit premature to include this in “exits,” but Kior, a publicly traded operator of the first U.S. commercial-scale cellulosic biofuel plant, dropped 39 cents to 65 cents per share at the market close yesterday, after telling regulators it has serious doubts about staying in business. The company, which went public in June 2011 (its shares priced at $15 a piece), just raised $100 million in October from Khosla Ventures and Gates Ventures. Bloomberg has much more here.

    AdMobius, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based mobile ad startup, has been acquired by Lotame, an independent data management platform, for undisclosed terms. AdMobius had raised $5 million in the fall of 2012 fromOpus Capital and Storm Ventures. Still-private Lotame has raised roughly $50 million over its 7-year history, including from Battery Ventures,Betaworks, Emergence Capital Partners, Hillcrest Management,TrueBridge Capital Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and Sozo Ventures.

    Cameo, a video-making app that launched last fall, has been acquired byIAC, with its 14 employees headed over the IAC subsidiary Vimeo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the company’s CEO tells Re/code Vimeo will continue running Cameo as a standalone app. If Cameo raised outside funding, it never reported it.

    Cenzic, a 14-year-old, Campbell, Ca.based company that makes application security testing technologies, has been acquired by 19-year-old, Chicago-based Trustwave, a broader security testing platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cenzic had raised $15 million in equity, according to Crunchbase, including from Mohr Davidow Ventures,Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, JK&B Capital and Advanced Technology Ventures.

    Vega-Chi, a five-year-old, London-based bond trading platform, has been acquired by the institutional trading network Liquidnet for undisclosed terms. Vega-Chi had raised $3.2 million from Octopus Investments in 2011.

    —–

    People

    Sam Altman, the newly appointed head of Y Combinator, talks, a lot, notes Re/code in new profile of the 28-year-old. Writes reporter Liz Gannes: “If you ask anyone who knows Altman, from former employees to investors to mentors to mentees to friends, they’ll mention his perpetual availability — the way he seems to reach out every day, multiple times per day, on the phone or email or text or instant messenger. Altman estimates he keeps in close touch with ‘low hundreds’ of people on a daily basis.”

    Venture capitalist John Doerr has cashed out more off his Googleholdings. On Monday, while you were eating Irish soda bread, he was unloading 3,497 shares on the open market for a total haul of $4.2 million. In late February, Doerr, who reportedly now directly owns just 2,522 shares in the company (value: approximately $3 million), sold 11,774 shares of the stock for a total value of $14.2 million. He also sold roughly $4 million worth of shares in mid-December.

    Marc Whitten, chief product officer of Microsoft‘s Xbox division, is leaving to become the chief product officer of the 12-year-old, wireless audio company Sonos. Geekwire looks at what the move means.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Facebook is looking for a director of global mobile partnerships at its Menlo Park, Ca., headquarters.

    —–

    Data

    Inspired by investor Hunter Walk’s post, “New Grads: Midstage Startups Are Your Best First Job in Tech,” Datafox has compiled a list of 45 companies that are Series B and C funded, less than 10 years old, and experiencing what the research firm calls “significant traction.” You can check out its findings here.

    How hot are investors on the Internet of Things ecosystem? CB Insights says financings in related startups grew each successive quarter of last year, hitting an eight-quarter high in the fourth quarter. Altogether, VCs plowed $1.1 billion into 153 deals, according to the firm.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Fund of funds Paul Capital is winding down its portfolio and shuttering all but its San Francisco office after a planned sale to Hamilton Lane collapsed. As much as $300 million of open commitments will be returned to investors, sources tell the WSJ.

    Google is in hot water for scanning millions of students’ email messages and allegedly building “surreptitious” profiles to target advertising at them.

    —–

    Detours

    More than a dozen neurotoxins cause behavioral and cognitive problems. Eek. Here they are.

    Night-vision contact lenses might be a thing soon.

    What the world eats for breakfast.

    GQ meets the people at Buzzfeed who curate all those super adorable pet slideshows you occasionally click through. (We won’t tell anyone.)

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Woolpower sweaters. Good enough for the Swedish army.

    We also love Oliver Gal, for affordable wall art that won’t remind you of your (fun but gross) college apartment.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

     

    Connie

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  • Google Glass Meets Healthcare in Augmedix

    Ian ShakilIt’s early days for Google Glass, and an almost absurd minefield of challenges lie ahead of it. But that’s not stopping a small number of startups from springing up around healthcare-related applications that can arguably cut costs, provide doctors more time with patients, and improve health outcomes.

    Augmedix — a 20-month-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s announcing this morning that it has raised $3.2 million led by DCM and Emergence Capital Partners — calls itself the “first and largest Google Glass startup” focused on healthcare. Its complicated task put simply: It beams electronic health record information to doctors while they’re meeting with patients, so doctors can, say, query someone’s white blood cell counts in real-time without having to traipse back to their computers in the middle of that patient’s visit or in between patient visits.

    Whether or not Augmedix is the biggest company focused on turning Glass into a physician’s tool “by every metric,” as its CEO, Ian Shakil tell me, its claims can’t be far off. According to the research firm Datafox, only a handful of startups are dabbling in any kind of Glass-related healthcare applications at the moment, partly because there’s still too much uncertainty about Glass’s widespread uptake, and largely because Glass isn’t protected under federal information privacy rules, meaning that each patient has to give his or her written consent – an effective but inelegant workaround.

    So why is Augmedix treading where few startups are ready to go yet? Shakil, who cofounded Augmedix a few weeks after graduating from Stanford Business School (which is also where he met his cofounders), talked with me about it the other day.

    You’re announcing new funding but you closed it in August. Why share the news now?

    We just wanted to be out of the media’s eye and focus on execution and on hitting more milestones and making more progress before talking to media.

    What sorts of milestones can you share? How many doctors are using Augmedix?

    We’re selling to large groups of doctors, rather than doctor to doctor, and so far we have several health systems and doctors groups [as customers] and we’re generating revenue. As healthcare continues to consolidate, our job becomes easier because there are fewer people to sell to. Enterprise sales is also the bread and butter of Emergence Capital, so it’s great to have them [as an investor].

    How do you address privacy concerns?

    Patients don’t walk in the door to see their doctor wearing Google Glass. They’re handed a laminated FAQ and are educated about [the process] and can opt out of having the doctor wear it.

    We’ve also created an entirely separate [from Google] cloud-based service that’s on pipes that we control, and we’ve signed business associate agreements with customers, saying, “We’re doing all the [protected health care information] just like other electronic healthcare companies.” We’ve hardened the device in lots of ways, too, such that it’s even more secure than a smart phone in a health care environment.

    As a third-party developer, you’re always at the mercy of the platform. How do you mitigate that risk?

    I don’t think the risk is as great as some people think. Also, though our materials are all about Google Glass, we’re hardware agnostic; [our tech] also runs on [the Android-based] Vuzix M100. And there are many other smart glass technologies out there, some operating in stealth mode; it’s becoming a competitive space.

    I think Glass is the best right now and that it has the best software environment and hardware, so it’s our go-to. But over the long run, I think we’ll be protected no matter what happens.

    You have 36 employees working on creating this technology and getting it into physician offices. Is it safe to say you’ll be raising money again soon?

    Yes, actually, we’ll look to raise another round, bigger than the amount we’ve raised thus far, later this year.

    Connie

    , , , ,

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