Turn back the clock to mid-April, 2011. The IRS deadline is approaching fast, and the founders of a Mountain View, CA-based startup called Task.fm are scrambling to finish their personal tax returns. “In true startup fashion, we did it at the last minute, and we had a couple of questions we couldn’t answer,” says co-founder … Continue reading “Just In Time for Tax Day, Task.fm Offers Instant Expertise”
Tag: Y Combinator
Shoptiques Garners New Funding
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=d460d741-229b-42de-a360-9013a68758f6&Preview=1 Date 3/22/2012 Company Name Shoptiques Mailing Address 36 East 12th Street 2nd Floor New York, NY 10003 Company Description Shoptiques.com brings boutique shopping online. On Shoptiques.com, you will experience personalized shopping with the most unique and fashion-forward inventory from the best local boutiques. This means no more searching through hundreds of … Continue reading “Shoptiques Garners New Funding”
Y Combo-Backed HBS Startup Shoptiques Launches E-Commerce Site
Olga Vidisheva started Shoptiques during her second year at Harvard Business School to give shoppers online access to the curated inventory from independent boutiques around the world. She’s since generated some pretty serious interest—12,000 people on the private beta site’s wait list, to be exact. The site has officially opened up to the public today, … Continue reading “Y Combo-Backed HBS Startup Shoptiques Launches E-Commerce Site”
500Friends Obtains $4,500,000 Series A Funding
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=483290b4-3486-4086-b60e-331ef1aa6b62&Preview=1 Date 3/16/2012 Company Name 500Friends Mailing Address 115 Sansome Street 15th Floor San Francisco, CA 94104 Company Description 500Friends Inc. is a developer of a social loyalty and rewards platform for retailers. Website http://www.500friends.com Transaction Type Venture Equity Transaction Amount $4,500,000 Transaction Round Series A Proceeds Purposes Proceeds purposes were not … Continue reading “500Friends Obtains $4,500,000 Series A Funding”
HAXLR8R Opens a China-Based Accelerator for Hardware Startups
Over the last week, 10 lucky companies have been getting the calls from HAXLR8R: they’ve been admitted to the inaugural session of the startup world’s newest venture incubator. Following the popular model pioneered by TechStars and Y Combinator, HAXLR8R will provide teams with a stipend of $6,000 per founder and about three months of mentorship, … Continue reading “HAXLR8R Opens a China-Based Accelerator for Hardware Startups”
Ridejoy Lands $1,300,000 Seed Financing Round
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=809aec6c-b1de-41b6-bf5d-1bf506793bf4&Preview=1 Date 2/7/2012 Company Name Ridejoy Mailing Address Undisclosed San Francisco, CA 94123 Company Description Ridejoy is a community-driven marketplace for sharing rides. We’re making it easy to share rides with friendly people. If you’re going on a trip, you can list extra seat space in your car, and if you need … Continue reading “Ridejoy Lands $1,300,000 Seed Financing Round”
After Demo Day: The Debrief from Y Combinator Startup FutureAdvisor
The explosion in incubators for early stage tech companies has spawned a familiar startup storyline: A team of bright founders hits on a promising idea, builds a prototype, and applies to one of the big-name programs. After they get accepted (or sometimes even if they don’t), it’s off to the races for a few intense … Continue reading “After Demo Day: The Debrief from Y Combinator Startup FutureAdvisor”
Georgia Startups Have New York on Their Minds at Flashpoint Demo Day
A flotilla of fifteen startups from Atlanta presented their ideas in New York on Wednesday for a demo day at the offices of Union Square Ventures. Merrick Furst, director of the Flashpoint accelerator at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the program helps entrepreneurs develop their concepts beyond their startup phase. “They are trying to … Continue reading “Georgia Startups Have New York on Their Minds at Flashpoint Demo Day”
Flotype Lands $1,400,000 Seed Funding Round
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=c60652cf-5285-47b2-9020-7ab38ceae362&Preview=1 Date 1/7/2012 Company Name Flotype Mailing Address 2020 Milvia St Berkeley, CA 94709 Company Description Flotype Inc. is a venture-backed company building a suite of enterprise technology for real-time messaging. Flotype takes a unique approach by building developer-friendly technologies focused on ease-of-use and simplicity, while still exceeding enterprise-grade performance expectations. Website … Continue reading “Flotype Lands $1,400,000 Seed Funding Round”
Tutorspree Reveals Sequoia Capital Led Its Seed Round
New York-based startup Tutorspree revealed that its $1 million seed round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, and individual investors. Tutorspree is an online platform that lets tutors across the country post profiles to offer their expertise and receive reviews from the students they work … Continue reading “Tutorspree Reveals Sequoia Capital Led Its Seed Round”
Boston: Cradle of Liberty and Data Startups
I didn’t know the full extent to which the Boston area has a thriving data and analytics startup scene. I had always associated the city primarily with biotech innovation. My company, Chart.io, provides hosted business dashboards to help companies visualize their database data. We’re based out in San Francisco (we were part of the 2010 … Continue reading “Boston: Cradle of Liberty and Data Startups”
Scientists Morph Into Entrepreneurs Through NSF I-Corps Program
In a grand test of whether the Silicon Valley startup accelerator model can help university scientists get promising new technologies to market faster, 21 teams hand-picked for the National Science Foundation’s new Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program converged on the Stanford University campus last week. The goal: to review the progress they’d made during an eight-week … Continue reading “Scientists Morph Into Entrepreneurs Through NSF I-Corps Program”
Proofpoint, GreenVolts, Prezi: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers
Time for our irregular, data-driven roundup of recent deals news from around San Francisco Bay. From biggest to smallest: $50 million—The amount that Sunnyvale, CA-based Proofpoint hopes to raise in an upcoming initial public offering, according to S-1 registration papers filed with the SEC yesterday. The cloud security company’s leading venture investors include Mohr Davidow … Continue reading “Proofpoint, GreenVolts, Prezi: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers”
Hipmunk Homecoming: CEO Adam Goldstein Talks Travel Site Usability
Into the lair of beasts strode Adam Goldstein. Armed only with his wits and a mean set of slides, he descended on the Boston area on a warm, early winter day. He was no stranger to the premises. Goldstein had been an MIT undergrad before moving to San Francisco to participate in the Y Combinator … Continue reading “Hipmunk Homecoming: CEO Adam Goldstein Talks Travel Site Usability”
PBS NewsHour Features Xconomy in Report on Startup Accelerators
In a segment featured Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour, correspondent Hari Sreenivasan brings an outsider’s curiosity to the strange, wonderful world of startup accelerators. The eight-minute report features Sreenivasan’s interviews with entrepreneurs and mentors at TechStars, AngelPad, and Y Combinator—archetypes of the venture incubator wave (or is it a bubble?) that we’ve been chronicling … Continue reading “PBS NewsHour Features Xconomy in Report on Startup Accelerators”
Vidyard Receives $1,650,000 New Funding
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=5e924e42-a6ec-42e7-9510-fd2795a4310e&Preview=1 Date 11/18/2011 Company Name Vidyard Mailing Address 130 Descanso Dr San Jose, CA 95134 Company Description Video has come a very long way in a few short years. Print, Television and Radio Media have been converging on the web since it’s very inception. Web-video has become a piece of everyone’s life, … Continue reading “Vidyard Receives $1,650,000 New Funding”
Hot Wiring Entrepreneurship: An Experiment in Detroit
It’s an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. There are no shortage of problems to solve, ever-lowering barriers to entry, and near-ubiquitous access to low/no-cost technologies, which makes damn near anything possible. I adore working side-by-side with those who also see the world as an experience in which to participate rather than just consume. I … Continue reading “Hot Wiring Entrepreneurship: An Experiment in Detroit”
MinoMonsters Secures $1,000,000 New Funding
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=c9d4c98d-9bf0-452d-9cd7-ce6caba11996&Preview=1 Date 11/10/2011 Company Name MinoMonsters Mailing Address Undisclosed San Francisco, CA 94105 Company Description The company, which recently opened offices in San Francisco, is the maker of MinoMonsters, a monster battle and trading game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Website http://www.minomonsters.com Transaction Type Venture Equity Transaction Amount $1,000,000 Transaction Round … Continue reading “MinoMonsters Secures $1,000,000 New Funding”
Comprehend Systems Garners $1,200,000 Seed Round
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=ae2a7adc-1a01-4133-83ca-1777f3d65c61&Preview=1 Date 11/8/2011 Company Name Comprehend Systems Mailing Address 235 Alma Street Palo Alto, CA 94301 Company Description Our mission is to create tools that help understand, explore, and analyze data across multiple, disparate datasources. Our first product, Comprehend Clinical, ultimately improves and accelerates clinical trials to help bring new, safer treatments … Continue reading “Comprehend Systems Garners $1,200,000 Seed Round”
TechStars Honchos David Cohen & Andy Sack: The Post-Demo Day Download
If you want a glimpse at the leading edge of tech startups, TechStars Demo Day is a fine place to go prospecting. In just 60 minutes of total pitch time, you’ve got a damn good idea of the industries, customers, ideas, and technologies that top entrepreneurs and investors think are ripe for innovation. And the … Continue reading “TechStars Honchos David Cohen & Andy Sack: The Post-Demo Day Download”
Facebook Should Have Stayed in Boston, and Other Quotable Moments from Y Combinator’s Startup School
For startup people, the 714 seats inside Dinkelspiel Auditorium at Stanford University were the hottest ones in the country on Saturday. That was the day of Startup School, the invitation-only event produced by Stanford’s student entrepreneur group BASES and Mountain View, CA-based venture incubator Y Combinator. For the seventh year in a row, a cast … Continue reading “Facebook Should Have Stayed in Boston, and Other Quotable Moments from Y Combinator’s Startup School”
Bizdom U: Transforming Detroit’s Brain Economy
Bizdom U, the Detroit incubator backed by Dan Gilbert, will now be nurturing even more local entrepreneurs thanks to a change in its business model. Starting with the fall session, which began on October 17, Bizdom switched to a model similar to that of TechStars or Y Combinator: After undergoing a rigorous screening, 30 startups … Continue reading “Bizdom U: Transforming Detroit’s Brain Economy”
Hyperink Obtains $1,200,000 New Funding
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=49897040-ace3-4b0f-b652-059c866d3dd7&Preview=1 Date 10/27/2011 Company Name Hyperink Mailing Address 333 Bryant Street San Francisco, CA 94107 Company Description Our mission is to unlock and share that knowledge by working directly with domain experts to publish beautiful, high-quality eBooks. Website http://www.hyperink.com Transaction Type Venture Equity Transaction Amount $1,200,000 Transaction Round Undisclosed Proceeds Purposes Proceeds … Continue reading “Hyperink Obtains $1,200,000 New Funding”
Five Things I Learned at Startup School
Y Combinator has a brilliant franchise. It is called Startup School. This year it is at Stanford University on October 29 and co-hosted with BASES, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. Some of Silicon Valley’s elite used to poo-poo Startup School as being too basic. I have always been in the camp supporting it. … Continue reading “Five Things I Learned at Startup School”
Solve Media, Backed by First Round Capital and AOL, Uses Online Ads to Tell People and Spambots Apart
New York’s Solve Media, funded by AOL Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, First Round Capital, and others, is putting Web advertising in hard-to-miss places. The two-year-old startup combines ads with the verification systems users must respond to when joining websites or requesting lost passwords. Solve Media’s CEO and co-founder Ari Jacoby says the idea is to … Continue reading “Solve Media, Backed by First Round Capital and AOL, Uses Online Ads to Tell People and Spambots Apart”
Blueprint Health, New Incubator in NYC, Looks to Nurture Health IT Startups
When Brad Weinberg started up his first company, ShapeUp, in 2006, incubator programs like TechStars and Y Combinator were barely off the ground. So Weinberg and his colleagues were left pretty much on their own to develop their software platform, which combines social networking, gaming, and financial incentives to promote wellness. The company has done … Continue reading “Blueprint Health, New Incubator in NYC, Looks to Nurture Health IT Startups”
Can Crowdsourcing Make a Dent in Unemployment? Ask MobileWorks
Jobs are the single biggest political issue of the day in the U.S., and rightly so. As of August, the official unemployment rate in the United States stood at 9.1 percent. That was down one point from the October 2009 peak of 10.1 percent, but still higher than at any time since the 1930s, with … Continue reading “Can Crowdsourcing Make a Dent in Unemployment? Ask MobileWorks”
TechStars Raises $24M More, Offers Each Startup $100K; Founder David Cohen Talks “Quality Over Quantity”
The early-stage tech accelerator business just got even more competitive. Boulder, CO-based TechStars, which runs seed-stage mentorship programs for startups in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York, announced today it has raised a new $24 million fund from a long list of investors that includes Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventures, DFJ Mercury, SoftBank Capital, … Continue reading “TechStars Raises $24M More, Offers Each Startup $100K; Founder David Cohen Talks “Quality Over Quantity””
Parse Secures $1,100,000 New Financing
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=a196918e-7773-4de8-85a6-ab6d43b8433c&Preview=1 Date 9/12/2011 Company Name Parse Mailing Address 1 Mongtomery St. 28th Floor San Francisco, CA 94104 Company Description Our vision is a world where mobile developers never have to develop, deploy, or maintain their own server-side stack. Our simple, but powerful native mobile SDKs provide all the server-side functionality developers need … Continue reading “Parse Secures $1,100,000 New Financing”
E La Carte Orders Up $4M More for Restaurant Tech
Boston-to-Silicon Valley transplant E la Carte has raised $4 million in new funding, according to a report in TechCrunch. The round was led by Lightbank. The startup previously raised more than $1 million in angel capital from investors including John Landry, Roy Rodenstein, Dave Balter, Dave McClure, Joshua Schachter, and Paul Buchheit. E la Carte, … Continue reading “E La Carte Orders Up $4M More for Restaurant Tech”
Apple, Y Combinator, Flite: The 1-Minute Version of Last Week’s Bay Area BizTech News
The earthquakes and storms stayed on the opposite coast last week, leaving the Bay Area to focus on what it does best—churning out new ideas and new startups. To wit: —Y Combinator, the famed venture incubator in Mountain View, CA, held its semi-annual Demo Day. (Demo Days, to be precise, since the 63 startups had … Continue reading “Apple, Y Combinator, Flite: The 1-Minute Version of Last Week’s Bay Area BizTech News”
The Attractions of a Boutique Startup Accelerator: Introducing Voivoda Labs
Over the past few years there has been a revival in the technology sector, led by the expansion of the mobile, social, and Internet marketplaces. With this expansion, the number of entrepreneurs attempting to create a startup to capture their share of the market has also skyrocketed. These entrepreneurs face the age-old dilemma of how … Continue reading “The Attractions of a Boutique Startup Accelerator: Introducing Voivoda Labs”
Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 Demo Day: The Definitive Debrief, Part 2
The Y Combinator startup incubator program in Mountain View, CA, is getting so big—63 companies presented at Demo Day this Tuesday, about half of them on the record—that we couldn’t squeeze summaries of even the on-the-record subset into a single article. Part 1 of our YC S11 debrief appeared yesterday and covered the first half … Continue reading “Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 Demo Day: The Definitive Debrief, Part 2”
Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 Demo Day: The Definitive Debrief, Part 1
Y Combinator unleashed its latest class of startups on the world yesterday at its summer Demo Day in Mountain View. The famed venture incubator, which provides mentorship, networking, investor access, and a modest cash stipend in return for an equity stake in each company, admitted a record 63 startups this time around. That’s up from … Continue reading “Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 Demo Day: The Definitive Debrief, Part 1”
Hipmunk on the Make: The First-Birthday Interview
I first covered Hipmunk on August 18, 2010, the day after the online travel startup debuted its innovative time-based flight search interface. One year later, how’s the Y Combinator-backed company faring? Spectacularly well, actually. In an announcement marking its first birthday last week, the startup said that users are conducting a million combined flight and … Continue reading “Hipmunk on the Make: The First-Birthday Interview”
Tutorspree Preps for Back-to-School Market
With summer ending, classrooms will soon fill with students who may need some help tackling tough academic subjects. Searching for tutors can be a haphazard process of scouring classified ads. New York startup Tutorspree offers a more streamlined platform for students to find potential tutors local to them. One-year-old Tutorspree is an online service that … Continue reading “Tutorspree Preps for Back-to-School Market”
There Is an Incubator Bubble—And It Will Pop
This week we published the third annual edition of the Xconomy Guide to Venture Incubators. It’s the only source we know of where U.S. entrepreneurs starting technology, life sciences, or energy companies can survey all of the early-stage mentoring and investment programs open to them in a single document. (You can buy the downloadable file … Continue reading “There Is an Incubator Bubble—And It Will Pop”
drchrono’s iPad App for Doctors Wins “Meaningful Use” Certification
Drchrono, a Y Combinator-backed startup in Mountain View, CA, that offers an iPad-based electronic health record (EHR) system for physicians, said today that its software has been certified by a group responsible for determining whether practices using the software are eligible to collect incentive payments from the Department of Health and Human Services. InfoGard, an … Continue reading “drchrono’s iPad App for Doctors Wins “Meaningful Use” Certification”
Massive $112 Million Venture Round Pumps Up Expectations for Airbnb
Apparently, the world is full of people who own homes or condos but would rather rent them out than actually live in them. And it has an equal number of people (perhaps the same ones) who’d rather bunk in someone else’s home when traveling than stay in a hotel. That’s the basis for the burgeoning … Continue reading “Massive $112 Million Venture Round Pumps Up Expectations for Airbnb”
“Going Directly At The Beast”—WePay Takes on PayPal with New Tools for Online Merchants
WePay emerged from the Y Combinator venture incubator in late 2009 with a plan to make it simpler for people to round up money online from groups of other people; think of a carpool driver collecting gas money from his riders, for example. Well, you can still use it for that. But as it turned … Continue reading ““Going Directly At The Beast”—WePay Takes on PayPal with New Tools for Online Merchants”
MemSQL Receives $2,100,000 New Funding Round
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=23cb32b2-50e2-4309-b920-c3bfc588aec0&Preview=1 Date 7/13/2011 Company Name MemSQL Mailing Address 380 10th St San Francisco, CA 94103 Company Description MemSQL is a scalable, memory-optimized database that offers orders of magnitude improvements in write and read performance and greatly simplifies application development and maintenance. Website http://www.memsql.com Transaction Type Venture Equity Transaction Amount $2,100,000 Transaction Round … Continue reading “MemSQL Receives $2,100,000 New Funding Round”
Twitter Buys BackType
BackType, creator of a system called Storm for distributed realtime data processing, said today in a blog post that it has been acquired by San Francisco-based Twitter. BackType had created a system called BackTweets that allowed publishers to monitor the marketing impact of their Twitter posts. That system has now been closed to new signups, … Continue reading “Twitter Buys BackType”
Chirply Brings Crowdsourcing—and Good Art—to Greeting Cards
In this era of Kindles and iPads and cloud-based data storage, the idea of an Internet startup that’s actually focused on paper is more than an anachronism—it’s almost a contradiction in terms. But that’s Chirply, a Y Combinator-backed company in San Francisco that sells high-end greeting cards—and soon notebooks and wrapping paper—printed with designs from … Continue reading “Chirply Brings Crowdsourcing—and Good Art—to Greeting Cards”
XSITE 2011, TechStars Demo Day, the Bruins, and Coolio: 25 Things to Remember From Boston’s Hell Week
Ladies and gentlemen, after last week I hereby declare the end of high season for tech events in Boston. We’ve had our celebrations, drunk our grain, and talked our heads off. Now, before we start getting some things done around here, let’s reflect just a little more. The following took place during a 24-hour period … Continue reading “XSITE 2011, TechStars Demo Day, the Bruins, and Coolio: 25 Things to Remember From Boston’s Hell Week”
Earbits Garners $605,000 New Funding
Feed Type Link http://www.venturedeal.com/Search/SearchResultTransactionDetail.aspx?TransactionId=4933f576-c6b6-45a0-8d78-793d3153b5d7&Preview=1 Date 6/17/2011 Company Name Earbits Mailing Address 957 Lake Street Venice, CA 90291 Company Description Earbits is personalized streaming radio with cojones. No ads, no commercials, no subscriptions…just a slick website with plenty of things to keep you busy. Explore and connect with killer bands across a huge variety of genres. … Continue reading “Earbits Garners $605,000 New Funding”
Will the Internet Venture Incubator Model Work in Cleantech? Greenstart Is About to Find Out
If you’re an entrepreneur with an idea for an Internet startup, there’s a growing collection of venture incubators around the country ready to help you launch it—Y Combinator, TechStars, and 500Startups are a few of the best known ones. There’s even a new incubator for health technology companies: Rock Health, which we covered here a … Continue reading “Will the Internet Venture Incubator Model Work in Cleantech? Greenstart Is About to Find Out”
Mike Maples and Ann Miura-Ko on The Limits of Incubators, the Right Fund Size, and the True Meaning of “Pivot”
Last week we published the first half of an extended interview with Mike Maples Jr. and Ann Miura-Ko, the co-founding partners at Palo Alto, CA-based seed stage investing firm Floodgate. The focus in that part was on big issues like how Internet technologies are accelerating startup innovation, how investors have to adapt in response, and … Continue reading “Mike Maples and Ann Miura-Ko on The Limits of Incubators, the Right Fund Size, and the True Meaning of “Pivot””
Rock Health, Say Media, Food Frenzy: The 1-Minute Version of Last Week’s Bay Area BizTech News
Memorial Day observances made last week shorter than usual, but there was enough news from the local information technology sector for any week twice its length. —San Francisco-based Rock Health, a new incubator for companies focused on using digital technologies to fix inefficiencies in the healthcare system, unveiled its first class of startups. They range … Continue reading “Rock Health, Say Media, Food Frenzy: The 1-Minute Version of Last Week’s Bay Area BizTech News”
Silicon Chef: A Half-Baked Guide to Food Startups
[Updated 12/06/12 with additional listings] When the ex-CEO of Pure Digital, maker of the famous Flip pocket camcorder, wins funding from Sequoia Capital to open a chain of grilled cheese sandwich shops, it may be time to abandon your own enterprise-cloud-marketing-analytics-automation venture or your social-mobile-deals-gamification startup and think about getting into the food business. I was … Continue reading “Silicon Chef: A Half-Baked Guide to Food Startups”
Rock Health, A New Incubator for Healthcare IT Startups, Names Its First Class
The summer after her first year at Harvard Business School, Halle Tecco got an internship at Apple in Cupertino, CA, helping to evaluate mobile apps for the health and medical category of the iTunes App Store. “I was on the phone all day with big hospitals and healthcare organizations who didn’t put the love into … Continue reading “Rock Health, A New Incubator for Healthcare IT Startups, Names Its First Class”