Philly Startup: Perceptual Network Completes An A-List $1M First Round For People Connecting

Perceptual Networks, a startup proud to from Philadelphia Pennsylvania announced today the completion of their first round of funding. The startup was founded by Jim Young founder of Hot or Not and I/O Ventures and Cheyenne Ehrlich who’s credits include taking two startups from 0 to 30 million plus users.

This round of funding for Perceptual Networks has one of the most impressive lists of backers to come from any startup based outside of Silicon Valley or New York. Venture firms First Round Capital and Bullpen Capital participated in the round. The list of angels is like a roll call of some of the top A-List players in the startup world:

Max Levchin (founder of PayPal and Slide and Chairman of Yelp),
Steve Chen (founder of YouTube and AVOS),
Michael Birch (founder of Bebo and Monkey Inferno)
Richard Yoo (founder of Rackspace and ServerBeach)
Shawn Colo (founder of Demand Media)
Joshua Schachter (founder of Tasty Labs and Delicious)
Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit)
James Hong (founder of HotOrNot)
Philip Kaplan (founder of Fandalism, Blippy, AdBrite, TinyLetter and many, many more)
Naval Ravikant (founder of Epinions and AngelList)
Tikhon Bernstam (founder of Scribd and Parse)
Garry Tan (founder of Posterous and Partner at Y-Combinator)
Gabriel Weinberg (founder of DuckDuckGo and NamesDatabase)
Jameson Hsu (founder of Mochi Media)
Bob Ippilito (founder of Mochi Media)
Ken Keller (founder of IGN.com and Cadence)
Paul Bragiel (partner at I/O Ventures)
Tom McInerney (former COO at Klout)
Bill Lee (founder of Remarq and Social Concepts and investor in Tesla)
Nils Johnson (founder of Beautylish)

One of the best parts about this news as that not one of the investors required the startup to move away from Philadelphia. After speaking with Ehrlich we’re not sure that they would have taken money from an investor that asked them to relocate. In regards to Philadelphia Ehrlich told nibletz.com:

“Jim’s wife is from here, and he had moved here about three years ago. That’s why it was on the list initially. But there are a lot of great things to be said about Philly:

Great engineering schools
Lower cost of living (relative to SF or NYC) and better quality of life
A great food and arts scene
As an employers, we see great talent here and limited competition for that talent, which results in a more stable workforce

Plus, the people are nice, friendly and open here. It really is a lovely place.”

Perceptual Networks takes people discovery to a new level by adding in the connection piece. Perceptual Networks is developing a suite of products that make it easy for people to find the people they best connect with, whether they are looking for the right co-workers or employees, the right relationship, the right friends and activity partners or the right community to live in.

“Over the last 7-8 years, Jim and I have been having a long series of conversations about how random the process is by which people meet and get to know each other. Finally, it just became obvious that we should work on this problem that was a central part of our thinking and dialogue for so many years.” Ehrlich told nibletz.com

“This is something that Jim and I have been talking about since the day we met,” said Cheyenne Ehrlich, founder and CEO of Perceptual Networks. “Your community, friends, co-workers and life partner, if you have one, collectively have such a huge impact on the quality of your life. We want to make the process of finding and developing that community of people as easy as possible, for everyone.”

While most discovery apps are about discovering someone right now, wherever you are, the tools provided by Perceptual Networks are looking for a more long term effect.

Investors in Perceptual Networks are confident they have a win. Young’s HotOrNot was founded in 2000 and sold for $20 million in 2008. HotOrNot is even featured in the movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in a scene where Zuckerberg and his roomates are combing through HotOrNot and adapt it to Harvard.

Linkage:

For more on Perceptual Networks visit their website here

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Boulder: Foundry Group Closes Third Annual $225M Fund

The Foundry Group, the venture capital group founded by Startup Colorado Co-Chair and Techstars Co-Founder, Brad Feld has announced that they’ve just completed raising their third annual $225M Fund.

As our friends at PE Hub are quick to point out the fanfare around the announcement was exactly the same as the previous two years. That’s perfectly fine with us though as Feld and his team are extremely busy and just about everything that he does is focused around funding, promoting and pushing entrepreneurs and Startups, and a lot of them are “everywhere else”.

For instance, Feld still serves as a mentor at TechStars and several other accelerators that are part of the Global Accelerator Network.

As far as the fund itself goes it will continue to invest in US based Startups and technology focuse companies. They prefer to invest in themes that have long term growth strategies in place rather than looking for the next Instagram. They often provide follow on funding for Techstars graduates. For example, The Foundry Group invested $5 Million in Orbotix Series B Round. Orbotix was mentored by Feld at TechStars. They created the Sphero robotic ball that even President Obama is a fan of.

Other notable investments include Cheezburger, Urban Airship, FullContact and Zynga.

Linkage:

Check out Feld’s blog here

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Baltimore Discovery Startup: Woofound Discovers Another Cool Mill

High profile Baltimore Startup WooFound has reportedly closed another 1 million dollar round of funding, bringing their total capital investment to $2.2 million. Not too shabby for a Baltimore startup in the discovery space,

WooFound is far from your run of the mill discovery application. That’s most likely the fuel behind the millions of dollars they’ve raised to date. Woofound matches your personality to things you want to do. Woofound was actually built in conjunction with psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Dr. Noreen Honeycutt from Baltimore Maryland. This personality engine coupled with a simple “me or not me” button at the end of the recommendation make the app more appealing and at the same time allow the app to teach itself in ways similar apps can not.

The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) invested $75,000 in this latest $1 million dollar round. WooFound was one of 16 Startups to receive funding from TEDCO as part of the Maryland Technology Transfer And Commcialization Fund.

“We’re honored to receive this investment from TEDCO to help us further develop our Career Application,” says Co-CEO Dan Sines. “All of our backers have provided tremendous support, not just financially, and we are grateful for their commitment to Woofound.”

Linkage:

For more on WooFound visit them here

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Sacramento Startup: Ask Ziggy Raises $5 Million To Take On Siri

Even the loyalist of Apple users have said that Siri, iOS’s virtual assistant, isn’t all that she’s cracked up to be. In fact the newest Siri commercial featuring director Martin Scorsese, features commands that can’t be easily replicated.

Almost as soon as Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled Siri as part of the iPhone 4s and the most current version of iOS, startups have been looking to challenge the quirky voice activated assistant.

One of those startups, Ask Ziggy, based just outside of Sacramento, has just announced last month that they’ve raised $5 million dollars.

The company, which isn’t even a year old yet, reported that the $5 million dollar capital infusion comes from a publicly traded multinational corporation, which they didn’t disclose.

Ask Ziggy also announced that they would be working closely with Burlington Massachusetts based, Nuance. Nuance has been a major player in the voice command space. It’s even rumored that Nuance may have some kind of hand in Siri itself.

Ask Ziggy already comes preinstalled on smartphones using the Windows operating system. It can also be found in products by Samsung, LG and Dell.

Ask Ziggy is looking to expand outside of mobile and to other devices.

“Speaking directly into a device and getting a voice reply, with zero typing required, is here at last,” said Shai Leib, CEO of Ask Ziggy told the Sacramento Bee. “This funding will now enable Ask Ziggy to deliver multilanguage, accent-independent, natural speech personal assistant apps running on all devices – including cellular handsets, tablets and even computing headsets, which will immediately change our world.”

Ask Ziggy is further developing their integration with Massachusetts based Kopin Corp and their Golden-I computing headset product. Leib is hoping that as the technology improves Ask Ziggy will be able to handle conversational type requests.

Leib used the example of “I feel like listening to some psychedelic rock” and having Pandora open and begin playing classic rock.

Linkage:

Check out AskZiggy here.

Source: sacbee.com

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Memphis Startup Accelerator ZeroTo510 Sets Record With Over 80% Follow On Funding In Less Than 30 Days

That headline is a true testament to the power of the cohort based ZeroTo510 startup accelerator in Memphis Tennessee. Five of the six startups in their recently graduated class received $100,000 or more in follow on funding from MB Ventures and Innova Memphis.

Four of the startups received follow on funding to continue acceleration of their businesses. Those four companies were:

BioNanovations has developed a device that uses bionanotechnology for rapid diagnosis of bacterial infection.
EcoSurg has developed an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional foam patient positioners used in surgeries.
Nanophthalmics has developed, through the use of nanotechnology, a surgical device to more effectively treat corneal abrasions.
Urova Medical has developed a minimally invasive treatment to address feminine stress urinary incontinence.

“In each case, we believe these four companies have shown the progress, the growth and proof-of-concept that were expected to move to the next phase of funding,” said Allan Daisley, director of innovation and sustainability initiatives for Memphis Bioworks Foundation and program director for ZeroTo510. “It is extremely rewarding to us as an organization, because the funding of four companies exceeds what we considered to be a measure of success when this program was launched.”

The fifth startup to receive follow on funding was Restore Medical. Restore Medical wowed the audience when Co-Founder Shawn Fynn announced during their presentation that they had already secured a purchase order valued at $3.75 million dollars pending 510k approval. In the case of Restore Medical, they decided to skip the acceleration investment and went directly to a Series A round. MB Ventures and Innova Memphis are leading that Series A round with an undisclosed investment, assumed to be more than the $100,000 Restore Medical would have received with the acceleration funds.

Handminder, a startup that has developed a rehabilitation device for people who have suffered a stroke, to regain use of their hands, did not receive follow on funding.

With an 80% success rate, by the standard of “follow on funding” Zeroto510 is the most successful accelerator in Tennessee.

Zeroto510 is a joint venture between Memphis Bioworks with cohort based accelerator programming provided by SeedHatchery a product of LaunchYourCity.

LaunchYourCity CEO & President Eric Matthews said: “The results speak for themselves. 35 companies have entered our incubators because of our efforts. EmergeMemphis has a waiting list for the first time. We have invested time and money in 12 promising startup technologies at our research institutions, two of which have started up as new companies. Over 20 companies have received pre-seed capital of $50,000 or less. Of those 8 have received follow-on capital of $100,000 or greater.”.

In addition to Zeroto510 and SeedHatchery LaunchYourCity has a sister program for independent filmmakers called “FuelFilm”. Also the local music incubator, The Memphis Music Foundation, has replicated some of the LaunchYourCity programming into their music resource offerings.

Linkage:

Check out LaunchYourCity at LaunchYourCity.com

Zeroto510 site is here

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Central Illinois Angels Invest In Startup: Intellihot Green Technologies

The Heartland Partnership announced yesterday that the Central Illinois Angels, angel network, has made another investment to a Central Illinois based technology startup,

Intellihot Green Technologies is based in Galesburg Illinois, The company has designed, and now manufactures, tankless gas water heaters. Every year hundreds of thousands of kilowatt hours of energy are wasted by heating water sitting in a tank.

Intellihot’s tankless systems for commercial and residential locations, heat water without a tank on an as needed basis.

Central Illinois Angels have invested $325,000 in the company which started out in the Peoria NEXT Innovation Center. Now that Intellihot’s water heaters are in production their manufacturing is based in Galesburg. The company continues to maintain an office presence at Peoria NEXT.

The $325,000 is part of a larger syndicated round. The Central Illinois Angels have invested $3 million in 11 companies to date.

Linkage:

Check out Intellihot here.

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Atlanta Startups To Win In CTW Breakup

Earlier this summer Atlanta super angel, Sig Mosely came out of retirement. It was announced that he was joining forces with Palaniswamy Rajan to form the $25 million dollar CTW ventures fund. Mosely also participated in a $600,000 round led by Dallas Maverick’s owner and fellow super angel Mark Cuban, in Atlanta startup Badgy.. It’s unclear whether or not it was Mosely or CTW in that round.

Now, just two months after the start of CTW the partners, Mosely and Rajan are parting ways. They are divorcing over what the Atlanta Business Journal is equating to “irreconcilable differences.

Rajan prefers to go long tail on technology ventures.

“Raj much prefers to dig deep, deep, deep into the technology,” Mosley said to the Business Journal “That does not do anything for me.”

Rajan feels the same way about Mosely’s desire to invest in entrepreneurs. Mosely is more of a risk taker which is actually great for startups.

Both men will go there separate ways but that doesn’t mean Mosely is going back into retirement. Mosely is creating his own fund that will invest between $200,000 and $500,000 in entrepreneur lead startups.

Mosely is hoping that his fund will be a feeder fund for deal flow with larger firms like Menlo Park Ventures.

Prior to retiring a first time in 2010 Mosely had oversaw the investment in over 130 technology companies as the President of Imlay Investments.

Linkage:

Source: Atlanta Business Journal

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Gwinnett Georgia Startup: 8Bit Receives $25,000 Founders Grant

8Bit is a wild gang of extremely talented and creative web publishing rockstars building a platform to give those web publishers without their creative fire access to an arsenal of great design. The Gwinnett Georgia based startup is the latest winner of the Gwinnett Innovation Park $25,000 Founders Grant.

While at first look you may get the impression that 8Bit is just another Word Press theme shop and those are about as common these days as Android developers, but when you dive through their site you’ll see that they’re super hero’s of the web publishing space and have compiled a bunch of great values that go into their work.

When you read their about page, creativity and urban,word pressing hipsterism seep out of your computer like a mocha latte seeping through the bottom of the Starbucks cup in your center console. If you read their blog and look at their actual work though, you’ll see they aren’t just a bunch of templates.

Each of their themes is customizable to the hilt. If you’ve been using Word Press for years, like we have, and you’re still not sure what all the different appearance settings do, no worries 8Bit spells it out for you in their themes while keeping a semblance of classy elegance. In fact 8Bit is so well liked that Mashable and TNW have featured their themes.

8Bit also offers customer support, a novel idea compared to the idiots of douchebaggery we bout this template from.

Oh but we’re reporting about their cash.

“The Founders Grant Award is intended to give back to the entrepreneurial community by rewarding entrepreneurial excellence and helping deserving companies continue on their path to success,” said Leland Strange, local serial entrepreneur, investor and long time supporter of Atlanta technology innovators to the Gwinnett Business Journal.

“8BIT loves being a part of the Nspire program. It has helped us get even closer to our goal by providing space for us to work together as a team, as well as opportunities for us to network,” explains John Saddington, 8BIT co-founder. “We are honored to receive the Founders Grant and know that the money will help us continue on our path to creating the best online publishing solution.”

Linkage:

Go on you know you want to, check out 8Bit here

Source: GBJ

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Toledo Ohio Startup: Buyvite Closes Funding Round Looks Forward To Expansion

Our good friend Brandi Wimberly and her group buying startup, Buyvite, have just finished closing a funding round. This unique startup makes creating makeshift buying groups easy to do and easy to collect.

No we aren’t talking about some crazy Groupon, group buying platform, we’re talking a much more practical use. Picture you and your cousins, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters are all putting their money together to buy grandma and grandpa an anniversary cruise. You know how this traditionally goes, one coordinator puts their money on the line for the entire trip and all of a sudden everyone has a problem making the payment.

ANother great example is say you and your college buddies decide to take a group trip to a baseball game. Same thing, one person is holding the bag. No longer, not with BuyVite.

Buyvite lets you pull money together for one thing, it makes collecting the money a cinch and then one administrator can take the collected money for the group purchase. Pretty smart huh?

That’s what the investors must have thought because Wimberly reports that she has closed a funding round and plans to expand Buyvite’s markets infrastructure, mobile platform and management team.

“Now that we have successfully closed this round of financing, we can aggressively and confidently pursue retail partners who are interested and willing to participate in this socially relevant and expanding piece of the marketplace in which to further drive their products and services to and through. Buyvite is a new and exciting way to capture this evolving and growing segment of the social payments audience and we are extremely confident that the retail community will seize and embrace this new opportunity. We’re also excited to be approaching some new high growth market opportunities that have so far been largely ignored by the social commerce space.” Wimberly said in a statement.

“Our recent investment will also allow us to add new functionality and pivot our product to more closely align with consumer and retailer feedback and feature requests. Our investors and advisors are very focused on retail business development and brand building but also respect the technology we are crafting and overall product execution. Among our investors and advisors are experienced business leaders with a wide range of talents that can help us achieve our goal of being the leading group payment platform for retailers. We are lucky to have such an amazing group of people helping to build this company.” Wimberly added.

Buyvite also announced the addition of Bob Mallo and Brad Bialas to the management team. Mallo will assist in strategic formation, operational direction and company wide execution. Most recently Mallo was the Group President of Follett Educational Distribution Group and President of Follett Educational Services prior to that. Bialas will help develop sales, marketing, and pricing models as well as strategic partners. Bialas has been in the payments space for 12 years, most recently as the President of BluePay (a large payment processing software provider) where he helped the company grow from 3 employees and nominal revenue to over $100MM in annual sales. Buyvite Advisors include Vijay Raghavendra of IBM, Balaji Gopinath of Turner Broadcasting and Media Camp, Jacob Tell of Oniracom and Poornima Vijayashanker of Bizeebee Software.

This undisclosed funding round was led by Rocket Ventures.

Linkage:

Check out Buyvite here

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Dallas Area Gets New Angel Network In TECH Fort Worth’s CowTown Angels

TECH Fort Worth, an early stage business incubator and huge start up resource in Fort Worth Texas has just announced the formation of CowTown Angels.

The new angel network consists of angel investors from across the region. Angel investors are those who invest in startups in exchange for stock in the company. It’s a high risk investment for some and in order to be an accredited investor the “angel” typically has a net worth of $1 million dollars outside of their residence.

The Dallas Fort Worth area (DFW) is crawling with millionaires who’ve made money in oil, traditional industry and tech. Angel networks are cropping up across the country with the fundamental goal of injecting startups with the early stage capital they need to bring their products to market. The hope is that these startups will generate a return on the investment and grow to bring new jobs and money into the area.

TECH Fort Worth will take the applications and vet startups ahead of monthly scheduled pitch meetings. From their the angels discuss the opportunities presented and then they can invest in them individually, in groups or together depending on the need and fit of the business.

“We know angel investors in our community, and we meet lots of companies who need startup capital,” said Darlene Ryan, Executive Director of TECH Fort Worth. “By providing an organized and efficient way for them to meet each other and discuss business, we hope to help more of these companies establish strong roots here, grow here and create jobs here.”

“It’s a natural extension of what TECH Fort Worth does for the local technology business community,” said Brent Sorrells, the incubator’s Director of Programs. “In our other programs, we coach and mentor entrepreneurs building companies based on technologies such as medical devices, data and energy, and we help them prepare their presentations to put their best foot forward. We’re excited to be able to offer this new program to connect the angel investors and entrepreneurs. It’s all about creating more jobs and wealth in our community.”

Linkage:

Check out TECH Fort Worth here

Check out CowTown Angels here

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Minnesota Venture Firm Tells Startups: Stop Reading TechCrunch

Four business partners with roots in Minnesota, came together earlier this summer and announced the formation of a new venture firm called AMP Partners. Minnesota has seen a recent boost in startups and entrepreneurism spearheaded by JumpStart Inc and then quickly taken over by Minnesotans.

Darren Marhula, Brad England, Mark Donahoe and Chris Palm pooled their own money together from investment banking, Wall Street, and property management, Marhula told tech.mn in June. “We’re interested in the right entrepreneur with the right plan more than the exact market. We’re not exclusively focused on any one type of business, but definitely interested in local technology startups.”

Now as the summer season comes to a close and AMP’s been on the ground running for the last few months or so tech.mn checked back in with Marhula who echoed a main theme that we continually hear on our sneaker-strapped nationwide startup roadtrip. That theme, simply put is, valuations are too high.

In the follow-up interview Marhula said “we continue to be surprised by the unrealistically high valuation expectations by many entrepreneurs out there, which has prevented us from making more investments.”. So again in line with markets their size like St.Louis, Cincinnati and even Washington DC, entrepreneurs are pricing themselves out of an investment. This can be a lethally hard lesson to learn.

To date, AMP has invested into two companies, presumably with more modest self-worth. HomeVisor is an online Realtor referral service and the first to receive funding from AMP. Their second investment , BuyWafers.com sells silicon wafers and other materials for semi-conductors. That company will be launching shortly. AMP didn’t reveal how much money was in either deal.

It’s evident that AMP, like most investors, are looking for viable startups and businesses and they’re not holding a business plan competition. AMP is also seeing a lot of buzzword happy entrepreneurs who are the same entrepreneurs being poked fun at by Vooza in New York.

Marhula said: “Stop reading TechCrunch and focus on building your business; get your valuation expectations in check and when you come in to pitch your idea, we don’t want to hear about exits, pivots, and MVPs…we want to see results.”

AMP Partners would love to hear your realistic pitch, drop them a line here

Linkage:

Source: tech.mn

Check out AMP here

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GM Ventures Invests In Rhode Island Startup NanoSteel

NanoSteel, a Rhode Island startup, with 34 employees is working on the future of steel. According to this report NanoSteel has created a new class of steel that will allow automakers to reduce the weight of vehicles without compromising the structural integrity needed for safety.

“We are investing in NanoSteel because of the opportunity associated with their new steel alloy technology,” said Jon Lauckner, GM’s chief technology officer, vice president of Global R&D and president of GM Ventures LLC told the Detroit News. “Over the next several years, light-weighting of vehicles will be a major focus area to improve fuel economy. NanoSteel’s nano-structured alloys offer unique material characteristics that are not available today, making them a potential game-changer.”

While it’s no secret that innovation is needed in the auto industry, automakers in the United States are tasked with the fact that U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards will almost double to 54.5mpg in 2025. While that’s still twelve years away GM is aggressively trying to start development on this project. Finding a lighter steel product, thereby reducing the weight of vehicles is definitely a viable option.

GM Ventures is General Motors $100 million dollar venture capital arm. In 2010 they invested $3.2 million into an Ann Arbor startup called Satik3 Inc. They are a battery company working on developing advanced solid state rechargeable technology for cars and electronics.

They also invested in Bright Automotive, a Rochester Hills company which is developing a plug in hybrid commercial vehicle set to launch by 2014.

GM Ventures has also invested $7.5 million in Sunlogics. That company is also based in Rochester Hills and is producing solar powered charging stations. GM plans to deploy these charging stations at GM dealers and at their other facilities.

The terms in the NanoSteel investment were not disclosed. They are joining NanoSteel’s current investors; EnerTech Capital, Fairhaven Capital Partners, and others for this Series C round.

Linkage:

Check out NanoSteel here

Source: Detroit News

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Toronto Startup ShopLocket Raises $1M For Simple Selling Platform

Two weeks ago we brought you an interview with Toronto startup ShopLocket. This innovative new startup has developed a simple selling platform, where selling anything online, in a one off sale, is as easy as embedding a YouTube video. From ShopLocket’s platform you can sell your digital camera, pair of shoes, dress, car or whatever else you want to unload on any social media channel, your personal blog, website or anywhere that you can embed anything.

There are three easy steps to listing an item on ShopLocket, just create your sale, share it and sell it. You can sell whatever you want. Got some old baseball cards? Sell them. Have an old cell phone? Sell it! Want to teach guitar lessons, no problem. Best of all there is no coding required. They also offer two payment options PayPal and Stripe.

ShopLocket was born after co-founder Katherine Hague had needed to sell some shirts for a consulting job she was working on. Setting up a traditional e-commerce site would have been too costly and too time consuming. Using an existing market place like e-Bay or Craigslist was too unprofessional. So ShopLocket was born.

We love the concept and it seems easy enough to quickly ramp up their user base. Rho Canada Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, BDC Venture Capital, Relay Ventures and Extreme Venture Partners obviously see the vision as well as they all came together last week to fund ShopLocket’s seed round to the beat of $1 million dollars.

“The main use of the funds will be to grow the team, both for marketing and development,” ShopLocket co-founder Katherine Hague said in an interview with BetaKit. “Up until now we were a team of three; Andrew Louis my co-founder, Dan Kalmar our Community Manager, and myself. Already we’ve added two team members, Jaclyn Konzelmann for business development and Sumanth Ravipati as our second developer. We expect to be adding a full-time designer and a third developer later in the year.”

Hague reports that a lot of this round came from their participation in Extreme Startups accelerator program. That program gives startups a $50,000 seed in the beginning of the program and an additional $150,000 investment at the end of the program. Many of the other institutional investors that participated in the round, did so because of their relationship with Extreme Startups. Hague said the round took under two months from pitching to money in the bank.

Obviously for a round to come together that quick it’s more than just their participation in an accelerator. Hague says:

“I think what separates us from a lot of different ways of selling online is how easy and social it is to sell. In minutes, someone can have a professional way to sell online. In addition to that, if someone likes the product that you’re selling, they’re able to either share a link to that product with their friends, or even embed it right in their own site.” she told nibletz.com

When a product is easy to understand, easy to use and looks great, like ShopLocket, it doesn’t matter where you’re located, you have a better chance of winning.

Linkage:

Our interview with ShopLocket

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Denver Startup Plink Raises $3M Series A From Grotech Ventures

Denver loyalty and rewards startup Plink has been on a roll lately. Back in June we brought you this story about how they partnered with TangoCard to bring their rewards beyond Facebook credits and that strategy has seemed to pay off.

Today they’ve announced that they’ve closed a $3 million dollar series A round entirely from mid-atlantic (VA & MD) based Grotech Ventures.

Plink began as a company that would take offline businesses and incentivize their customer base with something simple, and easy that millions would benefit from, Facebook credits. While only offering Facebook credits they rapidly ramped up their brick and mortar customer base, until the recent transition to rewards from TangoCard partners. The company has reported that they will use the new funding to continue accelerating development of their offline program. Of course they will also ramp up member acquisition and their marketing efforts.

“Connecting online-to-offline is a challenge for marketers,” said Plink Co-founder and CEO Peter Vogel. “Plink bridges that gap and Grotech Ventures’ investment brings nearly 20 years of successful experience, an enormous amount of industry know-how, insight, and strategic guidance to propel Plink to the next level.”

“For consumers, Plink is a no-brainer,” said Joe Zell, general partner of Grotech Ventures. “Why wouldn’t someone join and get rewards for going out to their favorite places? There’s no extra card to carry or steps a consumer has to take. In addition, Plink has already proven that huge national restaurant brands love the model and they’re already seeing significant increases in consumer purchases.”

Some of the largest fast food establishments are already on board with Plink including Arby’s, Dunkin Donuts and Burger King.

Large chains have embraced Plink because it doesn’t require any changes to their existing point-of-sale infrastructure, does not require staff training, Plink does all the marketing and the restaurants only pay a percentage of the sales that Plink drives. Initial results have shown that Plink members are spending 65 percent more per month at partner restaurants than they were prior to joining Plink. It’s a risk-free, 100 percent turn-key model for national chains and Plink will soon be adding large retail and travel partners.

Plink has raised $4 million to date.

Linkage:

Check out Plink here

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