Crunchfund Archives - Serious Startups

Portland Startup: Churchkey Can Company Gets Tech Investors For Their Nostalgic Beer

This isn’t the first time that tech investors have backed a food and beverage startup. Tech Investors came out in droves to back Jonathan Kaplan, the creator/founder of the Flip video camera with his chain of grilled cheese restaurants called “The Melt”.

Entourage star Adrian Grenier and former Nike designer, Justin Hawkins have teamed up to found the Churchkey Can Company. Churchkey makes what’s being dubbed a “Pacific Northwest brewed Pilsner style craft beer”, however it’s not the beer itself that has everybody talking, but rather the can it’s packaged in. Churchkey Can Company is putting their beer into a flat topped churchkey opening can.

Before pull back lids you may remember having a can opener in the house that had a diamond shaped end on it. You would puncture the soup can on both sides and pour the soup our of one of the triangle shaped openings. The opposite opening made sure that the soup poured out smoothly. That’s the same idea behind Churchkey Can Company’s flat can. A style of beer can that dates back to the 1930’s.

ChurchKey Can Company’s flat top steel cans are made out of all recycled steel. Grenier and Hawkins turned to the Ball can company to manufacture the cans for them. According to some, the flat top can and the church key opening actually locks in the freshness.

“It’s about the joy of drinking good beer – from the people you drink it with, to where you drink it, and with this unique package, how you open it,” said Justin Hawkins, Churchkey’s co-founder and creative director. “We didn’t make these traditions, but are keeping them alive with Churchkey.”

More after the break
Read More…

Startup in Space: Skybox Imaging Raises $70M to revolutionize Satellite Imagery

San Francisco: Skybox Imaging announced they had raised $70 million (US) in Series C financing. Led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, including Bessemer Venture Partners and CrunchFund. Khosla Ventures was involved in this round after financing Skybox in their Series A $3 million (US) and Series B $18 million (US) – Bessemer Venture Partners was involved in Series B as well.

What is Skybox Imaging? From their website:

Skybox Imaging is a commercial remote sensing startup seeking to revolutionize access to information that describes the daily activity on our planet. Founded in 2009, Skybox is designing, manufacturing, and operating the world’s first coordinated constellation of high-resolution microsatellites in order to deliver timely imagery and video of any spot in the world. Skybox headquarters is in Mountain View, California. For more information, please visitwww.skyboximaging.com and follow Skybox Imaging on Twitter.

Basically they seem to have come up with “micro-satellites” which they will use in an extraterrestrial network of many micro-satellites. They have found a way to cut the costs involved in satellite production and operation by very significant margin and thus have likely been able to gain a number of significant clients from Big Government, Relief Organizations, perhaps Google*. As Michael Arrington said over on his site

If a company was able to do that, and put a satellite into space at a small fraction of the current cost, they’d likely be able to lock down a number of high profile customers for a variety of previously cost-prohibitive applications. Confidentiality agreements and U.S. export regulations might prohibit that company from disclosing much, or any, of that information.

But investors would obviously have access to that information. You can draw your own conclusions as to why the company is hiring big data engineers in droves…”

Shawn Parker’s AirTime Is Ramping Up For Launch, Has 2,000 Users And They’re Hiring

In 2010 Napster’s co-founders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker quietly started making noise about a new start up. At that time it wasn’t clear if the two were reunited when Fanning received an early seed round of funding in the amount of $200,000 for a startup, at the time called SupYo, as in “What’s Up Yo”. At that time Supyo’s founders were listed as Fanning and Voxli founder Joey Liaw.

Almost a year to the day later in October 2011, Fanning and Parker had competed an $8.3 million series A round. Some of the top investor’s in Silicon Valley were involved including; Founder’s Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, Will I Am, Scott Braun and Michael Arrington. With an all star line up like that Parker and Fanning must be on to something big. All that is known so far is that it’s some kind of video chat.

More after the break
Read More…

Redfin Adds Price Alerts For Home Shoppers

Real Estate start up Redfin just made home shopping a little easier. They’ve added new price alert email notifications via their “Instant updates”. Now instead of waiting for a weekly or daily email, users are notified within 15-30 minutes of any price change to the properties that they are interested in.

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, told geekswire.com that in this day in age in real estate timing is everything. He pointed out that 17 percent of listings that debuted on Redfin and then sold, were under contract within three days or less.

“In a world where a Las Vegas chef can now buy a fish caught in the Adriatic before the fisherman has even returned to the harbor, it’s crazy to think that real estate for the most part has run on 1950s-newspaper-time, with one email update in the morning. Instant Updates changes the whole speed of the game.” Kelman told geekswire.com

More after the break
Read More…

Surprise Surprise: Greg Kumparak Joins Pando Daily

Greg Kamparak photo: Kamparak's Google+

The exodus at AOL owned TechCrunch continues. Earlier this week it was leaked that TechCrunch’s mobile editor, Greg Kumparak, was leaving TechCrunch. At the time Kumparak announced his departure he didn’t say he was going, but of course the obvious place was PandoDaily.

PandoDaily is the new start up focused site that was started by former TechCrunch editor Sarah Lacy. Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund led an angel round for the new site that was over 2.5 million dollars.

Lacy announced a couple of weeks ago that PandoDaily was holding monthly meet ups. The first of which was tonight. Arrington was the featured guest and had a fireside chat with Lacy. It was also announced that Kumparak was joining the PandoDaily team tonight.

More after the break
Read More…