Funding Archives - Page 8 of 8

Chicago Startups Yield $160M In Q1 From Funding To Acquisition: What’s This Midwest Mentality?

Whoever said Chicago didn’t have a thriving tech scene may need to crawl out from under their own angels and actually look at the facts. Builtinchicago.com has just released the Q1 numbers and they are mighty impressive for a town with no startup culture and entrepreneurs who are at home by 5:00pm.

According to the latest data from builtinchicago, 32 new startups were launched in Q1 2012. 17 startups saw funding to the beat of $33 million dollars and there were 12 acquisitions for a total of $127 million dollars. If you put your basic arithmetic hats on you’ll see that Chicago startups (and just the ones builtinchicago.com reports on) yielded $160 million dollars in funding and acquisitions.

Ageology, gtrot, Band Digital, Hireology, BodyShopBids, Kauzu, Buzz Referrals, Lab 42, CareShare, MediaFly, Channel IQ, Retrofit, Eved, Tap.me, Fippex, Univa and Vmock all saw some kind of funding in the first quarter of 2012.

Cellit, ClearTrial, Pointbridge, PrepMe, FeeFighters, RegistryPro, Intelli, RoundArch, ki edit + design, Savid Tech, MobManager, and Quiet FDN all saw exits through acquisition.

data from builtinchicago.com

Phoenix Arizona Has New Angels

Phoenix, Scottsdale and surrounding areas have a new group of angels in town ready to invest in the latest and greatest tech startups in the region. The Biltmore Angels was founded by a local group of Arizona State University Alumni. The group plans on investing in high potential startups and early stage companies in the immediate Phoenix area as well as the rest of the state. The Biltmore Angels will also work closely with ASU to provide investment opportunities to ASU spinouts and select companies for the Venture Catalyst program.

“Lack of access to early stage capital has been an age-old problem in Arizona for most of our home-grown start-ups”, said Charlie Lewis, founding principal of Biltmore Angels. “We look forward to providing a new venue for our State’s most promising companies to showcase their wares in front of active Arizona investors”.

The partners in The Biltmore Angels have a wide range of business experience in the areas of investment, finance, business development and law. Tom Connelly is President and Chief Investment Officer for Versant Capital Management. Charlie Lewis is Vice President of Venture Development for Arizona Technology Enterprises. The third member, Michael Hool is the Managing Partner at the Hool Law Group.

Nibletz spoke with Biltmore Angel Michael Hool who told us that they are offering mentorship through their partnership with TiE Arizona and Venture Catalyst and that they are looking to offer mentorship as part of the Biltmore Angels in the coming months.

“We look forward to engaging investors who have not previously been involved in organized angel investing processes.” said Hool in a release. “The idea of the Biltmore Angels is to provide another forum to connect not-previously engaged investors with each other and to the other state and regional angel groups for collaborative investments”.

“The formation of the Biltmore Angels is an incredible opportunity for startups in Arizona,” said Gordon McConnell, Executive Director of ASU Venture Catalyst, an early partner of the Biltmore Angels group. “Every client that the Venture Catalyst team works with needs assistance with finding and accessing funding and by partnering with the Biltmore Angels we will be able to provide those needed angel investment opportunities for our startups. That is an incredible value-add to the startup scene in Arizona.”

Arizona was recently named one of the fastest growing states in the country for startups.

Philadelphia’s appRenaissance Raises $1.5 Million In Seed Funding

appRenaissance a Philadelphia based mobile app developer and mobile infrastructure company has received $1.5 million in seed funding from Firstmark Capital and other Philadelphia angel investors.

The company private labels apps for other businesses. Some of their clients include; Ticketfly, BizEquity, AllFranz, Radian and Interact a Geo-social startup. appRenaissance also has a mobile application development platform called “Unifeed” that speeds up and simplifies development time and integration with enterprise services.

appRenaissance was founded by Scott Wasserman and CEO Bob Maul. The company has announced that they plan on using the funding to make a number of key hires and accelerate development of their Unifeed platform.

This isn’t the first time that Firstmark has teamed up with Maul. Firstmark was also in an investor in Maul’s company called Boomi a company that specializes in on demand integration technology. Like appRenaissance Boomi also has a proprietary platform. Theirs is called AtomSphere and connects providers and consumers of SaaS (Software as a service) applications via a pure SaaS integration platform.

“Backing a successful repeat entrepreneur like Bob is an easy decision,” said Amish Jani, Managing Director at FirstMark Capital. “Mobile computing is the next great wave of technology innovation and we look forward to working with Bob and founder Scott Wasserman to build a major player in the mobile apps and infrastructure space.”

“It’s great to be working with Amish and the guys from FirstMark Capital again as they were a major factor in our success with Boomi,” said Moul. “The mobile space is massive, it is still early, and ripe for innovation. And Philadelphia is the perfect home for the venture given the extensive mobile talent and thought leadership in the region.”

appRenaissance is located in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood and was founded in 2010.

Cincinnati Based Startup: SimpleRegistry Raises $150k To Ramp Up Registry For Everything

With Spring in full swing and May and June just ahead of us, wedding season is also in full bloom. We’re sure that means that while many of you are perusing tech sites like nibletz.com you’re also checking out gift registries, signing up for wedding sites and taking the telxon to Target’s aisles. Well STOP!

SimpleRegistry, a Cincinnati based startup has a solution for registries for everything. Whether you need a wedding registry, baby registry, honeymoon registry or heck you just want a bunch of gifts, you can use SimpleRegistry’s tool to create your registry and than take monetary gifts to get the things that you want.

The startup was founded by Brandon Warner, Chris Kolik and Tony Alexander. Alexander got the idea for SimpleRegistry after he launched his first registry related startup called “Traveler’s Joy” with a focus on creating honeymoon registries.

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Wayne State Launches A Pre-Seed Microfund For Student Run Startups

Wayne State has launched a first of its kind, in Detroit, micro-seed fund for student run startups. The fund called “The Warrior Fund” is being administered by Andrew Olsen who is the commercialization principal with the college’s tech transfer office.

The fund is only $25,000 this go round and Olsen will dole out awards between $2500 and $5,000 in hopes to attract student run entrepreneurs into staying in Detroit’s flourishing tech startup community.

“It’s great to have resources, but the ability to write checks is what really knocks down barriers,” Olson told website xconomy. “Students have the ability to practically live on air. They can do more with less.”

In addition to some preseed funding student run startups will receive mentoring including how to create a pitch deck.

The student run startups need to be legitimate companies registered with the state of Michigan and have tax ID numbers. They also can’t use the money to pay down student debt.

“We want startups to use the money on prototyping or to hire a developer to build a mobile app. We want this money to be need-to-have funding, not nice-to-have.” Olsen said.

Source: xconomy

Yes Ashton Kutcher Did Invest In Des Moines’ Startup Dwolla

Most people in tune with the startup community have heard of Ben Milne and his payment startup Dwolla. Milne founded Dwolla in Des Moines and has no plans to take it elsewhere.

Dwolla is making a name for itself by providing a payment system that isn’t dependant on a traditional banking system or credit card backing. It’s this innovative approach to payments and the fact that they’re based in Des Moines that attracted actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher and his A-list venture fund to Dwolla’s latest Series B round (announced in February).

Although announced in February Kutcher wasn’t formally announced as an investor until earlier today at Startup City Des Moines.

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Minnesota Tech Startups Gopher Angels Is Looking For You (Real Soon)

A new group of Angels is putting the finishing touches on their website, business and an event to kick off their new fund. Gopher Angels is holding an invite only event for seed stage tech startups on May 3, 2012 at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

Gopher Angels is currently pre-screening startups to see if they have what it takes to get funding from the group. Interested startups should visit this link to check out Gopher Angels and submit their best idea.

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Omaha Startup MindMixer Gets $1.9 Million In Funding

Omaha Nebraska’s MindMixer, which bills itself as a “virtual town hall” announced last week that they had raised $1.9 million in series A funding front Dundee Venture Capital who originally seeded the company with $300,000 back in February.

MindMixer’s virtual town hall platform is geared towards municipalities and universities. MindMixer already has 125 on board.

The idea came about when CEO/co-founder Nick Bowden and co-founder Nathan Preheim, who both have backgrounds in urban planning, noticed that no one attends community meetings.

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This Week In Funding 25 March 2012

This Week In Funding we have seen over $78 million dollars in investments go to Startups. They have raised it in all different ways, some going after big name Hollywood types like Ashton Kutcher. Or the more traditional rout with rounds Andreessen Horowitz leading the way. Everything from a Series A round to an E round happened. Bellow are a list of some of those that brought in investments this week.

Pinterest to be already valued at $500 million

Pinterest, the social pinning website that has been public less than two months is to be valued at $500 million, so says private financial data companyPrivCo. Little back story first before we go into why this is what will be proven as the Tech company that causes the bubble to burst in Silicone Valley.

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

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2 Kickstarter Projects Raise One Million Dollars Each On The Same Day

If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a crowd sourced platform for seed investments of projects. It originally started as a launching pad for musicians who were trying to fund album and video projects.

An artist or band would make a kickstarter page for their next endeavor. Say the project would cost them $5000 for a limited cd run, art, photography and studio time. The artist or band would provide telethon type incentives for people and fans to pledge to donate money to the project.

For example my little brothers band with a decent sized local fan base used kick starter for an album project. They needed $4000. For a $10 pledge the donators (fans) would get a free copy of the cd delivered to their home once complete. For a $20 pledge they would autograph the CD. For a $100 pledge they would meet the fans backstage and so on and so forth. 50 fans pledged enough money to reach the $4000 goal. Once they reached the goal the funds were secured via credit card (that had been given when the donator pledged) and all the money was gathered and delivered to the band.

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Swype Secures Another 6 Million in Financing

Swype, the most popular alternative keyboard for smartphones, announced today that they have received another $6 million dollars in a new round of financing. Leading the pack in this round were Samsung Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, Benaroya Capital, DOCOMO Capital and Ignition Partners.

Swype is an alternative keyboard to the stock keyboard found on many Samsung and Nokia smartphones. It allows the user to “swype” on their keyboard by drawing a connection between letters for the words they want to type. Nuance’s multi keyboard app called Flex T9 allows for similar technology.

Swype founder Cliff Kushler says he hopes to have Swype on 100million devices by the end of the year. In addition to smartphones and tablets Kushler is hopeful that the technology will adapt to other connected devices like car stereo head units, and home control devices. Kushler is also known for his involvement in the creation of T9 texting, a short form texting language that “dumb phone” users made popular at the beginning of the decade.

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