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

The Forgiving Valley: Path Puts Privacy Issue Behind Them Takes Another Round At A $250 Million Valuation

Yesterday we brought you the story of how some folks are out for blood against New York deals start up Sqoot. They misspoke and came off sexist, not once but twice. While opponents of sqoot are begging anyone that will listen to stop supporting their start up over saying that women would be at their hackathon serving beer, Path the social media network started by Facebook Alum Dave Morin, had a much more severe issue and just got another round of funding.

Although I truly feel that privacy is in the hands of the user and that if you are that worried about your privacy than you should stay off the net, Path did something far worse than Sqoot. They uploaded the complete contents of users address books to their own private servers.

More after the break
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