Venture Capital Archives - Page 3 of 3

VC Investment In Austin Texas Jumps 47% In Q1 While Many Cities In U.S. See A Decline

Austin Texas is the place to be for startups every March during the annual South By Southwest Interactive festival. Startups from across the country, and the globe spend anywhere from $10,000 to several hundreds of thousands of dollars to have the biggest pop during the festival. Well what about the Austin startup scene the rest of the year?

We all know about Austin success stories like that of GoWalla who sold their company in an acquihire to Facebook. They shut the service down this year during SXSW before relocating to Paolo Alto. However there are a lot more startups in Austin, how many? Well there’s an Austin startup list website that lists over 1400 startups, ranging from easly stage companies to those that are funded or on the brink of acquisition.

While the rest of the country saw an 18% decline in venture capital investments and deal volume fell 9% over the same period last year, Austin saw a 47% increase in venture capital funding during the first quarter.

Austin venture backed businesses tallied up $250 million dollars in 32 financings in the first quarter, reports the Austin Business Journal.

That number was fueled by three huge deals. Apollo Endosurgery got a $47.6 million dollar investment. In February Kinner Software received a $40 million dollar investment and in March Pivot3 Inc saw an investment of $23.3 million dollars.

source: Austin Business Journal

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…”

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.

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.

More after the break

19 Year Olds Make YCombinator Winter Class With Private Family Facebook Style Social Network FamilyLeaf

Two 19 year old entrepreneurs from Bellevue Washington are on their second start up already. Geekwire’s John Cook reports that when he first met them they were working on a gift card startup that was called AvantCard. The teenagers have been friends since grade school.

The friends Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta have started something new. Their project, FamilyLeaf, is a closed social network that is similar to Facebook but allows family members to privately share contact information, photos and updates with each other. It’s biggest competitor is the Facebook app Family Builder which was recently purchased by Intelius.

More after the break
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Motorola Solutions Venture Capital Participates In $2.6 Million Round For Retailigence

Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, the VC arm of Motorola Solutions, has participated in a $2.6 million dollar round of financing for Retailigence Inc.

Retailigence Inc has partnered with 70 major retail firms to date. Their client base, which encompasses big names like Whole Foods, H&M and Nordstrom, just to name a few, gives Retailigence access to their inventory systems. Retailigence then extrapolates that data from the inventory systems and pushes it to the cloud. Once in the cloud apps like Shopsavvy, Pic2Shop and Layar access the data to offer end users real-time inventory data on the items they are searching for.

Retailigence has 20 employees at their Palo Alto headquarters. They are going to use this round of financing to improve analytics, and expand their reach into Asia.

“They have a great vision and the kind of data analytics that retailers want,” said Reese Schroeder, a managing director of Motorola Solutions Venture Capital. “We have a very broad reach into the market with so many retail customers. There’s a lot of opportunity for us to collaborate on bringing some of these next-generation solutions to our customers.”

Source: WSJ