TechCrunch
SketchFab Aims To Be “YouTube For 3D Files”
Alban Denoyel founded Sketchfab on the observation that the internet lives largely in 2D but could easily become a 3-dimensional landscape. The website, which Denoyel is calling “YouTube for 3D files,” is seeking to raise $1M at TechStars Demo Day.
It’s a straightforward service: users upload a 3D model to Sketchfab in any of its 27 supported formats, which the server processes and displays using WebGL and HTML5. The graphic can then be embedded on any web page.
Accounts are free for “3D enthusiasts.” Monetization happens in incremental upgrades for use in advertising, marketing, media, and brand content. The rates stand at $7/month for 3D artists as a portfolio platform, up to $59/month for ecommerce sites. The most expensive enterprise plans support multi-user collaboration.
Denoyel is betting on the overtake of 3D everything in the tech industry. For ecommerce sites, he argues, 3D graphics are much more compelling than flat photographs in showcasing the product. SketchFab went live on Quirky this week, so check out the 3D models and decide for yourself.
Here are some Sketchfab’d TechCrunch glasses:
AirBoxLab Wants To Tell You What's In The Air You're Breathing – But Do We Even Want To Know?
Indiegogo project AirBoxLab, based out of Paris, France, is hoping to build the “Nest for air quality” with its sensor device that monitors and reports on how much VOC, CO2, CO, and particulate matter is circulating in the air you breathe every day. The sensors would also report on temperature and relative humidity, but the focus would be on keeping you up to date on your indoor air quality.
The aim of informing you about all the potentially dangerous gases you’re inhaling (including frightening sounding stuff like formaldehyde, benzene, ethylene glycol and acetone) is to make it possible for you to take steps to improve your local air quality, with the upside of providing improved long-term health benefits.
The AirBoxLab is a cylindrical, sensor-laden device, that connects to your smartphone or tablet and provides an intelligent readout of air quality over time via charts and graphs. The information gathered is used to inform patter recognition and machine learning algorithms to send you push notifications designed to help you optimize air cycling in specific rooms, find and eliminate pollution sources, and even prompt changes in behaviour to lessen the impact of general living on indoor air quality.
Air quality monitoring is not a new thing; it’s built into the Withings Smart Body Analyzer scale, for instance. But many of the devices already out there simply offer a basic readout of CO2 in the air around you, and its hourly progress. What AirBoxLab wants to do is make that information something actionable, and to provide a more complete picture of all the potential measures of air quality, not just CO2. In that regard, it is very much like Nest, since it’s intended to facilitate change, not just passively gather and record data.
Another similar project called the Air Quality Egg took to Kickstarter to fund its own project, and raised $144,592, well above its original goal. The aim of that project was to build a crowdsourced community database of air quality knowledge, and the AirBoxLab also wants to collect data from all its users to make a community resource. The projects share a lot of similarities, but AirBoxLab looks more squarely aimed at the general consumer market, whereas the Egg would probably appeal more to DIY-ers and tech enthusiasts.
AirBoxLab is seeking 10,000€ (around $13,000 USD), and has so far raised just over half its goal. Pre-order pledges start at the 129€ level, which is around $168 U.S., and a discount of 40€ from the anticipated retail price. The startup is targeting a September 2013 release for the AirBoxLab, and apps on iOS and Android will be available to help users interact with and view the data gathered by their monitoring gadgets. My only worry is that finding out what’s in the air I’m breathing every day will be more paralyzing than enabling – sure, you can change your behaviour to improve conditions, but only to some extent. We humans however can’t seem to quiet our curiosity, whether or not it helps us sleep better at night.
Yahoo News Gets A Makeover, But The Bigger Improvements Are Under The Hood
A little over a month after Yahoo partnered with Twitter to beef up its homepage news feed with relevant tweets from news organizations, the company is today announcing a major makeover for one of its flagship properties, Yahoo News. The updated Yahoo News site is has been redesigned with a more modern look and feel, to better fit in with Yahoo homepage’s new look, introduced earlier this year. But the bigger improvements are the less visible ones.
At the time of the homepage revamp, Yahoo said that the most notable change was not the homepage’s appearance, but rather its increased emphasis on personalization. The same, apparently, holds true for the new Yahoo News site. Although at first glance, users will just notice its cleaner, less dated look, the focus here again is on personalization.
The news stream is now customizable, so users can tell the site what kind of news they’re interested in seeing. You’ll notice that every story now has an “X” next it when you hover over it, and when clicked you can indicate why you don’t want to hear more about that story in more detail by clicking the topics associated with that particular news item.
For example, after clicking the “X” over a story about the Hernandez homicide investigation, the message reads “show me fewer stories about” and then provides a list of choices including “sports & recreation,” “football,” “Aaron Hernandez,” “National Football League,” or “New England.” Even if you don’t drill down into one of those choices, after clicking the “X” the story will become hidden from the news feed in a few moments.
Though seemingly a minor thing, the fact that Yahoo News is pulling out the major subjects involved in a news story like this indicates there’s some more serious technology under the hood, like semantics. We saw Yahoo use similar customization and personalization techniques when it debuted a new Yahoo iOS app in April, which took advantage of Yahoo’s $30 million acquisition of news summarization startup Summly. The app also allows users to select topics that interest them, as well as flag those that do not – choices that are synced across platforms when users are logged in with their Yahoo IDs.
As with the homepage update, where the site adapts to learn users’ preferences as they click, the new Yahoo News will also learn of your interests based on the stories you click through to read, even if you never explicitly tell it to stop showing you items by clicking the “X.”
The updated News site is also described as faster and better organized, so you can more easily click to the categories of interest like “science,” “politics,” “health,” etc. It now features Yahoo partner content like ABC News more prominently, as well.
The redesign is also arriving on iOS devices, and soon on Android, too. The roll out is starting now for U.S. users, and will complete in a couple of days.
Clinkle Raises Celebrity-Filled $25M Round As It Gears Up To Eliminate The Physical Wallet
Clinkle, a mobile payments startup that aims to put your entire wallet on your phone, has raised a $25 million round from over 18 investors.
The company, which has been in stealth mode since it launched in 2011, was the subject of much hype and speculation in April when a Wall Street Journal story explained that over a dozen students were leaving Stanford to launch the partially professor-funded startup. When Stanford president John Hennessy joined as an academic advisor, word got out about the startup and raised the stakes for success.
Beta testers, a former employee, and even Clinkle’s website have given us a look at how the app will function and what it will look like. Here’s the run down on one of the most interesting – and mysterious – startups in the Valley.
The Funding
A funding round with this many participants has been referred to pejoratively as a “Party Round,” which some investors like Chris Dixon warn against.
Duplan told me Clinkle took on so many investors because it was an “important thing for us to have a group of people together who have a broad set of experiences in a number of areas,” as the company faces a wide range of challenges in attempting to solve a big problem.
“This is not a small social app,” he said. “What we’re trying to do here is fundamentally change how people trade. Every human being, every day, has to do this.”
Duplan declined to comment on whether any of the investors would be joining Clinkle’s board.
Fundraising for the round began as early as last summer.
“I did not want to be distracted by press and the media,” Duplan said. “I decided it would be better to really focus on product and announce the round once everything came together and we were happy with where we were in the company’s evolution.”
Duplan said most of the money will go towards hiring. The company currently has around 50 employees, and will be “rapidly expanding.” Duplan said new hires will fill a range of roles, from engineering to marketing to design, and more as the young startup fights against much larger competitors.
The Idea
Duplan came up with the idea while studying abroad in London the summer after his freshman year. He was frustrated that he could download apps to do virtually anything abroad–call friends, stream music, even Scrabble with friends back in California–except pay for a sandwich.
The next summer, Duplan and about 10 other students rented a house in Palo Alto and began developing Clinkle.
“I think there’s a big disconnect between the hype and the reality on the ground,” Duplan said. “There is currently no serious contender to cash and cards.”
Duplan said faces two major hurdles: technology and adoption.
The Technology
Duplan said that there hasn’t been a scalable solution that enables a phone to pay a merchant without replacing the point of sale system. Duplan said Clinkle has figured out a way to make this happen without requiring infrastructure change.
Clinkle did a small beta test at Stanford that Duplan said “went incredibly well.”
Stuart Upfill-Brown graduated from Stanford earlier this month and was a beta tester for the app. He said he would pay other friends who were testing the app back for small things, like a late night pizza.
“It takes mobile banking to almost a social media level,” he said, explaining that you could pay friends back with stylish little notes and personalize your wallet.
“I thought the interface was intuitive because it’s designed to look like your wallet or a money clip would,” Danny Organ, another recent Stanford graduate and beta tester, said. “It’s nice to have everything in front of you visually.”
The two say the setup process was quick and simple: entering bank account information, setting a security code, and adding other friends who had the app. Clinkle uses a separate bank inside the app, called “Clinkle cash.” Users could transfer money back and forth from their bank accounts into “Clinkle cash.” These Clinkle dollars were then used for peer-to-peer and peer to merchant transactions.
“Anything that you would do with your wallet you would do now on your phone,” said a former employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That includes checks, credit cards, cash.”
Upfill-Brown used the app at campus mainstays like the Treehouse and Coho, where he would order and pay ahead of time through the app, and then go pick up his food.
“They very clearly are trying to put your whole wallet in your phone, whereas other things are covering one element. Clinkle felt more like ‘I can just leave my wallet at home,’” Upfill-Brown said.
Upfill-Brown, Organ, and the former employee all spoke to the usability and aesthetic design of the app.
“They’re a very driven company and they have a lot of talent,” the former employee said. “Their head designer, Rob Ryan, is the best asset of their company…that’s why it looks so good and functions so well.”
In addition to solo peer-to-peer transactions, Clinkle is adding group payments. There will be a messaging thread in the app where you can create groups and do group transactions.
Both Organ and the former employee independently say the app uses high frequency sound to communicate between devices.
The former employee said he wasn’t told anything about the tech while he worked at Clinkle, but had heard that the app uses the microphone and speakers of smartphones to emit a certain frequency; he said vendors wouldn’t have to add any hardware because any computer or iPad has speakers and microphones. As for older cash registers, he believes Clinkle would try to somehow incentivize the seller to upgrade to something that can emit and receive high frequency sound.
Adoption
“Building great technology in a vacuum isn’t going to be very helpful,” Duplan said.
Referencing Facebook spreading via small collegiate networks, Duplan said the company wants to be smart and systematic in releasing the app.
“I think for something like a mobile wallet to be useful to people, you have to have ubiquity in acceptance,” he said, noting the gargantuan problem in getting every merchant to do the same thing.
“The best way to form a new network is to start with small, close-looped groups and expand slowly from there,” he said. He said Clinkle will be releasing to “a good number” of colleges and Universities in 2013. He declined to give a timeline on when the general public could get the app.
Duplan explains that starting at colleges makes the problem a lot more manageable, as there are lots of peer-to-peer payments and many of the peer to merchant payments are to the same few merchants–the campus pizza place, the grocery store, the nearest place with cheap, delicious Natty Light, etc.
Clinkle will launch at any school that gets 1,750 students to enter their email address. For every friend a college student invites who joins the waiting line, they get a raffle ticket. Once every ticket has been given out, the raffle will take place and award major prizes.
The top prize is a solo ride aboard a Virgin Galactic rocket to 361,000 feet, “the high vault of space.” Other prices include a $20,000 scholarship towards tuition, and trips to events like Oktoberfest and the 2014 World Cup.
Duplan declined to comment on this contest and the link to the legal page with the contest rules was taken off the home page shortly after we spoke.
The former Clinkle employee said the company won’t take any fees on transactions, and will look to monetize elsewhere, potentially taking small cuts from merchants if customers use Clinkle coupons or special offers.
“It’s a lot easier to monetize payment than it is to monetize many other social apps or something else,” Duplan said. “When there’s real value being exchanged, there’s a ton on the line.”
The Verdict
The idea is a great one–I could not agree more with Duplan’s quote regarding current apps versus cash and cards. The app is beautiful and has positive reviews from early users. I’m a bit skeptical about the contest–essentially paying for growth–but it would be a small price to pay if they’re able to really take over the college market and spread from there.
Now they just need to get the app out there.
The former employee said he doesn’t know why they’ve taken so long to release the app, given that it works well in small beta groups, but assumes it’s related to the company’s growth strategy, not an engineering issue.
“They have the top engineers out of Stanford and they have a lot of them, and they’ve been working on it for a while,” he said.
“I think a lot of people at the company also have that same mentality,” the former employee said, regarding why it hasn’t launched yet.
Duplan said that in order for people to adopt Clinkle, the product must be an order of magnitude better than cash and cards.
“The margin for error is zero,” Duplan said.
Concert App Jukely Rallies Groups of Friends, Then Sells Them Tickets
Jukely is a social concert app that helps friends get together a group to see a show and then acts as the ticketing agent. After quietly piloting in New York, Jukely formally launched at Techstars Demo Day with plans to serve 200 cities worldwide — and to raise $500k today.
Whereas other apps like ThrillCall and Bandsintown match an individual with upcoming shows they might like, the point of Jukely is to focus on your core group of friends and connect fans with similar music taste. If two of your friends indicate they want to see a certain band play, you’ll get a notification and you can then all buy tickets.
Founder Bora Celik’s time as a concert promoter taught him a few things about the music industry: first, half of concert tickets are typically not sold, the equivalent of 24 billion dollars left on the table annually. Second, he noticed that getting people to a show was easy once they had a group together.
Although Celik says he doesn’t want Jukely to become known as a ticketing app — he wants people to come for the social aspect and stay for the easy purchase — you do in fact buy tickets through the app. Jukely makes direct deals with promoters and serves as a sub-promoter to the masses. It’s clubby like that: when you get to the door, you just say you’re on the Jukely list.
The plan is for Jukely to expand into creating awareness campaigns for artists’ managers and record labels. By pinging an artist’s superfans when there’s an upcoming show, they’ll also hit their friends in a ripple effect of notifications. When the artist goes on world tour, Jukely will be there every step of the way.
Celik says Jukely is currently talking with Groupme to see if there is a way to integrate the two. Outside of existing friend groups, there’s also the possibility of Jukely serving to organizing concert night meet-ups among people going to the same show or simply connecting strangers with the same taste in music.
In its pilot stage, Jukely saw 72% of users returning active, with 15% purchasing tickets. These numbers are solid, if a little revenue lean. However, if it helps build the popularity of live music it may just have a chance with artists, venues, and, most important, fans.
We Heart It, The Social Photo Phenom That's Quietly Amassed 20M Monthly Users, Nabs $8M Funding
We Heart It, a photo-based social network that is reminiscent of Pinterest in functionality with a dash of Tumblr’s youthful appeal, has raised $8 million from a group of investors including White Oak and IDG Ventures.
This may be one of the first times you’re hearing about We Heart It, but the company’s reach is actually huge. The site currently has 20 million monthly users, with more than 1 million new users registering every month, CEO Ranah Edelin told me in an interview alongside founder Fabio Giolito this week. And the people who use We Heart It really use it: Members on average spend more than 16.5 minutes on the site at a time, and the average mobile app user opens the app more than 25 times per month.
So who are these people? Well, in general, they’re young. We Heart It’s demographics skew to the female side, heavy in the under-24 space. That makes for a different crowd than Pinterest — these people aren’t planning their weddings or home decor just yet, they’re tacking inspirational images up in the same way that I created collages for my locker at school.
And though it’s flown under the radar in the tech press, We Heart It actually dates back to the fall of 2007. That’s when Fabio Giolito created a section within his own website that he called “I Heart It” to help him aggregate images that he found inspiring as part of his graphic design studies in a Rio de Janeiro college. Giolito showed the site to some of his fellow students, and they all asked him if there was a way that he could build a similar tool for them. So in December of 2007, We Heart It was officially born — two years before Pinterest, it should be mentioned.
From that point, the organic growth of We Heart It continued to surge, as people shared their favorite photos with friends, who in turn signed on to the site, and so on. This demand was exciting, but also overwhelming, as it had started to take up big chunks of Giolito’s salary (by 2009 he was working full time at Yahoo in Rio de Janeiro as a graphic designer.) So he eventually brought on a infrastructure-focused co-founder Bruno Zanchet, and the two of them took the leap to take on some seed investors and turn We Heart It into his full-time job. The site became a funded business, incorporated in California, in 2011.
I’ve been hearing increasing amounts of buzz about We Heart It for a while now — investors who heard about the company in recent months were raving about the “growth charts like you wouldn’t believe” from this company they’ve never heard of before. That buzz may have been stoked by the fact that We Heart It didn’t do the typical “Sand Hill Shuffle” to deliberately raise this new round of funding. Edelin and Giolito told me they just took meetings with people along the way of building the business.
What’s on deck now that the $8 million is in the bank? I’m told that We Heart It, which has 16 full-time staffers, is sticking to the same formula it’s used for years — now with just a little more fuel. Edelin is a relatively new addition to the team, bringing some industry experience at the executive level along with newly-appointed president Dave Williams (Giolito will head up product operations.) A few more hires will likely be added in the months ahead.
The company has experimented with some revenue generation initiatives in the past, and will likely keep that on the back burner for now as it continues to focus on user experience and growing its base. For Giolito, the aim is to always keep We Heart Its as clean and simple to use as possible, to let the visual sharing shine through. He put it like this:
“We just keep it simple, to let the content surface itself. People make it their own as they start to heart these images, and really express how you feel and who you are as a person. When you look at what other people heart, you really have this feeling that you begin to understand how they really are, even if they don’t know how to express it in words.
It’s what I like most about visual expression: You don’t even need to know how you’re feeling to connect with an image. The image says everything.”
Co-Founded By TC Alum Erick Schonfeld, TouchCast Aims To Reinvent Online Video With Interactive Apps
To explain TouchCast, a startup that’s launching its first product today, my old boss Erick Schonfeld argued that the Internet has’t really transformed video. Sure, with sites like Netflix and Hulu, the distribution model has changed, but he said they’re just “a different pipe” — the underlying content is pretty similar to what you’d find on TV.
“The whole problem with video right now is it doesn’t really play nicely with the rest of the web,” Schonfeld said.
I think that underplays the extent to which a YouTube video or a Vine is pretty different from what we’ve seen before, but I understand Schonfeld’s bigger point — that for the most part, online video feels walled off from the rest of the web, at embedded in a widget on a website but not really interacting with the rest of the site, or with any other online content.
Schonfeld, along with his co-founders Edo Segal (founder of real-time search startup Relegence, former vice president of emerging platforms at AOL, and now CEO of TouchCast) and Charley Miller, are trying to address this with TouchCast — apparently this is what Schonfeld has been working on since he left TechCrunch last year. (He’s also the executive producer of the DEMO conference.) The overall vision is really big — to reinvent online video and rethink the web in a way that “looks like TV but still feels like the web.”
Today’s launch isn’t quite that ambitious. Instead, it’s meant to be the first step in that direction. TouchCast is releasing an iPad app for video authoring and discovery. The idea is to offer a powerful video creation tool that doesn’t require all the work that video editing normally does (in fact, the current app doesn’t allow you to do any real post-production work at all — you just shoot and share), and to enrich the experience with what the company calls vApps.
Those vApps (short for video apps) are really where the TouchCast vision comes into play, by allowing users to incorporate web content like Twitter streams, Facebook Pages, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and stock carts, into their videos. Miller stopped by the TechCrunch office a couple of weeks ago to show me the app — before he started recording, he set up a couple of vApps, including a Google Map, ahead of time. Once he started shooting, he just tapped on them to bring them into the video, and he could interact with them the same way you can with any web content — given the iPad’s touch interface, it was very Minority Report-ish.
So if you’re a reporter, it’s an easy way to enrich your video with online content. Schonfeld noted this also means a journalist can quickly get a video online without being delayed by editing. (Not that it’s just meant for journalists — the company says the app is designed for use by everyone “from veteran YouTube creators to video enthusiasts, from in-studio and field broadcast reporters and journalists to educators and students.”) TouchCast says it’s launching with nearly two dozen vApps created by the company itself, but it plans to turn this into an open platform for any developer to introduce their own apps.
As for the videos , you can watch them in the iPad app, on the TouchCast website, and on YouTube. Eventually, Schonfeld said TouchCasts can be integrated with any website — in fact, he suggested that they could become the first thing you see on a website, sort of a masthead or introduction to the site, with what we think of as a normal website pushed “underneath the fold.”
TouchCast is self-funded. The iPad app is free, but Segal said TouchCast can make money in a number of ways, including subscriptions for additional features and storage, enterprise licensing fees, and advertising.
Update: You can see the technology in-action in the YouTube video below, though if you want the full, interactive experience you have to check it out on the TouchCast site. You can also read more about the vision in this blog post.
Aereo To Launch Its Internet Streaming TV Service In Chicago On September 13
Despite court battles, Aereo is on a roll. The startup just announced its streaming TV service will hit Chicagoland September 13. This comes just a month after the company announced its Atlanta launch details. Once Chicago is online, Aereo will be live in four of the country’s biggest cities, serving up network television to over 12 million Americans.
“There’s no place like Chicago and we’re excited to be launching in this world-class city in September,” said Aereo CEO and Founder Chet Kanojia said in a released statement today. “Consumers want more choice and flexibility when it comes to how they watch television and the enthusiastic response to our technology from people across the country has been humbling. At Aereo, we feel that we’ve built something meaningful for consumers and we’re proud of the work we’ve accomplished. However, there’s still much more to come as we continue our expansion into new cities throughout the summer and fall.”
Chicago marks Aereo’s fourth service area. The startup started in New York City quickly expanding to the surrounding areas. Boston came next followed by Atlanta a few days back. This is all while the company is fighting for its life in and out of the courtroom.
The big networks are fighting to stop Aereo from disrupting the status quo. Aereo essentially takes over-the-air signals and places them online. These signals are captured via tiny antenna’s rather than a direct transmitting from the networks themselves. This allows Aereo to bypass paying expensive retransmission fees, a fact that doesn’t sit well with the suits at the big networks.
But this isn’t about stealing content, famed TV executive turned Aereo investor Barry Diller. This is about moving TV to IP.
Right now, without Aereo, or any of its clones, television is not available through the Internet. Hulu and the like were built to serve as an advertising platform more so than a streaming platform. Aereo simply wants to bring TV to the Internet — while making a boat-load of cash doing it too.
Despite its gumption, Aereo’s legal troubles should not be ignored. Launching in more cities and more regions will only bring more attention to its disruptive business model. But likewise, Aereo cannot not sit idly, waiting for the hammer of justice to perhaps rule in its favor. It needs to launch. And with Chicago on the docket, it seems that’s exactly what the company is doing.
Passion Capital Cracks Open Data On Investments, Deal-Flow, Founder Salaries, And More
It’s not every VC that publishes annual stats on things like deal-flow, average size of investment, average founder salary, number of exits and startups dead-pooled. But openness — within no doubt carefully crafted limits — is part of London-based Passion Capital‘s brand after it set the bar with its inaugural report last year. And while “openness” is probably the headline takeaway again with this year’s report, it does provide some interesting insight into the workings of an early-stage VC in Europe and what, if anything, has changed for the firm over the last 12 months.
To set some context and give you an idea of its size and how active Passion Capital is, let’s begin by drilling into the first two year’s numbers. Spanning April 2011 to June 2013, the venture capital firm founded by Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero, and backed by a mixture of UK government funding and private investment, has invested in 34 portfolio companies, two of which have exited and three wound down.
The second-screen football betting app Picklive was sold to Sports Millions for an undisclosed amount, and academic research platform Mendeley was acquired by publisher Elsevier for an amount that TechCrunch pegged between $69-100 million.
The three startups shuttered were Twitter real-time chat service Bonfire, travel site Tripbirds, and wine portfolio app Vinetrade.
Digging deeper, noteworthy is that Passion has only added 13 new startups to its investment portfolio this year — OpenSignal, Memoto, Birdback, ShowMyHomework, CarThrottle, Thread, Future Ad Labs, Hasty, Toothpick, Duego, laZook, and Tray.io — though this doesn’t mean it has been any less active in terms of number of investments, but instead reflects that the fund is maturing when you factor in follow-on and bridge funding as well as Passion’s participation in 3 Series A rounds. In fact, in terms of total transactions (investments, follow-ons, exits, bridges, etc), 30 were made in year two compared to 31 in year one, so not much change there.
Furthermore, Passion has made a total of £5,695,000 in Seed investments, which in turn has gone on to attract a further £35,896,000 from more than 25 different VC funds, though this includes Passion’s own follow-on funding. Looking at the first year’s cohort only, 11 out of a possible 21 have gone on to raise follow-on financing at increased valuations, it says, while 6 are still operating from their seed round financing, and 2 of those are said to be profitable.
That’s perhaps telling, suggesting that Passion got its runway trajectory on the money, but I suspect the real story for many of the startups in its portfolio won’t come until year three. It is still early days after all — can we say Series A crunch?
In addition, Passion has bundled some interesting operational data mainly related to the way the VC firm attracts deal-flow, but also the average salary of the founders of its portfolio companies (£36,149 per annum), some of which I’ve included below.
Deal flow:
Year 2: 1,932 (up 26% from Year 1 number of 1,532)
533 from referrals (up 22% from Year 1)
779 from the website (up 19% from Year 1)
620 from events (up 40% from Year 1)Sources of the investments made:
9 from referrals from our existing Passion founders
7 from within our network (founders were already known to us)
6 from other referrals (not from our founders directly)
3 we proactively sought out (after tracking for some time)
2 from our open office hours
1 from a team which was renting desks at White Bear Yard
Meanwhile, Passion says that the average number of days between a prospective investment first meeting one of its 3 partners to a term sheet/investment offer is 6.41 business days — early-stage VCs are won’t to boast the speed at which they make any offer. It doesn’t say, however, how long it takes to get that first meeting.
It’s also — rightfully — highlighting the fact that it hasn’t charged any of its portfolio companies for legal expenses, closing fees, directors fees, or monitoring fees etc., noting in particular that it’s always paid for its own legal counsel, with little or no fuss (unlike others).
Of note, Passion says it doesn’t employ a PR firm to act on its behalf, which says something about the PR industry considering they do alright on the publicity front. Actually, Passion does more than alright and other European VCs could probably learn a thing or two from their openness, in every sense of the word.
And in a final boast, the VC firm says that the number of founder CEOs it’s replaced with “someone we’ve brought in” has been zero. That’s likely great news for the starry-eyed entrepreneurs it’s backed. However, like the difficult third album, Passion is now into the difficult year three for some of its portfolio companies, so let’s hope it’s not a case of famous last words.
All in all, though, good stuff.
Keep the openness comin’ — we look forward to next year’s update.
(For more data, see Passion Capital’s own blog post, which includes a rather nice infographic if you’re into those sort of things.)
GRP Partners Raises $200 Million Fund, Nabs New Office Space And Rebrands As Upfront Ventures
Los Angeles-based VC firm GRP Partners has raised a whole new, $200 million fund to make investments both in Southern California and throughout the U.S. With the launch of the new fund, the firm is also rebranding as Upfront Ventures, and it’s opening up a brand new office in Santa Monica to be closer to all the action.
GRP has been operating since 1996, making investments in tech companies like Overture, CitySearch, BillMeLater, Kyriba, and HDI in that time. Over the past several years, it has been working to better position itself for the next wave of investments, with some infrastructure that it’s built behind the scenes, as well as a public-facing presence through blogs and social media. But with all that change, the firm’s name — GRP Partners — didn’t seem to get across the mission of its partners.
With that in mind, it sought to find a new brand name that reflected the transparency and accessibility that it attempts to foster within the startup community. The firm also wanted a name that hinted at its preferred investment stage — seed and Series A — while also having a nod toward its home town of Los Angeles. And it seems “Upfront Ventures” fit all those requirements.
For the firm, the rebrand represents its movement toward a new, 21st-century style of investing. While historically VCs haven’t had to think much about their outside communications, that’s changing, partner Mark Suster told me. For VCs, transparency and openness is important in this day and age, which is one reason why Suster has such a public-facing blog.
Of course, he’s not the only one: Blogs by investors like Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon, and Brad Feld are becoming the norm, as opposed to the exception. Today, VCs are not just competing for deals, they’re also competing for share of mind among entrepreneurs.
“We felt it was important that we had a brand that reflected how we were already working,” Suster told me. The rebrand will help, particularly as Upfront Ventures has a fresh new $200 million to invest. That will be the firm’s fourth fund, following a $200 million fund in 1996, a $400 million fund in 2000, and another $200 million fund that it had raised in 2008.
The new fund will follow along a lot of the play book from the one it raised in 2008. In particular, Suster said the firm will continue to invest heavily in the local startup ecosystem. About two-thirds of all its investment dollars went to Southern California startups from its latest fund, and he expects that the current fund will also see about 60 percent spent locally.
While it’s been writing a lot of checks for Los Angeles-based startups, the firm has also founded local incubator Launchpad LA. And it’s helped to place interns from local schools like USC and UC Santa Barbara at startups in the region. The reason for that, of course, is that once they get a taste of working for a startup in L.A., they’re much more likely to return once they’ve finished school.
In addition to the new fund and rebrand, the firm has more big news — plans for a brand new office space that will move Upfront Ventures to Santa Monica, a little bit closer to where startups are located, and where all the action is. The team has signed a 10-year lease on a place that has 8,000 sq. ft. of indoor office space, and another 4,000 sq. ft. of outdoor space.
While it’s bet big on Los Angeles, the firm will continue to be opportunistic about deals in other locations. Suster says it’s had success in London, New York, Chicago, and other markets as well. That said, while it will try to make a few smart investments in Silicon Valley, it probably won’t be focusing on every hot startup that passes by there.
“The number one rule of venture capital is to be differentiated,” Suster told me. “I don’t want to be one of the 80 firms on Sand Hill Road fighting over deals.”
As The Lockitron Nears Shipping, Apigy Partners With Schlage And Details Building Gadgets On IOUs
Almost nine months after its crowdfunding success, the Lockitron is scheduled to ship on July 15th. As I learned through a chat with Apigy’s founder, it’s been a long road to this point as the young company overcame several obstacles including building $1.5 million in pre-orders without collecting any of the cash pledged by backers.
The company today announced a partnership with Schlage on a series of deadbolts specifically made for the Lockitron. Apigy’s co-founder Cameron Robertson explained to TechCrunch that this is in response to backer’s concerns that the Lockitron will not work with the lock on their door.
Apigy had several options to address this concern, which was especially prevalent in Europe where lock design very different from in the States. Cameron explained that they could have gone with an inexpensive deadbolt, allowing them to offer it for less. Instead Apigy partnered with Schlage, a very well-known and respected Ingersoll Rand lock brand.
This deadbolt features a design that’s better suited for use in home automation tasks. The end is tapered, allowing the deadbolt to more reliably lock — a pretty important consideration since the Lockitron is designed to be used remotely.
Backers will have the option of adding this deadbolt replacement to their Lockitron order for $30.
In a chat earlier this week Robertson detailed to me the pains his company has experienced since announcing this version of the Lockitron.
The company had a rough time from the start, getting rejected from Kickstarter that forced them to crowdsource their production funds themselves. This method allowed the company to treat their backers with a bit more respect. Instead of collecting cash after the crowdfunding campaign concluded, like Kickstarter, Apigy stated they wouldn’t force backers to pay until the Lockitron ships.
The crowdfunding campaign was a huge success. The company hit its $150,000 goal within 24 hours, and over the next five days collected $1.5 million in Lockitron pledges. And since they promised to not collect any money until shipping, this huge chunk of potential cash caused a bit of an issue.
To resolve it, Apigy turned to angel investors to get the capital needed to build and ship these devices. They essentially built their device on credit instead of a pot of Kickstarter money.
The company won’t reveal any specific order numbers, but they have been taking reservations since concluding their crowdfunding campaign last October. As of today, Lockitron.com lists 14,704 reservations totaling $2,278,891.
The first batch will ship to backers on July 15. Reservations are still open, so anyone can still get one for $179.
Apigy got a lot of things right with the Lockitron. This was their second go at a remote locking device. The company graduated from Y Combinator’s summer 2009 class with a device that promised similar remote access but at twice the price. They went back to the drawing board.
This generation of the Lockitron is much more sophisticated and available for under $200. Best of all, it works on most deadbolts — and if it doesn’t work on yours, Apigy now has the aforementioned replacement.
Apigy has a winner with the Lockitron. Cameron demoed the unit at our CES booth last January and it works as advertised. Excuse the pun, but it’s a clever, turn-key solution that brings simple home automation to the masses.
The company shouldn’t have a problem finding buyers for the Lockitron. But who is going to buy Apigy? That was my question to founder Cameron Robertson. The company, with its rockstar founders and products, is ripe for acquisition.
He laughed but then paused.
“We’re not for sale,” he stated frankly. Apigy has big plans for the Lockitron, explaining that they built its platform to continually evolve. They want to see it through.
So, essentially, Apigy is not for sale yet.
Guardly Launches Mobile Mass Notifications With Indoor Positioning To Help With Emergency Response
Toronto-based startup Guardly is launching a new product today, a mobile mass notification system (MMNS) that will allow its clients to broadcast out alerts and notifications of emergencies to their user base. That type of system has been used before, including by carriers like AT&T who recently started providing general public emergency alerts to iOS 6 users, but Guardly’s system is the first that offers location-based targeting, as well as indoor location positioning (IPS) aimed enterprise clients.
For Guardly, which provides subscription-based mobile security solutions for schools, businesses and building including apartments and parking garages, notifications are a big addition to the service portfolio. Guardly’s MMNS can also send up to 500,000 notifications in just seconds, meaning it likely fits the bill for even the largest of Guardly’s current clients. And the location-based component means that if a company has to send out a security warning to its people in the field related to a specific area, they can target them based on geography – Guardly co-founder Josh Sookman explained in an interview that previously, with systems like this a company would only be able to target people based on other divisions, like their position in the company or home working area.
The IPS aspect works for helping making the notifications a way to communicate with those affected by an emergency. The MMNS is designed to be a two-way communication tool, allowing people affected by situations to respond to the notices with a request for help. Said requests for assistance would be tagged using Guardly’s previously announced IPS tech, so that responders can accurately find them in case of need, and so that victims can broadcast all the information needed to get them help quickly and easily.
“One part of it is the actual delivery, as it’s choosing who actually gets the message,” Sookman said. “But then the second part is around when there is actually an issue in a building, it’s the first time that a mass notification system has actually been coupled with an indoor positioning system at the user level. So, if there’s a chemical spill or a fire, or some sort of threat to the building, people can get these alerts and actually request help with one tap in the application.”
The MMNS component adds another competitive advantage to Guardly over competitors like Rave Mobile, as Sookman says there isn’t a single provider out there in the same space as Guardly that offers the same combination of MMNS services paired with IPS to make the kind of emergency event call-and-response system the Toronto company has created.
The MMNS service is launching in beta for now, and is a paid add-on to existing Guardly services. Sookman says that pricing is reasonable, and based on user volume – not on notification usage, as is the case with some similar services. This has led to companies being reluctant to send out alerts at all, he says, which is something Guardly wanted to avoid. Fear of incurring high costs shouldn’t dissuade businesses from sending out these kinds of warnings, Sookman notes.
In addition to being useful during the situation itself, the alert system also tracks all data related to the notifications and responses, allowing clients to go back and see how each situation was handled after the fact. For Guardly, it’s something that came about in part due to client requests, so there’s definitely an appetite out there for this sort of thing, but we’ll see how quickly it gets adopted, and by which sectors first.
No comments:
Post a Comment