Categorie: Venture

Mutual Funds For Non-Profits: Bright Funds Wants To Be The Vanguard For Charitable Giving

Bright Funds, causes, charity, ecommerce, Enterprise, Fundings & Exits, investing, non-profits, social, Startups, TC, Venture

brightfunds-logoWhen push-comes-to-shove, people love to donate, especially when they believe that their donation (be it money, time, food or possessions) will make a real difference. While online charity and fundraising platforms have made it easier than ever before to donate to causes, charities and non-profits, web-based philanthropy still has plenty of room for improvement.

Today, donors, especially those who have grown up in the Web 2.0 Era, are frustrated by the lack of enjoyable giving experiences on the Web. Not to mention that, with the accessibility of information on the Web today, donors want more accountability in their dealings with non-profits and, in turn, are more focused on outcomes. In other words, they want to know if (and how) their donations are making an impact.

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Zetrip Finds Travel Photos And Recommendations From Your Facebook Friends, Raises Seed Funding

inspiration ventures, social, Startups, TC, Venture, zetrip

zetrip logoZetrip, new startup offering to help users find “travel inspiration” based on the activity of their Facebook friends, just raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Inspiration Ventures.

Co-founder and CEO Edouard Tabet said he came up with the idea last year, when he was planning a trip to the Galapagos and wanted to see which of his Facebook friends had been there too.

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Airbnb Says Today’s $117M Form D Filing Is Part Of Series B Financing [Update]

AirBnb, collaborative consumption, ecommerce, sharing, social, Startups, TC, Venture, venture capital

airbnb-logoIn September we broke the story about how the short-term accommodation-sharing site Airbnb was in the process of raising a significant third round of around $100 million. A Form D filed with the SEC today shows that it’s raised north of that: $117 million (or $117,051,696, to be exact). Airbnb says that this filing, although made only today, is part of last year’s Series B.

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Clayton Christensen: “Disruptive Innovations Create Jobs, Efficiency Innovations Destroy Them”

boxworks, Clayton Christensen, education, Enterprise, innovation, social, Startups, TC, Venture

Screen shot 2012-10-09 at 1.38.44 PMIf you get the opportunity to hear Clayton Christensen hold court, seize it. Speaking at BoxWorks in San Francisco today, Christensen was characteristically soft-spoken, self-deprecating and good-humored, even prompting Ron Miller to describe him as “the Steven Wright of business research” and the anti-Aaron Levie.

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Little Bird Takes Flight: Marshall Kirkpatrick Launches His Influence-Finding Startup, Raises $1M

little bird, marshall kirkpatrick, plexus engine, social, Startups, TC, Venture

little bird logoLittle Bird, a startup that helps PR agencies, marketers, and media companies identify influencers on virtually any topic, is launching in private beta today.

The company was founded by tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick — an an early TechCrunch writer who’s best-known for his long stint at ReadWriteWeb. He left his full-time role at RWW last November to start his own company, which was initially called Plexus Engine. He’s launching the product on-stage today at the Portland Incubator Experiment from agency Wieden+Kennedy, and with W+K’s help, he’s given his startup a new, less wonky-sounding name.

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Nexage Founder Devkumar Gandhi Raises $600K For Pinterest Marketing Startup Dobango

dobango, pinterest, social, Startups, TC, Venture

DobangoDobango, a startup that allows brands to promote themselves through fan competitions on Pinterest, just announced that it has raised $600,000 in seed funding.

The company is led by Devkumar Gandhi who previously founded mobile advertising startup Nexage. (Dobango’s seed investors include John Ostrem, the original backer of Nexage.) Gandhi served as Nexage’s CEO for more than four years, but eventually, he wanted to return from Boston to Silicon Valley, and to start something new.

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Gravity Raises $10.6M For Content Personalization And Marketing, Round Led by GRP Partners

gravity, social, Startups, TC, Venture

Gravity logoGravity, the content personalization startup founded by a team of former Myspace executives, just announced that it has raised $10.6 million in Series B funding.

When Gravity launched in 2009, it offered some content recommendation products for consumers, but its real goal was to convince publishers to use its “interest graph” technology to deliver a personalized experience for visitors — in other words, to show readers content that they specifically might be interested in based on their activity.

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Welcome To The Long Tail Of Social Media Marketing: Linqia Exits Stealth Mode With $3.5M Series A From Javelin, Esther Dyson

advertising, linqia, social, social media marketing, TC, Venture, venture capital

linqia logoThere have been a lot of social marketing efforts aimed squarely at making content go viral, but equally there seems to be a rising trend, fuelled by big data analytics, of brands (and social media sites themselves) looking at ways of targeting very specific groups of users who are the most likely to respond. Linqia, which has developed a platform to deliver highly targeted “stories” to specific audiences, is among the latter group. The company has just exited stealth mode with a $3.475 million Series A round behind it, led by $2.5 million from Jed Katz of Javelin Venture Partners, along with participation from existing angel investors including Esther Dyson, and a plan to transform how social media marketing is done today.

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Confirmed: Scopely’s New $8.5M Funding Round Was Not Wrapped In Bacon

Fundings & Exits, Gaming, mobile, social, Startups, TC, Venture, venture capital

scopely-interesting-engineerThere are a handful of startups that are going to build mobile-social gaming platforms or die trying. Los Angeles’ Scopely is one of the latest. The company, from AdSense Co-creator Eytan Elbaz, is closing $8.5 million in funding in a round led by Anthem Venture Partners. Over the past year, the company has grown to about 30, luring engineers with promises of $11,000 in bacon-wrapped cash and spear guns. (No joke. See the picture to the left. And they gave hires their own personal oil portrait too.)

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FashionPlaytes Raises $5M To Help Tweens Design Their Own Clothes

fashionplaytes, social, Startups, TC, Venture

fpgirl logoFashionPlaytes, which runs a fashion website for “tween” girls called FPGirl.com, has raised $5 million in Series B funding.

The site is aimed at girls between 5 and 12 years old. Users can design clothing on the website, then actually purchase the clothes (which include dresses, t-shirts, tops, and doll clothing) at prices starting under $20. Girls can also dress a custom avatar with their designs, share their portfolios, interact with other users in a monitored forum (the monitored part is important since we’re talking about kids), and learn from fashion industry experts.

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