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Freshdesk, the makers of cloud-based help desk software that allows companies to support their customers through email, phone, website, Facebook and Twitter, are on a mission to compete with the big boys of the space, like Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com. Though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering a unique brand of cloud-based customer support to the enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well.
That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through $10 million-worth of services which includes free support for one year. Any startup with less than $1 million in annual revenue qualifies, but to get thing started, Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made. → Read More
Tiger Pistol, an Australian startup offering social media marketing tools that it describes as both “small business friendly” and “enterprise powerful”, is coming out of its closed beta test today and launching to the public. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in angel funding.
Co-founder and CEO Stephen Hibber says that the goal was to create something that could take most of the difficulty and uncertainty out of creating marketing campaigns on social networks. You can start off with pre-built campaigns and templates, so you don’t have to create anything from scratch, and you’re tapping into Tiger Pistol’s knowledge about best practices. → Read More
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The rush of interest around crowdfunding is spawning many variations on the theme, and one of the more original of them — Crowdtilt, part of the most recent crop of Y-Combinator startups — is today announcing a funding round of $2.1 million for its platform that lets groups of friends come together to fund an event or project, like a house party or group vacation.
The company tells us that the seed round is coming from?SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Y Combinator partners Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan, and DCM and Felicis Ventures, and it follows on from a very impressive three months of growth.?James Beshara, the CEO and co-founder, tells us that it has now seen nearly $1 million of events funded since launching in February 2012.
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Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures. The startup previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding from most of the same backers ― Battery is the only addition. → Read More
One of the things I wish I had done in both of my companies (Excite.com and JotSpot) was to take a piece of advice that I now give most entrepreneurs I meet. That advice is: “Right after you sign your term sheet for your Series A, write the fantasy deck for your Series B (complete with whatever metrics, graphs and customer lists you would love to have).”
I say this because of the way I’ve both done fundraising and seen it done. Whether we like to admit it or not, the way it’s usually done tends to be very haphazard and bottom’s up. It starts with… → Read More
Can early-stage tech startups be financed the way that Disney might fund a Pixar film??We’re about to find out.
New York’s betaworks is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to do a deal with design collective Fictive Kin. It’s pretty unusual because it resembles the way a producer might bankroll a movie or a game publisher might work with a developer. In this deal, betaworks is paying Fictive Kin, a design collective, a lump sum every year to create three or four concepts. Those concepts will be the basis for companies that are majority owned by Betaworks. If one or two of them happens to take off, betaworks will jump in and figure out how to scale it with the help of Fictive Kin. → Read More
Two of the top venture capital firms have written a big check for Qualtrics, a 10-year-old company offering online data collection and analysis.
The $70 million round is Qualtrics’ first institutional investment ― the company says it has been profitable since it was founded in 2002. The money comes from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, which both have growth funds targeting investments like Qualtrics ― mature companies that have already achieved some success but have bootstrapped thus far. Apparently it’s the largest investment the two firms have ever made together. (Past joint investments include AdMob, the mobile ad network acquired by Google for $750 million.) → Read More
EyeTrackShop, a startup that develops eye-tracking technology for measuring ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million from Northzone.
The company says its technology works through a regular webcam, allowing market researchers to gather data quickly and affordably. You can run the test before you spend money on a campaign, or test how well the advertising works once it’s live, and how it performed in different formats and sites. Customers include big tech companies such as Google, AOL, and Microsoft, as well as P&G and JCDecaux. → Read More
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At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. Speaking to a crowd at the Grind work space in New York last week, Fred Wilson addressed this ongoing shift, saying, “there’s two times as much capital in the venture capital business today than we, the professional investors who make up the venture business, can actually put to work intelligently.” Bad for VCs, Wilson says, but good for entrepreneurs.
Of course, the fact of the matter is that the top investors are custodians of an equally valuable currency — information. With the noise and hype growing, it’s becoming even more essential to understand what it is about the anatomy of startups that makes them appealing to the right investors — or perhaps more importantly — why some of the best fail in spite of themselves.
In a new book, called Venture Capitalists at Work, Tarang and Sheetal Shah set out to provide entrepreneurs with real insight into how some of the top investors in the game evaluate, invest in, and mentor their startups — information that can be extremely powerful if put to use correctly — and that has thus far remained, they say, in a “black box.” → Read More
Stipple, the advertising startup that helps Web publishers monetize their images, just announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding.
The company already raised a $2 million seed round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Maples’ Floodgate, Justin Timberlake, and others. Floodgate and Relevance Capital led the new round, and there’s a long list of other investors. → Read More
When two of the biggest names in venture capital (arguably still the biggest) both invest in a startup, you know it’s probably time to take notice. So yes, take notice: A cross-device ad targeting startup called Drawbridge has raised a $6.5 million Series A from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
The company was founded in November 2010 by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, a scientist at AdMob and then, after the acquisition, at Google. Sivaramakrishnan says she started the company because she saw the proliferation of ad targeting technology on the desktop web, while there was “no significant technology innovation” on the mobile side. So she decided to tackle the problem herself, “outside of the big G.” → Read More
Y Combinator-backed analytics startup Mixpanel can now add Andreessen Horowitz to an already-impressive list of investors.
Mixpanel had already raised $1.75 million from Sequoia Capital, Square COO Keith Rabois, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch. Now Andreessen Horowitz has led a $10.25 million Series A, with participation from Levchin, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer CEO David Sacks. (It looks like Sequoia sat out the current round, though I’ve emailed Mixpanel to confirm.) Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine is joining the company’s board. → Read More
Ask a VC, the TCTV show where you ask the questions, is back after a long hiatus and we’re kicking things off with two partners this week from Spark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz!
If you’ve got questions about what it’s like to shift from being an entrepreneur to being a venture capitalist, both our interviewees can actually tell you. So how does this show work? You ask questions either in the comments or at askaVC(at)TechCrunch(dot)com and we’ll put them forward to our VC guests.
So for our first taping, we have Nabeel Hyatt, who just joined Spark Capital in February after serving as a general manager at Zynga (pictured at the right). He sold his company Conduit Labs to the social gaming giant and that deal set the groundwork for Zynga’s Boston studio. → Read More
Adaptly, a startup that manages ad campaigns across multiple social networks, just announced that it has raised $10.5 million in a Series B round of funding. At the same time, it’s launching a new product called Evergreen to help advertisers promote their social network content.
The round was led by Valhalla Partners, with participation from Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo ― all three are investing in Adaptly for the first time. The company previously raised a $2.7 million round from First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and others. Adaptly says all of its previous backers invested in the new round.
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Virurl, a startup that helps advertisers promote their content virally, is launching its public beta test today. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding.
Here’s how the Virurl model works: Advertisers upload the content that they want to promote, then set a campaign budget and a cost-per-click rate that they’re willing to pay. Then users can browse the content and share it with their friends via social networks or email. For each click that they generate, users earn points that can be redeemed for rewards or cash. (Any proceeds from Facebook clicks are donated to a charity of the user’s choice.) → Read More
SessionM, a startup led by Quattro Wireless co-founder Lars Albright, just announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series B round of funding.
The round was led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from past investors Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. CRV partner Jon Auerbach is joining the SessionM board. The company declined to comment on the valuation, but apparently VentureWire is reporting that the round values SessionM at $100 million. → Read More
Well, it’s been quite a year already for the crowdfunding industry. With the JOBS Act becoming law, the tech industry (and the economy) are headed for some big changes, as the legalization of crowdfunding in startups for non-accredited investors has come to pass. Not only that, but the most well-known crowdfunding platform has been busy racking up a blockbuster season. If it weren’t there already, Kickstarter hit the tipping point in February, as it saw a number of record-breaking projects and landed squarely in mainstream consciousness thanks to a slew of media coverage.
Yet, as crowdfunding prepares for its stampede, many have been asking just how active the industry has been to this point, collectively, especially as it may indicate what’s in store. Luckily, Massolution, a research firm that specializes in crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, is today providing an answer. Having collected data from more than 170 crowdfunding platforms, Massolution found that, collectively, these platforms raised $1.5 billion and successfully funded more than 1 million campaigns in 2011. → Read More
Launch Pad Ignition, the first tech incubator to make its home in the Big Easy, today officially unveiled the seven companies that participated in its second annual session.
The accelerator’s 12-week program began the second week of February and culminated yesterday with its own New Orleans rendition of the patented “Demo Day,” appropriately called “Launch Fest,” which we’ve been told is “Jazz Fest plus startups, on steroids.” Launch Pad’s model is a bit different than that of the traditional accelerator, in that Co-founder Chris Schultz tells us it’s geared towards building traction, not offering big early funding. → Read More
Content companies have struggled to monetize on the Web, and there has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of paywalls. What’s more, tech startups really can’t seem to rush fast enough into the hands of angel investors or venture capitalists. That’s why, as a digital content company that has been around for years and has yet to take a penny of outside investment, Lynda.com has such relevance in today’s landscape.
While it didn’t happen over night, Lynda.com has been able to build a paying customer base of over 1 million, outshining every major newspaper, and its traffic is on the rise. Using a passion for education, industry experience, knowledge of what is important to its customers, and focus on product-before-profit, co-founders and married couple Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin have turned $20K of their own investment into a platform that produced $70 million in revenue in 2011.
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One of the most frustrating online experiences for me is trying to track down a web page or tweet that I saw a few days ago. If I’m lucky, I bookmarked the page or favorited the tweet, but most of the time I haven’t, and so I can only sit there and fume.
So basically, a startup called Archify is the answer to my prayers. It’s a browser plugin that tracks every website you visit (excluding https pages and websites you visit in Incognito mode), and also allows you to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts for archiving. Then, when you’re trying to find something later, you just search the archives like you’d search the Web. → Read More
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