Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Accel Capital

Nimble Storage Raises $16 Million From Accel, Lightspeed, and Sequoia

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:00:06 +0000

Nimble Storage is a converged storage and back-up solution company that has raised $16 million in Series C. The funding came from existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.

Nimble was founded by Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari. “The interest we’ve had in Nimble has been remarkable. We were over-subscribed for this Series C round of funding and look forward to rapidly scaling the company to take advantage of a huge market opportunity,” stated Mehta. “It’s clear that we’ve hit a real customer pain-point, and the number of deals we’ve closed already proves there’s huge pent-up demand for a new approach to enterprise storage and backup.”

Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield Working On Online Video Game Company Called Tiny Speck

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:24:31 +0000

Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Flickr is now working on an online video game company Tiny Speck. Before building and selling Flickr to Yahoo!, Butterfield originally wanted to create an online video gaming company.

He failed to attract investors back then so he backed out of the idea. Tiny Speck’s first game Glitch is currently being tested with 5,000 users. Glitch is a massively multiplayer game that lets a lot of people play at once. Glitch is a fantasy world with avatars and characters that is inspired by wood block illustrations according to the NYT. The illustrations include giants, chickens, and underground mines.

Stewart lives in Vancouver and founded Flickr in 2004 with his former wife Caterina Fake. They had the photo sharing idea after they couldn’t finance their online game. Butterfield started Tiny Speck with 3 other Flickr employees.

Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, and other angel investors invested $6.5 million in Tiny Speck. Glitch is going to be a free game and they plan to make money by selling virtual goods.

[New York Times]

Metasearch Engine Kosmix Raises $20 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:50:21 +0000

As much as I like to see innovative startups succeed, I don’t quite see the game-changing abilities of Kosmix. This is why it surprised me that they were able to raise $20 million in recent funding. In total funding they have raised $55 million. When a company raises that sort of money, you have to ask yourself, what does your product actually do?

Kosmix does metasearches and aggregates content from a bunch of other sources. Top stories are pulled from Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, CNN, and Fark. Popular videos are pulled from Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr. Trending topics are from Twitter. Lucky Dip is from People magazine. Daily deals are pulled from DealNews, Amazon.com, and Orbitz. And finally Images of the Day are pulled from Kodak, Flickr, and Picasa.

In my opinion, it appears that Kosmix is to search is what Alltop is to RSS feeds. And the difference is that Guy Kawasaki spent $10,000 to create Alltop. I’m not the only one that questions Kosmix’s technology. VentureBeat has a similar opinion.

But the numbers don’t like when it comes to VC dollars. Kosmix had over 11 million monthly visitors recently. Kosmix will also be rolling out an advertising strategy next year some time as well as a customizable homepage.

The investors in the $20 million round of funding includes Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures. Former Motorola CEO/Chairman Ed Zander was also an investor.

Jim Bankoff’s SB Nation Receives Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:50:03 +0000

SB Nation is a sports startup that was started by Jim Bankoff, former AOL EVP of Consumer and Publisher Services. Bankoff is also a Senior Advisor with Providence Equity Partners. Bankoff was one of the AOL execs that pushed for the development of TMZ.com.

Although it is not known exactly how much SB Nation has raised, TechCrunch pegs it at around the “mid-seven-figure sum.” The funding was provided by Accel, Allen & Co., and several other angel investors. The other angel investors include Ted Leonsis (former AOL Vice Chairman and Washington Capitals owner), Brent Jones (former San Francisco 49ers player and MD of Northgate Capital), Dan Rosenweig, Jeff Weiner, and other executives from Providence Equity Partners.

SB Nation is short for SportsBlogs Nation. About 150 team sites are linked together by local writers within the SB Nation network. All of these bloggers share in advertising revenue. SB Nation sites combined receive about 2 million unique visitors per month.

SB Nation is based in Washington D.C.

Yahoo! May Acquire Maven Networks For $150 Million+

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:46:42 +0000

Yahoo! Inc. is rumored to acquire Maven Networks for over $150 million.Â Yahoo! was also previously interested in acquiring Metacafe and previously acquired online video editing company, Jumpcut.Â

Maven Networks is an Internet TV advertising platform.Â Here is a sample of what they do:
http://www.mediamave.com/foodnetwork/

Maven Networks is based in Boston, Mass. Some of Maven’s clients include FOX, Scipps Networks, Sony, TV Guide, Gannett, Univision, USA Today, CBS, IBM, HGTV, Food Network, and CNET.Â

Maven previously raised around $30 million in funding from Prism Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and General Catalyst Partners.Â Maven Networks has a partnership with Comcast and had a former advisor that is now the CEO of Brightcove.

[Information Source: NewTeeVee and TechCrunch]

Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra For $350 Million: Gearing For Online Office Application Competition

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:56:54 +0000

What does Georgia Tech, Digg, and Mozilla.org have in common? According to Yodel Anecdotal: Yahoo’s company blog, the email and group calendaring system is all powered by Zimbra. And because why it is so “damn cool” as described by Yahoo!’s Brad Garlinghouse, the search engine just bought the open source email/calendaring company for $350 million in cash.

This acquisition comes at a time that Google is gearing to develop further online office suite applications and when Microsoft is supposedly developing and testing online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well. Yahoo! is now on the bandwagon and will bring Yahoo! new customers and be able to benefit from the open-source community in terms of email software development.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.5 is the current release by Zimbra, but with the announcement of the acquisition, version 5.0 will not be delayed.

For those who are current Zimbra customers or want to learn more about how the acquisition, there is a Q&A available and Network Edition Trial on the Zimbra website.

The company raised $30.5 million over the course of three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich according to TechCrunch.