There is a lot of speculation about how J.P. Morgan and angel investor Chris Sacca acquired about 10% of equity in Twitter for $450 million. The most interesting part here is how the funding round was conducted. It was not done as a venture capital series of funding.
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1000Memories has raised $2.5 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners. Angel investors Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Paul Buchheit, Mike Maples, and Chris Sacca also participated in this round. David Thacker of Greylock will be joining the board of directors at 1000Memories. 1000Memories is a website where loved ones can express words about people in their lives that have passed away. The appeal of 1000Memories is that it does not have ads and the website design is stylish. [TechCrunch]
Instagram is a photo editing iPhone application that lets you add filters to the snapshots that you take. Instagram has hit 1.75 million users and they have seen about 290,000 photo uploads per day. The company has raised $7 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and individual investors such as Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca, and Adam D’Angelo. [BusinessInsider]
Chris Sacca is a former Google employee and is an investor in Twitter. According to an SEC filing, his venture capital company Lowercase Capital raised over $20 million in funding as part of the Lowercase Industry Fund. In early August, Sacca raised over $11 million and another $10 million in June. Lowercase raised $8.5 million earlier this year. Some of the company’s other investments include DailyBooth, Stickybits, Posterous, etc. [TechCrunch]
Chris Sacca has started a new angel fund with $8.5 million in assets. Sacca’s fund is called Lowercase Capital. One of Sacca’s personal investments was early in Twitter and it is likely that he transferred that ownership to his new fund. Other investments Sacca made personally include SimpleGeo, DailyBooth, Posterous, Stickybits, Gowalla, Bit.ly and Fanbridge. [TechCrunch]
Stickybits has raised $1.6 million from multiple investors. First Round Capital and Lower Case Capital are two new investors that joined in on Stickybits’ funding. Previous investors that participated in this round include Mitch Kapor and Polaris Venture Partners. Chris Sacca also joined in this round. Stickybits lets you attach photos, videos, text, music, etc. to any barcode.
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Swipely is a company that raised $7.5 million in a first round of funding. Swipely is essentially a social tool that can be used to share what you are buying. The model is very similar to Blippy.
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URL shortening service Bit.ly has been growing at an aggressive rate as they have become the default for Twitter. Given their current growth rate, the company needed another injection of cash as they have raised $1.5 million from previous investors. These investors include Betaworks, SoftTech (Jeff Clavier), Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Howard Lindzon. The funding was added to an SEC filing and TechCrunch confirmed the round with Bit.ly President John Borthwick. The $1.5 million round was set up as a convertible debt note. Bit.ly received 2.7 billion clicks last month. last week alone about 744 million Bit.ly links were clicked on. [TechCrunch]
