Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Felicis Ventures

People Search Engine Ark Raises $4.2 Million In Seed Round

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:55:34 +0000

Ark is a people search engine launched at Y Combinator Demo Day that has raised $4.2 million in a seed round of funding. Ark crawls Facebook, RenRen, LinkedIn, and Twitter to find out as much data as possible. The founders at Ark got the idea for the startup when they found out that 30% of searches are for people.

In March 2012, Ark indexed over 1 billion people from their social networking data. About 250,000 people have signed up for beta invites.

The $4.2 million seed round is the largest that any Y Combinator has received. Investors in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, and Felicis Ventures. Angel investors from Facebook, Salesforce.com, Qualcomm, and Microsoft also participated in this round.

Ark currently has 20 people on staff and they plan to hire more for their mobile and search engineering teams. Ark started in summer 2011 and their search engine was developed during the Y Combinator Winter Program.

Smartphone Medical App Company Azumio Raises $2.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:31:42 +0000

A couple of years ago Bojan Bostjancic and Peter Kuhar started building Instant Heart Rate, an iPhone app that measures the heart rate of a user through the smartphone camera. Users would hold their finger over the camera for 10 seconds and the app would be able to detect and measure their heart rate. This app has hit 8 million downloads in 9 months between iPhone and Android.

Bostjancic and Kuhar formed the company Azumio as the app continue to succeed. Now Azumio has raised $2.5 million in funding from Founders Fund, Accel Partners, and Felicis Ventures. The company will be using the funding to expand their product line going forward. Two of the company’s newest apps include Stress Check and Stress Doctor.

“Mobile technology is fundamentally changing everything, including our approach to health,” stated Bostjancic. “We realized this would happen with this technology built into smartphones, and we decided we wanted to provide a simple solution for bigger health problems.” Bostjancic previously sold WiMAX hardware company Telsima to Harris Stratex for $12 million in 2009.

[GigaOM]

MindJolt Acquires Social Gaming Network and Hallpass Media

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:25:03 +0000

MindJolt is a gaming company that is run by MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe. DeWolfe left MySpace a few years after News Corporation acquired the social network company.

MindJolt appears to be in a better spot than MySpace right now. MySpace is continuing to lose money and MindJolt is profitable with $20 million in revenue. MindJolt has also recently acquired Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Hallpass Media. This acquisition doubles MindJolt’s staff to about 80 employees.

When MySpace’s revenue fell in 2009, DeWolfe who was CEO at the time was basically kicked out. Facebook started really dominating in 2009. Currently MySpace is being shopped around and it is rumored that buyers are not willing to spend higher than $100 million for it. DeWolfe is rumored to be involved as one of the buyers. This is a huge difference from the $856 million revenues that MySpace posted in 2008 and the $580 million price that News Corp. spent to buy the social network in 2005.

Hallpass Media is a gaming portal website that receives about four million monthly visitors. Hallpass Media also has 1,500 web based games that will be added to MindJolt’s portfolio. Social Gaming Network (SGN) creates iPhone and Android games that have a total of about 30 million downloads.

“Initially, a lot of energy was spent on games on the Web, through platforms like Facebook,” stated SGN founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar. “But over the past year, what we’ve seen is that a lot of that activity is going into mobile. We’ve reached a tipping point.”

SGN raised about $18 million in venture capital funding from Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, The Founders Fund, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Bezos Expeditions, Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures, and Lars Hinrichs.

[NYT]

Shopify Raises $7 Million From Bessemer, FirstMark, and Felicis

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:16:40 +0000

Shopify is a software company that helps retailers create online stores. The Ottawa, Canada based company has raised $7 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Felicis Ventures. “While we are already profitable, the support gives us additional resources to improve our products and add value for our users,” stated the Shopify CEO and co-founder Tobias Lutke. “Our mission continues to be to make it as easy as possible for retailers of all sizes to start and run a business online.” The Shopify “app store” processes over $100 million per year from clients that include GE, Tesla, and Amnesty International. [Financial Post]

Intuit Planning To Acquire Mint.com For $170 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:50:47 +0000

In less than 2 years since launching, Mint.com is supposedly selling themselves to Intuit Inc. Mint.com is a financial tool that allows you to aggregate all of your bank and credit card information and find ways to save money. The deal is expected to close within the next few days.

Mint had launched at the TechCrunch50 conference two years ago and took the top prize giving them $50,000. Mint raised $31.8 million in total funding from First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, Hite Capital, DAG Ventures, and The Founders Fund. Angel investors in Mint include Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Geoff Ralston, and Dave McClure.

This acquisition is interesting because Intuit had previously sent Mint a letter demanding an explanation for how they jumped to 850,000 users within several months.