Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » First Round Capital

Poppin Raises $6 Million In Series A

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:35:43 +0000

Poppin is an office supplies company that has raised $6 million in Series A from Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, and several angel investors. Poppin makes office supplies in bright colors. Poppin will be expanding into furniture after this round of funding.

Poppin’s goal is to make “buying, using, looking at, and thinking about office products an extraordinary experience.” You can browse products by color, category, or bundle. Poppin was co-founded by Chris Burch. Burch was also an investor in PowerMat, Jawbone, and Voss Water. Supposedly the prices are quite reasonable too!

[TechCrunch]

First Round Capital Parodies Rebecca Black [VIDEO]

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:37:03 +0000

First Round Capital has put together a happy holidays card in the form of a parody for the song “Friday” by Rebecca Black. The video features the staff from Path, AppNexus, TaskRabbit, SinglePlatform, Birchbox, Xobni, Jelli, MemSQL, Monetate, 33Across, Turntable.fm, Mashery, Hotel Tonight, Warby Parker, RockMelt, Bitcasa, GroupMe, Milk, Cabana, Get Satisfaction, Kiwi Crate, and ModCloth. Check out the video above. [VentureBeat]

SavingStar Hits 1 Million Users In Under A Year

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:53:13 +0000

SavingStar is a service where you can receive grocery discounts by entering your loyalty cards into the system. I just registered an account with them and I noticed that they are able to get me an additional $2.00 off from 2 boxes of Pepsi, $1.00 off a bag of Tostitos, 50 cents off Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, etc. from Kroger. Other stores that work with the service include Rite Aid, CVS, Piggly Wiggly, Albertsons, County Market, Food City, Lowes Foods, Jack’s SuperValu, Ralphs, and the list goes on. SavingStar launched in beta this past August and raised $2.3 million in funding from Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Founder Collective, and several angel investors.

SavingStar renamed the company from SaveWave and raised $7 million in Series B financing this past April. Buddy Media Founder and CEO Michael Lazerow joined the company board of directors.

The company has hit a major milestone this past week. In exactly 230 days, the company has surpassed 1 million active users. This growth is faster than Groupon, Twitter, and Foursquare. SavingStar considers themselves as being a “Groupon for groceries.”

Every year, consumers spend about $550 billion per year on groceries. The benefits for grocery companies is that they can add their products to SavingStar for free and they will not be charged until a product is actually purchased.

[SavingStar Press Release]

Fab.com Raises $40 Million, Now Valued At Over $200 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:24:17 +0000

When Fab.com originally started, it was a social network for the LGBT community. Now the website is a flash sale website with 72-hour deals. The company has just raised $40 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and is now valued at over $200 million. It was only about 6 months ago since Fab.com switched from being a gay social network.

This past July, Fab.com raised funds that gave them a valuation of around $25 million. Fab.com processed about 100,000 orders in November alone, which was double the month before. Now Fab.com is averaging about $1.4 million sales per week. Fab.com currently has 1.2 million registered users. The company is expected to hit 4 million members by next year.

First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures, Baroda Venures, SoftTech VC, and Ashton Kutcher were investors in Fab.com’s series A and is believed to be participating in this round as well. Fab.com plans on using this round of funding for making investments in their distribution and customer service capabilities. Fab.com currently employs about 120 people. Fab.com CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg previously founded website Jobster Inc. The company runs about 14 sales per day which lasts about 72 hours.

[WSJ]

Liftopia Raises $1.3 Million Led By First Round Capital

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:12:23 +0000

Liftopia is a San Francisco based online retailer of ski lifting and mountain resort transactions. Liftopia has raised $1.3 million in a round of funding led by First Round Capital. Other investors in this round includes Dave Morin, Chris Sacca, Erik Blachford, and Sam Shank.

Liftopia has raised a total of nearly $3 million thus far. Liftopia is working with about 150 resorts across North America. The company plans to start expanding in Europe very soon.

Liftopia allows you to buy lift tickets in advance and help consumers save up to 80% off of the walk-up rates for lifts. Liftopia keeps a portion of each transaction.

[TechCrunch]

BankSimple Raises $10 Million Led By IA Ventures

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:32:16 +0000

BankSimple has announced $10 million in funding led by IA Ventures and previous investor Shasta Ventures. This is BankSimple’s Series B round of funding. The company previously raised $3.1 million in their Series A round. The company’s seed investors include IA Ventures, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Village Ventures, etc. That is not the only thing that the company had announced. They also made some partnerships.

BankSimple made partnerships with CBW Bank, Allpoint, Visa, The Bancorp Bank, TxVIA, and Andera. BankSimple is currently in stealth mode. The company should be opening up by the end of the year and will be sending cards out to their family and friends soon to test out.

BankSimple was co-founded by CEO Joshua Reich, CFO Shamir Karkal, and CTO Alex Payne. BankSimple aims to make banking less complicated by providing a way for people to save money. BankSimple also wants to make it possible to track transactions in real-time.

[TC]

Movieclips.com Raises $7 Million And Signs A Deal With YouTube

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:31:15 +0000

Movieclips.com is an online movie clips search engine website that launched in 2009. It has over 20,000 different clips across libraries from 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, and Universal Pictures. Miniclips has raised $7 million in funding led by MK Capital. Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, Richmond Park Partners, Jeff Clavier, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Kearl, Tom McInerney, Allen DeBevoise and Gordon Rubenstein also participated in this round.

Movieclips also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to ever scene, which makes it easy to find scenes by film title, actors/actresses, director, genre, mood, dialogue snippet, etc.

Movieclips also signed a deal with YouTube that allows them to license Hollywood HD movie clips. All video clips will have ads that will be shared between YouTube, Movieclips, and the studios.

“There’s a sea of content that can add to a YouTube user’s movie experience thanks to Movieclips.com…We’re excited to be working with Movieclips.com to provide users with exactly what they’re looking for when they want to get more into movies on YouTube,” stated YouTube Product Marketing Manager for Music, Movies, and Shows Camille Hearst.

The new round of funding will be used for doubling down on the YouTube opportunity. Movieclips will be integrated into mobile and social platforms too.

[TechCrunch]

Turntable.fm Raises $7.5 Million from USV

Riley Kennysmith — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:20:51 +0000

Betabeat reports that the rapidly-popular music service Turntable.fm has found an investor in Union Square Ventures. The company is reported to have raised about $7.5 million, having chosen an investment from Union Square-based USV instead of the west coast’s Kleiner Perkins or Accel. It’s possible that other investors from the founders’ other startup Stickybits may join in the funding, including First Round Capital, Lowercase, Polaris, Chris Sacca and Mitch Kapor.

Gay Social Network Fab.com Raises $8 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:56:14 +0000

Fab.com is a social network for gay men that used to be known as Fabulis. Fab.com has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

The Series A funding was from Menlo Ventures, First Round Capital, Baroda Ventures, The Washington Post, Jason Goldberg, SoftTech VC, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, A-Grade Investments, and Zelkova Ventures. Angel investors in this round included Kevin Rose, Jon Anderson, Don Baer, Josh Kusher, Dave Morgan, Ben Ling, and David Tisch. Fab.com’s seed round of funding was $1 million from Ashton Kutcher, SV Angel, SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, Baroda Ventures, and The Washington Post.

Fab.com has daily design inspirations and flash sales that provides 70% off of the retail cost. Membership to Fab.com is free, but the number of users are capped to maintain the low prices. Fab.com launched on June 9, 2011 and they have 350,000 registered users. Fab.com reported a profit of $1.3 million in the first 30 days of the debut. The company currently has about 45 employees.

[TechCrunch]

Smartling Raises $10 Million for Quick Crowdsourced Translations

Riley Kennysmith — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:15:46 +0000

Crowdsourcing translation service Smartling has raised $10 million in funding to improve its localized language tech. Smartling’s investors include U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock, First Round Capital and IDG Ventures. Smartling has already gained some big-name customers, including Foursquare and Scribd. [GigaOM]