Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Foundation Capital

Former Google China Head Kai-Fu Lee Raises $180 Million For Innovation Works Incubator

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:53:13 +0000

Kai-Fu Lee is the former head of Google China. Lee has raised $180 million for his startup incubator company founded two years ago known as Innovation Works. Innovation Works is an early-stage accelerator company.

Innovation Works provides funding, advisors, and support for start-up companies. “Our unique ‘incubation-plus-investment’ model has not only produced a pipeline of high-quality projects but also enabled local early-stage startup teams to grow quickly with the help of our 360-degree mentoring services, in effect creating the entrepreneurial academy for Chinese startups,” stated Lee. Innovation Works incubated 34 companies thus far. Nine of the companies secured additional rounds of funding from third-party venture capital firms.

Investors in this round include WI Harper, Silicon Valley Bank, Sequoia Capital, IDG-Accel, Foundation Capital, Foxconn, SAP, Bertelsmann, Motorola, Autodesk, and pension funds in the U.S. and Canada. Ron Conway and Yuri Milner was also in this round of funding. Executives from Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon.com, and Yahoo! also participated in this round. The incubator previously raised $115 million.

[TechCrunch]

Read It Later Raises $2.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:25:03 +0000

Read It Later is a popular bookmarking service that allows you to read content from any smartphone, tablet, or computer. Read It Later has raised $2.5 million in funding. The investors in this round include Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Google Ventures, Founder Collective, and several angel investors.

Read It Later founder Nathan Weiner started the company in August 2007. Read It Later received several offers, but he decided to remain independent.

Read It Later has 3.5 million registered users, but this number also includes users that are inactive. Read It Later is seeing about 10,000 downloads per day and over 250 applications have integrated Read It Later’s APIs.

Textbook Rental Chegg Raises $75 Million From Asian Company

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:38:19 +0000

Chegg is a very popular online textbook rental service. Chegg has recently raised $75 million from Ace Limited, an Asian-based investment firm. Chegg had $144 million of funding before this. Other venture firms that put money into Chegg include Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital, and Insight Venture Partners.

Chegg started as a classifieds rental service in 2005 on the campus at Iowa State University. Chegg works across 7,000 schools in the U.S and the company employs about 120 people across Silicon Valley and Louisville, Kentucky. Chegg recently acquired CourseRank, a Mountain View, California based start-up where students can share class schedules with friends and write reviews on classes.

[AllThingsD]

FreeWheel Raises $16.8 Million From Steamboat, TBS, Battery Ventures, and Foundation Capital

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:22:08 +0000

FreeWheel is a video advertising company that has raised $16.8 million in funding from Steamboat Ventures, Turner Broadcasting Systems (TBS), Battery Ventures, and Foundation Capital. The company has raised a total of $30 million. FreeWheel was founded by former employees at DoubleClick in 2007. The company works with marketers and publishers to manage video ad campaigns. FreeWheel’s platform can produce inventory forecast for live and on-demand content. Some of their clients include TBS, VEVO, MLB.com, and CBS. Two new agreements FreeWheel has made includes partnerships between Discovery Communications and ESPN Internet Ventures. [TechCrunch]

LendingClub Raises $24.5M In Series C

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:09:03 +0000

Lending Club has raised $24.5 million in Series C funding from Foundation Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Canaan Partners. The company now has a total of $52.7 million in funding. The additional funding will be used to advance their existing platform which allows lenders and borrowers to avoid the middleman (banks) for investing among peers. This round of funding will also be used for launching new products, marketing, and improving customer service. [PRNewsWire]

SimplyHired Raises $4.6 Million From IDG and Foundation

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:30:54 +0000

SimplyHired is a job search engine that aggregates listings from various websites. SimplyHired is based in Mountain View, California and has raised an additional round of funding at $4.6 million, led by IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital. This brings SimplyHired to a total funding amount of $22.3 million.

Previous investors include Gautam Godhwani, Peter Weck, Anil Godhwani, Jerry Crowley, the late Rajeev Motwani, Kanwal Rekhi, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, James Hong, Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Fox Interactive Media, IDG Ventures, and Foundation Capital.

Fox Interactive Media launched a classifieds website through MySpace since they made their investment in SimplyHired. SimplyHired stated that they have had positive operating cash flow over the past four quarters. The company had revenue growth for 16 consecutive quarters.

The additional funding will be used to hire additional employees and for international expansion. SimplyHired syndicates their technology to LinkedIn, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Plaxo, and CNNMoney.

[via paidContent]