Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Foundry Group

Zynga Expected To Raise Between $850 Million and $1.15 Billion In IPO

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:40:23 +0000

Zynga has filed documents with the SEC this morning which indicates that they are planning on raising between $850 million and $1.15 billion in their public offering. This is about $15 million more than their previous estimates.

Zynga is seeking to sell about 100 million shares at between $8.50 and $10 per share. They are reservhing 15 million additional shares for extra demand. Zynga is expected to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol “ZNGA.”

Zynga will be valued at about $7 billion based on 699.3 million shares understanding. This would put Zynga’s valuation at close to Electronic Arts, which is hovering at about $7.65-$7.8 billion. Zynga makes money from selling virtual goods on social games such as FarmVille, CityVille, and Words With Friends. Zynga has about 230 million monthly active users and they have a close-knit relationship with Facebook. Some financial analysts believe that Zynga is rushing their IPO before tech stocks take a major plunge.

Zynga was founded in 2007 in San Francisco by Mark Pincus. Pincus named the company after his dog Zinga. Zynga recorded a profit of $27.9 million on revenues of $597.5 million in 2010. In the first 9 months of 2011, Zynga hit revenues of $828.9 million. Even though Zynga’s revenues are growing, their number of daily active users has fallen two quarters in a row. Zynga currently has 2,500 employees.

The proceeds from the IPO will go towards working capital. About $83.6 million will be spent to satisfy tax withholding obligations that is related to stock of current and former employees. They also plan to use a portion of the proceeds for charitable causes through Zynga.org. In the sale, Zynga will have three classes of shares: Class A, Class B, and Class C. Pincus owns Class B shares and all of the company’s Class C shares. After the IPO, Pincus will control 36.2% of the company voting power. Pincus will not be selling any of his shares in the IPO. No other executives plan on selling stock either.

Some of Zynga’s venture capital investors will be selling their stock, including Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square, Foundry, and Avalon. Google will be selling 1.7 million shares. Kleiner Perkins will not be selling any of their stock.

[AllThingsD]

Occipital Is Developing Some Of The Most Sophisticated Augmented Reality Applications

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:14:50 +0000

Occipital is a TechStars company that had raised $7 million in Series A funding. The Boulder, Colorado based company had previously sold an app to eBay called RedLaser. And the company recently launched a new app called 360Panorama. 360Panorama will allow people to take 3D panoramic image captures through mobile devices. Now Occipital is planning a campaign to launch some high-tech augmented reality applications.

“360Panorama is just the tip of the iceberg,” stated Occipital co-founder Jeff Powers. “The iceberg is what sits underneath 360Panorama – it’s the beginnings of a sophisticated computer vision platform that aims to fundamentally transform the way we interact with environments,” added Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy.

Occipital will also soon start working with third party developers to create apps on a platform that Occipital is developing. These developers will be able to create new layers on top of the computer vision technology that is inside 360 Panorama.

Occipital’s Series A round of funding was led by Foundry Group. Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures, and Gary Bradski of Willow Garage is joining Occipital’s board of directors.

[Mashable]

Crowdtap Raises $7 Million

Riley Kennysmith — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 17:33:53 +0000

Customer-targeting service Crowdtap has raised $7 million in funding to improve its engineering and sales teams. The investors include Foundry Group, GSA Venture Partners and Mr. Youth. The latter previously invested $3 million in Crowdtap as seed funding. The service offers brands more information about their customers, and already has 150,000 clients, including Old Navy, Pinkberry and Bing. [TechCrunch]

Cloud Database Company MongoLab Raises $3 Million From Multiple Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:39:27 +0000

San Francisco based cloud database company ObjectLabs has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Foundry Group, GRP Partners, Baseline Ventures, Freestyle Capital, David Cohen, and a few others. ObjectLabs is best known for launching the database-as-a-service company MongoLab. MongoLab is the database-as-a-service provider for MongoDB. 10gen‘s MongoDB is used by companies like Foursquare, Bit.ly, and Etsy.

MongoLab provides cloud-based hosting services for MongoDB users on Amazon EC and Rackspace. MongoLab also can manage replication and back-up data on cloud servers.

“Developers have spent the better part of their careers writing code to change the shape of their data between object form and relational form. I recently heard one VP of Engineering refer to it as ‘our Vietnam’”, stated MongoLab CEO Will Shulman. “Since JSON is an object format, MongoDB makes a lot of these problems disappear. Developers have been waiting years for something like this.”

[TechCrunch]

Blog Advertising Company Lijit Raises $10 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:56:31 +0000

Lijit Networks is an ad company that power third party advertising services for publishers and offers a complementary search tool widget. The company has recently raised $10 million in funding.

This funding round is taking place less than one year after they raised $6 million in a fourth round of funding. Since launching in 2006, Lijit raised $27 million in total funding. This round was invested by Highway 12 Ventures, Foundry Group, Boulder Ventures, and High Country Ventures.

Lijit’s ad service platform has grown 74% since Q4. They have 17,000 websites in their network that have a combined 1.5 billion pageviews per month with around 106 million unique visitors per month.

Disclosure: Lijit is an provider for Pulse2.com.

[paidContent]

Smartphone Toy Company Orbotix Raises $5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:14:21 +0000

Orbotix is a smartphone toy company that has raised $5 million in Series B funding from Foundry Group and Highway 12 Ventures. Orbotix plans on launching a toy called Sphero this fall. Sphero is a robotic ball that can be controlled by iOS and Android devices. Orbotix spun out of the TechStars incubator. Sphero costs $130 and will include multiple games and apps. Mark Solon of Highway 12 Ventures and Brad Feld of Foundry Group will be joining the company board of directors as part of the funding deal. [TechCrunch]

Attachments.me Raises $500,000 In Seed Round

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 09:27:25 +0000

Attachments.me is a start-up that is aiming to help you easily find pictures or documents in e-mail attachments. Foundry Group has invested a $500,000 seed round in Attachments.me. Attachments.me was founded by Jesse Miller Ben Coe, and Joe Stump. Attachments.me indexes all of the attachments in your e-mail, then displays them in a visual grid. Attachments.me does not have a Gmail plug-in as of yet.

Cheezburger Blog Network Raises $30 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:29:30 +0000

The Cheezburger network of websites include FAIL Blog and LOLcats. The company has raised $30 million in funding led by the Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and SoftBank Capital. Brad Feld (Foundry), Greg Gottesman (Madrona), and Rich Levandov (Avalon) will be joining the board of directors at Cheezburger. I Can Has Cheezburger now has a total of $32.5 million.

Ben Huh founded Cheezburger in 2007. Now there are about 50 websites in the Cheezburger network of websites and they has a user base of about 16.5 million people that have uploaded 500,000 pictures and videos. Between all of their pictures and videos, the Cheezburger network sees about 375 million pageviews and 110 million videos per month.

Huh plans on increasing their staff size from the existing number of 50 people. The company is also planning on expanding internationally.

Cloud Engines Raises $15 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 01:14:23 +0000

Cloud Engines is the company behind the “personal cloud” device known as the Pogoplug. Cloud has raised $15 million in funding from a new set of investors. Softbank Capital, Morgan Stanley Investment Partners, and Foundry Group participated in this round.

Pogoplug is a small device that lets users access their files remotely from their home storage. Pogoplug devices also come with a free online service that lets people share files. Recently Pogoplug has launched several features for enterprises. There is a business version of Pogoplug called Pogoplus Biz.

[GigaOM]

RIM May Buy Gist

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:44:01 +0000

Research In Motion Limited (NASDAQ:RIMM) is in talks to acquire Gist. The deal is rumored to be nearly complete. Gist is a service that creates a profile for your friends in your business network from public information. Gist is led by CEO and former Microsoft employee T.A. McCann. The company has funding from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.

Gist started in 2008 and raised $6.75 million in Series A funding from Vulcan and The Foundry Group. Gist claims to have created 100 million social business profiles. Gist makes plugins for Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Google Apps. The company has applications for Android and the iPhone.

[GigaOM]