Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » General Catalyst Partners

eBay Acquires Hunch For Roughly $80 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:20:04 +0000

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) will be announcing that they have acquired Hunch for around $80 million according to Michael Arrington. Hunch was started by Chris Dixon, Caterina Fake, Tom Pinckney, and Matt Gattis. Hunch has raised about $20 million in total funding since they launched.

Hunch is a start-up company that allows users to answer questions using crowd-sourcing techniques. Hunch will be used on eBay for recommendation technology to revamp their own e-commerce recommendations. Dixon will be responsible for the existing 50 person recommendations team and will be opening an office in New York.

The New York office will grow to about 200 employees that will focus on recommendations. The team will analyze a lot of eBay purchase and sales data to predict inflation or a potential recession.

Hunch was founded in 2008. In mid 2010 Google was rumored to be in talks with Hunch for an acquisition. Investors in Hunch includes General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, SV Angel, and Khosla Ventures.

[Uncrunched]

Brightcove Files For An IPO

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:24:38 +0000

Brightcove is an online video infrastructure company that has filed for a $50 million IPO. It is unknown how many shares they plan on selling as part of the deal. The underwriters in this IPO includes Morgan Stanley, Stifel Nicolas, RBC Capital, Pacific Crest and Raymond James.

Brightcove is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has over 3,000 customers including Bank of America, Oracle, Showtime, NYT, the U.S. Army, and Macy’s.

Brightcove posted $26.35 million in revenue for the first half of 2011, which is up from $20.31 million the year before. Brightcove reported a loss of $9.5 million during the first half of 2011 and $8.1 million a year earlier.

In all of 2010, Brightcove reported revenues of $43.7 million and lost $17.4 million total. Investors in Brightcove includes Accel Partners and General Catalyst.

[Forbes]

GoodData Raises $15 Million Funding Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:01:55 +0000

GoodData is a cloud-based company that focuses on business intelligence. GoodData has raised $15 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell will be joining GoodData’s board of directors. Google’s president of Enterprise Dave Girouard is also joining the board of directors although Google did not invest.

GoodData plans on using the funding to accelerate their company. The company has 2,500 customers including Time Warner Cable, Zendesk, Twilio, Pandora, and Capgemini.

This is Andreessen Horowitz’s second investment in GoodData. The first round was $2.5 million in seed funding in 2009. GoodData raised $6.5 million in its Series A round of funding. The other investors in this round include General Catalyst Partners and Windcrest Partners.

[AllThingsD]

Airbnb Raises $112 Million In Series B From Andreessen Horowitz, DST, and General Catalyst

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 06:09:25 +0000

Airbnb has raised $112 million at a $1+ billion valuation. This round of funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz. The split is roughly 60 million from Andreessen, 40 million from DST, and 5 million from General Catalyst. The rest of the split is from previous investors and Jeff Bezos. This round of funding raises Airbnb’s total funding to $119.8 million.

“Over the past three years, we’ve built a community marketplace for unique properties and brought it into the mainstream and into almost every country on the planet,” stated Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky. “Today is a watershed moment — both for Airbnb as a company and for our community — that will enable us to touch new markets and expand our vision to make the world’s most interesting and inspiring places accessible to our users.”

Airbnb doubled their benchmark of 1 million nights booked in four months. The company now has over 2 million nights booked. Airbnb receives over 30 million page views per month.

[Marketwire]

Ping Identity Raises $21 Million for Secure Cloud Sign-Ins

Riley Kennysmith — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:42:50 +0000

Ping Identity has gained investors Triangle Peak Partners and Silicon Valley Bank, raising $21 million for their secure sign-in platforms. According to TechCrunch, the new investors join Appian Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, SAP Ventures and Volition Capital.

Ping Identity’s products allow users to sign in with a single cloud identity. The $21 million they have raised will be used to develop new products and boost their sales and marketing. Ping Identity currently serves more than 600 customers, providing a secure single sign-in for many cloud applications.

GroupMe Acquires BlackBerry App Development Company Sensobi

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 06 May 2011 03:48:42 +0000

GroupMe is an application company that allows people to create private groups and send out mass text messages. GroupMe has acquired a smaller application development company called Sensobi. Sensobi was co-founded by Ajay Kulkarni and Andrew Cheung. Sensobi will be integrated into GroupMe’s BlackBerry application. Later it will be rolled into GroupMe’s iPhone and Android applications.

Sensobi has a free application and a paid application. The paid application will be made free in the BlackBerry App Store in the near future. GroupMe is growing rapidly, but is still working on monetizing their users. GroupMe has raised $11.5 million in funding from General Catalyst Partners, Khosla Ventures, and several other venture capital investors.

[WSJ]

Widget Developer Community Widgetbox Raises $12 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:22:58 +0000

Widgetbox is an online community comprised of widget developers. The company has raised $12 million and renamed themselves to Flite. The third round of funding was provided by General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, and NCD Investors. Over 120 brands are associated with Widgetbox including Microsoft and Toyota.

“Over the past several years, Widgetbox has been a pioneer in helping make the Web a more interactive, entertaining and fun experience, while helping businesses better monetize their Web properties,” stated Flite CEO Will Price. “Our platform has evolved to become a powerful way for top brands to deliver a new category of Web ads — a new standard for how display ads are created, monetized and shared.”

[DigitalMediaWire]

HubSpot Raises $32 Million In Series D

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:41:28 +0000

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded HubSpot Inc. in 2006 and they have recently raised $32 million in Series D. The funding was provided by new investors Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Salesforce.com. Existing investors General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, and Scale Venture Partners also participated in this round. HubSpot has raised a total of $65 million thus far.

Halligan and Shah met while they were Sloan Fellows at MIT’s School of Management in 2004. HubSpot is a service that helps small businesses set up blogs, SEO, lead management, marketing analytics, e-mail marketing, landing pages, etc. About 4,000 companies in 31 countries use their services.

“We agree with HubSpot’s belief that search engines, social media and mobile devices have fundamentally changed how businesses should market themselves,” stated Google Ventures partner Rich Miner. “We’re thrilled to support their efforts to help thousands of small and medium businesses reach potential customers.”

Boxee Raises $16.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:23:28 +0000

Boxee is a New York City based company that makes software for watching online video on TV. The company has recently raised $16.5 million in a round led by Pitango and Softbank. Previous investors that participated in this round include General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures.

Boxee plans on using the funding to further develop their product and increase partnerships. Boxee is not mainstream and they face intense competition from Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

[BusinessInsider]

Mobile Q&A Service Opinionaided Raises $1 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 09:44:28 +0000

Opinionaided is a mobile Q&A service that has raised $1 million in funding several venture capital companies and angel investors. The investors include General Catalyst, SoftBank Capital, DFJ, ENIAC Ventures, Mark Wachen, Jonah Goodhart, Karl Jacob, and Vince Monical.

Opinionaided is an iOS application that lets people offer advice and opinions. On the app, users can input a question and determine a category for users to answer. It is like a Quora-type of business model but tailored towards mobile devices.

Thus far there has been 40 million responses to about 500,000 questions. The company is based in Red Bank, New Jersey.