Greylock Partners is tapping the business skills that Reid Hoffman has by making him an investing partner at the VC firm. Hoffman will work as the Chairman of LinkedIn at the same time. As part of the announcement that Greylock made, the company announced a $575 million round of funding. Currently Jeff Weiner is the CEO of LinkedIn.

In the past 6 six years, Hoffman has invested in Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Zynga and several other companies. “I definitely wear too many hats,” stated Hoffman as quoted by VentureBeat. “[Greylock and I] both wanted to make sure we had good, aligned interests. My interest was that I would continue to be massively focused on LinkedIn, and their interest was that I would help provide intelligence on the consumer Internet.”

Greylock is also an investor in LinkedIn. LinkedIn has over a $1 billion valuation based on their last rounds of funding. LinkedIn raised about $103 million in funding from Sequoia, Bain Capital, SAP Ventures, Goldman Sachs, McGraw Hill, Bessemer, Greylock, and the European Founders Fund. Hoffman worked at PayPal shortly before the acquisition and is considered one of the PayPal Mafia members.

Richrelevance designs personalized recommendation software used by companies such as Sears, KMart, Michigan Bulb Co., and Bestbuyeyeglasses.com.  As a matter of fact, Amazon.com said that they saw a 25% profit increase based on personalized recommendations.  In an SEC filing it has been revealed that Richrelevance has raised $12.5 million in additional funding.  Currently it is unclear whether this is a new round of funding or an add-on to the previous round.

The previous round was Series C at $9 million, led by DFJ with contributions from Greylock Partners, Tugboat Ventures, and several others.  Interestingly, the last time I wrote about a combined investment between Tugboat and Greylock, the Cuil search engine was involved.  That search engine was quickly hyped up and forgotten about despite a $200 million valuation.  Hopefully Greylock and Tugboat have better luck in this investment.

Richrelevance’s first couple rounds of funding amounted to $9 million in total funding.  That investment was also provided by Greylock, DFJ, and Tugboat.  The company has an office in Seattle and hired former Amazon.com Principal Engineer Darren Vengroff to run the company.  In the past year, Richrelevance said that they have tripled their revenues and has plans to further expand.

Cloudera is a custom enterprise software company that builds products around the Hadoop platform.  The company has raised $6 million in funding, bringing their total to about $11 million.

This round of funding was led by Greylock Partners and previous investor Accel participated.  Other Cloudera investors includes Diane Greene and Marten Mickos.  The company was founded in 2008 by Mike Olson, Christophe Bisciglia, Dr. Amr Awadallah, and Jeff Hammerbacher.

[via GigaOM]

Wink.com has been acquired by Reunion.com.  Wink.com is a search engine focused on individuals.  Reunion.com is both a social network and a search engine.  Both Wink and Reunion will be merging and launching a new website.  The new site will be launching in early 2009.

Reunion.com first partnered with Wink.com in April 2007.  Wink’s people profiles became available to Reunion’s members.  Last year Reunion.com acquired ZoomInfo.  Reunion.com was started with $1.4 million in angel funding and raised $25 million Series A from Oak Investment Partners.

Wink’s original investors was Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.  Cambrian Ventures and Greylock invested $6.2 million Series A in Wink around January 2005.

WEbook.com is a social network where users can collaborate on creating a book together.  Or users can review other people’s books and vote which ones are the best.  When the process is complete, WEbook can publish the book.  Recently the company completed their Series A in funding.  The amount was $5 million from Vertex Venture Capital and Greylock Partners Israel.  The 8 angel investors also participated in this round of funding.

Over 15,000 book projects have been worked on so far between all of the readers and editors on the site.  Authors share 50% revenue with WEbook after the book is published.  One example of a book that was collaborated between 30 authors is 101 Things Every Guy Should Know How to Do.

“WEbook.com now attracts more than half a million monthly unique visitors,
and the potential for the growth of the WEbook community is tremendous,” stated Sue Heilbronner, president of WEbook. “We are delighted to have the continued
support of Greylock as well as the addition of Vertex to our team of investors
and advisors as we continue to identify innovative ways to redefine the
publishing industry.”

Itai Kohavi founded WEBook.  The company is based in Bethesda, Maryland and the development team is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Cuil received a ton of press when it first launched.  As soon as people started tinkering around with it, a ton of negative reviews were published.  Tyler Hall, a developer at Yahoo! was able to replicate Cuil using Yahoo! Boss and the Google App Engine.  He called it Yuil, but later took it down.

Investors somehow believe that Cuil was worth $200 million when they put money into the company.  Cuil raised about $33 million in funding from several investors.  What possibly drove Cuil’s high valuation is it’s confidence in challenging Google.  Google is the most powerful search engine company on the map today and they are worth $140 billion. 

It seems like that any search engine that believes they can challenge them will get funding and a high valuation.  And Cuil used the same strategy as Powerset to get funding: building the hype.  Cuil claimed that they index more links than Google, but they struggle to find results as accurately.  

Powerset claimed to have better search technology than Google.  So they raised $20.5 million and was acquired by Microsoft for $100 million.  The only product that Powerset launched was a Wikipedia search solution before the acquisition.  Microsoft plans to integrate Powerset into Windows Live down the line.

To shake things up further, Cuil’s VP of Product Louis Monier resigned from the company.  Building the hype usually works against the founders of a start-up because it puts more pressure on them.  More pressure means more stress and more stress leads to less of a desire to stay with a company.

Matt Marshall of VentureBeat wrote an interesting article about how Cuil may have a hard time finding an acquisition with such a high valuation.  Cuil needs to do something drastic to prove that they are a worthy adversary of the big 3 search engines out there.

“We are trying to shake things up and find new ways to help people,” stated Anna Patterson, co-founder of Cuil.

Cuil is a new search engine that officially launched last night.  Cuil boasts over 120 billion links to websites.  This is very comparable to the size of Google’s index as well.  Cuil was founded by Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, and Russell Power.  Patterson and Power both worked for Google prior to starting up Cuil.

Cuil’s strength is that they can index websites faster and cheaper than Google.  Cuil has raised about $33 million in two rounds of funding from Greylock, Tugboat Ventures, and Madrone Capital Partners [Crunchbase].  Cuil has about 10-15 employees based out of Menlo Park, Calif.

Another strength of Cuil is that there are categories that appear on the right side-bar when common keywords are plugged in.  Below is a screen shot:

If I search for my own name, lots of results appear.  But if I search for “Michigan” or “California,” no results currently appear.  This indicates that Cuil has a while to go before indexing everything correctly.  I can honestly say that I’ve been more impressed with Cuil than any other Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Live, and Ask.com alternative so far.

Update: Here is the official press release

Related Links:
1. TechCrunch
2. L.A. Times
3. Techmeme Discussion

“If LinkedIn is able to achieve its goals and objectives in the coming years, this valuation of a billion dollars will be looked upon as very cheap,” stated Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital partner/LinkedIn Board of Director.

LinkedIn is making some Facebook-like moves.  LinkedIn has a fraction of the features of many other social networks, but apparently the “professional” card works.  Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have combined their investments and gave LinkedIn a $53 million round of funding.  This gives LinkedIn a valuation at $1 billion.

What does the investors get in return?  Between the 5 companies, they received a combined 5% equity in LinkedIn.  Some of the investors have joined LinkedIn’s Board ofDirectors as well.  Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook for 1.6% equity.  Other valuations in LinkedIn’s sector include Ning at $500 million, Facebook at $15 billion, RockYou at $200-$300 million, and MySpace acquired for $580 million.

LinkedIn has about 23 million users in 150 countries.  LinkedIn is aiming for $100 million in revenue this year.  LinkedIn has raised $80 million in funding so far.  Although analysts are guessing News Corp. or Microsoft may make a bid for LinkedIn, but Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn stated that he preferred to remain independent.

Information Source:
[1] AP via Wired]

“We could not be more pleased with the announcement we are making today. This funding is indicative of how SGN is poised to dramatically impact the future of gaming platforms on the social web, stated Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming Network (SGN). Our focus and drive is to develop a dynamic and flourishing ecosystem for gaming on the web and continue to be the obvious choice for game developers who want to create social games that engage millions of users on the social networks and beyond.”

Many of today’s companies are finding ways to create games to keep users appealed whether its on their own websites or powered by applications within top social networks. As there has been a slowdown in the development of pointless applications on these social networks, many companies are finding that games are the way to go. This is further evidenced by the funding that Social Gaming Network received today.

Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Capital, and Biddle Venture Partners have invested $15 million Series A into SGN. SGN is focusing on making it easy for developers to consolidate applications on top of gaming to create a way to interact with users and to monetize through the application’s popularity.

With this round of funding, SGN will add more features and functionalities to their current platform.

SGN’s claim to fame was the instant traction that was gained by Warbook, the company’s first Facebook game. Other popular applications that SGN has produced includes Jetman, Free Gifts, Fight Club, Superlatives, Nicknames, Street Race, and Text Twirl.

SGN’s userbase includes 1 million daily game players, 70 million virtual gifts sent, and 50 million application installations.

SGN is based in Palo Alto, Calif.  The SGN Blog is located at: http://blog.socialgn.com/.  For developers, SGN APIs are located at: http://developers.socialgn.com/.

Information Source:
[1] Press Release sent by theMIX Inc.

High school social network, Takkle.com took a niche and kept on strengthening upon it. Takkle lined up partnerships with major corporations that revolve around the purpose of their niche: showcase high school athletic abilities. Even Sports Illustrated, NYCIF, Greycroft, WMG Investments, IJ Smith Enterprises invested in Takkle previously.

In this round, Liberty Associated Partners, WMG Investments, and Greycroft participated.  Takkle allows athletes and coaches to upload photos/videos/blogs/profiles on the social network.  High school athlete statistics can also be added to profiles.

Takkle athletes can also create “Takkle Sheets.”  Takkle Sheets are like a sports resume that athletes can use to  promote themselves to be qualified for professional and college leagues.  Takkle is based in New York.

On March 26, 2007, Payoneer announced that Greylock Partners was going to invest $4 million in their company.  I believe that the investment had some sort of performance requirements associated with the agreement because TechCrunch reported that Payoneer received the rest of the $3 million today.

Payoneer is a company that allows companies and/or business partners teh ability to pay each other via MasterCard online.  I may try out the service since I recently activated a MasterCard after applying for a Citi® Dividend Platinum Select® MasterCard®.  Payoneer is a private company that works with the Royal Bank of Scotland and the First Bank of Delaware to process credit card transactions.

The company was founded in 2005 and has an R&D facility in Tel Aviv, Israel.  The company was founded in 2005 and has an R&D facility in Tel Aviv, Israel.  Current Payoneer partners include Metacafe, Amie Street, oDesk, and BitWine.  Payoneer recently announced that they have also partnered with iStockphoto.  If I end up testing out the service, I’ll ensure to write my experience with Payoneer in the near future.

According to AllThingsDigital’s Kara Swisher, Facebook is considering raising additional funds for expansion or potential further acquisitions. Facebook’s first and only acquisition thus far is Parakey, a company created by two of Mozilla Firefox’s core programmers.

Considering the costs of maintaining Facebook between staffing, facilities, and server costs, I am not surprised that Facebook would be looking for more money. If I remember correctly, Facebook has roughly 40 million+ members, is expecting to make around $150 million this year in revenues (compared to $50 million in 2006), and is expecting to file for a possible IPO in the future. If Facebook decides to pursue an IPO, it would be around 2009 or beyond.

(more…)

The reason why I like Revision3[1] is because the company produces the show, Diggnation. When a story hits the homepage of Digg and gets tons of hits and attention, the odds of the event being talked about on Diggnation increases. And then either the founder, Kevin Rose or producer, Alex Albrecht gives credit to the user who submitted that particular story. This gives Digg.com more of a human essence.

Although I do not watch the show much myself, I did watch the episode[2] after the HD DVD key fiasco to see the response from Rose and Albrecht. I would say that this episode is the one that captured my interest.

Sometime between last night and this morning, TechCrunch reported[3] that Revision3 gained $8 million in investment by Greylock partners. “Online video site Revision3 has raised an $8 million second round of financing, according to a source close to the deal, bringing the total capital raised to $9 million. Our understanding is that Greylock led the round,” wrote Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder.

Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation (which was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999), is also an investor in Revision3.  Having Andreessen as an investor is a classic example of Web 1.0 reaching out to 2.0.

With the new round of funding, I’m assuming that Diggnation will expand their network of online video programs.   Kevin Rose is a posterboy of web success.  Both of his ventures, Digg and Revision3 is kicking ass with no barriers in the way.

[1] Revision3.com
[2] Diggnation: Episode 100
[3] TechCrunch: Revision3 Raises $8 million From Greylock

My apologies for the slight delay in updates. I have been travelling a little bit the last couple days to Chicago and Minneapolis. But here’s a fresh update of tech deals:

Dollar Amount Involved: $114 Million
On Friday, March 30, Academy Music Group Holdings, Ltd. (AMG) confirmed that now a majority of the company is owned by Gaiety Investments [no website available] and Live Nation, Inc. Both Gaiety and Live Nation paid $114 million to purchase 56% of AMG from RJD Partners. AMG owns 12 music venues that host over 2500 events and attracts over 3 million in audience. AMG also owns Carling Academy Brixton and Shepherd’s Empire. Live Nation has the technology needed to stream concerts and events live so through this investment, AMG would constantly provide web content as well.

“AMG has one of the strongest live music venue brands in the UK,” stated Live Nation’s CEO Michael Rapino. “The venues that we are acquiring are among the best in the world. The acquisition of AMG will enable us to grow our UK venue network with a brand that music fans know and love.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $1 Million
Hercules Technology Growth Capital stated on Friday that they would be investing $1 million into Wallop. Wallop was launched on April 25, 2006 by Microsoft Corporation’s Research division and is based in Silicon Valley. The project is led by Karl Jacob and was backed with $13 million from Microsoft’s IP Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners, and Consor Capital.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $4.35 Million
CARTASITE is a Denver, Colorado based company that monitors remote assets in real time and uses a Network Operation Center (NOC) to interconnect with wireless carriers. Last year, authorities in Gainesville, FL recovered $1.5 million worth of art from a Budget truck driver that tried to run away and sell its cargo on eBay. However, the GPS system used in the truck was monitored by CARTASITE.”The irony is that Budget didn’t purchase our system as a theft recovery device,” stated David Armitage, the CEO of CARTASITE. “They are utilizing it as an inventory management tool that allows them to have enough vehicles in the right location at the right time.  It’s a huge operational benefit for them. The fact that it can also be used to handle rare situations like this is just a bonus.”It is because of this technology that Canterbury Partners and Arcadia Partners invested $4.35 million Series A into CARTASITE.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $7 Million
iUpload is a company that develops content manager, community publisher, and personal publisher online applications. The company is based in Burlington, Ontario Canada and serve major customers such as McDonald’s, Kodak, Northwestern Mutual, the New York Times and Newsweek. iUpload was founded in 1998.The Series A funding comes from Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Many customers are currently utilizing iUpload to set-up wikis, blogs, forms, and workflow diagrams.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
Sportsvite is a New York based company where users can invite each other to participate in various sports events. Sportsvite has roughly 20,000 members. The investor of Sportsvite is Grace Drive Management [no website available]. Although the website was funded last month, the amount was just declared to be $2 million as a first round.  Sportsvite was created by 212Media, who also operates 3 other companies: Bodvod, New Play Media, and Conscious Content.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $5 Million
Games2Win is a company based in Bombay, Maharashtra India that designs Adobe Flash games with comedic twists. Clearstone Venture Partners partnered with SVB Financial Group and led the $5 million recent investment into Games2Win. Games2Win also plans on launching multiplayer Flash games. Games2Win was founded by Mahesh Khambadkone and Cyrus Oshidar. “Internet users in India are still highly underserved when it comes to online entertainment that’s relevant and compelling. With its unique blend of topical, irreverent and action-packed games we are confident that Games2win will be a dominant player in the rapidly growing online gaming marketplace in India. With Clearstone’s track record of building category leading consumer internet businesses like Paypal, MP3.com and Etoys we look forward to building Games2Win into a globally recognized brand” stated Clearstone Director, Rahul Khanna.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $600,000
Austin, TX based company, Naturally Curly (www.naturallycurly.com) has recently announced that they have raised $600,000 from Jim Trebig,, Dr. Philip Sanger, and Tim Wall. The website was founded 9 years ago and has about 10,000 daily visitors.NaturallyCurly.com will use the funding for technical development and marketing. “Companies like NaturallyCurly have been able to see opportunities that have gone unnoticed by high-tech nerds like me,” stated Treybig. “The movement to communities like NaturallyCurly is the foundation for the future of advertising.”The founders of NaturallyCurly are Michelle Breyer and Gretchen Heber, who have also launched CurlyKids.com. NaturallyCurly.com was nominated in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition in Austin.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
John Mackay, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc. financed spiritual social network, Zaadz. Zaadz is based in Los Angeles and Brian Johnson is the founder and CEO. The social network has close to 50,000 users and calls itself a “place of political refuge for MySpace immigrants.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Search Physics is a startup that has developed a search engine capable of extracting content from websites, store additional information, classify links, and narrow down search results.Search Physics is based in San Francisco and raised an undisclosed amount of funding. The investors of Search Physics are Stanley Wong and David Shen, both from Yahoo! The founder of Search Physics is Dr. Minh Duong-van, a theory of chaos and quantum theory physicist.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $505,000
NeoSaej Corporation is a start-up that is currently in “stealth mode” (quiet about its idea for now). The company is based Burlington, Massachusetts. NeoSaej is looking to address “the severe inefficiencies in current online marketplaces, and greatly improves the e-commerce experience for all participants.”NeoSaej has received $505,000 of a $1 million Series A, led by Stata Venture Partners. The company was founded by Rohit Goyal in August 2006. Goyal is a former network engineer at Enterasys Networks.Another investor in NeoSaej is NeoNet Technologies, LLC.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
TRACE.TV has recently made a new partner: Universal Music Group. Universal Music Group will be providing TRACE with music and video rights. Universal will also provide TRACE.TV a weekly slot in Universal’s International Music Feed. TRACE was launched in 2003 in Paris, France and started out as True Magazine in London.TRACE is looking to expand to U.S. markets next year. Goldman Sachs is a previous investor.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $1.53 Million
Fliptrack is a website where users upload photos and videos and sync it with music provided. To keep the audience captive, the music is mainstream. Fliptrack is based in Mountain View, CA and has raised $1.53 million Series A funding by Mohr, Davidow Ventures, and other angel investors. Fliptrack raised $500,000 in angel funding. Fliptrack was founded by Stewart Putney.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $13.5 Million
Safeguard Scientifics has announced that it has provided $13.5 million in funding to Beyond.com. Beyond.com is based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and has more than 15,000 online communities. Beyond.com is aligned with Safeguard’s focus to partner with entrepreneurial technology companies that have a competitive advantage in Software as a Service (SaaS), Technology-Enabled Services and Internet-based businesses, stated Peter J. Boni, the President and CEO of Safeguard Scientifics. We’re executing upon our game plan to deploy capital in innovative and attractive companies to generate increased value for our shareholders. We welcome Beyond.com to the Safeguard team.”

 

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See [Pulse 2.0 - Greylock Partners Leads $4 Million Series A Investment In Payoneer]

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[Information Source: Alarm Clock]

 
Greylock Partners announced today that they would be investing $4 million in New York City based company, Payoneer.  Payoneer is a company that allows companies and business partners to pay each other via MasterCard online.  Payoneer is a private company that markets and manages prepaid MasterCard cards and works with the Royal Bank of Scotland and the First Bank of Delaware to process card transactions.

Upon realizing the importance of developing strong partnerships with Web 2.0 companies, Payoneer currently works with selected business allies such as Metacafe, Amie St., oDesk, and BitWine.  Using such a service could also be very beneficial for Web 2.0 start-ups with only a few employees that share office expenses.

“The Internet payout space may well become a killer application in the next few years as Internet companies transition to smarter ways to pay out their partners around the globe,” stated Moshe Mor, a partner at Greylock Partners. “Payoneer’s team has deep payments experience, and an already impressive track rate of customer adoption and solutions. We’re delighted to work in partnership with Payoneer to fuel the company’s expanded market presence.” 

“Web-driven businesses have the unique opportunity to use payments as a retention tool, not just a cost line-item,” stated Yuval Tal, the CEO and founder of Payoneer. “With our additional funding on board, we’ll be adding to our team, expanding our service offerings, and working aggressively to win new accounts during this exciting high-growth time in our market.” 

Payoneer was founded in 2005 and maintains a research and development facility in Tel Aviv, Israel.   The co-branded MasterCards provided by Payoneer can be used anywhere whether it is in any store, online, or ATMs that MasterCards are accepted.

Proven Model Cases:
Citigroup Inc./eCount Inc.
“The prepaid card market is experiencing high growth, and is currently estimated at more than $2 trillion worldwide, as corporations and consumers continue to move from paper checks to electronic-based payment methods” states a Citibank press release announcement of the fairly recent eCount Inc. acquisition.

eBay Inc./PayPal
Another proven model is the legendary $1.5 billion acquisition of PayPal.  In July 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock.  PayPal now has 114 million customers as of October 2006 over 103 markets and 17 different currencies.

It is expected that with this round of funding that Payoneer will become hypercompetitive amongst some of the major aforementioned players out there.  I have no doubt in my mind that we’ll start seeing the Payoneer logo quite a bit more as we shop online.

[Information Source: E-mail from PR Representative for Greylock Partners]