We’re going to be doing Hangout on Air sessions with prominent VC’s and angel investors. In the next few weeks we’ll get started with:

+John Lilly of Greylock Ventures
+Chris Dixon of Founder Collective
+Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners
+John Borthwick of Betaworks

For each session, we’re hoping to find 6-8 interested and interesting entrepreneurs, students, or fans of tech investing to lob questions at the respective VC’s. We’ll do 30m or so sessions, that we’ll broadcast and archive for posterity. We’ll announce each VC session with an individual G+ post… and if you’d like to be part of the interview panel, you can respond in the comments. I’ll select a group of panelists from those that self-nominate.

I expect this is going to be a lot of fun! Very open to suggestions and feedback as we explore what the community (and perhaps even the VC’s) find valuable.

Google+ was recently redesigned and Google claims to have 170 million users on Google+. Google said that the first hangout will take place on Thursday May 10 at 8:15AM PST with John Lilly of Greylock.

The $4.2 million seed round is the largest that any Y Combinator has received. Investors in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, and Felicis Ventures. Angel investors from Facebook, Salesforce.com, Qualcomm, and Microsoft also participated in this round.

Ark currently has 20 people on staff and they plan to hire more for their mobile and search engineering teams. Ark started in summer 2011 and their search engine was developed during the Y Combinator Winter Program.

Students on Edmodo can take quizzes and interact with the website. However students cannot direct message each other.

“Both Matt and I have seen networks grow spectacularly once they hit their tipping point. It’s clear to us that Edmodo is well on its way to becoming one of the key networks in our lives. Just as LinkedIn is the professional graph for work and Facebook is the social graph for your friends, Edmodo is the educational graph for learning. The graph provides the platform for teachers to bring selections of the web to the classroom…Edmodo is the third social graph network that Greylock has invested in, after Linkedin and Facebook,” stated Reid Hoffman.

Currently Edmodo has 5 million users in 60,000 schools, which is up from 500,000 users at the end of 2010. The funding will be used for hiring engineering talent and scaling Edmodo.

[TechCrunch]

Zenprise Raises $30 Million; Investment led by Greylock Partners

- Strategic Financing Round to Support High Growth in Customers, R&D and Operations Worldwide
- Greylock’s Asheem Chandna Joins Zenprise Board of Directors

Silicon Valley, CA – October 11, 2010 – Zenprise®, Inc., the leader in secure mobile device management, today announced the closing of a $30 million strategic round of financing. The round was led by leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners, with participation from all of Zenprise’s existing investors. The investment will support Zenprise’s rapid growth and accelerate its product development, sales and marketing efforts in order to meet the growing demand for its solutions.

“This year has been one of tremendous growth for Zenprise, driven by companies seeking to balance Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies with mobile device, application and data security,” said Jayaram Bhat, CEO of Zenprise. “This significant investment led by Greylock is a major validation of Zenprise’s strategy and market position. We look forward to expanding our product capabilities, marketing and sales while helping our customers everywhere confidently deploy and leverage mobile computing infrastructures, applications and data.”
Zenprise provides a family of enterprise-grade, partner-ready mobile device management solutions, including Zenprise MobileManager™ for on-premise deployments and Zencloud™ for flexible cloud deployments. These solutions offer real-time security, scalability, and high-availability across every major mobile platform including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

As part of this new funding round, Zenprise also announced that Asheem Chandna has been named to the Zenprise board of directors. Asheem has been a partner at Greylock Partners since 2003 and was previously VP of business development and product management at Check Point Software. Asheem has helped create and grow multiple technology businesses and product lines to market-leading positions, ­ both as a former operating executive and as a venture capitalist at Greylock. Current and prior company investments and board seats include: AppDynamics, Aruba Networks (ARUN), CipherTrust (Intel), Delphix, Imperva, Palo Alto Networks, Port Authority (Websense), Securent (Cisco), Sourcefire (FIRE) and Xsigo Systems.

“The invasion of smartphones and tablets into the enterprise has made secure mobile device management a top priority for IT organizations,” said Asheem Chandna, Partner at Greylock Partners. “We’re excited to partner with Zenprise to help build the leading company in this rapidly growing market.”

The Greylock-led investment comes on the heels of a particularly active year for Zenprise. Recent company milestones highlighting its technology innovation, corporate growth and customer momentum include:

- Positioned in the Visionary Quadrant of the 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management Software
- Named Top New Security Vendor by HP at HP Protect 2011
- Named a Top 50 Startup Winner by TiE Global
- Expanded U.S. headquarters with a new 24,000-square-foot facility in Redwood City, Calif.
- Opened new European headquarter office in Paris
- Opened additional sales offices in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Washington, Germany, the Netherlands and The United Kingdom.
- Broadened executive ranks with the additions of a new chief financial officer, vice president of worldwide sales, vice president of business development and vice president of customer success
- Added a significant number of Fortune 100 companies to the customer base including:
- Two of the top four entertainment companies
- Two of the top three computer software companies
- Two of the top three computer hardware companies
- Two of the top three telecommunications companies
- Two of the top three aerospace and defense companies
- Two of the top three petroleum refining companies

About Greylock Partners
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events, including: Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Sun Edison, Tellabs, Trilogy and Wily Technology. Current Greylock portfolio companies include Data Robotics, Digg, Facebook, Imperva, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, Pandora, Picarro, Redfin, Workday and ZipCar. For more information about Greylock Partners, visit www.greylock.com or follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/greylock) or Twitter (@GreylockVC).

About Zenprise, Inc.
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zenprise is the leader in secure mobile device management. Only Zenprise protects all layers of the mobile enterprise, keeping organizations secure and compliant. Zenprise MobileManger™ and Zencloud™ let IT say “yes” to mobile device choice while safeguarding sensitive corporate data, shielding the network from mobile threats, and maintaining compliance with regulatory and corporate policies. This gives IT peace of mind, lets executives take their businesses mobile, and makes employees productive while on the go.

Zenprise’s extensive list of global customers and partners spans a cross-section of countries and vertical industries including: aerospace and defense, financial services, healthcare, oil and gas, legal, telecommunications, retail, entertainment, and federal, state and local governments.

For more information about Zenprise, please visit www.zenprise.com or follow us on the Zenprise blog (http://www.zenprise.com/blog), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/zenprise) and Twitter (@Zenprise_Inc).

Traffic increased to 13 billion page views per month. There are now 30 million blogs that have been created using Tumblr. Across these 30 million blogs, 40 million posts are being generated per day. About 623 million minutes per month are being spent by people looking at Tumblr blogs.

“Tumblr has come far since we began our journey,” said Mr. Karp. “From the early users signing up to easily share all of the things they cared about, to the global community today where creators have an incredible opportunity to reach an audience of hundreds of millions, it’s been a remarkable four years.”

[TechCrunch]

Okta provides the opportunity for IT managers to maintain one central directory and replicate this across cloud apps. Okta’s on-demand service currently powers over 1 million authentications per month. This round of funding will be used for sales and marketing efforts. David Weidon of Khosla Ventures will becmoe a board advisor.

[Xconomy]