“We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”
-Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning [quote source: VentureBeat]

I have to admit that when I started writing for Pulse 2.0 about a year and a half ago, I used to think that another bubble would happen again. So many companies were getting funding again like we were back in the late 90’s. Since then Facebook became valuated at $15 billion, Feedburner got bought for $100 million, YouTube got bought for $1.7 billion, and the list goes on. Just when we thought VC spending was slowing down again, Ning raised $60 million and is now valuated at a half-billion dollars.

Ning is a company that builds custom social networks for a large client-base. The company was started by a co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen. Allen & Company is investor that plugged in the $60 million. Ning’s third round was $44 million, provided by Legg Mason. Legg Mason also is a major shareholder in Yahoo!

Ning plans to use this funding to build it’s infrastructure for scaling purpose.

In an interview that Peter Thiel (early investor in Facebook) had with Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, he stated with confidence that there’s absolutely no bubble in technology.  At first I was a skeptic of this quote, but now I’m a full believer.

Information Source:
[1] VentureBeat: Social network creator Ning raises $60M at $500M valuation by Anthony Ha
[2] AllThingsD: Kara Visits Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel by Kara Swisher

“Sermo’s state of the art technology has the potential to greatly improve our ability to provide physicians with timely and accurate information they want about our medicines and clinical data.”
-Michael Berelowitz, MD, Senior VP of Global Medical and New York Site Head of Worldwide Development for Pfizer

One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer Inc. announced today that they are partnering with Sermo Inc., a social network that has membership comprised primarily of licensed physicians.  Physicians on Sermo will have easier access to Pfizer’s clinical information to find data that they need. 

Sermo is Latin for conversation and joining Sermo isn’t easy.  Sermo validates whether all of the physicians that join the site are actually licensed.  Non-physicians are currently not permitted to join.  But Sermo has plans of opening the community eventually.  Physicians can make money on Sermo by writing or by voting for postings.  If physicians give opinions on a posting, there isn’t any malpractice liability because provinding opinions and information does not constitute the definition of malpractice.

Sermo is based in Cambridge, Mass. and raised $27 million in Series C funding last month.  Allen & Co. LLC and Legg Mason Investment Trust Inc. were the investors.  To date, Sermo raised a total of $39.5 million.  Daniel Palestrant, CEO of Stermo stated that they would use the funding to hire more employees and website capacity increase.  The company plans on hiring 25-50 more employees over 2008.

Sermo has about 26,000 licensed physicians participating on the social network.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health also has access to the social network.

Other investors in Sermo includes SoftBank Capital Technology Fund and Longworth Venture Partners.  Both companies invested a total of $9.5 million in Series B in January 2007.  Longworth invested $3 million in Series A for Sermo.