Tag Archives: Mangrove Capital Partners
KupiVIP Raises $55 Million In Third Round Of Funding
KupiVIP is the largest online private members shopping club in Russia for purchasing designer brands. KupiVIP has raised $55 million in a third round of funding. The investors in this round include Balderton Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Russia Partners. Other investors in this round include Accel Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners.
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Social Music Service Rdio Raises $17.5 Million
Rdio is a social music service start-up that has raised $17.5 million from new and existing investors. Mangrove Capital Partners has joined as a new investor along with previous investor Janus Friis through investment entities Atomico and Skype. The funding will be used to expand their platform and regions. Warner Brothers Records Chairman and Grammy-nominated producer Rob Cavallo is also joining the board of directors at Rdio.
Categories Atomico, Janus Friis, Mangrove Capital Partners, Rdio, Rob Cavallo, Skype, Warner Brothers Records
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Amuso Raises $1.5 Million From Mangrove Capital
Amuso is a trivia and online game company that is based in London, England. The company has recently raised £947,000 ($1.54 million). Amuso hosts trivia games on their servers and they make money by selling trivia games to MySpace, AOL, and MTV. Amuso currently has about 200,000 users.
The games are free and can be played for cash rewards. Amuso claims that their services are not gambling because the games are based on skill rather than random chances.
As part of the funding Amuso hired about 10 people. Amuso also hired Ned Walley and Rabin Yaghoubi. Ned and Rabin both worked as directors at Google. Bill Houghton, former AOL Entertainment director also joined the board of directors at Amuso.
Atomic and Mangrove Invest $4.2 Million In Jolicloud
Tariq Krim, the founder of Netvibes has been working on a new project for well over a year now called Jolicloud. Jolicloud is an operating system intended for use on netbooks. The company has raised $4.2 million in funding from Atomico and Mangrove. Niklas Zennström of Atomico, Gilles Samoun (fotopedia CEO), and Michael Jackson (Mangrove partner) have joined the Jolicloud Board of Directors as a result of the funding.
The Jolicloud operating system utilizes a web application and cloud service interface. Krim sees Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS as a validation for what he is trying to achieve with Jolicloud. Krim left Netvibes on a full-time basis this past May. Netvibes is an RSS reader website built on a cloud that has built in web applications. In a way Jolicloud and Netvibes complement each other. Jolicloud wants to be your default OS on a netbook and Netvibes wants to be your default homepage.
The user interface of the Jolicloud OS is similar to the iPhone operating system. The icons of applications are large and there is very little hardware needed to keep Jolicloud running smoothly. Jolicloud will also support touchscreens.
[via TechCrunch]
Seatwave Raises $17 Million From Accel, Atlas, Mangrove, Fidelity, and Adinvest
Seatwave is a European startup that sells secondary tickets over the Internet. Given that this is a huge market, the company has attracted $17 million in Series D funding. This round of funding was led by Accel Partners and Atlas Venture. Other investors in this round of funding Mangrove Capital Partners, Fidelity Ventures, and Adinvest.
GP Bullhound named Seatwave the fast growing digital media company. Joe Cohen, a former employee of Atlas Venture founded Seatwave. Through this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $53 million.
[via TechCrunch]
Quintura Receives Several Million In Bridge Funding From Mangrove
Quintura, the popular tag-based semantic search engine that offers search, analytics, and monetization services for web publishers and other content owners has received additional funding from Mangrove Capital Partners. This funding is part of a bridge funding round.
With this round of funding, Quintura will scale it’s site search platform from 8 million to 50 million by the end of 2009. Quintura also plans to bring in additional venture capital investors.
As part of the announcement, Quintura ave also hired Dennis Szerszen as the Chief Marketing Officer. Dennis used to be SVP of Marketing and Corporate Development at SecureWave.
Quintura currently powers the site search for ReadWriteWeb, Maxim.com, Cosmo.ru, Passio.ru, ComputerBild, Russian Newsweek, Hilary Magazine, and several others. Quintura Site Search is also being added to several other major U.S.-based major men’s lifestyle websites.
Mangrove Capital Partners also participated in Quintura’s first round of funding.
Categories Mangrove Capital Partners, Quintura
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WooMe Raises $12.5 Million Series B; Valuated At $41 Million
WooMe is a video dating social network that allows users to communicate on webcams. One of the features that makes WooMe popular is Woo Sessions. Woo Sessions are basically webcam video chatrooms. WooMe calls themselves an “introduction platform” according to VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison.
WooMe raised a second round of funding at $12.5 million led by Index Ventures, Atomico, and Mangrove Capital Partners. This brings WooMe’s total funding to $16.9 and now they are valuated at $41 million.
In terms of users, the company say that they have roughly 350,000 users and has 15,000 sessions per day. WooMe hopes to raise about another $500,000 in this round from “strategic angels.” WooMe started in December 2006.
Categories Atomico, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, WooMe
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Tough Searches? Quintura Delivers Where Google Doesn’t
“Google reaps about 60 percent of its outsize revenues and more than 80 percent of its profits from ads on that page, according to analysts’ estimates. That means the company’s success continues to hinge on the dominance of its simple search. There are no guarantees that its dominance will last.”
-David H. Freeman, Newsweek
Tui Stark, a photography stylist recently attempted to search for “snorkeling beaches blue water,” but searching for those keywords on Google turned out to be futile. Results that Google found included web sites about real-estate companies, rafting apparel, and listings for scuba diving, slightly irrelevant from the searches keywords. [Source: NewsWeek].Â
In my opinion, is Google overvalued? For the amount that their stock is trading today and how much their company is appealing competition to enter the market, they’re not too far away from becoming the next Yahoo! by becoming overshadowed by the next big thing. And one of the most valiant efforts made by a company to take on Google today is Quintura.Â
Quintura has stayed consistent in pushing their tag searching technology and have never strayed from it. Quintura has a kid-friendly search engine that filters out inappropriate content and most recently added a Halloween themed search homepage:
I challenge Pulse 2.0 readers to test out Quintura and leave any feedback for the company. I believe that users will find that the only problem that they have is that Quintura is not like Google. Keep an open-mind because I’m sure Quintura is here to stay. The company is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners.
Categories Mangrove Capital Partners, Quintura
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Quintura Raises Additional Funding From Mangrove
Quintura[1], a visual search engine company that has won numerous awards for alternative search engines by various sources, has raised additional funding. Over the past few months, Quintura has unleashed a partnership with Blinkx[2] and created Quintura for Kids[3].
“Since our first meeting in Spring 2006, we have really enjoyed working with the team of Mangrove Capital on our challenge to beat Google. We came to a mutual decision on raising new funding entirely from Mangrove,” stated Yakov Sadchikov, the co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We plan to use the capital to scale the Quintura affiliate model for site search and build a semantic web index using our neural networking techniques.”
Major search engines are starting to become vulnerable. Yahoo!’s CEO resigned and the company is still finding ways to prevent flustering. Google is monopolizing the search market and their corporate “don’t be evil” policies seems to be diminishing as the company tracks user activity through products such as Search History. People are finding it difficult to distinguish the difference between MSN and Live. And Ask.com is depending on creative marketing to retain market-share. This is the perfect time for alternative search engines to innovate.
Upcoming products from Quintura includes Quintura for Women and an API that will allow users to embed a search engine with Quintura’s tag cloud search to replace site maps. Quintura’s tag cloud search idea is unique and innovative. However, the homepage could probably use a redesign.
The homepage is the glue that keeps users sticking to the site. Today, Google.com looks like Live.com which looks like Ask.com. MSN looks like Yahoo!, which looks like AOL.com. We need something different! Quintura is off to a great start.
[1] Quintura.com
[2] Pulse 2.0: Quintura and Blinkx Team Up On Visual Video Search
[3] Pulse 2.0: Quintura for Kids Now Live
Categories Mangrove Capital Partners, Quintura
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Properazzi: Europe’s First Property Search Engine
For the past couple months, I’ve been covering Quintura, a search engine that utilizes tag clouds and was backed by Mangrove Capital Partners (an early investor in Skype). Properazzi, a new property search engine has launched and is also funded by Mangrove. Properazzi has 1.8 million properties listed in 45 different European countries.
The idea behind the site is to get a general understanding of real estate and potentially purchase property in the selected European countries. You can set your minimum and maximum prices in 92 different currencies and also search within the country or city for property that is on sale or for rent. As a test, I searched for property that has swimming pools in London:
The result was that properties in London with swimming pools were found and listed in the screen shot above. Another feature in the website is the ability to set the distance range in which you want property listings to be searched using the radar. The radius is set in kilometers. The map in which you set the radius is powered by a Google Maps API.Â
After the property listings are generated, you can filter through it by relevance to the keywords inputted, newest properties added, lowest priced, and highest priced. There is also a property type filter selection option so you can sort out houses, plots, bungalows, apartments, townhouses, etc. Once you click on the links associated with the property, you will be redirected to the website that contains the property information and can always return to the previous results because a Properazzi frame remains.
What makes this Properazzi’s investment so interesting is that it is unchartered territory. I have not heard of any other investment company funding websites that focus on European real estate. With the advantage of being first-to-market, I believe Properazzi has lots of potential. I heard about Properazzi from Tom Dibaja, Outreach Specialist of Properazzi.
Categories Mangrove Capital Partners, Properazzi
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