Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Norwest Venture Partners

Quirky Raises $16 Million

Riley Kennysmith — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:31:53 +0000

Crowdsourcing product development social network Quirky has raised $16 million in funding. Investors include Norwest Venture partners and RRE Ventures. The site connects inventors and entrepreneurs with participants who collaborate to help create a successful product. Quirky is also the subject of a reality series slated to air on the Sundance Channel at the end of August. [TechCrunch]

JiWire Raises $20 Million In New Round Of Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 11 May 2011 22:06:02 +0000

JiWire is a mobile ad company that has raised $20 million in a round of funding made by Trident Capital, Comcast Interactive Capital, DFJ, Panorama Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners. JiWire has raised a total of $45 million in funding thus far. JiWire has a location-based ad platform that runs on WiFi through 40 public WiFi networks. Last year JiWire acquired location based mobile shopping company NearbyNow. [TechCrunch]

Professional Social Network Application For Facebook BranchOut Raises $18 Million In Series B

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 11 May 2011 15:53:57 +0000

BranchOut is a professional social network application for Facebook that has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Redpoint Ventures. Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Floodgate also participated in this round. BranchOut now has a total of $24 million in funding.

The BranchOut application allows you to find jobs through friends on Facebook and it shows where your friends work. BranchOut creates professional profiles and it imports data from Facebook profiles including their employment history. BranchOut was founded by Rick Marini.

BranchOut allows you to search over 3 million jobs and 20,000 internships. Some of BranchOut’s clients that are using the Jobs tab include Groupon, Kiva, charity_water, and Readyforce. BranchOut has about 300,000 monthly active users.

[TechCrunch]

SocialVibe Raises $20 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:37:28 +0000

SocialVibe is a Los Angeles, California based social advertising software and technology company that has raised $20 million in equity funding. This round of funding was led by Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures, and Pinacle Ventures. Jeff Crowe (Norwest) will be joining the company board of directors as part of the funding. SocialVibe is led by Jay Samit and they plan on using the funding for growth. SocialVibe provides technology that invites consumers to participate in offers with brands in exchange for virtual goods. [SoCalTech]

Turn.com Raises $20 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:17:24 +0000

Turn.com is an ad technology company that has raised $20 million in funding. This brings the company’s total funding to $57 million. This round is the fourth and it was led by Greenspring Associates. Turn plans to use the funding to expand in Europe. Other existing investors that participated in this round include Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, Shasta Ventures, and Focus Ventures. [paidContent]

WhaleShark Media Acquires RetailMeNot.com For AU$90 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:12:18 +0000

Australians Guy King and Bevan Clark launched RetailMeNot.com in 2007 at a cost of about $30. Recently the two have sold RetailMeNot.com for $90 million to WhaleShark Media. With about 95 million unique visitors per year, RetailMeNot.com is the most visited coupon website in the world.

“We’re dedicated to revolutionizing online shopping by giving deal-seekers the easiest-to-use, most reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date information about deals and discounts available online,” stated WhaleShark Media CEO Cotter Cunningham. “In just four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday this year, WhaleShark Media sites (including RetailMeNot.com) drove record traffic with more than 6 million visits combined. This underscores the increased importance of online discounts in the broader e-commerce ecosystem.”

“When I launched the site, I honestly didn’t even consider that I’d be able to make any money from it,” stated King. “It’s quite surreal.” RetailMeNot.com was on track to hitting $30 million in revenues this year. Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Adam Street Partners provided financing for the transaction.

[ZDNet]

LendingClub Raises $24.5M In Series C

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:09:03 +0000

Lending Club has raised $24.5 million in Series C funding from Foundation Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Canaan Partners. The company now has a total of $52.7 million in funding. The additional funding will be used to advance their existing platform which allows lenders and borrowers to avoid the middleman (banks) for investing among peers. This round of funding will also be used for launching new products, marketing, and improving customer service. [PRNewsWire]

Norwest Venture Partners Raises $1.2 Billion

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:27:22 +0000

Norwest Venture Partners is a technology venture capital firm that is based in Silicon Valley, California. Norwest has invested early in many technology companies such as Kayak, Arbortext, Rackspace, MyYearbook, Playdom, Sulekha.com, Ngmoco, and Yatra.com. The company raised a new round of funding at $1.2 billion. This is the eleventh fund raised in the history of the firm and is the largest. The new round of funding will be used for international expansion. Norwest already has offices in India and Israel. The company has invested in Chinese companies as well.

Playdom Raises $43 Million, Receives $260 Million Valuation, Buys Out Trippert Labs and Green Patch Inc.

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:24:02 +0000

Playdom is one of the biggest competitors of Playfish, a virtual application company that was acquired by EA for $400 million earlier this week. Given that Playdom is one of the very few remaining large virtual application companies, investors want to get in on their business model. Playdom raised $43 million based on a $260 million valuation.

In terms of revenue, TechCrunch speculates that they are making $60 million per year. The participants in the $43 million round of funding was Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Rick Thompson, and New Enterprise Associates.

While Zynga and Playfish focus on Facebook for selling virtual items within game applications, Playdom focuses more on MySpace. Mob Wars has about 14 million users on MySpace and the company as a whole has about 28 million monthly game players. About 60% of the traffic is from MySpace and 40% is from Facebook.

In terms of payments, Playdom makes 70% from direct payments, 10% from advertising, and 20% from third party offers. Playdom is based out of San Francisco and doubled their employee count over the last couple of months to 110 people.

Now that Playdom has a lot more money in the bank, they have decided to go on an acquisition binge. Playdom acquired Green Patch Inc., a Facebook application company and Trippert Labs, an iPhone application company. Green Patch made a garden simulation application on Facebook and has about 1.5 million monthly application users. Trippert Labs created several iPhone applications such as MobAir: Pilot Training and Blowfish.

MobileIron Raises $9 Million Immediately After Launching

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:29:07 +0000

MobileIron is a mobile phone company that launched after being in stealth mode last week. The company raised $9 million immediately after coming out of stealth mode. MobileIron is intended to be a mobile security company for enterprises.

“The MobileIron Virtual Smartphone Platform is the first solution to combine data-driven central management of smartphones with deep visibility into real-time usage and cost drivers,” states the MobileIron Products page. “It is a simple-to-install appliance that plugs into your corporate network and lets you quickly gain control of your smartphone operations. Smartphone data moves to the cloud, giving IT, finance, and end users full visibility and control of smartphone operations through a central window.”

MobileIron can also monitor the data usage and alert IT departments when employees are nearing certain thresholds. This way the IT departments of companies can maintain costs when providing employees with smartphones.

The investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

[via InformationWeek]