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HTML5 Publishing Tool Company Strobe Raises $2.5 Million Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:04:59 +0000

Strobe is a start-up company that is creating publishing tools that focuses on a new generation of web standards. Strobe raised $2.5 million in funding as a first round. O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners participated in this round of funding. Strobe CEO and co-founder Charles Jolley announced the funding earlier this week.

Strobe’s technology is based on a project called SproutCore. Jolley has been working on SproutCore for years, including when he was working at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL). Jolley left Apple to go full-time on Strobe this past July.

“You build your app using Web technologies like HTML5,” stated Jolley. “You can then deploy to either the Web or package and ship in the app store.” Over seven companies wanted to invest in Strobe because it is a good time to be in the web toolmaking business. Strobe currently has about 9 employees and they plan to hire 3 more by the end of January. Bryce Roberts (O’Reilly) and Lars Leckie (Hummer Winblad) will be joining the Strobe board of directors.

[CNET]

Bit.ly Raises $8.9 Million In Series B Financing

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:48:42 +0000

Popular URL shortening and analytics service Bit.ly has raised $8.9 million in Series B financing. This round of funding was led by AOL Ventures and RRE Ventures. Existing investors include Betaworks, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Founders Fund, and SV Angel. Every day about 200 million Bit.ly short links are clicked on through Twitter and other services. Even though Bit.ly is no longer the default URL shortening service for Twitter, the traffic continues to grow for the service.

Bit.ly currently has 17 employees and their first source of revenues came from Bit.ly Pro accounts. They signed up about 3,000 companies and 1,000 power Twitter users. Bit.ly is working with The New York Times on a project called News.me, which is expected to launch soon. [TechCrunch]

Foursquare Raises $20 Million Series B

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:38:35 +0000

Foursquare, the mobile check in service started by Dennis Crowley has raised $20 million in Series B funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation.

This round of funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Existing investors Union Square and O’Reilly AlphaTech also participated. Foursuqare has about 27 employees working out of the company’s New York offices.

About 15,000 new people are joining Foursquare per day. Foursquare now has about 1.8 million registered users.

[TechCrunch]

Bit.ly Raises $1.5 Million From VCs and Received 2.7 Billion Clicks Last Month

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:24:42 +0000

URL shortening service Bit.ly has been growing at an aggressive rate as they have become the default for Twitter. Given their current growth rate, the company needed another injection of cash as they have raised $1.5 million from previous investors. These investors include Betaworks, SoftTech (Jeff Clavier), Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Howard Lindzon. The funding was added to an SEC filing and TechCrunch confirmed the round with Bit.ly President John Borthwick. The $1.5 million round was set up as a convertible debt note. Bit.ly received 2.7 billion clicks last month. last week alone about 744 million Bit.ly links were clicked on. [TechCrunch]

Rumor: Foursquare Valuated At $7-$14 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:03:33 +0000

Foursquare is an iPhone application that allows users to broadcast their location to friends. This service is pretty similar to Google Latitude. Foursquare raised about $1.3 million in seed funding according to an SEC filing. The money was provided by Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Albert Wenger joined the Foursquare Board of Directors as a result of the funding round.

Foursquare was founded by Dennis Crowley. Crowley founded Dodgeball and sold it to Google in the past. Google did nothing with Dodgeball so Crowley left the company. Foursquare just finished building a Google Android application and will soon be releasing a BlackBerry application.

After doing some searching, BusinessInsider found out what the approximate valuation of FourSquare is. It is roughly between $7-$14 million according to sources.

URL Shortening Service Bit.ly Raises $2 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:54:12 +0000

Bit.ly has been growing rapidly with the help of Twitter. People are constantly using Bit.ly to shorten URLs of stories, images, and videos that people want to share with their Twitter followers. Bit.ly was created under Betaworks, an incubation firm that helped sell Summize to Twitter last year. Betaworks has taken Bit.ly and is spinning it out as a separate, well-funded company.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and several other investors plugged $2 million into the URL shortening service. Other investors include Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway. Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly will join the Board of Directors at Bit.ly.

Just last week alone, about 20 million URLs have been shortened using Bit.ly. That number is increasing by 10% every week. The only source of revenue Bit.ly has is Google Ads that are scattered around their homepage. This is a similar approach to their biggest competitor TinyURL.com. TinyURL depends mainly on donations and Google Ads too.

[via MediaMemo]

San Francisco-Based Travel Start-Up, TripIt Raises $1 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:59:50 +0000

“At TripIt, we think technology should make your travel experience simpler, not more complex,” states the single paragraph on the homepage of TripIt.com.Â TripIt is based in San Francisco and was founded by Gregg Brockway, a Hotwire.com co-founder and Exec VP for Corporate Development.

The company announced a couple days ago that it has raised $1 million in Series A funding from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.Â The announcement was originally found on PE Week.

[Information Source: VentureBeat]