Kofax Inc. is a management software company that has just acquired 170Systems Inc. 170 Systems Inc. builds financial process automation software. Kofax acquired 170 Systems for $32.9 million. Of the $32.9 million, about $10.1 million was paid in cash and the rest in stock options.
170 Systems is based in Boston, MA and has about 140 employees. 170 Systems is a startup backed by Polaris Ventures. Polaris invested $14 million in 170 Systems and they still had roughly $10.1 million cash in hand. 170 Systems’ revenues were about $28 million, but the company was not profitable. Kofax has roughly 1,200 employees and $300 million in annual sales.
Turbine has raised $6.6 million out a planned $50 million round of funding. Turbine builds online games based on The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, and Asheron’s Call.
Turbine directly competes with Activision Blizzard, the developer of World of Warcraft. Turbine plans to release Dungeons & Dragons Online into a free game later this year called Eberron Unlimited.
Investors in Turbine include Columbia Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Tudor Ventures, and Granite Global Ventures. Turbine previously raised $95 million. The company has about 300 employees.
The company is even planning on announcing their first console game in the near future. Turbine may even buy out another gaming company.
Analytics company Quantcast is seeking a $50 million round of funding which would put them at a $300 million valuation according to PEHub.
The company is rumored to have received several term sheets, but the identities of the investors is not yet known. Quantcast monitors the traffic and demographics of about 10 million web sites and they are finding ways to monetize the service through a Media Program. The Quantcast Media Program gives advertisers the ability to select the audience they want to reach by having access to demographic information.
So far Quantcast has raised $25 million in total funding. Allen & Company invested $20 million Series B in 2007. Other investors include the Founders Fund, Polaris Venture Partners, and Revolution Ventures.
Earlier this week remote access software company LogMeIn announced that they are preparing for an IPO. The company plans to offer 6.66 million shares at a price of about $14-$16. The IPO is expected to take place on July 1. LogMeIn will trade under the NASDAQ with the stock symbol LOGM.
LogMeIn had a net income of $1.5 million for the three months ending March 31 on revenue of $17.2 million. About a year ago, the company had a net loss of $4.2 million on revenues of $9.9 million during the same time period. Intel owns 5% of LogMeIn and other investors include Prism Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Technology Holding Central and Eastern European Funds, and Integral Capital Partners.
LogMeIn customers include AMD, CardinalHealth, 3M, Best Buy, IBM, DHL, SAP, etc. The company is based on Woburn, Massachusetts. The company indicated the IPO back in January.
Hangout.net is a virtual environment that has fully customizable rooms, avatars, etc. The company makes it possible for MySpace users to create custom virtual rooms. Highland Capital Partners and Polaris Venture Partners has extended their Series A investment by an additional $4 million in Hangout.net.
The total funding that Hangout has raised is now about $10 million. The company’s seed funding is $1 million and the initial Series A financing was $5 million. The $4 million extension gave Hangout enough backing to last them a long time. The company confirmed the funding in an SEC document. Hangout is based in Boston, Massachusetts and is led by CEO Pano Anthos.
LOLapps has raised $3.5 out of $4.5 million Series A led by Polaris Venture Partners. San Francisco, Calif.-based LOLapps creates social applications for social networks. Michael Hirschland of Polaris is joining the LOLapps Board through this round of funding.
“Trying to recruit while you’re in ‘stealth mode’ is like punching yourself in the balls,” stated LOLapps founder, Babak Nivi. Here are pictures of LOLapps office.
Kavin Stewart runs LOLapps, product manager of Offermatica and co-founder of MixerMixer. Annie Chang, Brian Hue, and Kamo Asatryan are also founders in LOLapps. Ariel Poler is the chairman of LOLapps.
Dan Primack of PEHub broke the news by reading through regulatory filings.
“While Flash content is ubiquitous on the Web, the process of creating and distributing Flash content was time consuming and required specialized skills. And integrating Flash with third party Web services and components has been near impossible. With Sprout, anyone can quickly create rich, Flash-based content that incorporates advanced components and Web services, and distribute them on the Web,”stated Carnet Williams, co-founder/CEO of Sprout.
Sprout is a platform that makes it easy to create widgets. The company has recently raised $5 million in Series B to enhance features from Polaris Venture Partners and Mitch Kapor. Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris joined the Sprout board of directors as a result of the investment. Mitch Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designed Lotus 1-2-3.
Creating widgets on Sprout utilizes drag+drop methods. Users can drag+drop video, audio, images, and other interactive services built in. Built-in interactive features include Twitter, PollDaddy, and Ribbit.
Sprout is based in San Francisco, Calif. and Honululu, Hawaii.
Information Source:
[1] Sprout Press Release: Sprout Closes $5 Million Series B Led by Polaris Venture Partners
“The opportunity is to make it easier for marketers to spend money online,” stated Konrad Feldman, the CEO of Quantcast. “Panel-based research doesn’t work well in a fragmented media.”
Now backed with over $25 million in funding, Quantcast is the only free internet ratings service. Quantcast can measure widgets and other Flash media to show how often they are viewed everywhere. The investors in this round of funding include Polaris Venture Partners and Founders Fund.
With this round of funding, Quantcast will be ramping up their services and improve its accuracy. Essetially, Quantcast is gearing up for taking on the bigger names of rating services like comScore and Nielsen. Over 20,000 clients use Quantcast including Fox, CBS, Accuweather, and IDG.
Down the road, Quantcast will most likely act as a broker for pairing up target advertisements with web sites that have relevant audiences. “There are going to be big changes to how the business operates,” added Feldman. “We aren’t going to be talking about GRPs anymore. It’s going to be audience segments. There’s going to be a massive transformation over the next five to 10 years.”
“JIB JAB!” This is what two animated men have been saying for the last 8 years; one man has a middle-parted comb-over that would make Donald Trump jealous and the other has frizzy hair and a thick moustache. I would say that JibJab.com is one of the first web sites that I saw that truly showed the power of Adobe (formely Macromedia) Flash.* The $3 million Series B funding was brought in by Polaris Venture Partners.
Polaris Venture Partners is also an investor in Automattic, the company behind blog platform, Wordpress. Wordpress is one of the most popular blog platforms and is used to power Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, GigaOM, and Mashable.
The first round of funding for JibJab was around $3.4 million. This brings the total amount for JibJab to be $6.4 million. What will JibJab do with this money? Most likely they’ll keep building the same funny and witty videos that we’ve been seeing for years. And also there are more eCards in the pipeline. There is also a social network being built around JibJab where users submit… user generated content.
If I was JibJab, I would take some of those new-found earnings, buy a big bottle of bubbly, and toast to another 8 years of fun times on the Internets. Here’s a sample video clip produced by “JIB JAB!” around 2004.
*Side note: The first web site that really showed me the power of Flash was Eye4u.com, which hasn’t changed the look of their site since the day I saw it for the first time almost 10 years ago. Consistency points!
[1] ReadWriteWeb: JibJab Raises $3m More For Video Content, Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Heavy.com was believed to have raised around $12 million in December, but instead, sources say that $20 million in funding has been confirmed. The $20 million in funding from Polaris Ventures is Heavy.com’s fifth round of investment. Last year, Polaris had invested $10 million in Heavy.com and with this new round of funding, Heavy.com plans on expanding internationally. Today, Heavy.com has a good Alexa rank at 1,166 and a PageRank at 7/10.
Heavy.com, the NYC based video company is known for its humorous video collection such as Superficial Friends, a news coverage program called Heavy News, Worst Music Videos, and a parody of VH1’s Behind the Music, Behind the Worst Music. Heavy.com had announced that their 2006 revenues had grown 350% from the previous year and by looking at the homepage, it appears that Cingular and Microsoft have been promoting products along with the movie, Snakes on a Plane.
While I believe that the website is fascinating and creative, I found myself not thoroughly impressed by the load time. Most of the website is built on Adobe Flash and Java Applets. The Flash loader seems to have some minor bugs. The first time I visited the website, Heavy.com worked completely fine for me, but when I visited the homepage again, the Flash pre-load scenes seemed to freeze up and then finally load up at a slow pace. When testing the load time speed, I was using a reliable, wireless T1 connection. I would blame part of the slow load time on the Applet that is being used.
Intel Capital, Mayfield, Comcast, and Polaris Venture Partners has provided BlackArrow $14.75 in venture capital to promote the development of BlackArrow’s advertising technology ideas. The idea behind BlackArrow is to provide advertisements on the Internet and on television. The difference between BlackArrow’s insertion of advertisements into TV compared to other TV advertisement companies providing the same service is that BlackArrow will prevent TV watchers from skipping the advertisements even though the TV watches may have a fast-forward button on their digital video recorders (DVRs).
An example that VentureBeat provided about the BlackArrow service is that if someone attempts to forward a TV show playing on ABC, “The 30-second TV spots are removed and replaced with a group of pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll ads, as well as companion ads” are displaying in these playback modes. I assume that they would be still images since it would be difficult to implement uninterrupted video advertisements on these playback modes, but you never know what is going on behind the scenes at BlackArrow.
BlackArrow is based in San Mateo, CA. BlackArrow’s origins date began in 2002. Tom Morgan and Pat Dunbar founded the Digital Media and Advertising (DiMA) Group. Through these investments in the Group, various lead programmers and advertising experts came together to solve problems in the on-demand TV market. BlackArrow was the result. Denny Wilkinson is the President and CEO of BlackArrow Inc.
“JIB JAB!” This is what two animated men have been saying for the last 8 years; one man has a middle-parted comb-over that would make Donald Trump jealous and the other has frizzy hair and a thick moustache. I would say that 
