Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Scale Venture Partners

Cloud Storage Company Box.net Raises $50 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:54:29 +0000

Box.net has raised a new round of $50 million in funding. Investors in this round include Salesforce.com, Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and U.S. Venture Partners. Box.net has now raised a total of $128 million. Box.net has 7 million users and 300 million documents are stored on their service. Box.net was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith in 2005. About 77% of the Fortune 500 uses Box.net’s cloud storage solutions service. [TechCrunch]

CoTweet Parent Company ExactTarget Raises $30 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 05:34:28 +0000

ExactTarget has raised $30 million in a new round of funding to fund acquisitions and to expand operations. ExactTarget is an e-mail marketing company that acquired CoTweet in 2009. ExactTarget raised $70 million in May 2009. ExactTarget’s revenues increased 41% to $134 million in 2010. ExactTarget was initially planning on going IPO in late 2007, but decided to raise funding instead. The latest round of funding was led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Greenspring Associates also participated in this round. [paidContent]

HubSpot Raises $32 Million In Series D

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:41:28 +0000

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded HubSpot Inc. in 2006 and they have recently raised $32 million in Series D. The funding was provided by new investors Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Salesforce.com. Existing investors General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, and Scale Venture Partners also participated in this round. HubSpot has raised a total of $65 million thus far.

Halligan and Shah met while they were Sloan Fellows at MIT’s School of Management in 2004. HubSpot is a service that helps small businesses set up blogs, SEO, lead management, marketing analytics, e-mail marketing, landing pages, etc. About 4,000 companies in 31 countries use their services.

“We agree with HubSpot’s belief that search engines, social media and mobile devices have fundamentally changed how businesses should market themselves,” stated Google Ventures partner Rich Miner. “We’re thrilled to support their efforts to help thousands of small and medium businesses reach potential customers.”

Vitrue Raises $17 Million In Series C

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 21:28:27 +0000

Vitrue is a social media management company that has raised $17 million in Series C funding. Scale Venture Partners and Advent Venture Partners led this round of funding. Existing investors General Catalyst Ventures, Comcast Interactive, and Dance Ventures also participated. Some of Vitrue’s customers include Ford, Intel, MTV, Best Buy, and McDonald’s. Vitrue will be using the funding for expansion. [Mashable]

HubSpot To Have A $200 Million Valuation After Next Venture Capital Round

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 06:45:26 +0000

HubSpot is a digital marketing company that is close to receiving a new round of venture capital that would give them a $200 million valuation. Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital are rumored to be participating in the next round of funding. HubSpot’s last round of funding was $16 million and it was led by Scale Venture Partners. Thus far the company has raised $33.5 million.

Box.net Raises $15 Million For Enterprise Cloud Documents

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:33:26 +0000

Cloud content management platform company Box.net has raised $15 million in Series C. The funding was led by Scale Venture Partners. Other investors included DFJ and U.S. Venture Partners. The company has raised a total of $29.5 million thus far.

Box.net has a free iPad app that helps promote the premium products. Box.net currently has 4 million customers including the Oprah Winfrey Network, Nokia, and Volvo. During the first quarter, revenue was up 300%. [GigaOM]

Reply.com Preparing For $60 Million IPO

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:22:36 +0000

Reply.com is a local cost-per-click company. The company is preparing for a $60 million IPO according to a document filed with the SEC as of this morning. Reply.com’s revenues for 2009 was $32.6 million. The company operates with 50% gross margins. The company was profitable in 2009 for the first time. Reply.com raised a total of $27.5 million from venture capitalists. Investors include Scale Venture Partners, Outlook Ventures, ATEL Ventures, and Debi Coleman (former Apple CFO). [TechCrunch]

ExactTarget Raises $70 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:36:36 +0000

ExactTarget is an e-mail marketing company that has just raised $70 million according to an SEC filing. This brings the total funding for the year to $145 million according to TechCrunch. The latest $70 million round of funding was provided by Technology Crossover Ventures. The previous round of funding comes from Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Montagu Newhall. ExactTarget was planning to file an IPO but ended up changing their minds.

ExactTarget helps clients design e-mail marketing materials such as coupons. The company also provides automated fraud alerts to clients and sets up SMS text messages. Some of ExactTarget’s customers include Home Depot, Expedia, and Gannett.

Recent Tech Funding: YouMail, Mimosa Systems, Dice, RIPL, Cellfish Media, Zoodango, Reply, DoubleClick, OZON, ForeSee Results

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 19:19:31 +0000

Dollar Amount Involved: $1.9 Million
YouMail is a start up company that has brought on a veteran from America Online as their CEO and has raised $1.9 million in angel funding. The company is planning to offer a service that converts voice into text. Luis Villalobos was the lead investor in YouMail. Former AOL executive, Alex Quilici is now the YouMail CEO. YouMail is based in Irvine, CA.

One of the co-founders of YouMail, Ken Brickley mentioned that the funding will allow the company to attract more users. In regards to the market potential, Brickley stated, â€œIn the U.S. alone, there are 150 billion voice mails a year.” Brickley plans to turn these voice mails into page views. YouMail is currently filing for several patents.

Dollar Amount Involved: $17 Million
Mimosa Systems, an information management solutions company that offers services such as e-mail archiving and recovery in Santa Clara, CA has announced today that they have raised $17 million in Series C funding.The new round of funding was provided the $17 mill was led by Mayfield Fund and was joined by previous investors: Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

“Mimosa is a rising star in the multi-billion dollar, white-hot live content archiving market for unstructured and semi- structured information management, a critical need that is being fueled by eDiscovery and regulatory compliance,” stated Navin Chaddha, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. With significant customer momentum and an experienced management team, Mimosa is poised to lead the email archiving market. We look forward to leveraging our global network of resources to propel Mimosa’s worldwide growth.”

Dollar Amount Involved: $100 Million
New York based Dice Holdings, Inc. is preparing to file for an IPO soon. The amount will be worth $100 million in common stock and will trade under NYSE. Several major financial underwriters such as Credit Suisse Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley will underwrite the IPO.

Dice Holdings has several brands under its name including one of the most renown technology and engineering job board websites, Dice.com.The company also operates eFinancialCareers (acquired on October 31, 2006), JobsintheMoney (finance/accounting job board), ClearanceJobs (U.S. government security clearance job board), TargetedJobFairs (job fair/career event board), and CybermediaDice (Tech job board in India).

Dice has also previously worked on a project to help former Enron employees get back on their feet.

Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
RIPL is an upcoming social network that is based in Seattle and will have advertisement supported music and photo sharing services. Currently the website is only accessible by those who have an invitation or attend the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida.RIPL will have a product called the RIPL Receiver (which I’m assuming is a widget) that will sample music, videos, photos, and people in one’s network on the website. RIPL’s marketing plan hopes to emulate a similar technique as the iPod. Start from the teenage generation and then move up/down the age spectrum.The site was founded in December 2005 and raised $1.1 million in Series A Preferred seed capital in July 2006. Now it is rumored that the company has raised an additional $2 million as a Series A funding according to a regulatory filing.

RIPL is led by CEO, Bill Messing who is a former VP of Production at Classmates Online and a former Director of MSN.

Dollar Amount Involved: $10 Million

Cellfish Media, LLC is a New York based company that has a website where users can download games, ringtones, and share videos and photos with friends. Cellfish services are compatible with Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony phones.

Cellfish has announced yesterday that they have raised $10 million from Solidarity Fund QFL. It had previously raised $50 million in October from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund, and from a Desjardins Venture Capital affiliate. Cellfish is a subsidiary of French company, Lagardere Group.

Dollar Amount Involved: Coming Soon

Zoodango is a social network for professionals that is looking to take LinkedIn head on. Currently, Zoodango receives about 30,000 page views per day and had close to 3,000 profiles. Zoodango focuses more on setting up face-to-face meetings for professionals.

Zoodango announced that within 30 days they will announce an investment from “big profile strategic investors.” Zoodango has received angel funding from a Seattle-based billionaire investor.

The founder of Zoodango is James Sun, who is also a contestant on Donald Trump/NBC’s The Apprentice-Los Angeles.

Dollar Amount Involved: $6 Million
Reply!, a decision search engine has attained $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Debi Coleman (former CFO of Apple Inc.). Reply! is looked at as a competitor to Zillow.

Reply! was started in San Ramon, Calif. 6 years ago and used to be known as Next Phase Media.

Through this round of funding, Reply! intends on extending its services beyond real estate and automotive listings.

“We’d like to expand into other categories like insurance and home improvement,” stated founder and CEO, Payam Zamani. Randy Haykin, Managing Director of Outlook Ventures has stepped on the Reply! board of directors as a result of the funding.

Dollar Amount Involved: Acquisition Speculations
Let’s just say that this digital advertising technology company is being eyed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The company acquired Tangozebra last month to gain a stronger market prescence in Europe.

The company announced a couple days ago that it is setting up an auction-like bidding system for advertisements. DoubleClick is based in New York and has been priced at an amount north of $2 billion.

Dollar Amount Involved: $18 Million
OZON.ru is Russia’s largest e-commerce website for video, audio, books, games, and other electronics. It is known as “the Amazon.com of Russia.” Investors in the company have announced that they have plugged $18 million in the company. The funding was led by Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Cisco Systems Inc.

“With the support of our controlling shareholder BVCP, we at OZON.ru are extremely proud to have attracted top tier European investors such as Index Ventures. This investment round will allow us to pursue our ambitious growth strategy and further strengthen our logistical operations, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing Russian regions. We also look forward to benefiting from the extensive knowledge pool, expertise and international networks of our new shareholders,” stated Bernard Lukey, CEO of OZON.ru.

OZON has more than 260,000 items in 12 product categories and 400 suppliers. OZON has a distribution center in Tver and is HQed in Moscow.

Dollar Amount Involved: $20 Million
Finally some good news from the mitten-shaped state… Ann Arbor, Mich. based company ForeSee Results has raised $20 million from Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and CFI Group.

ForeSee Results is an online satisfaction measurement company that utilizes methodologies from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Compuware Corporation and CFI Group are both co-founders of ForeSee Results.