Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Sherpalo Ventures

Concur Investing $40 Million Into Online Travel Portal Cleartrip

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:47:27 +0000

Concur Technologies is investing $40 million in Indian online travel website Cleartrip.com. Cleartrip is similar to Kayak.com, but intended for the travel market in India. Cleartrip launched in 2006 and they have received venture capital from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DVJ, DAG Ventures, and Sherpalo Ventures.

“As a global technology provider, we understand that it’s critical to focus on the local needs of each market in which we operate,” stated Concur CEO Steve Singh in a statement. “In partnership with Cleartrip, Concur plans to leverage the synergies of our combined technologies to help us expand our offerings, extend our reach, and make business travel easier for the millions of travelers in India.”

Concur Technologies, Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:CNQR) is a provider of on-demand Employee Spend Management solutions that is valued at over $2.8 billion in the stock market.

[GeekWire]

Digital Textbook Company Inkling Raises Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 23:12:06 +0000

Inkling is a digital textbook startup company that has raised a multi-million dollar round of funding from McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures. Inkling had previously raised an undisclosed Series A round of funding in August 2010. Inkling’s technology has the ability to deliver interactive textbooks. Users can collaborate, add multimedia, and chat with each other within the specific content. Some of the dynamic content included in Inkling’s technology is 3D objects, videos, quizzes, etc. [TechCrunch]

StumbleUpon Raises $17 Million and Launches Paid Discovery Service

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:40:47 +0000

StumbleUpon, the company known for randomly showing you websites based on your interests through a toolbar, has raised $17 million in Series B funding. The funding will be used to invest in the company’s core technology and to increase employee count. The funding was provided by Accel Partners, August Capital, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures. The company has also launched a new way to monetize their services: Paid Discovery.

StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery services has 3 plans:

Light for $0.05 per each visitor
- Target by interest, location, and demographics
- Basic reporting
- Integration with Google Analytics

Standard for $0.10 per engaged visitor
- Priority serving in content streams
- Target by interest, location, and demographics
- Advanced targeting by device (web or mobile)
- Advanced reporting includes robust site performance and visitor data, traffic analysis and website quality score.
- Integration with Google Analytics

Premium for $0.25 per engaged visitor
- Guaranteed top serving priority in content streams
- Standard campaign targeting options
- Standard advanced reporting
- Integration with Google Analytics

FlightCaster Raises $1.3 Million To Help Consumers Predict Delayed Flights

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:37:01 +0000

FlightCaster is a website that is able to predict delays in flights about 6 hours before actual airline alerts. FlightCaster is able to predict flight delays by grabbing delay information from the past 10 years. Recently the company raised $1.3 million in Series A from Tandem Entrepreneurs and Sherpalo Ventures. FlightCaster is a Y-Combinator company.

FlightCaster has a mobile application that sell for $7.99 on the iPhone and BlackBerry. The company plans to release an Android application next. Next the company plans to release an API for developers to create third party applications.

Intuit Planning To Acquire Mint.com For $170 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:50:47 +0000

In less than 2 years since launching, Mint.com is supposedly selling themselves to Intuit Inc. Mint.com is a financial tool that allows you to aggregate all of your bank and credit card information and find ways to save money. The deal is expected to close within the next few days.

Mint had launched at the TechCrunch50 conference two years ago and took the top prize giving them $50,000. Mint raised $31.8 million in total funding from First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, Hite Capital, DAG Ventures, and The Founders Fund. Angel investors in Mint include Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Geoff Ralston, and Dave McClure.

This acquisition is interesting because Intuit had previously sent Mint a letter demanding an explanation for how they jumped to 850,000 users within several months.

Video Website, Mevio Raises $15 Million Series C From Several VC Firms

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:34:20 +0000

Mevio, a video website that was founded by Ron Bloom and Adam Curry started the company originally to podcast. About 4 years later, the founders decided to rename their former company, Podshow to Mevio. Mevio hosts original videos and will allow others to syndicate their content.

This idea impressed Crosslink Capital, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, DAG Ventures, and Sherpalo Ventures because these companies gave Mevio $15 million in Series C. All of these VC firms were previous investors as well. To date, Mevio has raised about $38 million.

Some of Mevio’s clients include Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch, and Hewlett Packard. Mevio has over 1 million hours of video content. Mevio also self-proclaims themselves as a leading site to discover new artists and free use licensing for original music.

More investors want in on Stikkit Series A

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:46:26 +0000

Yesterday, First Round Capital has decided to join Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures for investing into Stikkit’s Series A round of funding. The announcement was published in the Stikkit Values of N blog and was also covered by StartupSquad. Stikkit is based in Portland, Oregon and the Stikkit team is lead by Rael Dornfest, a former CTO of O’Reilly Media.

Stikkit allows users to save information and transfer it to various other event-tracking applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal, and 30Boxes. According to StartupSquad, users can also transfer to-do lists, directories, and bookmarks using Stikkit as well.

First Round’s funding was influenced by Rael spending time with First Round managing partner, Josh Kopelman during the early stages of Stikkit development. Through the funding, First Round partner, Rob Hayes entered the Stikkit Board. Hayes then influenced Rael and the Stikkit team to share office space with Platial, “The People’s Atlas” technology company.

Personally, I have not tested out Stikkit since I stopped creating to-do lists after graduating college, but I do believe that Stikkit software would be useful for those who are dependent on computers for their daily event-tracking needs. Below is a screenshot from StartupSquad: