Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Shervin Pishevar

Socialcam Raises Funding From 46 Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:38:13 +0000

Socialcam is an iPhone app that spun off of video sharing website Justin.tv last year as part of Y Combinators winter 2012 class. Socialcam has raised seed funding from 46 well known angel investors. Socialcam’s fiercest competitor is Viddy. They have been fighting back and forth as the top Photo & Video app recently. Socialcam has reportedly surpassed the 20 million user mark. Below is a list of all of the investors involved as compiled by TechCrunch.

Brian Chesky – CEO, Airbnb
Jonathan Abrams – Partner, Founders Den
Jason Johnson – Partner, Founders Den
Zachary Bogue – Partner, Founders Den
Michael Levit – Partner, Founders Den
Jeff Kapel – Assistant Coach, Duke Basketball
Ari Emmanuel & Jason Lublin – WME
Trajan Langdon – Retired NBA Basketball Player
Yuri Milner & Felix Shpilman – Startfund
Troy Carter & Allison Streuter – Atom Factory
SV Angel – Ron, David, Kevin, Topher, Robert
Crunchfund – Michael, MG, Patrick
Paul Buchheit – Inventor of Gmail, Founder FriendFeed, Partner Y-Combinator
Garry Tan – Partner Y-Combinator, Co-Founder Posterous
Alexis Ohanian – Partner Y-Combinator, Co-Founder Reddit
Harj Taggar – Partner Y-Combinator, Co-Founder Auctomatic
Paul Graham – Co-founder Y-Combinator
Jessica Livingston – Partner Y-Combinator
Tim Draper – Draper Associates
Stewart Alsop – Alsop Louie
Erik Moore – Angel investor in Zappos
Justin Kan – Co-Founder EXEC, Co-Founder Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
Emmett Shear – CEO & Co-Founder Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
Kyle Vogt – Co-Founder Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
Matt Ocko – Angel Investor
A-Grade Investments – Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Chris Hollod
Ronny Conway – Andreessen Horowitz
Justin Caldbeck – Lightspeed
Shervin Pishevar – Menlo Ventures
Laurene Powell Jobs & Stacey Rubin – Emerson Collective
Ram Shiram – Sherpalo, Angel Investor in Google
Shane Battier – NBA Basketball player, Miami Heat
Michael Rapino & Michael Abrams – Live Nation

Kevin Rose Believed To Be Joining Google To Work On Social Efforts

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:58:01 +0000

In April 2011, Kevin Rose started working full-time at a mobile development company called Milk. Milk launched a food and restaurant recommendation app called Oink, which was downloaded about 150,000 times in its first month as a free app. Rose is known for launching the social bookmarking website Digg.com and being a host of the popular podcast called Diggnation. Google has hired Kevin Rose through some sort of acqui-hire deal.

Google did not buy Oink or the technology. However it is rumored that Rose will be heavily involved in the social efforts at Google. According to TechCrunch, Milk’s investors put in about $1.7 million and the price of the acqui-hire deal was somewhere in the range of $15-$30 million. Google had to outbid Facebook for the deal too.

Google will be hiring eight of the team members from Milk. Investors in Milk include Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, and Shervin Pishevar. Milk shut down the Oink app yesterday.

Shaker Raises $15 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 01:26:10 +0000

Shaker is a virtual world startup based in Israel that has raised $15 million in a new round of funding. This round was led by Menlo Ventures’ Shervin Pishevar. Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund was already an investor in Shaker and they also participated in this round. Shaker was the champion at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference.

Some of Shaker’s other investors includes Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Troy Carter, and Rami Beracha (Pitango). Shaker was founded in Israel and recently opened an office in San Francisco. Shaker was started by Ofer Rundstein, Yonatan Maor, and Gad Maor.

Mr. Number Raises $3.5 Million From Menlo Ventures

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:24:43 +0000

Mr. Number is a mobile application for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry app that informs your friends when it is a good time to call you. Mr. Number also tells your friends whether you prefer text messages at the given moment. Mr. Number also does a lookup-based caller ID and it can block calls and messages from certain numbers. You can also report spam calls. Mr. Number has raised $3.5 million from Menlo Ventures. Mr. Number plans on using the funds to scale and build additional functionality. Shervin Pishevar and DuBose Montgomery of Menlo Ventures will join Mr. Numbers board of directors as part of this round. Mr. Number CEO Jason Devitt pointed out that nearly 3 million people have signed up for the service so far. [TechCrunch]

MindJolt Acquires Social Gaming Network and Hallpass Media

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:25:03 +0000

MindJolt is a gaming company that is run by MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe. DeWolfe left MySpace a few years after News Corporation acquired the social network company.

MindJolt appears to be in a better spot than MySpace right now. MySpace is continuing to lose money and MindJolt is profitable with $20 million in revenue. MindJolt has also recently acquired Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Hallpass Media. This acquisition doubles MindJolt’s staff to about 80 employees.

When MySpace’s revenue fell in 2009, DeWolfe who was CEO at the time was basically kicked out. Facebook started really dominating in 2009. Currently MySpace is being shopped around and it is rumored that buyers are not willing to spend higher than $100 million for it. DeWolfe is rumored to be involved as one of the buyers. This is a huge difference from the $856 million revenues that MySpace posted in 2008 and the $580 million price that News Corp. spent to buy the social network in 2005.

Hallpass Media is a gaming portal website that receives about four million monthly visitors. Hallpass Media also has 1,500 web based games that will be added to MindJolt’s portfolio. Social Gaming Network (SGN) creates iPhone and Android games that have a total of about 30 million downloads.

“Initially, a lot of energy was spent on games on the Web, through platforms like Facebook,” stated SGN founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar. “But over the past year, what we’ve seen is that a lot of that activity is going into mobile. We’ve reached a tipping point.”

SGN raised about $18 million in venture capital funding from Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, The Founders Fund, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Bezos Expeditions, Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures, and Lars Hinrichs.

[NYT]

Rapportive Raises $1 Million From Several Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:28:44 +0000

Rapportive is a startup that created a plugin for making GMail work better. It provides contextual information about your GMail contacts. As a result, Rapportive has raised $1 million in seed funding from several angel investors.

The investors include Jason Calacanis, Scott Banister, Paul Buchheit, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, and Roy Rodenstein. Other investors include 500Startups (a fund created by Dave McClure), Nivi & Naval Ravikant’s VentureHackers angel fund, Charles River Ventures, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, and BOLDstart Ventures. Rapportive is a Y-Combinator company.

The plugin that Rapportive created is a browser plugin that displays information about your contacts in the GMail sidebar. It replaces the ads in the sidebar. The information about the contact includes profile photos, occupations, and social network links. Rapportive was founded by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann, and Sam Stokes.

[TechCrunch]

Gowalla Raises $8.4 Million From Greylock and Several Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:04:12 +0000

Gowalla is a location based social networking website that has raised $8.4 million in funding. Greylock Partners was the lead investor and the company plans to use the funding to strengthen their development capabilities. Thus far Gowalla has raised over $10 million since they started in 2007.

“Gowalla has rapidly attracted a passionate user base by creating an innovative, useful service that is also a lot of fun,” stated Greylock’s David Thacker. “It’s exciting to discover new places and earn stamps for your passport from places as diverse as Buckingham Palace and the Sydney Opera House to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the coffee shop down the street. Gowalla also connects you with your friends, letting you share your travels and meet up with others in real time.” Thacker has joined the Gowalla Board of Directors as part of the investment.

LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman also joined Gowalla’s board of directors as an observer.

Other investors in Gowalla include Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Maples Investments, Shasta Ventures, Ron Conway, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, and Chris Sacca. Previous investors Alsop-Louie Partners and Founders Fund also participated in this round.

ToyBots Launches Platform For Actual Toys To Interact Socially Online

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:09:56 +0000

Social Gaming Network (SGN), the online game development company behind F.A.S.T., iBowl, and Vampires vs. Werewolves has launched a platform thats a bit different from their normal state of business. SGN created a product for toys to read data from the Internet and communicate that information to kids through the audio source within the toy. The demo that ToyBots used at the TechCrunch50 conference was called Woozee.

Woozee had the ability to read stories to children at night from previous audio recordings made by a parent or guardian. This way if a parent or guardian wanted to read a story to their children at night, the toy would be able to do it while they were away on a business trip. Pretty creepy eh? This means that Tickle-Me-Elmo would be actually read Goodnight Moon to your kids for you. As if kids’ imaginations weren’t already wild enough.

Toys could also have a network of friends that connect with other toys. ToyBots already has a telecommunications deal in place that they will announce later on. Some of the potential revenue streams include royalties and licensing costs. ToyBots would even give developers an SDK to create applications for the toys. Shervin Pishevar is the founder and CEO of ToyBots.