Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » SoftTech VC

Fab.com Raises $40 Million, Now Valued At Over $200 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:24:17 +0000

When Fab.com originally started, it was a social network for the LGBT community. Now the website is a flash sale website with 72-hour deals. The company has just raised $40 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and is now valued at over $200 million. It was only about 6 months ago since Fab.com switched from being a gay social network.

This past July, Fab.com raised funds that gave them a valuation of around $25 million. Fab.com processed about 100,000 orders in November alone, which was double the month before. Now Fab.com is averaging about $1.4 million sales per week. Fab.com currently has 1.2 million registered users. The company is expected to hit 4 million members by next year.

First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures, Baroda Venures, SoftTech VC, and Ashton Kutcher were investors in Fab.com’s series A and is believed to be participating in this round as well. Fab.com plans on using this round of funding for making investments in their distribution and customer service capabilities. Fab.com currently employs about 120 people. Fab.com CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg previously founded website Jobster Inc. The company runs about 14 sales per day which lasts about 72 hours.

[WSJ]

“YouTube For Businesses” Service Vidyard Raises $1.65 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:08:17 +0000

Vidyard is a company that is considered a “YouTube for Businesses.” The company has raised $1.65 million from SoftTech VC, Jawed Karim (YouTube co-founder), Y Combinator, SV Angel, iNovia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Paul Buchheit, Vivi Nevo, David Nizkad, Dennis Kavelman, and several others.

Vidyard launched in August and is intended for businesses to use as a marketing tool. Vidyard is similar to YouTube, but their video upload services links to the brand’s website rather than YouTube itself. Vidyard also has real-time analytics about embed performance and there is ad free video hosting. Video players can be branded and there is instant search technology.

Vidyard allows you to upload a video file or a video from YouTube. Then you can add a custom thumbnail and use 10 different player skins with different sizes and colors. You can also enable viral sharing on Twitter and Facebook.

Vidyard has also added the ability to push video content to YouTube channels, Facebook walls, and Twitter feeds today. You can also pull in YouTube analytics into your Vidyard Dashboard.

[TechCrunch]

Infographics Design Company Visual.ly Raises $2 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:37:01 +0000

Visual.ly is an infographics design company that has raised $2 million in seed funding. The investors in this round includes Crosslink Capital, SoftTech, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Giza Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Mark Goines, Josh James, etc. Visual.ly had about 26,000 users sign up as part of their beta. Over 300,000 infographics have been created and they receive about one million pageviews per month. Some of the companies that Visual.ly works with include BuzzFeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, GOOD, NASDAQ, Skype, the Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic. Visual.ly plans on using the funding for building their development team and hire additional data visualization specialists.

Gay Social Network Fab.com Raises $8 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:56:14 +0000

Fab.com is a social network for gay men that used to be known as Fabulis. Fab.com has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

The Series A funding was from Menlo Ventures, First Round Capital, Baroda Ventures, The Washington Post, Jason Goldberg, SoftTech VC, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, A-Grade Investments, and Zelkova Ventures. Angel investors in this round included Kevin Rose, Jon Anderson, Don Baer, Josh Kusher, Dave Morgan, Ben Ling, and David Tisch. Fab.com’s seed round of funding was $1 million from Ashton Kutcher, SV Angel, SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, Baroda Ventures, and The Washington Post.

Fab.com has daily design inspirations and flash sales that provides 70% off of the retail cost. Membership to Fab.com is free, but the number of users are capped to maintain the low prices. Fab.com launched on June 9, 2011 and they have 350,000 registered users. Fab.com reported a profit of $1.3 million in the first 30 days of the debut. The company currently has about 45 employees.

[TechCrunch]

Outright Raises $5 Million From Sequoia, First Round, Shasta, and SoftTech

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:59:07 +0000

Outright.com has raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures, and SoftTech VC. This is Outright’s second round of funding. The company is just like Mint.com but uses more of a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Outright raised $2 million in funding previously from seed investors. The seed investors include the companies that put in the second round except for Sequoia. Outright is intended for small businesses and individuals. This helps people put their taxes together easier too. The service is free and the company plans to introduce several add-on services in the future.

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]

FitBit Inc. Raises $2 Million From True Ventures, SoftTech VC, and Angels

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:22:39 +0000

FitBit is a company that created a device and website to determine how much fitness and sleep you are getting. The device retails for about $99 and debuted at the TechCrunch50 conference. The device is wireless and comes with a recharging dock. The FitBit Tracker devices automatically uploads activities, calories burned, distance, and sleep quality to the website. This information is then presented to the device holder in an entertaining way.

True Ventures and SoftTech VC have decided to plug in about $2 million in funding into these companies. Through the round of funding, Jon Callaghan of True Ventures has joined the FitBit board. FitBit plans on using the funding to further the development and distribution of the device. The funding will also help develop additional products and services. Signing up for FitBit.com is free.

FitBit was started by Eric Friedman and James Park. Friedman has previously worked for Webshots and co-founded Windup Labs. Park was also a co-founded in Windup Labs.