Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Spark Capital

Blog Service Tumblr Raises $85 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:48:38 +0000

Tumblr is a popular blogging service that has raised $85 million in a new round of funding. Tumblr is best known for simple blogging tools to post photos, videos, songs, etc. The investment in this round was led by Greylock Partners. Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Richard Branson, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Sequoia Capital also participated in this round.

Tumblr founder David Karp said that this extra round of funding “allows us to continue to scale our business and give real focus to the further development of Tumblr.”

Traffic increased to 13 billion page views per month. There are now 30 million blogs that have been created using Tumblr. Across these 30 million blogs, 40 million posts are being generated per day. About 623 million minutes per month are being spent by people looking at Tumblr blogs.

“Tumblr has come far since we began our journey,” said Mr. Karp. “From the early users signing up to easily share all of the things they cared about, to the global community today where creators have an incredible opportunity to reach an audience of hundreds of millions, it’s been a remarkable four years.”

Skillshare Raises $3.1 Million From Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:09:05 +0000

Skillshare is a P2P learning company that has raised $3.1 million in funding from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Skillshare is a platform that can help turn anyone into a teacher. Users can offer their own offline classes based on their skill. Skillshare takes 15% of the revenue.

Skillshare organized about 500 classes in New York with 2,500 students. Skillshare plans on using the additional funding to expand outside of New York. They are branching out to San Francisco and Philadelphia so far. The company plants to expand to Boston, Portland, Seattle, L.A., and New Orleans later this year.

Skillshare co-founder and CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn believes Skillshare can continue to grow and start building physical schools. Fred Wilson of Union Square plans on offering MBA Mondays classes on the website this fall. Skillshare previously raised $550,000 in a seed round of funding from Founder Collective, SV Angel, and other angel investors.

[GigaOM]

Biz Stone Joins the Spark Capital Team

Riley Kennysmith — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:46:17 +0000

Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter who recently stepped away from the company to relaunch Obvious, has taken a role as strategic advisor at Spark Capital. According to Mashable, startups Spark Capital has invested in include Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Boxee, Kik and Stack Exchange. Stone also runs the Biz & Livia Stone Foundation and is a strategic advisor at AOL.

OnSwipe Raises $5 Million In “Series Awesome”

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 19:20:17 +0000

OnSwipe is a tablet publishing company that has raised $5 million in “Series Awesome.” This past January OnSwipe raised $1 million in seed funding. This round of funding was led by Spark Capital and followed on by Lightbank. Yuri Milner, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Betaworks, Morado, Eniac Ventures, and Thrive Capital also participated in this round.

”We realized what we are building is a larger opportunity than we ever thought while growing at a breakneck speed. In order to own the market we went out and raised a Series Awesome from the best group of investors possible that share our goal of world domination. And yes…the legal docs actually say Series Awesome,” said OnSwipe co-founder Jason Baptiste.

[TechCrunch]

Spark Capital Reneged On Lauren Leto’s Start-Up Bnter [RUMOR]

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 08:11:49 +0000

When Sarah Lacy interviewed Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet about the danger of venture capital firms investing in similar companies, she indirectly found out about some drama between Tumblr and BNTER after doing some follow-up investigation. Lacy found out from three sources that Spark Capital had reneged on a term sheet that was offered to BNTER, a start-up based in New York founded by Lauren Leto.

Backing out of the deal with BNTER angered angel investors Chris Dixon and Ron Conway, who was also investing in BNTER. Spark principal Andrew Parker reached out to Leto last December after being impressed by the company’s messaging product. At the time, BNTER was a two-person company. Leto pitched the company to Spark in Boston and negotiations carried on for several months.

In March, Spark Capital had faxed Leto a termsheet saying that it wasn’t signed because the partner could not get their hands on a fax machine, but said it was a done deal. After Spark checked in with Tumblr founder David Karp to see if he considers BNTER as a competitor, he said yes. Karp red-lighted Spark’s investment in BNTER because he believed they were direct competitors.

Spark did not end up sending the $2 million investment and they refused to pay a $200,000 break up fee. Thinking the deal was done, BNTER started to ramp up their company by hiring an Android developer. To make ends meet, Leto decided to cut her salary down to zero. Leto is a co-founder in Texts From Last Night (TFLN) and is a new college grad of Michigan State University.

[TechCrunch]

Mobile Consumer Surveys Company Txteagle Raises $8.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 05:33:13 +0000

Txteagle is a mobile consumer surveys company that has raised $8.5 million in venture capital led by Spark Capital. Txteagle was founded in 2009 and is based in Boston. They have gathered data from 2.1 billion consumers. Txteagle’s software allows consumers to send and receive survey messages to them for free. Those who participate in the surveys are given free airtime if the mobile operators are affiliated with Txteagle. [DMWMedia]

Adap.tv Raises $20 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:10:25 +0000

Adap.tv has raised $20 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures, and Spark Capital. Adap.tv has raised a total of $43 million thus far. Adap.tv’s platform lets advertising companies manage their online video ads. Publishers use Adap.tv to monetize their websites with the video content. Adap.tv currently sees about 60 million unique visitors and they deliver about 1.8 billion video ad views per month. [TechCrunch]

Mobile Messaging Startup Kik Interactive Raises $8 Million In Series A

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:01:26 +0000

Mobile messaging startup company Kik Interactive has raised $8 million in Series A funding from RRE Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Spark Capital. Fred Wilson (Union Square) and Adam Ludwin (RRE) are joining the Kik board of directors as a result of the funding. Kik Messenger launched in October 2010 and it works similarly as the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). After downloading Kik, the app will scan your contacts and let you know which of your friends have Kik. Kik hit about 1 million users within the first 15 days of launching to the public. Today Kik has over 3 million users. [Kik Press Release]

Stack Overflow Raises $12 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 21:58:45 +0000

Question and answer website Stack Overflow has raised $12 million in funding and has launched a career website. The $12 million Series B funding round was provided from new investors Index Ventures and Spark Capital. Union Square Ventures also participated. Stack Overflow has also been renamed to Stack Exchange Inc. [GigaOM]

White Label Group Buying Platform Group Commerce Raises $8 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 20:05:00 +0000

Group Commerice Inc. has raised $8 million in Series A funding from Spark Capital, Carmel Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures, and Bob Pittman. Group Commerce is a white-label group buying platform company that was founded in 2010. Essentially they help websites launch their own daily deal services. Some of their newest clients include Dailycandy, Thrillist, and The New York Times. Group Commerce was founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt, and Andrew Glenn. Group Commerce is based in New York.