Luke Nosek is a co-founder at PayPal and is a Managing Partner at Founders Fund. Nosek wants to move from the Internet and new media sector and get into science. Nosek is joining Halcyon Molecular, a human genome sequencing firm as a founding president.
Halcyon plans to sequence complete human genomes in less than 10 minutes at a cost of $100. This is a much smaller price and smaller amount of time than currently existing genome sequencing labs. Nosek will continue to lead The Founders Fund’s genomics investing division. Peter Thiel will be joining the board of directors at Halcyon Molecular too.
Halcyon will be competing with 23andme, a genomics company founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Halcyon even received a $2 million aberration corrected STEM electron microscope on loan from the U.S. DoE.
Udorse is a visual endorsement engine that launched at TechCrunch50. The company raised $500,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund and Peter Thiel joined the Board of Directors. The idea behind the website is that people endorse items they love in the form of pictures. This could include t-shirts, watches, cufflinks, etc. Udorse encourages users to endorse items and places in photos by tagging them. They places or items in the photos are tagged to websites.
For example, if you want to endorse the new Ray-Ban sunglasses you bought, you are encouraged to tag them in a picture of yourself wearing them to a website where others can buy it. The brands will appreciate the free endorsement too. Udorse even has several partners. If sales are made by your referral picture, then you get a cut too.
Udorse even allows you to connect your Facebook Photos to your Udorse account, making it easier to tag the photos initially. The person that highlights the item receives a 25% commission fee if another person purchases the item. As of yesterday Armani and American Apparel partnered with Udorse. Udorse was founded by Geoffrey Lewis and Trevor Austin.
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.
Thread is a dating application on Facebook that suggests potential matches that has just raised a new round of funding. The company raised $1.2 million from Sequoia Capital, the Founders Fund, First Round Capital, and angel investor Ron Conway.
Thread was founded by several former PayPal product managers. “The best people to date are friends of friends,” stated Thread CEO Brian Phillips. “Not all the best people are on dating sites. All the best people are on Facebook.” Phillips recently went on his third date with someone he met on Thread.
Thread pulls in your contact information using Facebook Connect and pulls the public profiles of all your friends. Through the website, you can find out which friends of your friends are single and ask you mutual friend to introduce you. Stalking at its finest.
Thread was originally known as Frinto (friend+intro) but decided to change their name. The Thread.com domain name was already taken and it took them two years to negotiate a deal over the ownership. The owner was told that they would receive equity if the business was successful. If it wasn’t successful, the owner would get the domain name back.
Zivity is a San Francisco start-up company founded by Scott (husband) and Cyan (wife) Banister. Zivity’s business model was to sell a subscription fee of $10 per month to people that wanted to look at provocative pictures of women. I always had my doubts about this company because they were essentially competing against all image search services and image websites. Why would someone pay to use Zivity when you can find such content free?
Around October 2008, Zivity fired about one third of their staff and now they are splitting the company. Zivity launched a new website called TopFans.com and it looks… for lack of a better word.. mediocre. Celebrity websites are found all over the Internet, but TopFans just looks bland compared to all the rest.
When Zivity first launched, the company received plenty of media coverage which may be the reason how they raised $8 million in two rounds. The company today has $4 million of cash left. Zivity will retain $2 million and $2 million will be given to TopFans.com. Thats unfortunate considering that the design of TopFans looks very cheap. If you gave me $2 million, I could probably build the next Google.
Cyan will remain with Zivity, but CEO Jon Elvekrog will become the head of TopFans. Remaining employees will be dispersed between the two.
BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund will have ownership in TopFans.com now. Will they see a return on their investment? Unlikely.
CoTweet is a startup that has built a Twitter platform for helping companies reach and engage customers. CoTweet has several prominent companies using their platform such as Ford, Starbucks, Microsoft, Sports Illustrated, Zendesk, and Dish Network.
CoTweet announced earlier this week that they have raised $1.1 million in first round funding from Baseline, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments, and Freestyle Capital.
The company platform has the ability to manage multiple tools and accounts at once. Several people also have the ability to post to a single account using the CoTweet platform.
CoTweet is available for free as of right now but the company will eventually charge for their services. “CoTweet is an essential tool that allows us to manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard, or have a single account with multiple people managing it,” stated Scott Monty, the digital and multimedia communications manager at Ford Motor Company in a press release. “We can also identify who’s responsible for Tweets, which gives us the flexibility to pull experts into the discussion, and to keep a human face while doing so.”
Analytics company Quantcast is seeking a $50 million round of funding which would put them at a $300 million valuation according to PEHub.
The company is rumored to have received several term sheets, but the identities of the investors is not yet known. Quantcast monitors the traffic and demographics of about 10 million web sites and they are finding ways to monetize the service through a Media Program. The Quantcast Media Program gives advertisers the ability to select the audience they want to reach by having access to demographic information.
So far Quantcast has raised $25 million in total funding. Allen & Company invested $20 million Series B in 2007. Other investors include the Founders Fund, Polaris Venture Partners, and Revolution Ventures.
Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is a space transportation companies that was started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. SpaceX is building reusable space launch vehicles called the Falcon 1 and the Falcon 9 along with a Dragon series of vehicles.
The company started in 2002 and employs about 800 people. Musk himself put $100 million in seed funding for the company. After that the company raised $20 million in Series A from The Founders Fund. The company is now pursuing an additional $60 million additional round. DFJ put in about $15 million of the new round.
Last year SpaceX launched a rocket into space after failing three times. Now SpaceX is being hired by aerospace companies and the government to launch satellites.
Facebook has named the top 25 fbFund recipients. Combined, all of them will receive $625K in funding. The top 25 include PhD candidates, former NASA engineers, and one of the drivers of the World Solar Challenge.
“Facebook started fbFund to help seed innovation among a global community of entrepreneurs and to help change the economics of starting a company,” stated Elliot Schrage, VP of Communications, public policy and platform marketing at Facebook. “By refusing to take an equity stake for our grants, we’re making it a little easier for talented entrepreneurs to maintain ownership over their ideas and focus on getting their business off the ground. Given the current caution in the market, we think fbFund is an even more attractive solution for innovative entrepreneurs to create the next great opportunities.”
The fbFund started in 2007 with a $10 million seed fund. The fbFund is a joint venture between Accel, Facebook, and The Founders Fund. Six hundred applications were sent within the first month of the fund’s release. The top 25 created the following applications:
• BarTab • BlackDrumm • Bottle Rocket • Check My Campus • Daikon • Faithfeed • Good Call Sports • GroupCard • Kontagent • Koofers • Mousehunt • Newsbrane • PartyBuzz • Pongr • ProfessionalProfile • RealGifts • Social Arcade • Socialfly • Teach the People • Thankster • TrailBehind • Twenty20 Cricket • vDream Racing • Weddingbook • Wildfire
These applications will be presented in a second round. The top 5 of these 25 will receive $225,000 in additional grants.
