VantagePoint Venture Partners believes that neighborhood social events are so crucial that they decided to shell out $7 million to Zvents in series A funding. Not only did Vantage Venture Partners participate, but so did Red Rock Ventures and NetService Ventures Group.
What will Zvents do with their newly bloated bank account? Increasing staff and increase geographic accessibility, of course. As part of the new arrangement, there will also be newly added staff members which include: David Carlick of VantagePoint Venture Partners, Laura Brege of Red Rock Ventures. Current board members include Paul Martino, the CEO of Aggregate Knowledge, Richard Melmon, managing partner of NetService Ventures, and Ethan Stock, the CEO of Zvents. Zvents revenue source includes local advertisements for local businesses, similar to Facebook’s college-specific advertising.
“Local is a huge growth area on the Internet today, for both relevant content and targeted advertising,” stated David Carlick, a Managing Director of VantagePoint Venture Partners. “Zvents’ search, content, and advertising solutions are enormously valuable to media firms looking for ways to become more relevant to their audience, and better monetize their content.”
VantagePoint Venture Partners have also been an investor of MySpace in the past, a social networking website that also promotes the usage of local event management. I cannot tell you how many events that I have been invited to in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area by simply stating that this is my geographical location in my MySpace profile.
Clearly, local event management is a hot topic in the world of Web 2.0. As the new features are added post-investment on Zvest, I’ll ensure to perform a more fully in-depth review on Zvest.
[Source: VentureBeat]
