First Round Capital Roundup: 2/12/2011

One Kings Lane, an online social shopping site focused on household furnishings in which First Round Capital was an early investor, has raised an additional $23 million led by Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. First Round also re-upped. The company, cofounded by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus’ wife Alison Pincus, reported that 2010 sales were up 500% over 2009. (See also Fortune article).


Another First Round portfolio company, Path, turned down a $100 million + incentives offer from Google, according to TechCrunch, instead taking a $8.5 million round led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. Path, cofounded by Facebook veteran Dave Morin, is a mobile social network, and although it is still rather small Google is said to have wanted the talent base.


New York-based Tremor Media has acquired First Round portfolio company Transpera, expanding its online advertising platform into the mobile space. In November of last year, Tremor had acquired another First Round-backed company, SanScout, for a price reported to be at least $65 million. comScore has ranked Tremor a close second to Hulu in terms of the number of video ads served. Also, mobile data solutions platform Motricity agreed to acquire mobile marketing and advertising provider Adenyo for $100 million and incentives that could add up to $50 million more; Adenyo had acquired First Round-backed MoVoxx in 2010, although it is not known what, if any, First Round's resulting equity position in Adenyo might have been.


Digiday: Daily has a brief interview with Ari Jacoby, CEO of First Round-backed "CAPTCHA" advertsing service Solve Media, which has offices in New York and Philly. Gigaom has an article on BankSimple, a New York startup close to launching, which will not actually be a bank itself but rather provide a user-friendly, mobile-oriented platform for consumers to interface with smaller banks. BankSimple's CTO is Alex Payne, an early Twitter employee. The startup has raised $3.1 million to date from First Round Capital, Ron Conway and others. Truveris, a New York startup focused on providing automated pharmacy benefits review services (an area that King of Prussia's Health Market Science is also trying to get into) raised $3.8 million, led by GSA Venture Partners with First Round Capital also participating.


Josh Kopelman has joined GSI Commerce's Board of Directors, a move that appears to make sense in a number of ways, given his background in ecommerce and ad tech and the strength of many of First Round's portfolio companies in these areas. Kopelman also spoke at the Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst Outlook conference in New York late last month, emphasizing the need for general partners to align their fund size to “exit-market realities". “When I hop on a train in Philadelphia I can either take the local or the express,” the Wall Street Journal's Venture Capital Dispatch quoted him as saying. “I think most traditional VCs when they fund a company kind of buy an express ticket to an IPO. And I think what you’re seeing with some of these smaller funds, they’re buying a ticket on a local train".



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