First Round Capital Roundup: 6/28/2011
Plenty of things going on in the Wonderful World of First Round Capital, perhaps at even more than the usual rapid pace.
First, locally, portfolio company Monetate of Conshohocken announced the winners of its first Open Source Prize: the First Prize winner was Michael Schroeder's Rx Shortages, a mobile application designed to help doctors and hospitals access information about drug shortages. Winners get a lot of neat tech stuff and most importantly, a month's supply of pizza and Mountain Dew. The winners where honored last week in an “Open Source Open Bar” event in Philly last week.
Monetate currently has about 50 employees and hopes to have 100 one year from now if it can find the engineers it needs locally, the Inquirer reports.
Still curious about the lack of an announcement on First Round's apparent investment in Radnor's Relay Network, although First Round, NewSpring and ICG are clearly listed as investors on Relay's website. I reported on the disappearing Wikipedia entry for Relay back in April.
New Hope-based myYearbook cofounders (and siblings) Catherine Cook and CEO Geoff Cook were named Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs Of The Year for the Greater Philadelphia area. Catherine Cook was still in high school when she help start the company, which says its annual revenue run rate is now at $30 million.
More on the Channel Intelligence/Click Equations deal: CEO Lucinda Duncalfe Holt (who is changing her name to Lucinda Bromwyn Duncalfe-not a divorce, as she explains here) is moving on; President Craig Danuloff will become Chief Product Officer at Channel Intelligence. The two companies have had a client relationship for years and have both been in ICG's portfolio, though I'm not sure how exactly they fit together or what the future plans are for Click Equations under Channel Intelligence. ClickEquations had 12 employees at the time of the deal, according to an article in the Inquirer.
First Round Managing Partner Chris Fralic gives us a photographic portfolio of the signs that carry the names of some Bucks County estates, a place "where people excessively name their houses", he says.
Going on elsewhere: Josh Kopelman participated in a VC panel at the Churchill Club in California earlier this month, talking about how he pitched and didn't pitch Half.com, among other things. The Wall Street Journal writes about Silicon Valley's Alpha Club, a networking group for entrepreneurs that First Round helps fund.
First Round's Charlie O'Donnell reports on "Dinner with Werner" (Amazon Web Services' CTO Werner Vogels that is) with some First Round people recently.
Mobile payments startup Square, in which First Round has a stake, made two very high-profile additions to its board; former US Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.
Portfolio company Turntable.fm is getting a lot of buzz and users; a complete pivot (as Managing Partner Howard Morgan writes) from a startup originally named Stickybits, Turntable.fm lets users play DJ and build up points based on their audiences. AdKeeper, which has raised funds at a $100 million plus valuation, fortunately says people are actually keeping online ads, which is what the service is designed to do. Facebook has teamed up with RockMelt's social web browser with an integration that Facebook apparently invested a good deal of time developing (though Facebook is not an investor in the company).
ROBLOX, a neat-sounding startup that lets kids build virtual games which simulate real life, raised a $4 million second round with First Round returning as co-lead investor. SimpleGeo has teamed up with Factual to expand its Places API; if I understand it correctly SimpleGeo is going to focus its business on its API with Factual providing more of the location data.
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