Rede social brasileira Atlz foca em recrutamento de universitários e recém-formados. A Atlz, rede social de recrutamento voltada especialmente para universitários e recém-formados do Brasil, chega ao mercado com o objetivo de democratizar o acesso às informações relacionadas à carreira e trazer oportunidades profissionais para jovens talentos. O site já atua há dois meses em formato beta, com mais de 10 mil cadastros, e em médio prazo busca conectar empresas de todos os portes e 6 milhões de alunos universitários no País. De acordo com a pesquisa do CEO Study, realizada em 2011 com 1,5 mil empresas, de 33 setores em 60 países, a falta de mão de obra especializada é o maior problema encontrado por 71% dos presidentes de empresas no Brasil. A porcentagem fica bem acima da média mundial, de 58%. “O mercado global de recrutamento movimenta 400 bilhões de dólares, e a tendência é que a indústria fique ainda mais aquecida.
Com bilhões investidos anualmente em novos projetos no País, cada vez mais será necessário talento com competências específicas para executá-los. Google+ Startup Saúde Brasil: A primeira incubadora pra startups de saúde da América Latina? O EmpreenderSaúde, reconhecido site de inovação e empreendedorismo , vai realizar nos dias 12 e 13 de maio na Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), em São Paulo, o Startup Saúde Brasil. Foram selecionados 30 mentores de altíssimo nível para mentorar 10 startups selecionadas.
O processo, único na América Latina, durará todo o final de semana, contará com representantes de grandes players do setor saúde e é aberto a todas as startups do continente. Mentores de empresas como Fleury, MinhaVida, Bradesco Saúde, Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein e outros já confirmaram presença (Confira os mentores já confirmados em: . Entre os palestrantes estão o Felipe Baeta da Endeavor, Fernando Reinach do Fundo Pitanga, André Médici do Banco Mundial, Fernando Fernandes do site Saútil, Rodrigo Menezes do escritório Derraik&Menezes e Eduardo Cruz, fundador e CEO da AxisBiotec, uma holding brasileira de biotecnologia.
Para se inscrever acesse startupsaudebrasil.com. Google+ Site de classificados Fisgo recebe investimento do fundo NascenTI, da Confrapar. Cisco to Spend R$1B in Brazil to Fund Tech Center, Startups. (Bloomberg Businessweek) April 2, 2012 – Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) said it will spend more than $1 billion reais ($546.6 million) in Brazil in the next four years to boost manufacturing in the South American nation and step up investment in local startups. The projects include a “center of innovation” in Rio de Janeiro that will be focused on developing technologies for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, as well as other products for the surveillance, education and health-care markets, San Jose, California-based Cisco said in a statement today. “With today’s announcements, we reinforce Cisco’s long- term commitment to Brazil and expect to become a relevant partner in this incredible growth journey the country has been experiencing,” Rodrigo Abreu, president of Cisco’s Brazil division, said in the statement.
Cisco is also helping to create a venture-capital fund focused on Brazilian technologies. Cisco made the announcement during its Cisco Plus Brazil event in Rio de Janeiro. Cisco anuncia fundo de Venture Capital de R$50 Milhões para Investir no Brasil. A Cisco anunciou recentemente uma nova estratégia de iniciativas para o Brasil em seu evento Cisco Plus no Rio de Janeiro. No evento estavam presentes o ministro brasileiro de comunicações Paulo Bernardo, o governador do Rio de Janeiro Sergio Cabral, e o prefeito do Rio, Eduardo Paes.
De acordo com o site da empresa, as iniciativas são para “incentivar inovação, transformação e desenvolvimento socioeconômico, expandindo sua presença no país e destacando a importância de investimentos em Tecnologia da Informação e Comunicação – TIC – para o crescimento e competitividade do País.” A empresa investirá mais de R$ 1 bilhão nos próximos quatro anos. Segundo o site da empresa, a Cisco pretende gerar 800 empregos no Brasil. Além disso criará uma plataforma para inovação e empreendedorismo high-tech por aqui. Fundo de Venture Capital para startups e TIC O fundo terá R$ 50 milhões, além do aporte de investidores locais que se tornarão parceiros. Centro de Inovação da Cisco no Rio E aí? Accel-Backed YapStone Acquires Faith-Based Donation Service ParishPay.
E-payments company YapStone just announced that it has acquired ParishPay, a service for donating to faith-based organizations. YapStone’s main product is RentPayment — as you can probably guess, it’s a service for property managers to collect credit card and electronic check payments from their tenants. However, when YapStone raised $50 million from Accel Partners last year, one of the stated goals was to expand into other e-payment markets. That’s where ParishPay comes in. The service was founded in 2001, and then acquired in 2006 by Smart Tuition, which offers financial tools for private and faith-based schools.
Now ParishPay will operate as a business division of YapStone, with its own office in New York. YapStone says there should be no disruption of service to existing ParishPay customers. In the acquisition press release, YapStone chairman and co-founder Tom Villante describes the deal as “an important milestone” for the company. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Rumor: Zillow In To Buy RentJuice For $45 Million. Between gossip and rumors and gossip and more rumors, the Silicon Valley day-to-day is so dramatic Bravo is turning it into not one but two TV shows. No joke. That doesn’t convince you? Well, how about this? Anyways, I’m in the middle of tracking down a huge funding story but want to get a (separate) rumor du jour out there to you guys, because I’m experimenting with this whole “process journalism” format and have asked several people at both parties involved for more info, to no avail.
Zillow, which went public in July, is the world’s third largest real estate listings marketplace. There are term sheets down from Zillow (not yet signed) and the all-cash $45 million deal should be finalized in two weeks, says whoever contacted me this morning. So what the hell!? So if this is true you heard it here first. MindMixer Raises $1.9M For Virtual Town Halls, Launches ImproveSF Website.
If you live in San Francisco, you probably spend a lot of time complaining about the lackluster public transportation. I’m no exception — so today, I was really excited to see a new government website called ImproveSF, where residents can submit and vote on suggestions about how to make Muni better, faster, and more reliable. Not surprisingly, there’s a cool startup behind the effort. It’s called MindMixer, and it just announced that it raised a $1.9 million Series A from Dundee Venture Capital.
CEO Nick Bowden says that he and his co-founder Nathan Preheim both come from an urban planning background. The idea came from their experiences holding public meetings that no one would attend. “Most of those products are idea-oriented — they solicit ideas,” Bowden says. In other words, it’s not just about submitting and voting on ideas, but also channeling those ideas into specific strategies that are affordable on a government budget. With JOBS Act Becoming Law, Crowdfunding Platforms Look To Create Self-Regulatory Body.
Today, President Obama signs the JOBS Act into law, legalizing crowdfunding in startups by non-accredited investors, so that anyone and their mother can invest. The new law stipulates that entrepreneurs can now raise money from any and all, however, startups are limited to $1 million per year, and must stick to portals approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission. What’s more, the legislation dispenses with the 500-shareholder rule, which put a limit on the number of shareholders a company was allowed before registering with the SEC (and going public). The new law gives high-growth companies a longer grace period, or on-ramp, leading up to IPOs, and lifts some of the one-size-fits all regulation that likely has been hampering the IPO market. While this is a big win for startups, it puts significant pressure on the crowdfunding market to self-regulate — which is risky.
The group aims to create principles to: What do you think? More on CAPS here. Can Minerva Build An Online Ivy? With $25M From Benchmark & Larry Summers Advising, There’s Hope. Well, we’ve said it before: Technology is changing education. It’s flipping the classroom, bringing instructional videos to the masses, and dragging online higher education into legitimacy. Investors have begun to hear the call, as was evidenced today when Benchmark Capital made its largest seed investment to date — $25 million — in a startup/university called The Minerva Project. Sure, it’s not quite the $41 million Color raised pre-launch, but it’s certainly head-turning for an education startup. Hopefully it can avoid the rough early start and crushing expectations that come along with big seed rounds.
At first blush, with this kind of big, early funding, well-known names, and outsized ambition, the project is intriguing to say the least, if not full of bravado. By creating an educational experience that is built from online resources, Nelson says that Minerva won’t be subject to the same scarcity of resources that besets institutions today. NEA Leads $33M Round In CRM Developer And Salesforce Competitor SugarCRM. SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has completed a $33 million equity and debt financing round. We’re told around $14 million of the round was equity financing. The investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates and includes participation from new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital as well as the company’s current investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International.
To date, SugarCRM has raised over $60 million in equity funding. While Salesforce tends to grab the most attention as the cloud-based CRM company, SugarCRM has quietly built a loyal, and growing userbase around its customer relationship management platform for sales teams. SugarCRM, which has been cash flow positive since Q4 2010, saw sales grow 67 percent in 2010, and added more than 2,700 companies to its user base. Although SugarCRM has a worthy competitor in Salesforce, Augustin says the company “wins its fair share of the customer CRM deals.”
Mogreet Nabs $4.1M For An Easy Way To Share Rich Media To Any Mobile Device. Mogreet, a Los Angeles-based mobile video marketing startup, is today announcing that it has raised $4.1 million in strategic capital. The round was led by Black Diamond Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including DFJ Frontier, Ascend Ventures, Bryant Park Ventures, and Draper Associates. The new infusion of capital brings the startup’s total funding to $14.1 million. Along with expanding its international presence, Mogreet will be using the funding to support its recently launched product, moShare. Launched in 2006, Mogreet has built a distribution platform for mobile messaging, which specializes in the delivery of rich media, specifically video and MMS, to mobile devices. The startup works with both Fortune 500 companies and SMBs in over 170 countries to help them better engage their audiences.
Mogreet currently accounts for over 70 percent of MMS messages sent by marketers in the U.S. For More on Mogreet, check them out at home here. PhoneDeck Is A Game Changer For Small Businesses, Divorce Attorneys. I sold mortgages over the phone in a previous life. That involved calling over 100 people a day using an archaic but functional web-based phone system. That system cost the company a fortune to implement and required a dedicated support staff. PhoneDeck does most of it for free. And it works directly with Android and S40 phones. This is disruption defined. Mike Butcher broke the news about PhoneDeck’s recent launch yesterday. It works well, too. Small businesses often spend good money on similar phone services. PhoneDeck seems to have all the right additional functions, too. There is a bit of blind trust involved with PhoneDeck. Still, privacy issues aside, PhoneDeck could be the free answer to many people’s expensive problems. Yapp Raises Funding From Kleiner Perkins To Allow Anyone To Create Mobile Apps For Events.
Maria Seidman helps organize a monthly womens’ networking event for her business school alums in New York City but was frustrated with some of the options for creating a dedicated mobile app for an event. So she decided to create a DIY mobile app creation platform herself. Today, her brainchild, Yapp is launching as an online service where a consumer — even if they lack any technical or design skills — can create a beautiful mobile app in minutes. As Seidman explains to me, she believes that one day everyone will be able to create a mobile app but doesn’t believe that one platform can create apps for everyone and that consumers, developers and even companies need different options for various skill sets.
She’s targeting the consumer audience with Yapp, which wants to make it as simple to create an app as it is to create an online invitation. Users simply go to Yapp’s homepage and can start creating an iOS app or an HTML5 mobile site in minutes. Business Audience Marketing Company Bizo Raises $10M. Bizo, a company offering technology to help advertisers reach a business audience, has raised $10 million in a Series B round of funding. The company has now raised a total of $20 million. Crosslink Capital led the round, and the firm’s newest partner David Silverman is joining Bizo’s board of directors. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock also participated. Bizo’s ad platform includes ad targeting and audience analytics, and it uses that platform to sell both brand display and direct response ads.
At the end of last year, Bizo claims it reached an annual revenue run rate of $18 million. Bizo has been working on new technologies too, Glass says, for example by investing social marketing and video tools. He adds that as the company expands, “Bizo’s focus remains on helping marketers more effectively reach business professionals.” The company spun off from ZoomInfo.
WalkMe Walks You Through Websites. A Tel Aviv startup, WalkMe, aims to do for your website what your UX team should have already done: make it easier for your users to understand. The service creates little pop-up bubbles over various points in order to lead your users through a typical interaction, be it a bank website or a complex social tool. These aren’t videos that run in the corner. Instead, every time you complete an action the system pops up a new bubble for the next step. These interactive bubbles will also help correct mistakes in input. Founded by Dan Adika, a former software designer for HP, the site offers free demo plans as well as more complete plans for enterprise customers. The system also handles usage analytics. Pricing ranges from 1 cent per “interaction” to $99 a month for multi-language support. Mobile Social Gaming Company Dragonplay Raises $14M From Accel To Expand To iOS. More Developments For Amazon’s In-App Payment System For Appstore, But More Work Needed.
The Story of Skout: From Deadpool’s Door to $22M Led By Andreessen Horowitz. YouDazzle Launches As A Simple File Sharing And Web Meeting Platform For SMBs. RR Donnelly Invests $2.5M In CoffeeTable To Bring Retail Catalogs Into The Tablet Age. Gamification Platform BigDoor Raises $5 Million From Foundry Group. The Tap Lab Raises $550K To Seed Some Hits in Location-Based Mobile Gaming. YC, Rock Health-Backed Agile Diagnosis Launches To Help Doctors Better Treat Their Patients. Wrapp races to outpace DropGifts with German launch. Second Prize Is A Set Of Steak Knives: MarGenius Is A Social Network For Networkers. Funding Circle, a Kickstarter for SMBs, Picks Up $16M From Index, Union Square Ventures. Tandem: Mobile Accelerator Unveils Inaugural Batch, Gives Sneak Peek At Round Two. 2tor Raises $26M D Round To Put Online Degrees In The Same Class As Their On-Campus Rivals.