Yelp Closes 5-Star IPO Day With $1.47 Billion Valuation. For Yelp, this has been a very good day. The restaurant review site was received exceptionally well by Wall Street during its first day as a publicly traded company, closing at a price of $24.58 per share, up a full 63 percent from its $15 IPO price. Yelp shares traded at strong prices all day, hitting a high of $26 per share and never falling below its $22 opening price. It’s a warmer reception than we’ve seen with some other recent web IPOs: Shares of Zynga, for example, dipped below the IPO price within the first minutes of its stock market debut back in December. The fact that Zynga was solidly profitable at the time of its IPO while Yelp is still operating in the red just goes to show how unpredictable the stock market can really be, and how many things are at play when the market is determining a company’s value.
Of course, today is just the first step in Yelp’s new life as a publicly traded company — it’ll be interesting to see how things shake out in the weeks and months ahead. Facebook Introduces Real-Time Analytics for Pages. Facebook plans to roll out analytics that will for the first time give Page administrators visibility about real-time activity on the site. The addition to Pages Insights is expected to roll out over the next few weeks, a rep from the company says. The analytics will be available to all Page administrators globally. Such administrators will have instant access to real time results for People Talking About This, and Page post metrics including Reach (Organic, Paid, Viral) and Engaged Users. The upshot for marketers, media outlets, public figures and organizations is that they can now see what's going on on their Pages and tweak their content and advertising.
The real-time Insights comes after Facebook overhauled Pages Insights in October with new metrics including People Talking About This, Friends of Fans and Weekly Total Reach. Yelp Shares Pop Over 60 Percent In Early Trading; Valued At $1.3 Billion. Wow. Reviews site Yelp just saw a huge pop in early trading of its stock on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. Yelp opened at $22 per share, after pricing at $15 last night. Shares, which are listed under the symbol ‘YELP’, are trading up 60 percent from last night’s pricing, putting Yelp’s valuation at over $1.3 billion. UPDATE: Yelp’s stock closed at $24.52, up over 60 percent from the initial pricing. Yelp offered 7.15 million shares, aiming to raise about $107.25 million. As heard yesterday, the deal is said to be heavily over subscribed.
Yelp’s total revenues in 2011 were $83.2 million, up 74.6 percent from $47.7 million in 2010 (and 25.8 million in 2009), but net losses were up to $16.9 million in 2011 — a 74.2 percent increase from a net loss of $9.5 million in 2010. In 2011, Yelp, which was founded by Jeremy Stoppelman, saw 65.7 million unique monthly visitors for the year (with 5.7 million uniques on mobile), up from 39.3 million in 2010. Enterprise Identity Management Platform ForgeRock Raises $7 Million From Accel. ForgeRock, the open source vendor behind the I³ Open Identity middleware platform, has raised $7 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners. ForgeRock offers one unified platform approach to solve enterprise companies’ secure Identity management challenges. The I³ Open Platform allows customers to manage Authentication, Access Management, User Entitlements, Federation, Identity lifecycle management, provisioning and more.
This can be implemented in-house, or in a private or public cloud infrastructure. I³ products currently include: OpenAM (Access Manager) for Authentication, SSO, and Cloud-enabled Federation; OpenIDM (Identity Manager), which is a scalable identity lifecycle management and provisioning solution; and OpenDJ (Directory Java, a next gen identity repository. Hot Background Location App Highlight Gets Funding, Gets Ready For SXSW.
A new generation of location apps is here, just in time for the world’s best event for using them: the South By Southwest music, film and tech extravaganza starting next week in Austin, Texas. Ahead of it, my favorite of the bunch, Highlight, is announcing that it’s pushing out a new version for the event, and bringing in funding. But before I get into the news, what’s special about Highlight, and competitors like Glancee? Instead of asking you to check in, they simply run in the background, sending notifications to you when interesting people are physically near. For SXSW, these apps can help you sort out the most relevant folks from the crowd. The way Highlight’s iOS app works, in particular, is that it has you log in with Facebook, then it shows you anyone nearby who has friends or even just interests in common as you go about your day-to-day life (note that interests equals Facebook pages that you’ve mutually liked).
Armed With New Funding & A Global Mission, ResearchGate Adds PayPal Co-founder To Board. At the 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Benchmark Capital Partner Matt Cohler took to the stage to talk about the state of the venture capital industry. In so doing, Cohler said that he thought too many investors were becoming focused on risk mitigation, which can often deter investors from going after companies that may be building something really big, trying to change the world — but will be slower to monetize and offer the requisite immediate ROI. He then mentioned that he had recently led an investment in a company called ResearchGate, because when he asked the company’s founder, Ijad Madisch, what would constitute success in his mind, Madish replied, simply, “winning the Nobel Prize.” “That sounds like aspiration and ambition to me,” Cohler said. What’s more, last week, ResearchGate closed its series B round, which was this time led by Founders Fund, with follow-on contribution from Benchmark Capital, Accel Partners, and Michael Birch, as well as Yammer CEO David Sacks.
Atomico Makes First Brazilian Investments. (peHUB) February 29, 2012 – Atomico, the international venture capital firm founded by Niklas Zennström, also known as a co-founder Skype, today announced its first two investments in Brazil, following recent investments in other Latin American countries. It has invested US$8.7M in Connect Parts, the leading online retailer of motorcar parts that recently changed its name from Dakota Parts, and US$2.9M in Bebê Store, the online retailer selling products for young children and mothers. Atomico invests in technology companies around the world, mostly in the internet area, and has made more than 50 investments on four continents. It looks for companies that have remarkable growth prospects and outstanding management teams. The firm is headquartered in London, but has offices in São Paulo and Beijing. Niklas Zennström, CEO and Founding Partner of Atomico, said: “We’re delighted to be making investments in Brazil.
Connect Parts/Dakota Parts is Brazil’s leading online auto part retailer. Quer aprender inglês e melhorar seu pitch? A startup Colingo pode ser sua aliada. Compartilho aqui uma resenha do Renê Fernandes, que completou 5 anos trabalhando oficialmente (informalmente desde 2005) no Centro de Empreendedorismo e Novos Negócios da FGV (FGVcenn) e já publicou alguns posts no Startupi. Ele conta e analisa o caso de um empreendedor norte-americano que veio fazer negócios no Brasil com a sua startup Colingo, que atua de forma inovadora na questão “pratique inglês com americanos nativos”. Confira e inspire-se. Recebi no FGVcenn o empreendedor Lee Jacobs, da Colingo. Ele e seu sócio Benjamin (Ben) Lowenstein estão lançando uma plataforma de ensino de inglês para brasileiros. A idéia é que seja possível conversar online com um tutor norte-americano, aprendendo inglês em um sistema que permite mapear as principais falhas e dar feedback em tempo real, mostrando as maneiras para que o aluno possa melhorar sua fluência.
Em posts anteriores eu já falei das principais falhas dos brasileiros ao fazer um pitch. @renejrfernandes Google+ Wireless Memory Card Maker Eye-Fi Raises $20M Series D, Led By NTT DOCOMO. Eye-Fi, the maker of those nifty, wireless memory cards that automatically sync digital camera photos to your devices, as well as to cloud services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube, is today announcing it has raised $20 million in Series D funding. The round was led by NTT DOCOMO, the largest mobile operator in Japan, something which hints at the company’s plans towards further international expansion through carrier relationships. Also participating in the new round were existing investors Shasta Ventures, Opus Capital and TransLink Capital. In addition, Eye-Fi announced an expansion to its executive team, which sees former Skype and eBay exec Michele Don Durbin joining as Eye-Fi’s VP of Marketing. Don Durbin will be involved in helping the company with its planned international growth, the company says, both geographically and across product categories.
Self-Improvement Marketplace Betterfly Raises $1.5M, Gets A New CEO. Looks like it’s self-improvement time for Betterfly, a startup that, as the name suggests, allows users to “better themselves” by signing up for classes and private sessions on everything from belly dancing to web design. The company just announced that it has raised a $1.5 million Series A from previous investor Lightbank, the Chicago firm created by Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. Betterfly is also naming Todd Sullivan as the company’s new CEO — founder and former CEO Joshua Schwadron will remain as chairman of the board, and the startup says he will still be “active in day to day operations.” Sullivan, who has been on the job since January, says that Betterfly takes a different tack from other personal service offerings because it’s focused on connecting students with individual instructors, rather than companies.
Betterfly launched the beta version of its site in May of 2010. Enterprise Social Networking Platform Yammer Raises $85M From DFJ Growth, Khosla, And Others. Enterprise social network and communications platform Yammer has finally closed that big round we and PandoDaily heard about earlier this year. The company has raised $85 million in new funding, bringing the total investment in Yammer to a whopping $142 million. DFJ growth and Social+Capital Partnership (who led Yammer’s last round) led this round. Other investors joining the round include Meritech, Khosla Ventures, Capricorn (the investment arm of Jeff Skoll), as well as existing investor Charles River Ventures, Founders Fund, USVP, Emergence Capital Partners. Founder and CEO David Sacks tells us that the company had over $30 million of insider investment in the round. We’ve heard the company’s valuation for the round was around $500-600 million (Yammer wouldn’t comment on this) Sacks says a number of angel investors also participated in the massive round including Sacks’ old PayPal colleague Max Levchin, as well as CrunchFund, Bill Lee, Ronnie Lott, and a few others.
Cloud-Based File Syncing Platform SugarSync Raises $15M To Add Another Data Center To The Mix. SugarSync, an application that syncs your data across desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, and even televisions, has raised $15 million in series D financing led by new investor Coral Group with participation from existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sigma Partners, Hatteras Venture Partners and Hercules. This brings SugarSync’s total funding to $50 million. Yuval Almog of Coral Group has also joined SugarSync’s Board of Directors. While companies like DropBox have gained much of the media’s attention, SugarSync has quietly been plugging along, offering its own take on the cloud, file storage and syncing market.
Currently, the platform is offered on a variety of mobile platforms including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian (Windows Phone 7 is coming soon), and features a two-way sync solution for mobile devices. The company says it has millions of customers in over 100 countries, and this number is expected to grow. AffinityLive Debuts To Help Businesses Manage Operations In The Cloud. Oracle and SAP have been offering ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for sometime now to help businesses manage operations, including billing, time sheets and more. But small businesses can’t afford some of these legacy solutions and are looking for a simpler, easy to use product in the cloud. Enter AffinityLive, a SaaS that essentially helps businesses manage all of their work and data in the cloud. As founder Geoff McQueen tells me, many small businesses are using tools like Excel to manage data.
AffinityLive basically manages all client work, from prospect through to payment, and everything in between in one integrated system. The SaaS gives real-time forecasts of staff utilization and workload using a patent-pending algorithm, will automatically capture every email sent between a team and its clients, features a smart time sheet, manages billing and more.
“Lots of SaaS products today are doing one thing, and do it well,” Geoff says. Intel Capital Launches $100M Connected Car Fund To Invest In Automotive Technologies. After launching the Ultrabook Fund to invest in tablet technologies, Intel Capital, the investment arm of chip giant Intel Corporation, has created a $100 million fund to invest in technology innovation in the automotive industry. Called the Intel Capital Connected Car Fund, the new venture vehicle will be targeted primarily at investing in technologies that will deliver in-vehicle infotainment, mobile connectivity, driver assistance systems and other car-focused applications. This also includes new in-vehicle applications and development tools, speech recognition, gesture recognition and eye tracking optimized for the connected car. The fund plans to invest over the next four to five years, and will be looking at funding startups across the technology spectrum including hardware, software and services companies.
It’s important to note that Intel, as a company, has been working with automakers and in-vehicle infotainment suppliers to help integrate its own technologies into cars. Google Ventures And Others Put $5M In Enterprise Mobile Security Company Duo. Enterprise mobile security company Duo Security has raised $5 million from Google Ventures, True Ventures, and Resonant Venture Partners. This brings the startup’s total funding to $6 million. Duo Security essentially provides a two-factor authentication service to companies who want to protect employee phones, with not just one but two secure log-ins. The company says that deploying two-factor authentication has traditionally been expensive and time-consuming with hardware requirements and other protocols. Duo Security lowers this barrier and expedites deployment with self-service enrollment. Via mobile apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and other platform, Duo Security allows for secure logins and transactions.
Users can generate secure passcodes without the hassle of hardware tokens. And the startup says one of its differentiating features is usability. The new funding will be used to expand Duo’s team, mobile security research, and for authentication platform development. It’s Official: Apple Sends Out Invites For March 7th iPad 3 Event… In San Francisco. ClassPager Lets Teachers Quiz and Remind Students Via SMS. ASO (App Store Optimization) Is The New SEO, And Here’s A Tool To Do It. Vocus Buys Email Marketing Company iContact For $169 Million. Tello Raises $2.7M From True Ventures To Give Businesses Consumer Feedback On The Fly. EmployInsight Grabs $1M For Its Employee Measurement Platform (And NYSE As Its First Client)
Ginger Software Raises $6.3M For Its ESL Writing Tools; Adds Former Facebook Exec As CEO. Textbook Rental Site BookRenter Spawns Rafter, A Course Materials Management Network For Colleges. Brayola Wants To Help Women Find The Perfect Bra. Poppin Seals $6M Series A From Shasta and First Round To Beautify Your Bland Office. Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, And Obvious Put $4.5M In Sleek Social, Mobile Gifting Platform Karma. Gnzo Is Instagram For Video And A Flashy Multi-Video Viewer In One. ZenCash Syncs With Invoicing Apps, Helps You Actually Get Paid. Social Email Contact Manager Xobni Raises $10 Million From ‘Commercial’ Partner. OpenX Acquires Supply Side Platform LiftDNA. mBlox Launches New Cloud-Based Mobile Marketing Platform: Engage.