Unionsquareventures. Khosla Completes The VC Triumvirate At Disrupt. In venture capital, there are three people who rule Silicon Valley: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. All three will be speaking at Disrupt. (There are still a few tickets left). We’ve already mentioned Doerr and Moritz, and now we are pleased to announce that Khosla will be completing the triumvirate. Khosla, of course, was the first CEO of Sun Microsystems back in the 1980s before he joined John Doerr to embark on a storied career as a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins.
At Kleiner, he had a string of huge wins, including Nexgen (which was acquired by AMD and formed the core of its ability to take on Intel), Juniper Networks, and Cerent (which was sold to Cisco for $7 billion). In 2004, he created Khosla Ventures to invest his own money and began to dive deep into greentech, while still keeping his hand in infotech. Khosla will give us the lay of the land in greentech. 23andMe lands $22M from Google Ventures and others to expand personal genetics research. Twitter May Be Seeking A New Investment Round Upwards of $200 Million. Creadev. Foursquare Founders Pull Out $4.6 Million For Themselves From Last $20 Million Round. Dennis Crowley didn’t get the big personal payday he would have if he had sold Foursquare to Facebook, which he almost did.
But Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai did okay with the $20 million Series B funding they raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square, and O’Reilly AlphaTech. According to an SEC filing (first spotted by Dan Frommer at SAI), the two founders personally took home $4,636,688 from that round, or 23 percent of the total amount raised. Under a part of the filing titled “Use of Proceeds,” the company had to disclose “the amount of the gross proceeds of the offering that has been or is proposed to be used for payments to any of the persons required to be named as executive officers, directors or promoters in response to Item 3 above.”
There are only three people listed as “executive officers, directors or promoters”: Crowley, Selvadurai, and board director Albert Wenger of Union Square. Foursquare valorisé 95 millions de dollars | FrenchWeb.fr la communauté des acteurs de l'internet francophone. Le fond d’investissement créé par Ben Horowitz et Marc Andreessen ($300 millions) vient de mener un tour de table de 20 millions de dollars pour accélerer le développement du réseau social géolocalisé Foursquare, ce qui porte à 95 millions de dollars sa valorisation.
Cet investissement met également fin, tout du moins temporairement, à des rumeurs de rachat par Facebook ou Yahoo! Ben Horowitz donne sur son blog 3 raisons qui expliquent cette prise de participation: un incroyable entrepreneur, Dennis Crowleyun produit Killer, avec une croissance du taux d’adoption plus rapide que Twitter un marché gigantesque Foursquare enregistre près de 1,8 millions d’utilisateurs et recrute chaque jour 15 000 nouveaux membres et développe des opérations marketing avec de nombreuses marques telles que The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zagat, Bravo TV, Starbucks, C-SPAN, Marc Jacobs Et si vous vous demandez comment faire du business avec FourSquare, DisMoiOù ou Gowalla, réponse ici ;-)
Reevoo secures a Series B fundraising to expand into Europe. Last year we found out Reevoo, the online customer reviews startup which had looked like it was slowing down, was actually signing up partners and getting traction. Today it announces a Series B round of funding from existing investors, though terms were undisclosed. The funding has been secured from existing investors Eden Ventures, Banexi Ventures and business angel Andrew Phillipps. The expansion capital will be used to grow faster across Europe and adding social functionality. A Series B funding is usually in the range of £8-10m. Prior to this Reevoo had raised over £7m. That means Reevoo is clearly confident of making it in the long term and becoming a pretty big business, although there is also the chance this is a “down round”, which is never great for the founders. Reevoo was co-founded by Ben Griffiths, Guy Logan and Richard Anson in 2004, but only Anson, CEO, now remains.
It also has relationships with publishers such as The Telegraph, Future Publishing and IDG. Chris Sacca's 'What is left?' Goldman Sachs vet John Lindfors joins Digital Sky Technologies as partner. Global investment group Digital Sky Technologies (aka DST), who has famously invested in major Internet companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, has made another key hire. The latest finance whiz to join the Russian investment firm as partner is John Lindfors, who will start there next September. Lindfors has been a partner at Goldman Sachs and head of the bank’s European Technology Investment Banking practice since 2006. He joined Goldman Sachs as a Financial Analyst in 1993 and worked in London and New York during his 17 year career at the bank.
Born in Helsinki, Finland in 1969, he graduated from the Swedish School of Economics with an M.Sc. in 1993. Goldman Sachs has lost key people to DST before; it’s proven to be a welcome fishing pond for the investment firm. Another partner, Verdi Israelian, joined Digital Sky Technologies as a Partner in 2009. Four VC Firms Battle For Foursquare, Valuation Goes Stratospheric. What do Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint Ventures have in common? Besides being tier one venture capitalists, at least one thing: They are all fighting furiously to be the lead investor in Foursquare’s next venture round.
All that competition is driving the valuation massively upwards, too. A couple of weeks ago we’d heard that the deal would likely be closed at around a $50 million valuation. Today we’ve confirmed that the final price will likely be $60 million – $70 million. They’re raising around $10 million, which means when it’s all over Foursquare will be worth up to $80 million on paper. The front runner in the deal is Gideon Yu from Khosla, we’ve heard from multiple sources. What a choice, though. Social Gaming Startup MetroGames Gets A $5 Million Infusion From Playdom. Argentinian social gaming company MetroGames, has just raised $5 million in series A funding from game developer Playdom. According to a release, the investment will be used to expand MetroGames’ development of games and its social gaming platform. Playdom’s CEO, John Pleasants will join MetroGames’ board.