Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

CircleUp Raises $7.5M Led by Union Square Ventures

CircleUp — a company we’ve covered closely, given that it is one of the only crowdfunding platforms so far that legally helps people make equity investments in startups — has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Union Square Ventures, and also included Google Ventures, Rose Park Investors and Maveron.

In its first year, CircleUp helped companies that make physical consumer products raise $10 million, ahead of the approved-but-still-not-yet-implemented JOBS Act, which would expand equity crowdfunding to a broader range of investors.

One notable aspect of the CircleUp investment is that lead investor Union Square Ventures has assembled an unusually dense portfolio around similar businesses that you might think would overlap too much. Other USV investments include Kickstarter, Lending Club, Funding Circle and Science Exchange.

“We like those models in almost every flavor they come in,” said Andy Weissman, the USV partner who led the investment and joined CircleUp’s board.

Which models, exactly? “It’s a peer marketplace matching up two sides of a transaction,” Weissman said. “It takes something very hard — raising money for consumer companies — and makes it more transparent and more liquid. That’s interesting regardless of the JOBS Act.”

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald