Chris Dixon will indeed be the latest VC to join Andreessen Horowitz, as I had reported earlier was likely, starting in January.

Dixon is a lively and interesting choice for the high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firm, having been a successful serial entrepreneur, a savvy angel investor and also a voluble tech scene commenter in blogs and on Twitter.

Perhaps most interesting is that Dixon, who is largely based in New York, will move to California to join what Marc Andreessen describes as a “single-office” firm.

In other words, Chris, get ready to be force-fed at Hobee’s!

In all seriousness, Andreessen said in an interview today that his big criteria for picking Dixon was because, “when the next Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room, we want them to say, ‘I want that person.’”

In addition, he noted that Andreessen Horowitz has a “bias for entrepreneurs … and Chris is the real deal when it comes to being an entrepreneur.”

Indeed, Dixon was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Dixon, whose job at Bessemer was junior, said that he became interested in Andreessen Horowitz once he learned more about them after helping the start-ups he had invested in with fundings. He was especially struck by all the added help the firm provided in areas such as recruiting.

While he said his investing as a partner there would be “non-thematic,” he noted that it was likely he would “tilt more toward consumer” investments.

“I am going to try to pick the special bird,” he said, paraphrasing a quote by famed Sequoia Capital VC Mike Moritz. “And not the flock.”

Here is a blog post on the move by Dixon and one by Andreessen, in which he apparently thinks I leak for a living.

According to sources, well-known New York techie Chris Dixon is in the final stages of discussions to become a partner at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

While the deal is not yet complete, Dixon seems likely to become the firm’s latest addition. It’s not clear what his area of specialty will be, but it is likely to center on start-ups, given his experience.

Dixon is one the more voluble and energetic tech players on the New York scene, as well as a serial entrepreneur with several prominent exits. He was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previous to this, he also programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

In his bio on the Founder Collective site, Dixon said: “I think one of the reasons I can be helpful to entrepreneurs is I’ve worked in the trenches on both the startup side and the investor side.”

His selection by Andreessen Horowitz is an interesting one, since it is the first by the firm of a solidly New York-area techie, although it is not clear if Dixon will move to California or not.

He’s also not been afraid to tangle with VCs in his frequent blogging. In one post in July, titled “Shoehorning Startups into the VC Model,” he noted:

“A startup should raise venture capital (or ‘venture-style’ angel/seed funding) only if: 1) the goal is to build a billion-dollar (valuation) company, and 2) raising millions of dollars is absolutely necessary or will significantly accelerate growth. … Unfortunately, many of these startups graft VC-friendly narratives onto their plans and raise too much money. Short term it might seem like a good idea but long term it won’t.”

Criteo, the performance display advertising company, just nabbed about $40 million in additional venture funding.

The Series D round, led by SoftBank Capital, gives the Paris-based company an $800 million valuation, according to sources, although Criteo declined to comment on the figure.

Previously, Criteo had raised just over $23 million from investors that include Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures.

In an interview, CEO J.B. Rudelle said the money would be used for growing its footprint in the U.S., as well as Japan and Asia, more quickly.

The company has seen quick growth here and the market has already become profitable. But Rudelle said, “This funding is obviously a big step. We are going to use it to accelerate our efforts in key markets.”

Criteo now operates in 32 countries, he said, and it hopes to extend its global footprint as more companies are looking for better performance from online advertising.

“The need for performance to drive display advertising is enormous,” said Criteo president Greg Coleman, referring to “personalized retargeting,” which delivers highly targeted ads to consumers.

Ad tech such as Criteo has become a hot arena of late with larger companies such as Yahoo and Facebook interested in acquiring assets in the space.

For now, at least, it looks like Criteo filled its kitty to stay independent.

Here’s the official press release from Criteo:

Criteo completes €30 million Series D led by SoftBank Capital
Syndicate of investors includes Yahoo! JAPAN, SAP Ventures, Adams Street and Bessemer

NEW YORK — 26 SEPTEMBER 2012 – Criteo, the global leader in performance display advertising, today announced a €30 million round of financing led by SoftBank Capital to support the company’s hyper-growth trajectory.

Profitable since 2009, Criteo has continuously delivered growth, exceeding all forecasts since the company’s founding. The company now serves more than 3,000 advertisers worldwide, with the US being the number one revenue generating market. This new investment will help Criteo to continue reinventing the online display advertising market, with a goal of making it as efficient as search marketing.

JB Rudelle, CEO and Co-Founder of Criteo said: “In a period of high-growth for Criteo, this new financing enables us to invest substantially in innovation, technology and people. In addition, we are very excited to leverage the knowhow and footprint of SoftBank and Yahoo! JAPAN for our expansion in Asia, a very strategic region for us. Overall, the fact that such a sophisticated syndicate of investors has decided to join us is a powerful validation of our unique model.”

Matt Krna, Principal at SoftBank Capital added: “We are delighted to partner with Criteo and help the company extend its leadership in the cost-per-click performance display advertising sector, particularly in Japan and throughout Asia. In speaking with Criteo’s clients and partners, it became clear to us that the company’s analytical, performance-based model offers clear advantages to the entire online ad ecosystem, including consumers.” Mr. Krna will join Criteo’s board as an observer.

Recently Criteo announced an exclusive partnership with Yahoo! JAPAN — in terms of cost-per-click personalized display advertising, it is the first time that a third party technology company has had access to its inventory. To support its growth, Criteo has also recently invested in a state-of-the-art 100,000 square foot R&D centre in Paris, France.

The experience can be analogous to watching a professional basketball or football game on TV, especially as videogames increasingly become a rival to other major forms of entertainment.

The $15 million round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners; Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates also participated. The capital will go toward hiring more engineers to continue building out its platform and improving quality.

The videos run on Twitch’s own platform, rather than on a third-party site like YouTube, allowing it to exclusively target the hardcore gamer. Twitch said it now has more than 20 million viewers, who tune in every month to watch different channels based on games like World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Starcraft and Borderlands 2. As part of the experience, commentators provide feedback in real time.

The San Francisco company announced Twitch a year ago at E3, saying it would be an independent brand from Justin.TV. Five years prior to that, it was trying to build out a live video platform on the Web. Now, Twitch has nearly taken over.

“We launched Twitch a little over a year ago, and already we have more than 20 million unique viewers per month,” said Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch. “Our current team has put us at the forefront of the live videogame streaming movement, and we can now invest aggressively to support our growing community with new ways to stream, watch, and chat.”

Similar to live sports on TV, Twitch makes money by playing advertisements during the game play. It has also experimented with a subscription model, where fans pay a monthly fee. Additionally, the game players get paid to broadcast their videos on the site.

Also meddling in the space is Los Angeles-based Machinima, which racks up millions of page views a month on other sites, including YouTube and Facebook.

According to sources, former top Yahoo exec Hilary Schneider will be named president of LifeLock, which offers theft and fraud protection services to individual consumers and businesses.

The move — which is set to be announced soon, said sources — is an interesting one on a lot of levels.

First, the Tempe, Arizona-based LifeLock has just filed to go public at the end of August on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “LOCK.” The company — which is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins — seeks to raise $175 million in its IPO.

Obviously, bringing in Schneider adds an experienced public company exec to the team, which is headed by CEO and Chairman Todd Davis.

Perhaps more interestingly, it that it is a major shift in focus for Schneider — who left Yahoo in 2010 and has since been doing consulting work with TPG Capital on a wide range of digital companies.

She has largely been focused on online advertising in her career and was much recruited for a range of such opportunities after departing Yahoo. Instead, she chose to work at TPG, where she actually helped the powerful private equity firm think through a possible bid for Yahoo at one point.

Schneider left Yahoo after clashing with then-CEO Carol Bartz — Bartz was later fired — over a range of issues at the Silicon Valley Internet giant. Schneider had headed media and advertising sales there for its key U.S. division.

Before Yahoo, Schneider was a top exec at media giant Knight Ridder and, earlier, was CEO of Red Herring Communications and also CEO of Times Mirror Interactive. The Harvard Business School grad started her media career at the Baltimore Sun.

I am awaiting comment from LifeLock on the pending appointment.

It’s a hassle that ClearSlide, the cloud-based presentation company, has been aiming to solve. Few things will annoy a boss or a new sales prospect more than wasting their time while you fumble around with a computer to get a deck ready.

ClearSlide’s approach uses a cloud-based service that houses presentation decks on the Web at a single personalized URL. There are no applications to install and no attachments to send. You just send the other party the URL, and they’re ready to see what you have to show them.

It’s a pretty simple play that attempts to turn the whole Web-conferencing business on its ear. But something must be working. Today, the company says it has raised a $28 million Series B round of venture capital funding, led by Bessemer Capital Partners. Greylock Partners and Felicis Ventures, investors in prior rounds, also participated. Additionally, Byron Deeter, a partner at Bessemer, and John Jack, the former CEO of Fortify Software, are joining ClearSlide’s board of directors.

ClearSlide says it will use the funding to rapidly expand its team, which has recently grown to include 100 employees at offices in San Franciso and New York; plans are afoot to double that. Its base of customers is expanding, too: CareerBuilder, Expedia, Gannett, Hoovers and Rackspace are all customers.

The service is being aimed very specifically at sales teams, and is meant to work equally well whether the presentation is being given in person, over the phone or via email.

As part of the deal, Gary Reiner — the former CIO of General Electric and an operating partner at GA, who’s also a director at Hewlett-Packard — will join Box’s board. Also joining the round as a new investor is the Social+Capital Partnership.

Sources familiar with the company’s efforts tell AllThingsD that there are at least two other institutional investors taking part in the round, but those firms are, for now, not being named, though they’ll be revealed in regulatory filings soon. In taking institutional investments, as part of a late-stage investment, Box is following a variant of the strategy that companies like Facebook and Workday have followed on the path to an initial public offering, which Box is considering for sometime in 2013.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Box was raising funds at an implied valuation of $1.2 billion, and sources familiar with the terms of the deal confirmed that such a valuation estimate is right on target.

The investment brings Box’s total capital raised so far to about $285 million. In fact it’s been less than a year since Box took an $81 million strategic investment round from Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with several venture capital funds including New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners. Box has proven one of the more popular plays for venture capitalists in the last few years, and its roster of backers runs the gamut of Sand Hill Road’s bigger names: Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners are all investors.

But ask Aaron Levie about an IPO, and he’s quick to demur. “We can do way more as a private company than we can as a public company,” he says. “Taking this round gives us the foundation to build the foundation we need.”

By VC standards, $125 million is a sizable deal, but Reiner told me it’s about an average-sized deal for General Atlantic. “We invest about $2 billion a year,” Reiner told me, “and do about a deal a month,” in sizes ranging from $50 million to $500 million, but averaging about $150 million each. The firm’s investments have included stakes in Alibaba Group, Facebook, Gilt Group, and ServiceSource.

And there’s no question that Box is growing. Just last month, it announced plans to expand into Europe, disclosed that it had hired Stefan Apitz away from LinkedIn as its VP of operations, and talked about a new data center in Las Vegas. And in March, it took its exploding batch of employees — now 500 strong — to new headquarters in Los Altos, Calif.

What’s interesting about Reiner leading this investment and taking a seat on Box’s board is the fact that he was for years the CIO at GE, and as such was once the very kind of person who you might have expected to be suspicious of the cloud’s value to large enterprises.

I asked him to put his old CIO hat back on for a moment and consider how he might have seen Box years ago. “The biggest concern a CIO has is about important documents being stored outside the firewall,” Reiner told me. “But the fact is that almost every large enterprise has been broken into, and every CIO has been humbled regarding how tought it is to secure your own environment. But the fear of trusting a cloud service is a lot less now than it was about four or five years ago.”

Rather than fight the constant losing battle to keep the bad guys out, better to let someone whose reputation depends on security develop a service specifically for sharing files across a company or with partners.

At GE, Reiner oversaw the building of an internally-built file sharing network that did a lot of the same things Box does, but without anywhere near as many features. “We couldn’t find someone to build it for us, so we built our own, and it quickly became critical to the heartbeat of the company,” he said. “It had a lot of the same functionality but its user experience was nothing like Box.”

I asked Reiner what he thinks about the timetable for a Box IPO. His answer: “Who knows? … All we want to do is help,” he told me. “The goal is to provide the best business guidance that we can.” There will be time to talk about IPOs sooner or later.

Serlet, who is often called the father of Mac OS X, worked at Apple for 14 years. At Parallels he will be a non-executive director. In a statement, Parallels CEO Birger Steen called him “the rare combination of a software visionary and master of execution.”

Serlet came to Apple by way of NeXT, the software company Apple so famously acquired at the end of 1996, in a move that brought Steve Jobs and several other key executives back to engineer what has been called the greatest corporate turnaround in history. Serlet worked on NeXTStep, which was an early foundation of OS X, as well as on OpenStep and WebObjects. He also spent four years as a researcher at Xerox PARC. He holds a doctorate in computer science from France’s University of Orsay.

Serlet’s departure from Apple was initially seen as a surprise, but was later determined to have been part of a planned transition, during which Serlet handed off his duties to Craig Federighi.

Parallels is best-known for the virtualization software that allows Mac users to run Windows and other operating systems on their machines. It’s a privately held company that has been around since 1999, and counts Insight Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. But it also sells the Plesk suite of server management tools.

The funding is expected to be announced tomorrow morning.

(Update: Rakuten confirmed the deal in a press release, which is below.)

The Tokyo-based Internet giant will invest upwards of $50 million in a $100 million round that values the social bookmarking phenom at $1.5 billion.

There might be other individual investors in the new round, but those were still to be determined tonight by Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann.

(Correction: We previously reported it was a $120 million round, but sources said it is $100 million. It’s possible more could still be added, as we heard conflicting accounts.)

While the latest round of funding for Pinterest has been the most hotly sought of late in tech circles, one source said Silbermann was looking for a global strategic investor and had talked to several large Asian companies.

Said one source on why he settled on Rakuten: “He just really liked them.”

The current investors in Pinterest, which is a social collection site where users can “pin” their interests via a handsome graphical interface, include Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital, as well as several well-known angel investors. That group had valued the company at $200 million last October, and are joining the new round pro rata.

Founded in 2008, Pinterest had previously raised a little under $40 million in funding.

It’s interesting that the latest round was not led by an institutional investor, since everyone and their mother wanted in on the deal. Sources said no new venture capital firms were included in the round and that is the way Pinterest’s quirky leadership wanted it.

Sources said Silbermann has been concerned with Pinterest’s global growth as well as fending off international clones, and was looking for a partner with which the start-up could work closely.

“Ben did not want any more VCs,” said one source. “He wanted an investor that moved the company forward.”

Rakuten will presumably help advise Pinterest on turning their pretty pictures into purchases, as commerce is already starting to emerge naturally on the site.

It’s a good choice of partners in that regard. Rakuten is one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world, with a flagship site Rakuten Ichiba. It was founded in 1997 and had revenues of $4.7 billion in 2011. Its CEO is Hiroshi Mikitani, whose nickname is Mickey.

One the richest men in Japan, Mikitani is one of the best known entrepreneurs there; he has been described as “Richard Branson meets Jeff Bezos.”

Earlier today, The Next Web reported that the funding was coming this week and said the company was looking at international partners, but it did not name Rakuten.

Rakuten Leads Investment In Pinterest

Global social commerce pioneer takes stake in online sharing service

TOKYO, May 17, 2012 – Rakuten, one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, today announced that it is leading a $100M investment in Pinterest, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, as well as a number of angel investors.

The funding will allow Pinterest to continue improving its service and expanding its community globally. The investment also marks the start of a strategic partnership between Rakuten and Pinterest to help expand in Japan and into Rakuten’s 17 other global markets.

Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten said: “While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”

Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, said: “Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests. Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal.”

Rakuten ranks among the top 10 internet companies in the world. Among its numerous online properties, its flagship B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) model e-commerce site Rakuten Ichiba is the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world’s largest by sales. Its global presence has been reinforced through the acquisitions of leading online marketplaces Buy.com (US), Priceminister (France), Ikeda (now Rakuten Brasil), Tradoria (now Rakuten Deutschland) and Play.com (UK), and investments in Ozon.ru and AHA Life. Whereas other marketplaces may compete directly with sellers, Rakuten’s model seeks to empower merchants to deliver Omotenashi, a Japanese high service mindset, which helps sellers create lasting relationships with customers.

And here’s a video of Kara pontificating away on the subject for WSJ.com’s “Digits” show:

It’s a small number, but it’s progress. Still, as the ranks of women leading companies grow, there’s something you very rarely see: A pregnant CEO.

Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar

Pooja Sankar and Maria Seidman are both first-time founders and CEOs of young, venture-capital-backed tech start-ups. And they’re both pregnant and due this summer. Talk about doing it all.

Sankar runs Piazza, a discussion platform for college courses. Founded in 2009, it has 100,000 users and recently raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Meanwhile, Seidman started Yapp last year as a mobile-app-creation tool for nontechnical users. Still in private beta, it raised seed funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The two women have a lot in common. Both raised funding for their companies before they got pregnant, and both have entrepreneurial husbands and support from family and other childcare resources.

Neither is anticipating taking much of a maternity leave.

Pregnancy is obviously a highly personal experience, and also a taboo conversation topic in the workplace. It’s something I don’t know a ton about, so I waded into my questions carefully — but both Sankar and Seidman were open and generous in our interviews (see the video below).

They told me their pregnancies have helped set the tone within their small companies for a culture that incorporates some degree of family, balance and delegation. But they’re also working their butts off.

Yapp CEO Maria Seidman

Seidman, who’s already mom to a four-year-old, said it’s not uncommon for her to put her kid to bed at 8 pm and work till 3 am. And Sankar noted that two days into her marriage, she attended a conference that was crucial for her company — with henna from the wedding all over her hands and legs.

There aren’t many past examples of pregnant tech CEOs out there. Two are Jessica Herrin of Stella & Dot and Jessica Jackley of Kiva and ProFounder — whose own investor posted an essay online on the topic “A pregnant founder/CEO is going to fail her company.”

“I haven’t felt discriminated against, but I have no idea what people really think,” Seidman said of her pregnancy. She said she tries to be nonjudgmental of everyone else’s life and child-rearing choices. When a man recently approached her at an event to volunteer himself as a new CEO for Yapp, she shrugged it off.

She added, “Were there days that I was so nauseous and exhausted that I wanted to lie under the desk? Yeah. But I’m committed to the product.”

Sankar and Seidman both graciously sat for video interviews about being pregnant CEOs. Here they are:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120510/meet-pooja-sankar-and-maria-seidman-the-pregnant-start-up-ceos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120427/cloud-based-phone-software-start-up-twilio-taps-former-jive-exec-as-its-cmo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120427/cloud-based-phone-software-start-up-twilio-taps-former-jive-exec-as-its-cmo/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:30:54 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=200299 There’s a certain kind of geek who gets excited about Twilio. Who among software developers wouldn’t jump at the chance of adding voice-calling and text-messaging options to a public-facing application? Companies like eBay unit StubHub, Salesforce.com and Airbnb have used it to create some custom apps that include the use of a phone.

This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120427/cloud-based-phone-software-start-up-twilio-taps-former-jive-exec-as-its-cmo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120117/sendgrid-raises-21m-to-send-even-more-emails/ http://allthingsd.com/20120117/sendgrid-raises-21m-to-send-even-more-emails/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:00:40 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=164204 SendGrid has raised $21 million in a Series B round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The Boulder, Colo.-based company sends 2.6 billion personalized emails per month to users of services like Pinterest, Airbnb and Path — with 26 billion total emails sent over the past two-and-a-half years.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120117/sendgrid-raises-21m-to-send-even-more-emails/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120106/piazza-raises-6m-for-college-class-discussion-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20120106/piazza-raises-6m-for-college-class-discussion-platform/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=160877 Piazza, a Q&A service for discussions of college coursework with the approval and participation of instructors, has raised $6 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and including Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures. The company said it has 100,000 users — many of them in computer science and math classes — and that its average daily login lasts four hours.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120106/piazza-raises-6m-for-college-class-discussion-platform/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120105/millennial-media-tries-cashing-in-on-mobile-ad-boom-with-ipo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120105/millennial-media-tries-cashing-in-on-mobile-ad-boom-with-ipo/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:23:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=160703 Millennial Media, the mobile ad network that has been loudly declaring its interest in a public offering for the past few years, has pulled the trigger.

The planned IPO is notable because it’s the first time that a pure-play mobile ad company has gone public. Most of Millennial’s other competitors have been acquired instead, most notably by Apple and Google, the company’s primary competitors.

The company’s S-1 reveals that the start-up lost $7.1 million on sales of $47.8 million in 2010, and $417,000 on sales of $69.1 million in the first nine months of last year. Millennial’s business is focused on selling advertising that runs on mobile apps, and it says it reaches 200 million users worldwide; in December it processed 40 billion ad impression.

The Baltimore-based company says it most recently gave itself an enterprise value of $305 million. That was back in September 2011, when it granted a block of options. The company’s primary backers are New Enterprise Associates, Charles River Ventures, Columbia Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120105/millennial-media-tries-cashing-in-on-mobile-ad-boom-with-ipo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111207/twilio-nabs-17-million-more-in-funding-from-current-investors/ http://allthingsd.com/20111207/twilio-nabs-17-million-more-in-funding-from-current-investors/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:30:55 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=151205 Twilio, whose technology lets developers build telephony and messaging into their apps, announced Wednesday that it has raised $17 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — two of its existing investors. The San Francisco-based company, which has around 100 employees, plans to use the money to help fuel continued hiring and international expansion.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111207/twilio-nabs-17-million-more-in-funding-from-current-investors/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111121/ebay-buys-hunch/ http://allthingsd.com/20111121/ebay-buys-hunch/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:57:51 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=146193 EBay has purchased Hunch, a recommendations engine that’s supposed to figure out what users like, based on their tastes and affinities.

Michael Arrington, who broke the news this morning, pegs the purchase price at “somewhere around $80 million.”

Hunch, led by high-profile CEO Chris Dixon and, for a time, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, had raised around $20 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners; last year, the company had reportedly mulled a Google deal for around $60 million. The purchase is one in a string of start-up acquisitions for eBay.

Here’s a 2010 interview with Dixon and Fake, conducted by Kara Swisher:

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