AllThingsD » JAFCO Ventures

Inkling Raises $17M for Digital Textbooks

Liz Gannes — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 07:01:13 +0000

Inkling, the San Francisco-based maker of interactive iPad textbooks (see D9 demo video here), has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Tenaya Capital and including Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education and Sequoia Capital.

Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis, citing IBISWorld data, noted in a recent interview that the U.S. textbook market was worth $16 billion in 2010 — versus $15 billion for “trade books” (fiction, literary non-fiction, everything else). That’s depicted in the chart below.

Inkling has 60 employees and hundreds of offshore workers who help format books, which MacInnis said he expects to increase to thousands next year.

Today, Inkling’s best sellers are medical textbooks. The company is eagerly anticipating back-to-school season, especially in a year when many colleges and graduate schools are experimenting with student iPads, MacInnis said.

MacInnis said Inkling will also soon expand beyond textbooks, though he’s keeping the details under wraps for now.

Seven Questions for Asheem Chandna of Greylock Partners

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:19:03 +0000

It’s not every day that the chief executive of a publicly held company leaves for a start-up, and so today’s hiring of Verisign CEO Mark McLaughlin by the network security start-up Palo Alto Networks, which The Wall Street Journal reported today, is notable by that measure alone.

The start-up, backed by Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and Jafco Ventures, tapped McLaughlin in a sign that it is gearing up for an IPO. I talked today with Asheem Chandna, a Palo Alto Networks director and partner at Greylock, about the new hire and about the crazy growth the company is going through right now.

AllThingsD: Asheem, I always ask people to start at the top: What is Palo Alto Networks and what does it do?

Asheem Chandna: We’re in the network security space. We build next-generation firewalls technologies. We ship an appliance that contains some subscription services on it so in a way it combines the business model of Cisco with that of Salesforce.com.

And how big is the business?

We disclosed that we’re on a run-rate to $200 million in revenue, and we have 4,500 customers. We’re cash-flow positive for the past five quarters, and we’ve been shipping product for 16 consecutive quarters. We have about 450 employees in the company today and we expect to add another 350 in the coming 12 months.

So you have more than 4,500 customers. Can you name any? Security companies are often reticent to do that.

We have many we can name, several of which we’ve done seven-figure deals with. Some we announced today: Qualcomm, eBay, Verisign, Cricket, the Los Angeles Community College district. Others we’ve named before include SanDisk and Constellation Energy.

And what prompted you to hire Mark McLaughlin from Verisign? Was it him or was it his experience at Verisign that got you interested?

What we were really focused on was leadership capability, what Jim Collins would call a Level 5 leader and the raw IQ, intensity and discipline. We’ve known Mark for several years, he’s an exceptional leader and one of the best leaders I personally know.

How did the search go down?

We had a search under way for eight months. It’s taken that long because this is a one-in-a-decade company. It’s one of the fastest growing companies in enterprise IT. We were deliberate and focused on really finding the right person, who would be a good cultural fit with the team. We hired Russell Reynolds to help us with the search. We reviewed more than 150 people in detail, and interviewed more than two dozen people. There were many senior executives at public companies who were interested in this position.

Every security company tries to solve a particular problem, and my understanding is that Palo Alto Networks can detect traffic coming from certain applications. So when I’m signed into Facebook or Tweetdeck or Skype on a network where your gear is in use, you can detect it and watch out for good and evil traffic on those applications, and block the bad traffic. Is that right?

Exactly. That’s one of the three basic innovations that are our bread and butter. The one you just described is really our headline feature. We can uniquely identify applications and users as they pass through the firewall and the network. The second is around malware. We can scan for malware at very high speeds, which is also something that hasn’t been done before. Finally, we collapse multiple network functions that are usually done on individual appliances into one large system but without a degradation of performance. We do Web filtering and intrusion detection, which are traditionally done on separate network appliances. Network administrators are struggling with appliance fatigue. We are giving them the ability to roll all those things into a single appliance with no degradation of performance.

So, since everyone is going to start asking: When are you going public? Are you going to be hiring bankers soon?

We haven’t set a date for any of that yet. The focus is really to build and grow the company to the next level. Going public is just another milestone. We want to be the biggest independent network security company in the industry.

Reputation.com Raises a New $41 Million Round

Pui-Wing Tam — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:31:43 +0000

Reputation.com has raised a $41 million round of funding, as the online privacy start-up aims to expand its business with new offerings.

The new round was led by venture-capital firm August Capital, with participation from Insight Capital and existing investors including Jafco Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Bessemer Venture Partners, said Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. The round, which Fertik said was oversubscribed, brings the company’s total capital raised to more than $65 million. It was the company’s fourth round of institutional financing, otherwise known as a Series D.

Fertik said Reputation.com decided to raise more money because it is planning a big push into a new line of business. To date, the company has offered several services that help consumers manage their privacy, information and reputation online. Now Reputation.com has also built a dataset business–essentially, the start-up has collected data on individuals and layered that information with its own technologies–which allows the company to come up with assessments on people, among other things.

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Now That Intel's In Control at McAfee, President Dave DeWalt Resigns

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:59:32 +0000

McAfee, the Intel-owned security software company, just announced the appointment of two new co-presidents: Michael DeCesare and Todd Gebhart. They will report directly to Renée James, Intel’s senior vice president and chairman of the McAfee subsidiary.

The bigger news is that Dave DeWalt, the McAfee president who saw the company through its $7.7 billion acquisition by Intel last year, is departing, though he will remain on McAfee’s board.

It’s not the first time that DeWalt has taken a company into a large acquisition. In 2003, he was the CEO of Documentum, which was acquired by storage giant EMC. He’s also chairman of the board at Polycom and recently joined the board of Jive Software, the pre-IPO social enterprise concern where former McAfee director Tony Zingale is CEO.

Last month VentureBeat reported he was going to Palo Alto Networks, a security start-up backed by Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and JAFCO Ventures.

DeCesare joined McAfee in 2007 and had run its global operations, including manufacturing, facilities, and worldwide sales. Gebhart joined McAfee in 1999. His most recent role was running the retail and direct web sales strategies for the consumer, mobile and small business units.

Zynga and Pandora Ad Provider SocialVibe Raises $20M

Liz Gannes — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 18:23:07 +0000

SocialVibe, the performance advertising network that offers users an alternative to paying for virtual goods on Zynga and subscriptions on Pandora, today announced it has raised $20 million in a Series D round led by Norwest Venture Partners and including previous investors Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures. The Los Angeles-based company also operates its own social apps for individuals to spread branded content in order to raise money for various causes.

Funds Invest in Privacy Start-Ups

Pui-Wing Tam and Ben Worthen — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:00:22 +0000

As privacy snafus mount across companies such as Facebook Inc. and AT&T Inc. (T), venture capitalists have spotted a new market opening and are pumping millions of dollars into privacy-related start-ups.

This month, online privacy start-up ReputationDefender Inc. plans to disclose that it has raised $15 million in new venture funding–even though the company wasn’t actively looking for new cash. SafetyWeb Inc., which helps parents monitor their kids’ online activities, said Thursday it closed $8 million in funding. And Truste, which offers seals of approval to websites that meet certain privacy standards, raised $12 million earlier this month.

Many of the investors include top-tier venture-capital firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Accel Partners. Venture firms such as Jafco Ventures, Atlas Venture and Battery Ventures also have invested in online-privacy start-ups in the past few months.

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Clicker's Jim Lanzone Talks About TV on the Web (And Shows Off L.A. Digs)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:58:27 +0000

During my recent sojourn in Los Angeles, BoomTown dropped in on the Melrose Avenue HQ of Clicker, the Web site trying to make search sense of premium video on the Web.

I had a chat with Jim Lanzone, former CEO of Ask, the fourth-place search service owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), about whether such a service could survive with giants like Google (GOOG) around.

Lanzone is certainly trying to differentiate Clicker, which aims to steer clear of both copyright issues and huge bandwidth costs by simply being a helpful friend to consumers in search of good video from television, movies and the Web itself.

As Katherine Boehret’s review of the Clicker service in November described it:

[Clicker is a] free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site–like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

To try to improve its Web search efforts, Clicker raised another $11 million in venture funding in February in a round led by Jafco Ventures, with participation from earlier investors Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The funding follows an $8 million round announced last fall.

Here’s the video of my interview with Lanzone, who also gave me a short tour of Clicker’s HQ:

[ See post to watch video ]

Local Ad Start-Up Yodle Raises $10 Million C Round. What Does That Mean?

Peter Kafka — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:30:09 +0000

Venture capitalists and other investors are still willing to put money into Web/tech/media start-ups. But their terms are getting tougher, for obvious reasons. One start-up founder I talked to last week described his last round of funding, completed in December, as akin to “getting shot in the head.”

Bear that in mind as you read the press release announcing the newest round of funding for Yodle, a New York-based local advertising start-up. The company has brought in new investors in its C round–JAFCO Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth have joined DFJ and Bessemer Venture Partners. That’s good, because under conventional wisdom, the appearance of new money in these things validates the older money’s investments.

But the C round is also smaller than the B round from a year ago–the $10 million round Yodle is announcing is less than the $12 million it trumpeted in the fall of 2008. That bucks the traditional funding order, wherein each round is bigger than the last. So what does that mean?

Impossible to say until we hear more about valuation and deal terms, which I don’t have. Last year, people close to the company were floating a $40 million-plus valuation for the service, which connects mom-and-pop companies with the Web, via Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG) et al.

That’s one of the great untapped sectors of online advertising, so if the Yodle folks can crack it, they deserve as much as they can get, downturn or not. I’ll report back if I get more info on the deal. If you feel like contributing your knowledge you can reach me at peter@allthingsd.com, or via the blind tip box here.