Kleiner Perkins

News Byte

A Year Later, Google Joins Kleiner Perkins sFund

Liz Gannes in Social on November 11, 2011 at 11:15 am PT

Google has added its money to Kleiner Perkins’ sFund, joining launch partners Zynga, Comcast, Allen & Co., Amazon and Facebook. Given the VC firm was an early investor in Google, the tech giant’s lack of participation seemed strange when Kleiner Perkins launched the sFund a year ago. But then again, Google wasn’t really doing social a year ago. Google just bought Katango, the sFund’s first investment and its first exit.

News Byte

Google Buys Automated Friend Manager Katango

Liz Gannes in Social on November 10, 2011 at 3:22 pm PT

Google has acquired Katango, a start-up that analyzed Facebook friend lists to generate lists of related people so that users could better segment their social networks. Since Katango launched, both Google+ and Facebook have introduced similar functionality (though not as automated as Katango), so an acquisition by Google seems like the best possible outcome for the start-up, which had raised $5 million from Kleiner Perkins.