Half way into the year, it is worth taking stock of who invested in internet & mobile startups, with whom and how much.
The Internet bubble is not: despite Snapguide’s strap line on the company’s holding page on the web, it is neither showing nor telling much but is however closing a $2m round with Index, Atlas Michael Arrington (of Techrunch), Dave Morin (ex-Facebook, founder of Path) and Gary Clayton (from Nuance voice recognition). Anyone of you who remembers the dotcom era might feel uncomfortable with the size versus stage of the round: $2m with no evidence of customers. But this time is different. Really. People have been there and done the bubble and, in contrast to the markets, private equity investors have a long memory (too long sometimes).
Female founders on the up (at last): everloop & shadow government are both female led and got angel funding. We will be eagerly tracking progress.
Same old, same old? The Paris-based mobile developer Storific got $150k seed money from Kima Ventures to develop a mobile platform that lets customers place orders in restaurants, bars and hotels. I saw a couple like this lately, one from a team of MBAs. I did not think it was worth taking it further: Kima obviously knows something I do not. To the MBAs to whom I said no, (if they read this) mea culpa, it is likely that I was wrong.
Mixing business with pleasure: Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher brings glamour into investing with his participation in Zaarly (buy & sell anything with the people around you); and British writer, comedian and the ‘QI’ minded Stephen Fry seeds the Bath (UK)-based Ubitek Ltd .
The new kids on the block: LA based Sharesquare launched their beta QR code for groupies (aka performers’ followers and lovers) after raising ca. £100k from hacker angels .
[...] internet and mobile seed and series A investments for the first half of 2011 I wrote about in the previous post; however, with so many open source deal tracking sites available (Chubby Brains, Crunchbase, [...]