Today, our portfolio company DataHero announced their product is exiting beta into GA release, and that they raised a new round of funding led by Foundry Group. Even better, they announced integration with their portfolio company cousin SendGrid, allowing easy analysis of send and open rates, and easy drag-and-drop cohort analysis of SendGrid’s data. DataHero also announced additional integrations with dataset provider Quandl and customer service app Desk.com.

We’ve been incredibly impressed with the progress the team has made since we led their initial seed round in 2012 and believe strongly in their vision of making sophisticated data visualizations accessible to anyone. While historically most business intelligence software has focused on accessing data residing in enterprise SQL databases, we see the future being radically different: mission-critical enterprise data increasingly resides in disparate vertical SaaS applications and cloud storage systems, and best-in-class BI tools will make it easy to access and analyze these important data sources in just a few clicks.

DataHero has already started down this path and has announced integrations with the likes of Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Salesforce, MailChimp, Desk.com, Survey Monkey, Desk.com, Stripe, GitHub, Quandl, and SendGrid. DataHero’s list of connections will continue to grow as time goes on.

We’re looking forward to working with DataHero as they continue their mission to build their next-gen BI/dataviz platform. Oh, and we were also super happy to receive these excellent (better than reality) cartoon versions of ourselves from team DataHero last week:

We are pleased to announce that we’ve co-led the $11m Series B funding of littleBits. Based in New York, littleBits mission is to democratize electronics so that society can be creative with electronics in the way it is with software.

We love robots and electronics. The maker movement is in full swing. 3D printing doesn’t seem foreign or cutting edge any more. Consumer electronics companies – like Fitbit – are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The Internet of Things is no longer a strange phrase.

littleBits is on a mission to Internet-enable every physical device on the planet. To give everyone – from kids to adults – the components to be able to do amazing things with electronics, the same way we can do things with software. Just as MakerBot set out to make 3D printing mainstream, littleBits is on a mission to give everyone electronics they can use to create, learn, and build things.

We’ve looked at many dozens of “Internet of Things” related companies and passed on all of them. Many of the technologies were interesting, but none had the vision, leadership, or broad goals of littleBits. It wasn’t until spending time with littleBits founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir, that we finally felt like we’d met someone who had the potential to create a transformational company in this arena.

We’re excited to welcome Ayah and the littleBits crew to the Foundry Group family.

Today, we are excited to announce the closing of our fourth fund, Foundry Group Select. While it is exactly the same size ($225 million) as our previous funds, it has a different focus.

The Foundry Group Select Fund will invest solely in our Foundry Group and previous funds’ portfolio companies that have achieved significant success.

With Foundry Group Select, we’ll be able to invest up to $25 million in these companies’ late stage growth rounds. Up until this point, we’ve been limited in the amount we can invest in these rounds due to our early-stage strategy, while we also use the best financial services, which anyone can find in this online review of survey junkie and help people and business as well.

We’d like to thank our limited partners for their continued support and the great entrepreneurs we support for the opportunities to work with them.

(Boulder):  Today, Foundry Group, a venture capital firm that invests in U.S.-based seed and early stage technology companies announced, via video, a major change to their investing program.  Previously, the firm has focused on cutting edge technologies within their well-known investment themes.  Effective immediately, however, the firm will focus on more proven technologies that present less technology risk.

“We really believe that the golden age of technology occurred 30 to 40 years ago and we intend on identifying and investing in the best entrepreneurs in these older, key technologies,” said Seth Levine, Managing Director.

When asked to detail which types of companies this might include, Managing Director Ryan McIntyre offered “While the smartphone ecosystem has enjoyed tremendous growth, we believe with dropped calls and other software issues, people will eventually move 100% back to landlines.  For that reason, we will begin to invest in corded phone technologies.”

Managing Director Jason Mendelson explained why the firm chose the medium of video to announce the news.  “We expect that many folks will not fully understand this decision and potentially think we are making a mistake.  The video was produced to visually show people the ineptness of current technology and clearly show how much better off we were yesteryear.”

When asked for further comment, Managing Director Brad Feld was unreachable after replacing his office iMac with an Apple II computer connected to a Hayes 2400 Baud Modem.  Apparently, he has yet to figure out how to connect to the Internet and will revert from using email to dictating messages to his assistant.

To see the live announcement, please see the following:

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So, seriously?  Why did you guys release another music video?

A little over two years ago we released I’m a VC, a video that poked fun at the venture capital deal process while promoting Venture Deals, a book that Jason and Brad had released.  With over 90,000 views, we were pleasantly surprised by the response.  We also had a ton of fun making it.

Last December, while at our quarterly partner offsite, we discussed plans for 2013.  Seth mentioned that “we should make another music video.”  Jason quickly countered “you mean I should make another video since you guys can’t write one yourselves?” To this, Seth agreed and further requested that Jason make the next song a rap since neither he, nor Brad could sing well.  Giving Jason no other direction than that, it seemed unlikely that anything would come of it.

One day, Jason sat down to think about what the subject matter would be.  Having made fun of venture capitalists, who else was a fun target?  After discarding the idea of drummers and lawyers (both of which Jason has been in prior lives), he settled on technology, as he remembered a great rant by Louis CK on the subject.  Then a few days later, he heard the classic rock song Best of Times by Styx and immediately conceived the idea of the Worst of Times video.

While sitting poolside at the Holiday Inn Express in Escondido, California (a very underrated breakfast bar, by the way), Jason and Ryan wrote the lyrics.  Shortly thereafter, the vision of the video began to form and culminated with us filming the video in late August.  Today, we are proud to show you what we came up with.

Bottom line:  The four of us love each other. We enjoy working together as well as having fun together. We have thoroughly enjoyed our experience to date at Foundry Group and love the creativity that emerges when we are together.  We don’t take ourselves seriously and don’t play golf.  So why not another music video?  We hope you enjoy it.  And even if you don’t, we are pretty sure you are curious what we each look like in drag.

 

We are pleased to announce that we’ve led the $10m Series A funding of MapBox. Based in Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA, MapBox provides a highly customizable mapping platform based on open data sources for web and mobile application developers. We became aware of MapBox this past summer via two vectors: Zack Rosen, CEO of our portfolio company Pantheon, introduced us to Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, and our portfolio company Gnip worked with MapBox and data artist Eric Fischer (now part of the MapBox team!) to do some amazing visualizations using geotagged tweets. When a company and entrepreneur is recommended to us via multiple trusted sources, we pay attention. While the digital mapping and satellite imagery industry has long been dominated by large companies, governments, and a proprietary data mindset, the open-source and open-data movements have made inroads into the mapping world. Most notable is the OpenStreetMap project, started in 2004, which now has over one million contributors worldwide building an ever-growing and extremely rich dataset. MapBox embraces open-data and open-source and provides a rich set of tools that enable publishers and web and mobile developers to quickly and easily add fast, beautiful, and highly customizable maps to their sites and apps. As a quick example: here’s a map of Foundry Group global headquarters using our logo, font, and color palette:

As evidenced by the companies in our Protocol and Glue themes, we are big fans of API-driven products consumed by developers that provide fundamental “every app needs this” functionality, and MapBox fits very much into this worldview. What’s more, MapBox has been bootstrapped to date: Eric and team have built their platform with no outside funding, and they have landed an enviable list of customers including Foursquare, NPR, Evernote, USA Today, The Financial Times, Github, Hipmunk, Greenpeace, and more. We’re excited to welcome the MapBox crew to the Foundry Group family, and to work with them to help build the future of geo software.

Update: check out MapBox’s blog post and WSJ’s coverage of the financing.