We are pleased to announce that we’ve led a $2.7m Series A financing of Mobiplug Networks, a graduate of this summer’s Boulder TechStars program. Mobiplug is developing an affordable all-in-one home monitoring and control solution that starts with a gateway device that sits on a home network and speaks a variety of the most common wireless protocols like ZigBee, Z-Wave, Insteon and more.

Once installed, homeowners will be able to monitor and control lights, locks, thermostats, sensors and other devices in the home via smartphone and tablet applications that will make using these technologies simple and delightful. A great benefit to the consumer will be the comfort, convenience, and peace of mind they receive at an affordable price. At the same time, Mobiplug is opening up their API so that developers can innovate on their platform as well, which will enable all sorts of cool functionality by allowing web services with open APIs to interact and access the gateway to create truly automated actions with the connected devices, via simple API calls.

Most importantly, Mobiplug will make advanced home monitoring and control technologies accessible to a much broader market than has previously been possible because their system works with off-the-shelf electronics from major retailers, bypassing the typical high costs and difficulties inherent in deploying traditional high-end systems in the home.

Ryan was a mentor for Mobiplug throughout the summer TechStars program and was excited by the strength of the founding team and their vision of bringing home monitoring and control and the Internet-of-things to a broad market. They also have a clear strategy to leverage the large existing install base of home automation devices already in the market that have been historically been far too complex and expensive for the average homeowner to deploy.

Finally, fellow Mobiplug mentor Tim Enwall, previously the founder of Tendril Networks, became equally enthusiastic about Mobiplug’s vision and decided to join the company as CEO.

As these things came together in the final weeks of the TechStars program, we offered to lead Mobiplug’s Series A financing, and, thankfully, they accepted our offer.  We’re looking forward to helping Jeff, Lee, Mike and Tim build Mobiplug into a great company in the coming years.

We are very happy to announce today the closing of our third fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2012, L.P. The fund is the same size as our last one: $225,000,000 in limited partner commitments. We are pleased to be working with a great group of investors.

We will continue to do exactly what we have always done: invest in seed and early-stage investment opportunities in the software and IT space that are located across the United States. We’ll also continue to pursue a strategy of Thematic Investing that has served us well over our investing careers.

We very much look forward to working with another group of great entrepreneurs and portfolio companies.

– Jason, Ryan, Seth and Brad

P.S.  For those of you keeping track this is the exact same blog post we used last time to announce our fund.  🙂

We recently led a $3m financing in Modular Robotics, a Boulder-based company that is building a programmable robot construction platform. They’ve already released their first product – Cubelets – which is available for purchase now.

As kids, we played with Legos, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets. Over the years there have been efforts to integrate this primal desire to “build things” with robots, combining the physical (e.g., Legos) with the digital (software). One of the first attempts at creating a robot construction platform has evolved into Lego Mindstorms. The idea for Mindstorms came out of the MIT Media Lab and was commercialized in conjunction with Lego and is now a substantial product line for Lego. The First Robotics Competition spawned a number of kits over the years, including those from VEX, another company in this category. Many other companies have created kits around robotics, ranging from the simple to the extremely complex.

Research into what makes a compelling robotic construction kit has continued at all of the major universities that have robotics programs, especially MIT, CMU, and Stanford. These programs combined the physical and the digital, and were based around specialized programming languages like Logo and Alice, along with mainstream languages like C and Visual Basic. While these were compelling products, there were mostly designed for people who had a programming background and as a result were both complex and ultimately not destined for mainstream adoption.

Imagine our surprise when we discovered that ModRobotics, a company based on research that the founder (Eric Schweikardt) did while at CMU, was located in our own backyard in Boulder. Eric had been quietly building ModRobotics with SBIR funding, completely uninterested in raising money from VCs. He bootstrapped ModRobotics and shipped his first product, Cubelets.

Six months ago, at the urging of Nikolaus Correll, a CU Professor of Computer Science, we co-founded a new MeetUp group with Nikolaus and our friends from Orbotix named Boulder Is For Robots. Eric presented Cubelets at the first meetup and we were immediately smitten.

Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. There are currently 15 Cubelets, including Battery, Brightness, Distance, Drive, Flashlight, Inverse, Knob, Rotate, Speaker, and Temperature. By configuring them in different ways, amazing robots can be quickly created.

Each Cubelet is programmable so the behavior can be specifically changed and controlled through software. ModRobotics is developing a proprietary programming environment with a UI that offers a simple scripting language as well as a detailed programming language.

We are excited to be working with Eric and team on creating the next generation of a programmable robot construction platform.

Last night FullContact announced that we have led their $7m financing. We are psyched to be an investor in another great company that has gone through the TechStars Boulder program. Brad will be joining the board.

FullContact has a straightforward goal – solve the world’s contact information problem. Right now there is no “single version of truth” for an individual contact and as more and more systems use and proliferate fragments of contact records, things are just getting worse. The problem is not merely collecting and presenting contact information, but cleaning up the data, enriching it, de-duplicating it, validating it, and making it easily accessible in any context.

Imagine a unified address book in the cloud that has perfect information for every single person with a contact record of any type. This unified address book is continually updated, cleansed, enriched, and validated. And while users can update their own contact information if they chose, this system doesn’t and shouldn’t rely on individuals to update their data. It integrates with every web-based or mobile application that uses any sort of contact data. And it is available to every developer via an API.

This is what FullContact has set out to create. They’ve made incredible progress on this and we look forward to helping them on their journey.

Yes, we’ve been busy with financings lately, but we’ve been very fortunate to meet a lot of great entrepreneurs.  And today we are excited to talk about Cloudability.  Cloudability, located in Portland, OR, is creating a software platform that collects, analyzes and models cloud computing costs and usage.

We’ve long been believers in cloud computing, both as investors and users.  Forbes estimates that by 2013, 80% of companies will be using cloud-computing resources in their businesses.  Today the market spends $68 billion on cloud resources and that number is expected to triple by 2015.  These adoption numbers are being driven by the deployment of SaaS (Software as a Service) models of software deployment, but also more recently BaaS (Backend) and IaaS (Infrastructure).

While the usages and spending on the cloud increases, so does the complexity of managing a particular user’s cloud infrastructure.  First, there are many different providers of these services (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, and many others) and they all offer different performance capabilities, services and pricing.  As a company deploys more of its software to the cloud, managing the optimization of costs and performance becomes a time-consuming and tedious job.

To date, there have been providers that will help manage and analyze a customer’s cloud usage, but they’ve suffered from one of two problems.  Some providers are tied to a particular cloud, for instance Amazon’s AWS.  While helpful, it is rare that one cloud provider can be all things to a company; therefore the company doesn’t have a comprehensive view of all of their cloud usage.  The second problem is usability.  To date, cloud management software has been created for IT professionals.  Unfortunately, this isn’t helpful to the business decision makers and requires translation from the technical folks and is not anywhere near real time.

The driver behind Cloudability’s adoption is the democratization of IT: anyone can buy it, and if you buy it you’ve got to keep an eye on the costs, make sure you’re getting value for money; and traditional structures the CIO & CFO use to manage costs are completely by-passed. This is a structural problem that has to be solved and requires new tools and ways of thinking.

Cloudability is creating a multi-cloud, easy-to-use platform to manage and analyze cloud resources.  Currently, they can analyze 16 different clouds to give complete visibility into the usage and spending across all of these resources.  Because of this ability and despite the early stage of the company, Cloudability currently manages over $123,000,000 of cloud spend for over 3,000 customers in 80 countries.

With Cloudability, anyone in an organization can immediately see overages, waste and sprawl of cloud resources.  This also includes predictive analytics of what future spend may look like, as well.  In the future, the data they collect across clouds will become very valuable when modeling for customers what their costs and usage could be in different scenarios designed to improve efficiency.  Furthermore, we believe that compliance issues for cloud services will only increase and Cloudability will be in the best position to analyze and report on such data.

We’ve been following the company since we met them at the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) and then through their successful experience at TechStars Cloud.  We are fortunate to get to work with Mat, J.R., Jon and rest of the Cloudability team.  Welcome to the Foundry family.