RIM has announced that it has acquired Gist. We are super proud of the Gist team for all they have accomplished since we invested in them in May 2009.
Recently, we were fortunate to have the kind folks from MSNBC come visit us to see why Boulder is such a special place for entrepreneurship and innovation.
Today Cheezburger Holdings announced that we have led a $30 million financing.
We were originally introduced to Cheezburger’s founder and CEO Ben Huh about 18 months ago by our mutual friend Micah Baldwin at the LA TwiistUp event. We apparently shared a fondness for clever misspellings and hit it off immediately.
At the beginning on 2010, with our friend Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group, we approached Ben and started talking about investing in Cheezburger. The timing wasn’t right for Ben and his investors for a variety of reasons but we stayed in touch.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Ben called and asked if we were still interested in putting together a financing and really going for it. During the year we had really honed our view of a new theme we have been calling “Distribution.” Cheezburger was right in the sweet spot of this theme, along with Zynga, Topspin, and StockTwits. Since we knew the company well, it took about 17 seconds for us to agree that we wanted to see if we could put something together.
We quickly put together a syndicate with Madrona, Avalon Ventures (with whom we’ve co-invested in Zynga and Standing Cloud) and SoftBank Capital (with whom we’ve had a long relationship and recently co-invested in Cloud Engines), figured out a deal with Ben and his existing investors, and now have a chance to be a lot more humorous on a day to day basis.
In the last three years, Cheezburger has grown far beyond their original lolcats site. They are now a major disruptive force in the way we consume all kinds of humor. We expect Ben to start putting this money to good use right away, hiring engineers, PMs, and sales staff. The jobs are listed at https://jobs.cheezburger.com. If you’re still reading this, you really should pounce on the opportunity to work for the funniest company we’ve ever seen.
At the very end of last year we announced an investment in Integrate – a performance advertising platform company. Seth posted about it on his blog at the time and we meant to repost it here at FoundryGroup.com as well. Here it is:
Performance marketing has been both a very lucrative side of internet advertising but also a bit of the wild west, where rules are made to be stretched or broken (with alarming regularity). And while the simplicity of pay for performance has been attractive to many advertisers, diligence has been required to monitor the quality of the traffic and leads generated by performance marketers. In particular, control of creative assets and their appropriate use has been a concern for many advertisers that is why many businesses opt to hire a SEO agency to bring traffic to their websites. In addition, existing performance marketing platforms have been limited solely to online assets.
Enter Integrate – a platform that simplifies the execution of performance marketing campaigns and allows advertisers unprecedented control over their campaigns. Integrate places transparency into the marketplace for both publishers and buyers, allowing both to review one another’s business data before making an informed decision to work together. In addition, algorithms are built into Integrate to monitor deceitful practices that have previously plagued the industry. The Integrate platform provides legitimacy and basic regulation to an industry that has seriously lacked it. As a result, since its inception earlier this year, Integrate has attracted some of the largest internet performance advertisers as well as a number of well known retailers and brands who had not previously been significant buyers of performance based leads.
Today we’re announcing a $4.25M financing for the company that we believe will push its growth trajectory even higher. It joins a handful of adtech related investments in the Foundry portfolio (coming soon: my Foundry Unified Theory of AdTech Investing) that together are enabling online advertisers to better target specific users (AdMeld and Triggit), more effectively place media (Integrate and Trada) and access new publishers (Lijit) and media (Medialets).
Integrate was founded by Hart Cunningham and Jeremy Bloom, with whom I’ve had the fortune to work with over the last 5 months as this investment came together. These guys eat, breathe and sleep (literally – I think they have a cot in the office) performance marketing. I have a deep appreciation for passionate entrepreneurs and Jeremy and Hart fit this mold to a tee.
We’re looking forward to telling you more about Integrate as we continue to build and enhance the platform and add more and more advertisers and publishers to the Integrate platform.
Some additional coverage of the financing:
TechCrunch,
Mashable
As we reflect back on 2010 it is fun to remember the new companies we invested in during the year. We ended up making investments in 11 new companies this year – eight in our 2007 fund and three in our new fund which we announced in October.
When we look back and see when the investments were made, our timing is very lumpy. We’ve always been this way – we don’t have a particular pacing, tempo, partner allocation, or thematic allocation goal – we just all work on everything together and invest when we get really excited about something.
Following are the investments we made in 2010 by month.
– April: SendGrid
– May: BigDoor, Sifteo, SimpleGeo
– June: Triggit
– September: Openspace, Fitbit, Orbotix
– November: Urban Airship
– December: Integrate and a stealth company that rhymes with Integrate
These investments cover a wide range of geography (Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland) and touch on most of our themes (Protocol, Distribution, HCI, Glue, and Adhesive). We’ve got a good range of first time entrepreneurs, new relationships for us, and folks we’ve worked with in the past in the mix.
At the beginning of October, we raised a new $225 million fund (the same size as the fund we raised in 2007) – our November and December investments were from that fund.
In addition, we made many follow on investments to our existing portfolio companies, we remain very involved in a number of things around the entrepreneurial community including the continued expansion of TechStars, Jason’s involvement on the board of the National Venture Capital Association and the FASB Blue Ribbon Panel, Startup Visa, and the conferences we helped create (Defrag, Glue, and Blur).
We believe 2011 will be an incredible year for software and Internet innovation, company creation, and entrepreneurial impact and we are psyched to be a part of it.