We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has invested in SimpleGeo. SimpleGeo, based in Boulder, CO, provides a hosted geospatial platform for web and mobile application developers, enabling third party app developers to build sophisticated location-based functionality into their applications on web-based and mobile platforms, including Android devices and the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
With the widespread availability of GPS-enabled smartphones, the market for location-based applications and services is going mainstream. Once the province of luxury automobiles and expensive single-purpose devices, hand-held turn-by-turn navigation applications have become commodity items that are either free or very low cost. Beyond basic map-based navigation apps, entirely new categories of applications have emerged based on the widespread availability of location-aware mobile devices. These include location-based advertising platforms, social/gaming “check in” tools like Foursquare and Gowalla, augmented reality applications like Layar and more.
As market demand for applications with location-aware features has increased, developers have struggled with the complexity and domain specialization related to building geospatial functions into their applications. As a result, a market opportunity has emerged for a company to provide an easy-to-use and scalable geolocation infrastructure platform to third-party application developers.
SimpleGeo was founded by Matt Galligan and Joe Stump. Previously, Matt founded SocialThing, a Boulder TechStars 2007 company acquired by AOL in 2008. Joe was previously Chief Architect at Digg and left the Bay Area to come to Boulder to create SimpleGeo.
SimpleGeo began life as CrashCorp and was focused on building augmented reality games for mobile devices. As they began development, they quickly discovered that the biggest challenge in building their game was implementing the geolocation infrastructure services it would require. Given the growing popularity of apps with location-based functionality, most notably the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, the company shifted its focus towards building a robust geolocation infrastructure layer that third-party app developers could use to easily integrate sophisticated location-based functionality into their applications. Thus, SimpleGeo was born.
SimpleGeo offers a scalable cloud-based infrastructure for geodata that enables developers to store check-ins, points of interest, virtual goods and media in a private layer. This data can be retrieved by performing geospatial and spatiotemporal queries. In addition, SimpleGeo offers a rich marketplace of third-party geodata that is accessible to developers via the SimpleGeo Marketplace. The company has forged data partnerships with companies such as ESRI, deCarta, Skyhook Wireless, Quova, MetaCarta and Weather Decision Technologies.
We are thrilled to be working with Matt again. Our partner Jason was one of Matt’s mentors for SocialThing during TechStars’ inaugural summer program in 2007, and we’ve followed the evolution of SimpleGeo with great interest since Matt and Joe began brainstorming about the business.
Additionally, we are fortunate to be co-investing with some great firms that we really respect and have had the pleasure of co-investing with in other portfolio companies: Redpoint Ventures and First Round Capital. Last, but not least, we’re excited to be co-investing for the first time with Chris Sacca at Lowercase Capital and with Josh Felser and Dave Samuel at Freestyle Capital. We’re looking forward to working closely with Matt and Joe and the rest of the SimpleGeo team and our co-investors to help build SimpleGeo into a great success and a fundamental infrastructure layer of the web.
When we speak about the history of Oblong, we tend to start with the movie Minority Report, where John was Steven Spielberg’s science advisor. If you haven’t seen the movie in a while, check it out. It is one of the only movies that we’ve seen that holds up in its vision of the future even 8 years later.
And while there was a working prototype of the system during the time the movie was being filmed, that was hardly the beginning. In fact, John had worked at the MIT Media Lab to create what was called The Luminous Room.
The Luminous Room was Oblong’s g-speak platform version 0.5 (perhaps). When we first considered investing in the company, we were amazed to see how long John had been thinking about the larger issues of GUIs and the data implications of operating systems.
If you are interested in seeing John’s early work, the Luminous Room link has videos which will show you the building blocks of what we think is one of the most interesting companies that we’ve ever invested in.
Sifteo is a game-platform development company that has developed “Siftables” the world’s first table-top gaming platform. Siftables are sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities that act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them by piling, grouping and sorting to interact with digital information and media.
As cool as this sounds, it’s not nearly as cool as the company’s TED talk and demo below.
Founded by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, out of the MIT Media Lab, we believe that Sifteo is developing the next generation popular gaming platform that will go beyond the early successes of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPad/Pod/Touch.
The Sifteo platform will have an easy to use SDK that will allow developers to create and sell games on the system. The tools includes a gesture recognition system that abstracts user actions, such as grouping and sorting, into events the designer can easily attach to software events. Overall, the system radically simplifies and speeds game development.
Most importantly, Siftables are fun. The embedded video shows but a couple of possibilities, but we really look forward to seeing all the of the creative content that is developed on the platform.
We really look forward to working with Jeevan, Dave and the rest of the team, including returning investors and our friends from True Ventures.
SendGrid offers a powerful and flexible cloud-based transactional email platform that enables companies and application developers to easily send and receive emails to and from their users, while enhancing their email delivery rates and providing rich analytics. The SendGrid platform easily scales to handle millions of users, providing access to world-class email infrastructure services, freeing developers from the hassles of managing the complexities of email servers and technologies.
Historically, companies have sent two categories of email to their customers and/or users: bulk emails, which are typically marketing messages sent out to their entire user base, and transactional emails, which are user-specific emails that update a particular user about changes activity in his/her account, provide purchase confirmations, send password reset notifications, etc. There exists a large and mature ecosystem devoted to outsourcing and optimizing the sending of mass- marketing emails to end-users. These emails are often regarded as spam by their recipients, despite the fact that most users likely opted-in to receive such emails when they registered for an account with the website sending these messages.
Interestingly, no such ecosystem has developed around transactional emails, despite (or perhaps because of) the greater challenges and message volumes associated with supporting an effective transactional email system in-house. As an example, it is estimated that Facebook alone sends well over one billion transactional emails to its users per day. Unlike mass-marketing bulk emails, transactional emails are seldom perceived as spam by end-users, and both the sender and the receiver have a vested interest in these transactional emails arriving at their destination.
Managing a transactional email system in-house results in increased costs associated with supporting the email system, while poor deliverability rates of an application’s transactional emails can decrease user engagement, site traffic and revenue.
Most web application developers are not proficient with mail server technology or the SMTP protocol that underlies it – the expertise required to deeply understand the email technology stack is very different from the HTTP/XML/HTML expertise that the average web developer possesses.
SendGrid moves transactional email functionality to the cloud and allows web developers to access sophisticated email processing capabilities through a simple API (application programming interface) that frees the developer from having to deploy, scale or manage an email server. SendGrid’s cloud-based email services enhance transactional email deliverability and scalability, while also providing rich analytics and enhanced email capabilities without requiring the developer to write custom email-specific code.
Integration with SendGrid is simple for the developer, requiring only a change of DNS settings to redirect outbound and/or inbound email through SendGrid’s servers. SendGrid provides a free entry-level demo account that allows a developer to send up to 200 emails daily free of charge. When customers move above the 200 emails/day limit, they are required to upgrade to a paid account, with monthly charges based on volume.
SendGrid was a graduate of the Boulder TechStars Class of 2009, and Foundry Group partner Ryan McIntyre acted as a mentor for SendGrid’s CEO and co-founder Isaac Saldana throughout the summer program. Following SendGrid’s “graduation” from TechStars, the company raised a $750k seed round in late 2009. Since their launch in the Fall of 2009, SendGrid has landed thousands of customers and has delivered nearly 1.2 billion messages on their behalf.
As we observed SendGrid’s rapid customer growth, which has occurred through word of mouth and without formal sales or marketing efforts, we made an offer to invest in SendGrid, and, thankfully, they accepted our offer to lead this round. We’ve got a long history of investing in the email ecosystem, most recently via our investments in Postini (acquired by Google in 2007) and Return Path. SendGrid is in many ways architecturally analogous to Postini (and shares Postini’s simple DNS-based deployment model), but instead of serving as an inbound email filter to enterprise email inboxes, SendGrid provides its cloud-based email infrastructure in the service of application generated emails sent to (and received from) users of a web-based application.
SendGrid sits squarely in the middle of our Protocol investment theme, which subsumed our Email, RSS and Implicit Web themes. We are excited to welcome the company to the Foundry Group portfolio and look forward to working with SendGrid’s founders Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, Tim Jenkins and the rest of the SendGrid team to build the company into a huge player in the email infrastructure market.
Foundry Group Moves to Twitter Platform for Deal Evaluation
While we are fans of investing in companies in the email ecosystem with our thematic investing approach, we have come to the realization that email is not the most efficient form of communication for evaluating potential investment opportunities.
We are blessed to have a large number of entrepreneurs who are interested in us as potential partners and the volume of email we receive can sometimes overwhelm us, so we began the investigation for a more streamlined approach. We hired consultants from McKinsey & Company last summer and after 9 months of working with us to learn how we operate, it was obvious that Twitter was the right choice.
The benefits of Twitter versus other platforms were clear. First, everyone is on Twitter, so there is no chance that an entrepreneur wouldn’t be able to reach us. Second, this will greatly reduce the number of spreadsheets and financial projections that we would feel obligated to read. We realize that financial projects are just that – projections and therefore are never accurate. We’ve decided to stop pretending that they make sense. Third, and perhaps most importantly, if an entrepreneur cannot explain their opportunity in 140 characters or less, how focused can they be?
Besides, with the amount of board meetings that we attend, verbosity is not a wanted characteristic.
Speaking of board meetings, we have begun the process of streamlining board meetings with McKinsey, as well. We’re hoping to devise a similar approach using Skype to eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings and travel.
So, if you are an entrepreneur and want to work with us, Tweet us! One thing to note: PLEASE do not send us twitter links or multiple tweets per company. This is just as bad as email and really destroys the spirit of what we are trying to do here.
