Alastair Goldfisher

You don’t need a lot of money to be an active investor, but it helps. That’s one takeaway I had when I looked at the data to see which venture firms were most often doing deals and shaking the hands of entrepreneurs during the first half of the year. Take for example First Round Capital. […]

Lately, with so much IPO activity, rising valuations, deal flow and SEC meetings taking place, I’m told it’s never a dull day in the VC community. The same is true for us at Venture Capital Journal and our online affiliate peHUB. Things have been hopping since the beginning of the year with new hires, new […]

The Clymb, a Portland, Ore.-based ecommerce startup specializing in outdoor gear, has raised a $2 million Series A round from Walden Venture Capital and the Oregon Angel Fund (OAF). The board consists of Art Berliner, managing director of Walden; J Allard, a former Microsoft executive; and Chairman Drew Smith, a representative of OAF and a former managing director with Intel Capital. "This is not just another deal-of-the-day kind of business," Berliner tells peHUB. "We see a lot of early stage ecommerce businesses, but The Clymb has developed excellent relationships with its vendors which will set it apart in the outdoor gear category."

VC-backed Blue Jeans Network launched today, announcing the release of its high-definition video conferencing product. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup, which was founded about 18 months ago, has raised $23.5 million in venture funding from Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners. The board of directors includes Matt Howard from Norwest, Ping Li […]

Fresh off of raising $1.35 billion for two funds, Accel Partners has backed Palo Alto, Calif.-based ScaleXtreme, a developer of systems management products delivered as a cloud service. Ignition Partners led the $11 million Series B, with participation from previous investor Accel, which had invested $2.5 million in a Series A round last fall. As […]

Bunchball, an online gamification solutions provider, has raised a $6.5 million round of funding from Triangle Peak Partners (led), Northport Investments, Correlation Ventures and Granite Ventures. The company previously raised a $2 million Series A round in 2006 and a $4 million Series B round in 2008 from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures. Bunchball, founded […]

New Enterprise Associates is planning to step up its pace of early stage investments, thanks in part, no doubt, to how the plummeting costs of launching a business make smaller investments potentially more lucrative. NEA—which last month made early stage investments in Inporia, a stealth ecommerce startup, and Grubwithus, a social dining service—has reportedly formed […]

We’ve all heard the dumb jokes surrounding lawyers. We may have even told one or two ourselves. Most of the jokes are not even that funny. Maybe they sound funnier when they deal with personal injury lawyers, you know the ones. They’re the snake oil salesman, ahem, I mean lawyers, the ones with the questionable […]

In the wake of Salesforce wrapping up its acquisition of Radian6 Technologies for about $330 million this past week, the large enterprise software developer is not necessarily hunting for more deals. That was the takeaway from Ryan Aytay, vice president of corporate development at Salesforce, who said last week that the San Francisco-based company is […]

Pete Curley and his two co-founders at HipChat, can cross something off their list: They got their billboard (see image on jump page). In September, I wrote about HipChat, a provider of a private instant messaging services for companies, after the startup raised $100,000 in angel financing from the Founders Fund TechFellow’s award program. Subscribers […]