New Enterprise Associates has led a $2.7 million seed round in Blend, a San Francisco-based maker of a social networking app for college students. Trinity Ventures, Foundation Capital, Lerer Ventures, Maveron, BoxGroup, XG Ventures and SparkLabs Global Ventures also joined in the seed round. The app is available for students in more than 3,500 universities nationwide, except those from Ohio State University. Blend co-founder and CEO Akash Nigam attended the University of Michigan before dropping out and launching Blend. As such, the company doesn't allow students from rival school Ohio State to sign up for the app.
The C100 is just four years old, but it has achieved an impressive track record in that short time. The nonprofit—which aims to bring like-minded Canadian entrepreneurs and executives together in Silicon Valley through its programs, such as 48 Hours in the Valley—reported that startups connected to it have raised US$700 million in venture funding since the C100 launched in 2010. That’s great news for Scott Bonham, a founding partner at GGV Capital, who has begun serving as co-chair of the organization.
NextView Ventures' Rob Go explains why Sequoia Capital's investment in WhatsApp is even more amazing than it appears at first glance.
We are giving away five free tickets to fintech entrepreneurs for our fintech-themed Venture Alpha East conference in New York on March 26-27. Here's how to win.
In a peHUB Canada exclusive, Tom Rand, managing partner of the privately-backed MaRS Cleantech Fund, writes about what's at stake in the current global debate over climate change and the potential impact of clean technologies. For Rand, the issue comes down to a contest between the Cleantech Bulls and the Climate Bear. In this contest, a number of Canadian venture-backed startups like Hydrostor, Woodland Biofuels, Sparq Systems and Polar Sapphire are demonstrating why the Cleantech Bulls are showing increasing muscle.
The number of technology companies aged five years or younger has fallen to below 80,000, down from a high of 113,000 in 2001, according to a new report from the Kauffman Foundation, says Reuters.
Draper Fisher Jurvetson has closed its early-stage focused Fund XI on $325 million after roughly two months in the market, the firm said on Tuesday. Fund XI is the smallest the firm has raised for some time, which reflects the firm's slimmed-down strategy.
In light of the letter than Tom Perkins recently wrote to the Wall Street Journal, and its aftermath, we're re-publishing a profile of him that originally appeared as the cover story in the December 2007 issue of affiliate publication Venture Capital Journal.
In high school, the stereotype goes, jocks and computer geeks sit at separate lunch tables and socialize as little as possible.
Real Ventures recently signaled a new direction for the six year-old venture capital firm – a direction that will soon be made manifest by the first close of its third, $100 million partnership, Real Ventures III, peHUB Canada has exclusively learned.The fund’s launch will cap what has been an exceptionally active period for the Montréal-based Real Ventures, one of Canada’s foremost early-stage IT and Internet-focused investment specialists, and the most active private investors in domestic seed-stage and startup financings in 2013, according to Thomson Reuters.