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Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
No surprise: Andreessen Horowitz leads Foursquare’s $20 million funding (via DealsBeat)
Chango Closes $1.4 Million Round, Brings Search Targeting To Display Ads (via TechCrunch)
GroupSpaces secures $1.3 million and brings Valley players on board (via TechCrunch Europe)
Company: CyberSynchs
Website: www.cybersynchs.com
Headquarters: New York City
Year Founded: 2008
Founder: Amos Winbush III
Investors: Self-Funded
Employees: 15
Company Description:
"CyberSynchs offers applications that enable data synchronization, sharing and transfer through the hybrid cloud"
By Amos Winbush III, CEO
Leaving my native Louisiana for New York at the age of 19 to pursue my dream of a music career, only in my wildest dreams would I have envisioned that five years later I would trade in my headphones for an entrepreneur’s hat as the founder and CEO of CyberSynchs. In two short years the company has grown into a $20 million technology company with an ever-expanding impact on the mobile, wireless and home entertainment industries.
CyberSynchs is a Universal Data Synchronization (UDS) company that offers $2.99 per month subscription-based wireless applications that enable consumers to automatically synchronize, backup, share, transfer and retrieve mobile device content as well as other consumer electronic device data. CyberSynchs Mobile, our flagship product, performs these actions at individual pre-determined intervals. Users sign up for the service at www.cybersynchs.com, after which a text message is sent to his or her mobile device, providing a link that installs the CyberSynchs application. Data synchronization is immediate; CyberSynchs doesn’t require any hardware, cables, SIM or storage cards.
That’s the 30-second elevator pitch. There is the proverbial “so much more.”
The CyberSynchs system is embedded into devices from a wide array of manufacturers, enabling virtually unlimited connectivity, data synchronization, sharing and transfer through the hybrid cloud between mobile devices and personal computers. We maintain a partnership with Oracle/Sun Microsystems Inc., by which our company develops on Sun’s JAVAFX platform, distributing our company’s mobile, television and PC applications on more than 1 billion JAVAFX-supported devices.
CyberSynchs Mobile automatically synchronize, stream and transfers 98 percent of all smartphone and mobile device data, including phone numbers, address books, calendars, voice and text messages, emails, music, ring tones, GPS locations, photos, videos…virtually any digital file. All subscriber information is housed on CyberSynch’s secure servers for full, immediate content management or data recovery onto a new device in the event of a damaged or lost smartphone or other digital device.
Data on CyberSynchs servers are accessible only with the user’s unique device ID code and personal password. Subscribers can access their data on a user-friendly website in real time from anywhere in the world via a smartphone, mobile device, PC…really any device with an Internet connection for complete 24/7 control over their personal data.
Like many technological innovations through the years, CyberSynchs, and my transformation from budding musical artist to entrepreneur, were quite accidental. The process was also borne of frustration, and ultimately by necessity.
Routinely putting in 14-hour days in the recording studio, I had become highly dependent on my smartphone. When its screen went completely and irrevocably black after only six months of use, I contacted both the manufacturer and service provider expecting, or at least hoping, for a quick resolution. Alarmingly for me at the time, neither could do anything to recover my lost data, which included thousands of key personal contacts, emails, text messages, photos, and music files. A musician without music files? In essence, I founded CyberSynchs out of sheer frustration.
It was June 2008. I personally invested $100,000 to get the operation up and running from my studio apartment. While I possessed no prior entrepreneurial experience, I quickly learned a key tenet to launching and running a successful business: finding and hiring the best people to manage various functions and operations. To that end, I had a chief technology officer in place by August to begin developing and implementing what is now our system.
By November, in the throes of the country’s economic collapse, we had hired a core number of talented, though suddenly out-of-work technicians, quickly forming our in-house application development team. Soon thereafter, an outside investor acquired 5 percent of CyberSynchs with a $500,000 investment.
My networking efforts netted our company’s partnership with Sun, a technological and business coup as this gave us the ability to develop applications on JAVAFX and access the Sun Cloud. Because Sun distributes CyberSynchs within JAVAFX, the agreement swiftly and exponentially expanded our technology’s market penetration.
Our company’s expanded reach from a strictly mobile-centric to a universal data synchronization company earlier this year represented the latest rung in our step-by-step growth plan, which also includes the licensing of our product to major corporations for integration into their devices. CyberSynchs is also in discussions with several automobile manufacturers to embed our technology into on-board computer systems, as well as with two retail chains toward broadening our offerings’ distribution.
We are fielding four separate venture capital offers to meet our goal of raising an additional $5 million by the end of August. That said, we will continue to run a lean operation. There are 15 of us; at the most I envision a staff of 25 to 30. To achieve further growth, we will continue to follow the licensing model that has enabled us to achieve our success to date. Entrepreneur Magazine listed CyberSynchs as one of its “100 Brilliant Companies” for 2010. Being named Black Enterprise’s Innovator of the Year for 2010 personally humbled me.
CyberSynchs will maintain an innovation-centric corporate entrepreneurial culture designed to promote and continually develop the best-of-breed technology solutions to meet market needs. That’s how this whole thing started. The recovery of data on my crashed smartphone, after all, represented both a personal and market need.
CyberSynchs - www.cybersynchs.com
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
Tesla Motors rings Wall Street’s bell (via VentureBeat)
Homerun For SunRun: Sequoia Capital Leads $55 Million Financing (via TechCrunch)
Motion-sensor chip maker InvenSense files to go public (via GamesBeat)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
Tesla bumps IPO from $178M to $244M with one day to go (via GreenBeat)
Geodelic Scores $7 Million To Boost Its Location-Aware Mobile Apps Business (via TechCrunch)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
eBay founder Omidyar leads $5.5M for D.light’s solar lanterns (via GreenBeat)
Pearltrees lands $1.6M more for social discovery on the Web (via DealsBeat)
Triggit Raises $4.2 Million For Its Demand Side Ad Platform (via TechCrunch)
Company: Knewton
Website: www.knewton.com
Headquarters: New York City
Year Founded: 2008
Founder: Jose Ferreira
Investors: FirstMark Capital, Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital; angel investors
Employees: 45
Company Description:
“Knewton is replacing mass education with personalized learning.”
By Jose Ferreira, CEO
The idea of learning on the Internet is difficult for some people to swallow; the phrase “online education” evokes grainy one-way video lectures, boring, ineffective lessons, and/or slimy for-profit degree mills.
Knewton is none of the above.
Instead, with the help of our revolutionary adaptive learning engine, we at Knewton are out to prove that online learning works—and in fact, can be more engaging, effective, and scalable than traditional classroom approaches. We currently use an initial version of our adaptive learning engine in our online GMAT, SAT, and LSAT courses.
The idea for Knewton first came to me 18 years ago, when I began working at Kaplan. I saw a lot of unproven instructors teaching students at local Kaplan centers, and got tired of telling students they needed help in broad areas like “geometry.” I wanted to be able to target students’ weaknesses at a much more granular—and meaningful—level.
Now, the technology has finally caught up with the vision. Adaptive learning—the notion that computers can improve educational outcomes—has been around for a long time, but most approaches have been on a small scale, or reliant on overly simplified technologies. Our adaptive learning platform facilitates the tagging and organizing of all educational material, delivers and assesses learning items, and serves optimized learning content for each individual student. With Knewton, all educational content will become dynamic, interactive, and individualized. In our SAT course, instead of telling a student he needs help with geometry, we can tell him that while he has a firm handle on the fact that all radii in the same circle are equal, he needs more strategies for 3-4-5 right triangles, and here are some practice questions on that topic. That’s adaptive learning—and it’s a very powerful tool.
Our courses’ adaptivity isn’t their only selling point. At Knewton, we also pride ourselves on our superior customer service, satisfaction, and teacher quality (our Net-Promoter Score is a 70, vastly superior to many other test-prep companies, whose scores hover around 10 or 20). We bring excellent teaching to students anywhere in the world; to ensure personalized attention and interactivity, our test-prep courses are team-taught and use live chat. Because we are online, we have less overhead than traditional brick and mortar providers and can sell our courses for a fraction of the price of our competitors. We also offer unheard of money-back guarantees (an increase of 50 points on the GMAT, 150 on the SAT, and 5 on the LSAT).
The potential for the Knewton platform goes far beyond the GMAT, however. Knewton’s vision is to revolutionize test prep, and then open up our platform to third-party content providers to allow the technology to power education in the broadest sense. The world is in the midst of a one-time rapid migration of the world’s educational content, from print to digital. Knewton’s adaptive learning engine will systemize this content, merging learning items with content management systems to make relevant educational material available to students around the globe.
Our platform combines a number of different technologies, including a proficiency engine that tells us each student’s unique learning profile, and a concept prioritization engine that determines which specific learning item to serve up, at which time. To power these engines, we’re building self-serve interfaces, auto-tagging tools, and APIs integrated with major repositories of educational content.
Years from now, when we’re done, teachers, trainers, and publishers alike will be able to manage and distribute their content in ways they never thought possible. We’re also developing complex algorithms that will query previous students’ data; as more students and content are entered into the system, our recommendations will become smarter.
As far as we know, no other team in the world is working to combine these technologies in such a comprehensive way.
We currently have 45 full-time employees, up from 30 in December ’09. We closed a third round of funding in April 2010, led by FirstMark Capital, to bring our total capital to just under $20 million. Other investors include Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and prominent angel investors like Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman.
Knewton - www.knewton.com
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
HP Goes NuTsie For Melodeo, Pays $30 Million For Music Streaming Service (via TechCrunch)
PapayaMobile raises $4M, launches mobile social game platform for Android (via VentureBeat)
Online Targeting Company Resonate Networks Raises $5 Million (via TechCrunch)
Silego Technology brings in $5.75M for clock products (via DealsBeat)
ViaCLIX gets $3.1M to merge internet with TV (via DealsBeat)
Today’s funding roundup:
Playdom raises $33M in funding to fuel social gaming acquisition spree (via GamesBeat)
Online Privacy Startup ReputationDefender Raises $15 Million (via TechCrunch)
Snaptu raises $6M to make Java phones more iPhone-like (via MobileBeat)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
Opscode Gets $11M to Take on IBM and HP Management Software (via gigaom)
Semantic Web Startup Inform Technologies Lands $4 Million, New CMO (via TechCrunch)
The CEO of Airbnb, a startup website that connects travelers with bed-and-breakfasts, rooms in private homes, and short-term rental apartments, has embarked on a five-month journey where he'll live around San Francisco in rentals found on his site. Talk about immersing yourself in your work.
Airbnb, a Y-Combinator-funded company, was founded in 2007 by CEO Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. Now Chesky is putting his own business to the ultimate test.
It’s an interesting way to promote the company and it's bound to generate considerable media buzz—more startups should do this sort of thing. If you want to follow Chesky’s big adventure, you can on Airbnb’s blog: http://blog.airbnb.com/
Funding and acquisitions roundup for a Friday:
Tesla Motors hopes to raise at least $178M in much-anticipated IPO (via San Jose Mercury News)
Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital Opens For Business with $8.5 Million Angel Fund (via TechCrunch)
Solyndra nixes its IPO, but brings in $175M to keep the ball rolling (via GreenBeat)
Taiwan Semi Takes $50 Million Stake In Solar Startup Stion (via Barron’s)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
It’s Official: AOL Sells Bebo to Criterion Capital Partners (via Mashable)
Apptera Raises Another $10 Million For Its Voice & Visual Mobile Advertising Network (via TechCrunch)
SafetyWeb Secures $8 Million So Parents Can Better Secure Their Kids Online (via TechCrunch)
Rakuten to acquire France’s PriceMinister for approximately €200 million (via TechCrunch)
Format Dynamics raises $5.5 million for targeted print advertising (via DealsBeat)
AlienVault lands $4M for IT security tools (via VentureBeat)
Former Forbes CEO invests in WebMynd’s publisher tool (via MediaBeat)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
Bill.com Raises Another $8.5 Million To Streamline Business Bill Payments (via TechCrunch)
BaseKit raises $2.6m for its ‘Photoshop-to-website’ service, launches in UK and US (via TechCrunch)
Worlize Is Building A User-Generated Social Gaming Platform, Raises Funding (via TechCrunch)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
FarmVille Maker Zynga Has Now Raised a Whopping $366 Million (via Mashable)
Custom chip maker eASIC brings in $10.7M (via DealsBeat)
Using games to make movies, Machinima.com raises $9M (via GamesBeat)
Cardiovascular Simulation raises $10M for medical research (via DealsBeat)
Context Optional Acquires Facebook App Development Platform Buzzeo (via TechCrunch)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
Gogobot Unveils Plans To Evolve Online Travel, Takes $4 Million From Battery Ventures (via TechCrunch
News Corp. Buys E-Reading Platform Skiff From Hearst, Invests In Journalism Online (via TechCrunch)
picoChip Gets a $20M Boost for Femtocells (via gigaom)
Ex-Slingshot Execs Raise $5 Million For Social Commerce Startup BeachMint (via TechCrunch)
888 Holdings acquires online gaming firm Mytopia for $18M (via GamesBeat)
Consolidation In IT Services Land: NTT DATA Buys Intelligroup For $200 Million (via TechCrunch IT)
Sonicbids Acquires ArtistData To Help Musicians Get More Exposure On The Web (via TechCrunch)
The web is abuzz this morning about Microsoft’s Kinect launch event (or should we call it a “hype event”) last night. So far it has been the highlight of the E3 video games show in L.A. (which officially opens today), and takes motion gaming, popularized by Nintendo’s Wii, to a whole new level with body-motion emulation—no “wand” controller needed.
The technology behind Kinect comes from Microsoft’s acquisition last year of 3DV Systems, a Portland, Oregon-based startup. 3DV pioneered the use of a 3D, motion sensing camera system, which it called the ZCam. As of the end of 2008 when the acquisition happened, the camera was still in its development stage—apparently Microsoft is now close to having it market-ready.
According to reports, 3DV had raised about $38.5 million in funding, and Microsoft purchased the company for $30 to $35 million. 3DV’s investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and RDC Rafael Development Corp.
There are several other startups working on similar technology, we'll no doubt hear more about these companies in the coming months with Microsoft raising the ante in the game console world.
If you’re a startup beyond the idea stage looking to partner with one of the world’s best-known brands, Mashable and PepsiCo. are seeking submissions for a “Startup Challenge” competition. The winners will have the unique opportunity to have their service used in PepsiCo. marketing initiatives. Here are some of the details:
PepsiCo is looking for companies that are already beyond the idea stage and stand to benefit by having their emerging technology products piloted by one of their brands (and in turn becoming a case study), which include Frito-Lay, Gatorade and SoBe, among many others. Thus, one of the requirements for startups is that they’ve already raised between $250,000-$10,000,000 or are doing at least $250,000 per year.
For more, check out: Mashable and PepsiCo Partner for New Startup Challenge
Funding and acquisitions roundup for today:
Soonr lands $4.5M to expand its cloud offerings for work on the go (via MobileBeat)
CoolSystems raises $2.25M to heal sports injuries (via DealsBeat)
Avantis Medical Systems brings in $2.1M to detect cancer (via DealsBeat)
Phoenix Ditches Virtualization Product Line, Sells Assets To HP For $12 Million (via TechCrunch)
Crowdcast raises $6M to tap the wisdom of your workforce (via SocialBeat)
Akamai Acquires Mobile Web Development Company Velocitude (via TechCrunch)
Collecta Raises $5M for Real-Time Search (via Mashable)
Chinese AutoNavi, provider to Bing Maps, files for $100M U.S. IPO (via VentureBeat)
The New York Times published a compelling piece yesterday by Tom Friedman about the need for more government incentives for startups. He calls on the expertise of Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, and Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International for ideas on how the Obama Administration can help stimulate the creation of more startups. These are all good ideas—some more realistic than others—but the most salient point Friedman makes is that startups and entrepreneurship ultimately drive healthy economies…and create better jobs. Here’s the article: A Gift for Grads: Start-Ups
Today’s funding and acquisition roundup:
Well-known angels back local services startup Thumbtack.com (via DealsBeat)
Zokem raises $2.4M for holistic mobile analytics (via MobileBeat)
Even on iPhone Day, there is indeed some funding news:
Olympus Capital debuts with $150M for cleantech, IT amid VC turbulence (via GreenBeat)
RevenueLoan Raises $6 million To Loan Your Startup Money (via TechCrunch)
Cyber cafe management startup OneRoof lands $3.4M (via DealsBeat)
Today’s funding and acquisition roundup:
Hearst to buy search marketing star iCrossing for $325M (via VentureBeat)
Velti acquires Media Cannon to expand its mobile ad business (via MobileBeat)
BookRenter raises $10M to challenge Chegg in textbook rentals (via DealsBeat)
Rummble raises further $800k to boost its UX and expand team (via TechCrunch Europe)
Not many startups would be so bold as to call themselves a Facebook alternative, but Diaspora, a project started by four NYU students, is doing just that. And, amazingly, they just raised $200K in contributions from 6,500 different backers through the Kickstart site (their original goal was $10K). Facebook backlash indeed. As MG Siegler at TechCrunch notes, it will be interesting to see what they do with the money. But if boldness is a crucial component to entrepreneurial success, these guys just might hit it big.
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
Google Acquires Advertising Platform Invite Media (via Mashable)
Transpera lands $9M more for mobile video advertising platform (via DealsBeat)
Hercules Technology Growth Capital lends $111M to nine companies, still has more to invest (via VentureBeat)
Note-taking app developer Snaptic raises $2.3M (via VentureBeat)
Today’s funding and acquisitions roundup:
Eric Schmidt And Founder Collective Giiv Mobile-Gifting Startup $3.35 Million (via TechCrunch)
Awareness Technologies raises $6.5M as security sector stays hot (via VentureBeat)
FetchBack Fetches $40 Million From GSI Commerce (via TechCrunch)
Crowley, Founder Collective And IA Ventures Put $2.5M In Realtime Data Startup Metamarkets (via TechCrunch)
Kudzu Interactive Raises $7M To Bolster Growth Of Digital Ordering Service Snapfinger (via TechCrunch)
