Venture Capital Archive

Here’s the latest NYC venture capital news:

TechAviv Angels Launch

TechAviv founder Yaron Samid has announced the launch of a new angel investing group named TechAviv Angels. Several popular NYC startup founders are part of the group including Ron Yekutiel from Kaltura and Yaron Galai from Outbrain. It looks like about 15 entrepreneurs make up the TechAviv Angels group. In addition, a number of early stage VC firms are participating as well.

From the announcement, “We seek to identify, fund and mentor our next generation of big winners. Every two months in Tel Aviv 5 startups get 5 minutes to pitch in front of our members. We’re an informal Angel club with members investing individually.”

It’s free to present and the first demo night will be held on November 24. I am unsure of is if the demo event will be held in NYC or in Israel. I will update this post once I find out the answer. More details on Ouriel Ohayon’s blog.

RRE Offers Office Hours

NYC VC firm RRE Ventures has announced that they will now offer office hours beginning on November 9. Each entrepreneur can signup for a 15-minute slot and discuss any topic with the venture capital team at RRE. RRE has invested in a number of NYC-based startups including Adaptive Blue, Drop.io and GoMobo.

Venture Capital firm First Round Capital (FRC) has announced the opening of a new NYC office today. The NYC office is First Round Capital’s third office – their other locations are near Philadelphia and in San Francisco. The NYC office will be headed by parner Howard Morgan. Morgan spoke at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable event earlier this year where he provided insight into his thoughts on venture capital and some thoughts on what FRC looks for in the startups they invest in.

Additionally, nextNY founder Charlie O’Donnell will join the FRC team as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR). O’Donnell is a popular figure in the New York startup scene and he is also the founder of career startup Path 101. Check out all of our Path 101 coverage.

O’Donnell notes in his announcement post that Path 101 isn’t going away but two of the three founders will continue  the project with a nights and weekend development cycle.  Co-founder Alex Lines has taken a position with NY-based Betaworks.

Content sharing and bookmarking service Shareaholic has announced a new round of angel funding this week. Founder Jay Meattle says that they raised a, “few hundred thousand”. Meattle also notes that more items are shared each day via Shareaholic than on Digg.

Xconomy has more details on the funding.  The full list of Shareaholic’s angel investors includes:

• Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
• Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
• Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
• Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
• David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete
• Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
• Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It looks like their business model will be based on data usage. Check out our post about their buzz monitor launch from this past summer.

Last week at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable, Chapter President of Keiretsu Forum New York Tri-State, Larry Chaityn provided an overview of a good venture capital presentation. While I was not in attendance this month, Larry has allowed me to post the presentation below and you can also download the presentation.

The idea behind the presentation is to help you create the most ideal pitch to secure the funding your startup is seeking. There is a discussion about font sizing, market, what’s the problem your startup is solving, customer base, go-to market strategy, team (what makes the team special), along with information on financials and competition.

Based in Rome, password manager service Passpack has announced new funding this week. The new funding adds 70,000 euros to their previous angel round of 350,000 euros raised in June 2008. Passpack is managed by co-founders Tara Kelly (U.S. citizen) and Francesco Sullo (Italian Citizen). The new funding is provided by Zernike Meta Ventures (ZMV).

The Passpack announcement about the funding goes into great detail about how the funds will be used. The list includes: continued product development, infrastructure, marketing, more content on their blog and some secret items which they won’t share at this time.

With all of the talk last week of busted Twitter passwords and the push for passwords that look like ‘dsdk2929!@#$a924′ , Passpack might be in a perfect position to capitalize on the current buzz.

Webware’s Josh Lowensohn has a good review of Passpack. Additional reviews on Mashable and Lifehacker.

NY-based Groupable has announced a new angel round of funding in the amount of $300,000. The Funders Group, LLC led the round, with The Venture Capital division of Insurial Americas, Inc. joining the round.  Groupable notes that the funding will be used to further develop the company’s online marketplace platform.

Groupable provides a marketplace bringing together online/offline groups and sponsors. The company describes their service as, “We are an online marketplace connecting groups of all types to corporate and local sponsors.” The concept is interesting because so many groups and recurring meetups are always looking for a helping hand from a sponsor for food, venue, etc.

To learn more about Groupable, checkout our initial review. My only concern with Groupable is the ability to get a large enough supply of sponsors into the network. Today’s announcement of their angel round of funding should help gain more groups and sponsors.

Tonight at the Entrepreneur’s Roundtable, Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson provided feedback for a variety of startups who pitched their ideas. I will post the pitches over the next couple of days. At the beginning of the event, Fred opened up the conversation for a Q&A and I’ve posted the video below.

When asked what Fred looks for in a deal he noted:

• they look for companies that are changing the game in a big way
• companies that are shaking something up
• companies that work better than the companies in the sector
• some of the areas they are looking for deals in education, finance, energy, environment and government

Other topics in the video:

• dealsize USV looks for
• discusses his blog
• why Boxee is doing great things
• potential venture regulation
• general vc market commentary

Read the rest of this entry »