by Jason Wilk on November 24, 2008
- CafePress just raised $8.3M in a Series C venture funding from Sequoia Capital.
- This brings the entire funding up to $23.8M (Sequoia accounts for $22.3M of that)
- CafePress lets users design, buy and sell merchandise such as t-shirts, hats, bags, mugs, bumper stickers and they take care of the manufacturing and shipping.
- The user-generated retail site claims they have over 6.5M members trading 150M+ products @ 11M uniques a month.
- Their biggest competitor, Zazzle, just announced a break-through in the user-generated products space by introducing an automatic design to embroidery technology. They have raised twice as much money as CafePress.
- It’s very interesting to follow Sequoia Capital’s investments. They were so eager to tell the world about how Good Times Are Over. Will they be so kind to tell us when they think it’s picking up again? Probably not.
Update: We are getting word that the funding rumors are false. Sounds like another case of false citizen journalism.
TC
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by Jason Wilk on October 16, 2008
- Sequoia backed, AdBrite, is laying off 40 employees or 40% of total staff.
- AdBrite’s CEO, Iggy Fanlo, had success through the last internet downturn when he fired 200 of 300 people at Shopping.com to get the company profitable and off to a $620M acquisition in 2005
- Adbrite is a top five advertising network, which serves 1.3B ad impressions a day across its 70,000 publishers.
- This is the perfect kind of company that can weather the storm by getting rid of a bunch of employees, especially a marketing exec.
- Last year they had revenues of $32M and this year they are on pace to beat that.
TC
by John Jorgensen on October 14, 2008
by John Jorgensen on October 13, 2008
- Turf.net has raised $225K from Harrison Metal Capital, following a $225K seed round from Y-combinator in January ‘08.
- Created by 4 co-founders (recent grads from Harvard and Yale, one of whom works for Google), Turf.net is an online capture the flag game super-imposed over Google Maps.
With all this talk of VCs only funding companies that increase productivity or reduce costs, its good to see that casual online gaming is still alive post-Lehman Bros. The only real reason to be more productive is to have more time to play games anyways. Take that Sequoia.
The Alarm Clock
by glu on October 13, 2008
- # of funds:
- Q3 07: 78
- Q3 08: 55 (-29%)
- $ raised:
- Q3 07: $9.2B
- Q3 08: $8.1B(-12%)
- Top 3 Funds:
- Sequoia Capital – $930M – late-stage fund
- Austin Ventures – $900M – middle-stage fund
- InterWest Partners – $650M – early-stage fund
- The numbers seem right on with the slow decline following last years bubble. Although, an important safety tip Egon: these stats are from before that recent economic thing.
No cause for concern here yah?
TC VB
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