The latest from TechCrunch
- Square Closes That $100 Million Round, Mary Meeker Joins Board
- Accel, Khosla, and Andreessen Horowitz Pour Another $30 Million Into Social Browser RockMelt
- Meet The Newest Startup Brood From i/o Ventures
- Fitocracy Brings Games And Social To Your Workouts (Invites Within)
| Square Closes That $100 Million Round, Mary Meeker Joins Board | Top |
| It’s official. Jack Dorsey’s Square has joined the billion dollar valuation club . The mobile payments startup closed a $100 million series C led by Kleiner Perkins, a story we broke a few weeks ago. The new round values Square above $1 billion. Tiger Management is also an investor. And Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst who is now a partner at Kleiner, will get a board seat. She will join other new board members Vinod Khosla and Larry Summers . Square is bringing credit card payments to a new class of merchants and, eventually consumers. It’s shipped more than 500,000 credit card readers , is processing more than a million transactions per month, and more than $3 million a day. It recently launched an iPad app to replace cash registers and Square devices are now sold in Apple Stores . CrunchBase Information Square Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Mary Meeker Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Accel, Khosla, and Andreessen Horowitz Pour Another $30 Million Into Social Browser RockMelt | Top |
| Is there a future for social browser startup RockMelt ? Despite attracting only a few hundred thousand active users since its much-hyped launch, the company filled with ex-Netscape rockstars and backed by former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen just managed to raise another $30 million in a B round led by Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway, Bill Campbell and Josh Kopelman also participating. Jim Breyer of Accel and Vinod Khosla will be joining the board as observers. That’s some pretty serious money. What do these investors see in RockMelt that most users don’t ? Could it have anything to do with the special interest Facebook is showing towards the social browser? After all, both Marc Andreessen and Jim Breyer are now board members of both RockMelt and Facebook. Seems like an interesting coincidence. There are a few possibilities here. One is that Facebook will end up buying RockMelt if it feels it needs to get into the browser game . But if that was the case, why not just buy them right now before this round, when RockMelt was still cheap? Maybe Facebook is ambivalent about having its own browser. In the meantime, it is helping RockMelt with engineering resources. But that is not enough. And that brings us to the second possibility. RockMelt needs to start getting users, lost of them, millions. It needs to prove that it is not just another Flock flop . And that millions of people want a social browser with Facebook chat and sharing built in everywhere they go across the Web (no wonder Mark Zuckerberg likes it). But getting millions of users costs money. You either have built-in distribution like Google, Microsoft, and Apple or you have to pay money in online marketing and distribution deals to acquire new users. That’s where the $30 million comes in. During an interview with CEO Eric Vishria this spring, I asked him why RockMelt had so few users. “Our focus has been engagement,” he told me. “In the next couple of months we will shift to grow the number of users in a serious way.” I think we are going to see that now. How many users will $30 million get RockMelt? Up until now, RockMelt has depended on viral distribution. But Vishria broke down those numbers for me as well, and they don’t look that good. While about half of all people who have tried RockMelt invite an average of 4.8 friends to also try it, only 18 percent of those actually converts, or one out of those five. So what you end up with is that each user recruits one new user, on average. That translates into slow and steady growth, but not the hockey-stick curves RockMelt needs to be taken seriously. And even if RockMelt can become an independent player in the browser market—which means taking share from Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Safari—its a tough market to be in. All the other browsers are essentially subsidized by bigger companies (even Firefox is dependent on Google search dollars). So not only does RockMelt have to figure out a way to get a lot more users, it also has to figure out how to make money from them. Or else just get big enough that Facebook has to buy them. CrunchBase Information RockMelt Accel Partners Khosla Ventures Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Meet The Newest Startup Brood From i/o Ventures | Top |
| The i/o Ventures Demo Day starts in a little under a half an hour, and I am about to head over to Valencia Street to watch the startups present. i/o Ventures is the SF-based incubator that offers five or six startups a 4-6 month long spot in its 7,000 square foor loft/coffee shop space as well as $25,000 in seed money, in exchange for around 8% of the company. We’ve covered some of the companies before, put I am publishing a preliminary list here (to be updated as I watch their presentations). CodeEval ( our coverage ) – A platform for interviewing and testing programmers, CodeEval lets companies automate the process of filtering job candidates through giving them a coding challenge. CodeEval co-founder Jimmy John estimates that there are 13.5 million developers in the US alone, with a $10.6 billion global market. ” We want to make this the de-facto standard of hiring across the board,” John says. Pieceable ( our coverage ) — Pieceable, which just released Pieceable Viewer, is a platform that attempts to make mobile development easier by offering customers ready-made components for iOS apps and an interactive app Q&A platform on a web browser. Prepay — A mobile loyalty program that offers customers prepaid store credit, allowing them to save up to 10-20% on purchases. For example merchants can sell $100 lunch credit to frequent customers for $120, or buy back unwanted store credit. Cortex ( our coverage ) — A sharing platform and browser extension that allows you to rapidly share web content like videos, images and links via its menu. Cortex is the fastest growing app in the Chrome web store, and is currently seeing 1 share a second with around 87K shares a day. Mobbles – “Pokemon meets Tamagotchi,” a mobile game that lets you raise and fight whimsical creatures called Mobbles with the added benefit of geolocation. “We're not inventing a new concept, we're just mixing together already successful content,” said co-founder Alexandre Curtelin bringing up that Pokemon has already brought in 30 billion in revenue. i/o Ventures co-founder Paul Bragiel tells me that the over-arching theme in this spring’s class is consumer internet gaming and mobile, and that the incubator prefers startups with at least one technical co-founder. When asked about the relatively small size of the class, he said, “We are not interested in being a factory and we are super selective.” i/o picked five out of a pool of 500 applicants for this spring’s group. When asked what it took to be an i/o Ventures company, he replied, “At the end of the day we ask ourselves ‘would we have started a company with these guys when we were younger.’” Rad. Out of the six companies in the last batch of i/o startups, two were acquired and the rest all raised financing of between $500,000 – $1 million to execute on their ideas. See you at the meetup. You can read more about the last i/o Ventures demo day here and watch a video of Bragiel describing the program, below. CrunchBase Information i/o Ventures Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Fitocracy Brings Games And Social To Your Workouts (Invites Within) | Top |
| You may not have heard of them quite yet, but a startup called Fitocracy is pretty hot right now. Six months into its private beta and Fitocracy has already gathered 18K users and has 8K more on the wait list. (And we have 1,200 free beta invites here , so click away!) But, ‘why is Fitocracy so hot right now?’ you ask in your best Zoolander impression. Well, for starters, Fitocracy brings role playing game mechanics and a social aspect to online fitness — and it’s got a great name. What’s more, Fitocracy blew up on Reddit and a few fitness forums because it has a backstory that a lot of people (especially the nerdly-inclined) can identify with. Fitocracy Founders Brian Wang and Richard Talens are college friends and are both currently fitness buffs and have been known to even compete in a body-building competition or two. But it wasn’t always that way. Wang is a self-described skinny kid and Talens a self-described chubby guy. Their not-exactly ballooning in muscles (and the inspiration for their startup) is largely due to the fact that both guys are long-time gamers, having been playing MMO and RPGs since Ultima Online and Chrono Trigger. Of course, today, they look like this . (Oh, and here’s a before-and-after picture of Richard, FTW .) So, the founders decided to approach fitness exactly as they did their favorite RPGs: Give people a reason to get excited about, or addicted to, fitness by bringing the gaming reward system to workout routines. For example, when you join, it won’t be long before other users are offering you Fitocracy’s version of a workout plan, called “quests”, in which you are encouraged to do a certain number of squats, lifts, crunches, etc. The platform awards you with points, the ability to level-up, badges and more to get you dedicated to your fitness and treating it like a game, rather than some arduous task you’d rather put off until never. Of course, you’re going to be a lot less likely to adopt (and stick to) a workout routine without a little encouragement. Points are nice, but we need that carrot — that positive reinforcement to keep going. Which is why Wang and Talens have added a social aspect to Fitocracy — to build an environment of support and social reinforcement to keep people trucking on their personal fitness quests. You can interact with friends, share regimens, points-earned on social networks, get advice from others in various forums, and so on. Another reason why fitness has such a high drop out rate is that, for any number of reasons, many people fail to see quick results from their workouts. (See any exercising infomercial on television if you think this isn’t a problem.) A lot of times, we’re too lazy to seek out advice or research the right routines. Adding game elements, social layers, and significantly shortening the feedback loop all work towards increasing retention and keep you coming back. I had one Fitocracy user tell me that, in just three months of using the site, he had already dropped a waist size and added significant muscle mass. With a platform targeted at tech-savvy people, and for those of us who may live largely sedentary or laptop-centric lives, this is music to our ears. Of course, Fitocracy does face some competition from another hot startup — Boston-based RunKeeper, which is building a platform that allows users to integrate all of their various health gadgets and apps in one place online. While RunKeeper has built a data-driven service with an open API (as part of what they call their “HealthGraph”) and is mobile on iOS, Fitocracy is more focused on gaming and, of course, less on running. In light of its competition, Fitocracy could definitely use some more information on nutrition and some mobility — it would be great to be able to tap into Fitocracy when at the gym or on-the go. Though, as I understand it, both of these are at the top of the team’s priority list. Fitocracy is currently looking to raise a seed round, somewhere in the ballpark of $500K I’m told, and is courting fitness-loving investors. It’s a cool site, and a great idea. It’s about time someone created a RPG for fitness, so that nerds can get back to doing what they do best: Kicking ass. And also earning XPs. CrunchBase Information Fitocracy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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