OUYA Closes $15 Million In Funding Led By Kleiner Perkins, Boasts 12,000 Game Developer Sign-Ups
Today, gaming console and software company OUYA announced that they have closed a $15 million round led by Kleiner Perkins, and with participation from the Mayfield Fund, NVIDIA, Shasta Ventures and Ocean Partners. This marks one of the largest institutional investments to go to a project that had its humble beginnings on Kickstarter. OUYA is a company that launched back in 2012 on Kickstarter under the guiding hands of Julie Uhrman, a video game industry veteran who believes that gaming should be affordable and enjoyable for everyone. She and the team developed a $99 Android gaming console, which hooks into the TV and comes with automatic access to free-to-try games. It launched on the crowdfunding site to much fanfare, scoring $8.6 million in funding, which ends up being around 9x more than OUYA asked. Along with the $15 million round, which brings OUYA’s total amount of funding to $23.5 million, the company will also be bringing KPCB General Partner Bing Gordon on to the board of directors. ...
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Goldman Sachs' Anthony Noto On What To Look For In A CFO
Anthony Noto, the global co-head of Goldman Sachs’ global telecommunications, media and technology group in investment banking, took the stage at this morning’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 event to talk about the IPO market, trends, and other topics related to tech companies going public. In one interesting portion of the conversion, Noto offered his opinions on what startups should look for when they’re ready to hire their first CFO. Noto, for those unfamiliar, has a diverse background in the industry. Before serving as co-head of the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) Group at Goldman Sachs, he was co-head of the Global Media Group for TMT Investment Banking. He rejoined Goldman Sachs in 2010 after serving as the National Football League’s executive vice president and chief financial officer for nearly three years, where he oversaw finance and strategy functions, including corporate development, labor finance, operational finance and accounting, tax and treasury. And before ...
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AOL's Video Hat Trick: A Slate Of Original Content, Be On Creative Studio, And A Deal With FreeWheel + Mediaocean For Multiscreen Ad Buys
Online video is booming, and today AOL (owner of TechCrunch) unveiled three new initiatives that spell out how it plans to tackle it: 15 original, unscripted shows; a new creative studio, Be On, to create branded videos; and a deal with FreeWheel and Mediaocean to add in AOL’s video inventory to its platform, so that media buyers looking for multiscreen investments across TV and online video can include AOL in the mix. The news was unveiled at the company’s 2013 Digital Content NewFront event, the upfront event where AOL presents its strategy for the year ahead to key advertisers and agencies. The slate of content is not AOL’s move into Netflix-style dramas (for now, at least). Instead, it plays on the network of sites that AOL already owns in the news and information space, which also includes other tech sites like Engadget as well as the Huffington Post. Up to now the AOL On network, the video network that AOL launched last year to span all of those sites and more (the videos go ...
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Brian Pokorny Returns To SV Angel As A General Partner After Airbnb Talent Deal
Brian Pokorny, who led photo-sharing service Daily Booth and Batch into a talent acquisition by Airbnb, is returning to SV Angel as a general partner. He has a long history with the firm. He’s been a strategic partner of SV Angel since 2009, before he left to be CEO of photo-sharing site DailyBooth. He has also worked with Ron Conway on angel investing since 2006. Pokorny personally has stakes in companies like Twitter, Square, OMGPOP, Milo, Chomp, Tweetdeck, Circle, Bump, Posterous, Milk, Couple, Elepath, and MessageMe. “Investing feels very natural for me,” Pokorny said. “You get to see a variety of things and you get to be very close to startups at an early-stage.” Before working with SV Angel the first time, he worked at Google. Through that, being CEO of Daily Booth and being acquired into Airbnb, he says he’s seen companies at every phase from early-stage, to the hyper-growth period and then into becoming a large, mature corporation. “My passion kind of lies with early-stage ...
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ElectNext Raises $1.3M To Provide Contextual Political Data To News Sites
If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Digital News Ventures, Gabriel Investments, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Investor’s Circle. When I spoke with ElectNext’s founder and CEO, Keya Dannenbaum, she explained ElectNext as something similar to our own CrunchBase, providing widgets full of data for publications to embed: “We have a comprehensive underlying database (on politicians on our case as opposed to companies in the CrunchBase analogy) from which we create data-driven content that lives inside, and gives relevant context to, political news.” Dannenbaum knows politics, as she’s ...
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