08May

Gamification Startup SessionM Raises $20M Led by Charles River Ventures

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SessionM, a startup led by Quattro Wireless co-founder Lars ALbright, just announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series B round of funding.

The round was led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from past investors Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. CRV partner Jon Auerbach is joining the SessionM board. The company declined to comment on the valuation, but apparently VentureWire is reporting that the round values SessionM at $100 million.

Quattro, of course, was acquired by Apple and became the basis of the company’s iAd program. Albright led business development on iAd until he left to start SessionM, initially raising a $6.5 million round from Kleiner’s iFund and Highland.

When SessionM launched in March, Albright told me his goal was to improve engagement and retention in mobile apps, by adding a lightweight game layer. As users perform different activities in an app, they can unlock different achievements and earn rewards through the company’s mPoints program. The technology also provides a new advertising opportunity for brands.

In the funding press release Albright says that SessionM is increasing app usage by nearly 2x and seeing ad clickthrough rates that are 20x the industry average.



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07May

Google Ventures-Backed Location-Sharing Service EchoEcho Raises $750k From Bullpen, PROfounders

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EchoEcho is one of the more useful location-based applications on the market today. Instead of focusing on check-ins and deals, the application simply makes it easy for you to find out where your friends are and lets you set up a meeting with them. Last September, EchoEcho raised $750,000 from Google Ventures, UK-based venture firm PROfounders and Don Dodge. The company just told us that it has raised another $750,000. This round was led by Bullpen Capital with participation by PROfounders Capital. EchoEcho plans to use this new funding to grow its team and focus on user acquisition.

In its current iteration, EchoEcho lets you quickly figure out where one of your friends currently is with just a few taps. To ensure privacy, your location is also automatically shared with the friends you try to locate. From there, you can either use the built-in chat to organize a meeting or use the app’s built-in location database to decide on which bar, coffee shop, restaurant or other public place you want to meet at. Users who don’t have the app installed will receive a text message and can then use the service’s web app to update their location. EchoEcho is currently available for all the major smartphone platforms, including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Phone. The company’s current and future development efforts will focus on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, however.

EchoEcho was founded in 2010 and the company has been iterating over this problem of how to make location-sharing useful ever since. The core concepts behind the app (simplicity and privacy) haven’t really changed since then, though. In a day and age where biannual pivots aren’t unusual, that’s a long time to work on a single product, but the work is clearly starting to pay off for EchoEcho. The company’s co-founder and CEO Nick Bicanic told us that he has some major announcements planned for later this summer, but sadly refused to provide us with more details at this stage.

Talking about today’s investment, Bullpen’s Duncan Davidson told us that Bullpen likes to “invest in essential mobile apps that everyone should be using. A Find Friends app is such an app. EchoEcho is designed to be useful, not cute. It remains in the control of the user, and makes it easier for people to meet up, rather than broadcast ambient location or require a check-in.”

We also asked Don Dodge about his reasons for investing in EchoEcho in the previous round. In his view, the need for accurate location services is exploding. Dodge also noted that he thinks, “Nick Bicanic is a true visionary in location-based services, and EchoEcho is a great example of what can be done.”

With this new funding, EchoEcho plans to add more group features to the app. Group features have long been missing from the app. As Bicanic told me, it took the team a long time to figure out how to best design this functionality. The company is also working on providing better support for indoor location and has partnered with Walkbase and WiFiSlam (another company Don Dodge invested in) to improve its indoor location features (it first tested these features at SXSW earlier this year and is currently running at trial at Stanford University as well). Also on EchoEcho’s roadmap is support for tablets and integration with Facebook.

What’s interesting about the company is that it is also looking outside the traditional markets for location apps. It just did a deal with Pioneer, for example, to bring its service to Pioneer’s AppRadio platform for in-car apps. In addition to this, as Bicanic told me, the company is also thinking about how mobile location technology could be used in developing countries to, for example, locate doctors or a mobile ATM.

At its core, though, EchoEcho is about figuring out how to best answer the question, “Where are you?” Bicanic is pretty outspoken about the fact that he doesn’t think ambient location tools like Highlight are the answer to this, as there are too many technological and social issues (think battery life and privacy) that currently condemn these apps to remain niche products. Instead, he says, people just want to figure out when and where to pick up their friend at the airport or where to best meet for coffee.



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02May

Crowdstar Raises $11.5M To Double Down On Mobile Gaming, Has Layoffs As It Leaves Facebook Behind

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It’s a sign of the times. Crowdstar is through with making games for Facebook and the company has just raised another $11.5 million to double-down on their move toward mobile gaming. The company’s existing investors including Time Warner, Intel Capital, YouWeb, The9, and NV Investments all topped up, bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million. Chief executive Peter Relan says there are some new investors too, but he couldn’t disclose who they are.

“Last year’s mission was pivot to mobile and this year’s mission is profitable growth,” Relan said in an interview. “We see the mobile market as five to six times larger than the Facebook social games market.”

You may know Crowdstar from such absurdist titles as Top Girl and Social Girl. In the game, you’re a girl who needs to buy virtual clothing, meet other virtual girlfriends and get a virtual boyfriend. At times, the game’s notifications have screamed at me, “YOU’RE NOT HOT ENOUGH!” I have also dated “Kevin, the Cutter of Meat” in the original Top Girl game.

Unlike Zynga, Crowdstar’s titles skew a little younger. They’re for women ages 13 to 30. The mobile versions of the games have brought Crowdstar 25 million users and revenues are 80 percent from iOS and 20 percent from Android. Google Play and Amazon’s appstore are even in total monthly revenue. Amazon’s users are more lucrative. But since there are fewer of them, it balances out overall.

With the funding, Crowdstar is also laying off about 25 people on the Facebook side of the company. Relan says he’s finding them jobs with other companies in his network. (He runs the gaming-centric YouWeb incubator, which has spawned companies like OpenFeint, which sold to GREE last year for $104 million.)

“ The people no longer staying at CrowdStars Facebook studios have already been referred to other YouWeb companies as well as other games companies that we regard with great respect,” he said.

That’s not to say that mobile gaming will be a cakewalk. The profit margins on the business has come under pressure over the last 18 months with increasing competition. Apple has also cracked down on cheaper, and more unscrupulous, ways of acquiring users like download bots and offer walls.

Recent exits in the space like OMGPOP’s sale to Zynga and yesterday’s sale of Funzio to GREE have also set a benchmark valuation of roughly $200 million for leading gaming companies. Crowdstar’s $35 million in funding doesn’t imply a lot of room for return for later investors.

But Relan says that Crowdstar’s approach is more defensible since it’s highly focused on one demographic sliver of the market: young women.

“We’re not Pocket Gems and we’re not TinyCo,” Relan said, referring to the companies that top-tier venture firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz have bet on. “They’re going for a non-selective audience. They’re competing against the Zyngas and GREEs of the world.”



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02May

DIY Mobile Website Creator bMobilized Raises $1.5M Series A, Prepares To Take On DudaMobile

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NY-based mobile web startup bMobilized, which bills itself as a competitor to the well-heeled new Google partner DudaMobile, has just closed its Series A round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. The funding was raised from two early stage European VC firms, Alliance Venture and Investinor.

Like DudaMobile, bMobilized is focused on enabling SMBs to convert their existing websites into HTML5-enabled mobile sites that work on any device, OS, or web browser.

According to CEO Ben Seslija, nine out of every ten small business websites don’t have mobile versions of their sites today – and yet, Americans are poised to spend an estimated $115 billion in goods and services on mobile devices by 2015. So yes, there’s clear market need for services operating in this space.

As for bMobilized, its core offering is a lot like DudaMobile’s, competing feature-by-feature with many of DudaMobile’s key advantages, including automatic sync, templating, speed, customizable widgets and more.

bMobilized says it uses 300 different algorithms to identify and analyze the different parts of the website, and then coverts that site to a mobile-friendly version in under 30 seconds. Also offered are over 30 features designed to improve the mobile experience, including things like a contact bar, maps, social sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn), support for a product promo window on the homepage, and more.

That contact bar is especially helpful, as it can be customized with widgets like “click-to-call,” “click-to-email,” “click-to-SMS” and more, which allows visitors to instantly connect with the business they’re researching.

Support for ad products is available, too, including text, image and video ads from Google AdWords, QR Code, and in-app ads. And again, like DudaMobile, the mobile sites automatically sync with the company’s main website when changes are made.

Pricing is competitive with DudaMobile’s product, for the most part. Although DudaMobile offers a free level of service, bMobilized’s monthly fees of either $5/month or $9/month (with support) are comparable to DudaMobile’s $9/mo. middle-of-the-road plan. So why choose one over the other? Well, obviously each company thinks their own offering is the better choice. Seslija just says customers should try out bMobilized for themselves to be convinced.

bMobilized, now a team of fourteen, was founded in 2005 in Oslo, Norway, but only relocated to NYC in 2010. Prior to this round, bMobilized had taken investment from European and U.S. firms, Tomas AS, Magnus Invest AS (the personal investment company for Birger Magnus, bMobilized chairman), Spring Capital, Redwood Partners, and Ignitas AS.



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27Apr

Misfit Wearables, The Startup From Agamatrix’s Founders, Former Apple CEO John Sculley, Raises $7.6M

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Google Glass isn’t the only game in town.

Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures.

Misfit isn’t saying too much about what it’s working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn’t compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn’t need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that’s so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there.

“Wearables from the 1.0 era make people look like Iron Man,” said chief executive Sonny Vu.

The name of the company has a super-interesting backstory. Up until last fall, Vu, Sculley and his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar, were tossing around some pretty lackluster name ideas like Etherware. He, Iyengar and Sculley were sitting around at a table at the Rosewood on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, having trouble deciding when news flashed that Steve Jobs had passed away.

“It was a real shame we never got them together after John’s departure from Apple, so we decided to name the company in honor of Steve,” Vu said.

The name Misfit Wearables is inspired by the opening line in the famous 1997 Apple commercial that launched the “Think Different” slogan: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”

The other thing that’s notable about the company is the team. Vu and Iyengar co-founded Agamatrix. It isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley, but it made the first medical device add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a glucose meter that diabetes patients use to test their blood sugar levels regularly.

Over 10 years, Vu and Iyengar built it into a business that makes between $50 and 100 million per year through the sale of glucose test strips. The two of them started tinkering with glucose sensing technology, and found a way that was twice as accurate as the leading technology on the market purely through better math. Vu said since most research and development teams working on glucose sensing were led by biologists, his team could fix inefficiencies that experts from other disciplines couldn’t see. When Agamatrix originally entered the market, there were more than 30 competing products. Yet they managed to gain a foothold.

Then when the iPhone came out, they dreamed up a new concept: a glucose meter that would upload and track a patient’s blood sugar levels through an app. It took nine months of back-and-forth with Apple to get approved it for the iPhone. It also took a few years for them to get insurance companies and Medicare to cover the cost of glucose meters for diabetes patients. The FDA cleared it last December and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis now markets it under the name iBG Star.

So for all of you who might complain about how hard it is start a mobile or Facebook app company, this was crazy hard!

Vu says he’s using the new round of funding to grow his team. He’s relocating to San Francisco from Boston where he’ll build a hardware and industrial design team locally. Then, interestingly enough, Misfit’s software team is located in Vietnam, because Vu found some world-class machine learning experts there that were trained in good U.S. technical Ph.D. programs like the one at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. (Honestly, this isn’t so crazy though. I run into companies every week that have serious development studios in Eastern Europe, Pakistan and East Asia.)

“We’re doing algorithms (machine learning) and app development in Vietnam because of speed, not just cost,” Vu said. “There’s lots of this kind of talent in Silicon Valley but they’re just not readily available, at least not to newcomers like us.”



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