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Evan
Williams’ Obvious Ventures Backs Breezeworks for Blue-Collar Productivity App
Timothy
Hay | San Francisco
Obvious
Ventures, a new firm launched by Twitter Inc. co-founder Evan Williams and serial entrepreneur James Joaquin, has said its mission is to back startups with a “world-positive” business model, or companies that can do well while also doing good.
Now
the firm has led a $5 million Series A round for San Francisco-based Breezeworks Inc., a company coming out of beta with a mobile platform that aims to give independent, mobile, blue-collar workers some of the technological sophistication that has become the
norm in large organizations and enterprises.
The
round, which Breezeworks said comprised $3.1 million in new equity and the conversion to equity of previous debt financing, was joined by Marc
Benioff of Salesforce.com, James Murdoch of 21st Century Fox Inc., Jeff
Skoll, David Sacks, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel.
Breezeworks
this week will release its mobile application for iOS devices, which will automate many of the daily operations of plumbers, locksmiths, electricians, housekeepers, fence installers and other mobile service professionals, Chief Executive Mathew Cowan said.
“There
have been technology-driven productivity gains all over the place, but this segment has been left out,” he said. “This is a tremendous part of the U.S. economy.”
The
app, which costs a flat $20 a month, handles scheduling, invoicing, payments, customer follow-up and other functions that have been neatly automated for larger businesses for years, Mr. Cowan said.
The
company has also been funded by Allen & Co., CRV (formerly Charles River Ventures), Harmony Partners and
XSeed Capital, according to its website.
Breezeworks,
which is also developing an Android version of its mobile platform, will go on the hunt for customers with its Series A round, the CEO said.
Mr.
Joaquin of Obvious Ventures said Breezeworks’ platform can help individual businesspeople remain independent, which will have a positive social impact.
“It’s
a digital democratization,” he said. “It’s making big-business tools accessible to all.”
Mr.
Joaquin, who previously founded startups that were acquired by AOL Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Apple Inc., takes a board seat at Breezeworks in the Series A round.
Mr.
Joaquin and Mr. Cowan of Breezeworks have known each other for years. Mr. Cowan was a co-founder of venture firm
Bridgescale, where Mr. Joaquin worked as a venture partner in 2007 and 2008, Mr. Joaquin said.
Obvious
Ventures is still in the midst of raising its inaugural fund, he said, and is precluded from providing any details about it.
While
the firm aims to be the lead investor in Series A rounds, the Breezeworks investment is the first the firm has done as the lead backer, he said.
Obvious
Ventures joined in one
of the largest venture rounds ever raised,
a $542 million round for visual-display company Magic Leap Inc., VentureWire records show.
The
firm has also invested in Workpop,
an online site for listing hourly-wage jobs, according to VentureWire records.
http://breezeworks.com
Write
to Timothy Hay at timot...@wsj.com
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Veradocs
Emerges with $14M to Stop Cloud Data From Leaking
By
Deborah GageMountain View, Calif.
Cloud
apps like Box and Dropbox make it easy for anyone to store and share documents. But they create worries for corporate IT departments, whose job is to prevent sensitive information from being leaked.
Veradocs
Inc. emerged Tuesday with $14 million in funding and a way to tackle the data leakage problem without forcing customers to shut cloud apps down. The funding was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors, including
Yahoo Inc. Chief Information Officer Mike Kail.
Veradocs
was founded in January and has been testing its software with hedge funds, media companies and other prospective customers that have highly sensitive information. Co-founder and Chief Executive Ajay Arora compares the software to Snapchat, the messaging service
that makes messages disappear that Facebook Inc. tried to acquire last year for nearly $3 billion. (Snapchat was
recently
valued at
$10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal).
With
Veradocs, individuals or corporate IT departments can, by right-clicking on a file, attach privileges to it, specifying who gets access and tracking where the data that make up the document are going. If anyone who isn't authorized
tries to get access, Veradocs has a
killswitch that revokes access to the data. Document privileges can be set globally by IT departments and can be changed in real time.
Mr.
Arora said he got the idea for Veradocs while working at a venture firm as an entrepreneur in residence after he and his co-founder, Prakash
Linga, sold their previous company
RAPSphere, which protected data and corporate applications on mobile devices that people brought to work.
As
an EIR, he said, he talked to more than 100 chief security officers, chief information officers and other IT executives who told him that with all the new ways for data to leak out of their companies, maintaining control over that data was their biggest concern.
But,
he said, by attaching security and policies to the data, “you can make them follow the data wherever they go…and not worry about plugging holes” in what are now porous corporate walls.
The
new money will be used to get Veradocs’ software into the market. That is expected to happen in early 2015. Battery General Partner Roger Lee joins the board, and Robin Daniels, the former head of enterprise marketing at Box Inc.,
has joined the startup as chief marketing officer.
Mr.
Daniels said Veradocs won't compete with his former employer. His job is to get
Veradocs to work with Box and other cloud services, including Dropbox and Google Drive, to help all of them protect their users’ data.
After
spending three years at Box talking to customers, he said, he’s decided that people will use different cloud services for different things—Box at work, Dropbox at home, Google Drive for collaboration, etc.--so he believes
Veradocs has a big opportunity.
Also,
Veradocs is a young company, and for the first time, he said, he will get the experience of “build(ing) a team from nothing.”
http://www.veradocs.com
Write
to Deborah Gage at debora...@wsj.com.
Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage
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Shift
Raises $23.8M to Build Used Car Marketplace
Lizette
Chapman | San Francisco
Investors
have put more than $23 million into Shift Technologies Inc., a used car marketplace that is racing
Beepi Inc. and others to disrupt the multibillion-dollar sector.
Founded
less than a year ago, Shift co-founders see the same market opportunity that prompted Sherpa Ventures and other
Beepi investors to plow $60 million into that startup last month.
The
premise is that used car shopping--be it via dealerships or direct to sellers--is unpleasant, inefficient and woefully in need of a technological overhaul.
“It’s
a huge market that we see the ability to rethink and rebuild,” said Draper Fisher
Jurvetson Partner Emily Melton, who co-led the company’s Series A round.
Ms.
Melton said she was most excited about the large opportunity Shift is attacking, which she compared to previous DFJ investments like
Redfin for home buying and SpaceX for space travel.
Like
Beepi, Shift allows people to buy or sell used cars from their phones. Unlike
Beepi, which emphasizes the integrity of its car reviews to eliminate the need for test drives, Shift includes test drives.
Shift
employs “car enthusiasts” who function as car concierges. They schedule “instant test drives” with potential buyers and bring cars to them personally. They also meet with sellers to establish a price guarantee and then take the vehicle to a Shift warehouse
to be evaluated by mechanics, detailed, photographed and posted for sale across sites including AutoTrader.com, Car.com and CarGurus.com and as well as Shift’s own site, Driveshift.com.
Shift
splits the difference between the guarantee price and the final sale price with the car owner.
“Our
interests are aligned. If we can get a better price then we will,” Shift co-founder and Chief Executive George
Arison said.
Mr.
Arrison said the startup also generates revenue through add-on services like financing and warrantees and plans to expand those products in coming months.
He
said he will also use the funding to hire more employees, particularly engineers, and expand the team from 20 to 60 or so within the next six months.
Expanding
the San Francisco and Los Angeles markets and ultimately opening new regions is also planned.
“We
think we can 10x the business over the next 6-9 months,” Mr.
Arrison said.
DFJ
and Highland Capital Partners co-led the $20 million Series A round with participation from SV Angel, Great Oaks VC and individuals including Google Maps co-creator Lars Rasmussen,
Meraki Networks Inc. founder Hans Robertson, Square Inc. co-founder Jim
McKelvey and Shazam Ltd. founder Chris Barton.
DFJ’s
Ms. Melton and Highland Capital Partner Manish Patel join the Shift board.
Valuation
was north of $60 million.
Shift
raised a $3.75 million seed round that was previously undisclosed.
http://driveshift.com.
Email
Lizette Chapman at lizette...@wsj.com.
Follow her on Twitter at @zettewil
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Menlo
Security Peeks Out With $10.5M
Deborah
Gage | San Francisco
Menlo
Security Inc. has raised $10.5 million for software that Chief Executive Amir Ben-Efraim says will turn the industry’s traditional approach to cybersecurity on its head.
The
Series A round was led by General Catalyst Partners and includes Osage University Partners.
Mr.
Ben-Efraim, a former vice president of cloud security at Juniper Networks Inc. who has worked on cybersecurity issues since 1998, declined to provide details on what his company is doing because the startup is still in stealth mode.
But
he said it will not take the usual approach of trying to detect whether something is good or bad before deciding whether to take action. That approach fails, he said, because cybercriminals have learned to outwit it.
Secret
workarounds that are built into malware so it can evade detection may include, for instance, the requirement that a user hit the letter “y” on the keyboard 100 times before a piece of malware, which has by now penetrated the user’s system, will activate.
“So
we’re back into the impossible games of cat and mouse that we’ve been playing for a long time,” he said.
Mr.
Ben-Efraim sold his previous company,
Altor Networks, which secured virtual machines, to Juniper in 2010. He said he took a pause after leaving Juniper and asked himself whether the world really needed another cybersecurity company.
But
he decided that current security tools aren’t working, and “it seems like the conditions for security keep getting worse,” he said. “The more I thought about it, the more I thought that as a security industry, we’re the furthest behind the bad guys that we’ve
ever been.”
Menlo
Security takes on two new board members with the funding—General Catalyst Managing Director Steve
Herrod, a former chief technology officer of VMware Inc.; and Bracket Computing Inc. Chief Executive Tom Gillis, a former general manager of security technology at Cisco Systems Inc.
Mr.
Ben-Efraim said he worked closely with both men in his roles at
Altor, which he founded, and then at Juniper and valued their experience.
Menlo
Security plans to have products in the market by early 2015, he said.
http://www.menlosecurity.com
Write
to Deborah Gage at debora...@wsj.com.
Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage
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NEW
MONEY
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Shift
Raises $23.8M to Build Used Car Marketplace
Lizette
Chapman | San Francisco
Investors
have put more than $23 million into Shift Technologies Inc., a used car marketplace that is racing
Beepi Inc. and others to disrupt the multibillion-dollar sector.
Founded
less than a year ago, Shift co-founders see the same market opportunity that prompted Sherpa Ventures and other
Beepi investors to plow $60 million into that startup last month.
The
premise is that used car shopping--be it via dealerships or direct to sellers--is unpleasant, inefficient and woefully in need of a technological overhaul.
“It’s
a huge market that we see the ability to rethink and rebuild,” said Draper Fisher
Jurvetson Partner Emily Melton, who co-led the company’s Series A round.
Ms.
Melton said she was most excited about the large opportunity Shift is attacking, which she compared to previous DFJ investments like
Redfin for home buying and SpaceX for space travel.
Like
Beepi, Shift allows people to buy or sell used cars from their phones. Unlike
Beepi, which emphasizes the integrity of its car reviews to eliminate the need for test drives, Shift includes test drives.
Shift
employs “car enthusiasts” who function as car concierges. They schedule “instant test drives” with potential buyers and bring cars to them personally. They also meet with sellers to establish a price guarantee and then take the vehicle to a Shift warehouse
to be evaluated by mechanics, detailed, photographed and posted for sale across sites including AutoTrader.com, Car.com and CarGurus.com and as well as Shift’s own site, Driveshift.com.
Shift
splits the difference between the guarantee price and the final sale price with the car owner.
“Our
interests are aligned. If we can get a better price then we will,” Shift co-founder and Chief Executive George
Arison said.
Mr.
Arrison said the startup also generates revenue through add-on services like financing and warrantees and plans to expand those products in coming months.
He
said he will also use the funding to hire more employees, particularly engineers, and expand the team from 20 to 60 or so within the next six months.
Expanding
the San Francisco and Los Angeles markets and ultimately opening new regions is also planned.
“We
think we can 10x the business over the next 6-9 months,” Mr.
Arrison said.
DFJ
and Highland Capital Partners co-led the $20 million Series A round with participation from SV Angel, Great Oaks VC and individuals including Google Maps co-creator Lars Rasmussen,
Meraki Networks Inc. founder Hans Robertson, Square Inc. co-founder Jim
McKelvey and Shazam Ltd. founder Chris Barton.
DFJ’s
Ms. Melton and Highland Capital Partner Manish Patel join the Shift board.
Valuation
was north of $60 million.
Shift
raised a $3.75 million seed round that was previously undisclosed.
http://driveshift.com.
Email
Lizette Chapman at lizette...@wsj.com.
Follow her on Twitter at @zettewil
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Veradocs
Emerges with $14M to Stop Cloud Data From Leaking
By
Deborah Gage | Mountain View, Calif.
Cloud
apps like Box and Dropbox make it easy for anyone to store and share documents. But they create worries for corporate IT departments, whose job is to prevent sensitive information from being leaked.
Veradocs
Inc. emerged Tuesday with $14 million in funding and a way to tackle the data leakage problem without forcing customers to shut cloud apps down. The funding was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors, including
Yahoo Inc. Chief Information Officer Mike Kail.
Veradocs
was founded in January and has been testing its software with hedge funds, media companies and other prospective customers that have highly sensitive information. Co-founder and Chief Executive Ajay Arora compares the software to Snapchat, the messaging service
that makes messages disappear that Facebook Inc. tried to acquire last year for nearly $3 billion. (Snapchat was
recently
valued at
$10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal).
With
Veradocs, individuals or corporate IT departments can, by right-clicking on a file, attach privileges to it, specifying who gets access and tracking where the data that make up the document are going. If anyone who isn't authorized
tries to get access, Veradocs has a
killswitch that revokes access to the data. Document privileges can be set globally by IT departments and can be changed in real time.
Mr.
Arora said he got the idea for Veradocs while working at a venture firm as an entrepreneur in residence after he and his co-founder, Prakash
Linga, sold their previous company
RAPSphere, which protected data and corporate applications on mobile devices that people brought to work.
As
an EIR, he said, he talked to more than 100 chief security officers, chief information officers and other IT executives who told him that with all the new ways for data to leak out of their companies, maintaining control over that data was their biggest concern.
But,
he said, by attaching security and policies to the data, “you can make them follow the data wherever they go…and not worry about plugging holes” in what are now porous corporate walls.
The
new money will be used to get Veradocs’ software into the market. That is expected to happen in early 2015. Battery General Partner Roger Lee joins the board, and Robin Daniels, the former head of enterprise marketing at Box Inc.,
has joined the startup as chief marketing officer.
Mr.
Daniels said Veradocs won't compete with his former employer. His job is to get
Veradocs to work with Box and other cloud services, including Dropbox and Google Drive, to help all of them protect their users’ data.
After
spending three years at Box talking to customers, he said, he’s decided that people will use different cloud services for different things—Box at work, Dropbox at home, Google Drive for collaboration, etc.--so he believes
Veradocs has a big opportunity.
Also,
Veradocs is a young company, and for the first time, he said, he will get the experience of “build(ing) a team from nothing.”
http://www.veradocs.com
Write
to Deborah Gage at debora...@wsj.com.
Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage
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Intellia
Therapeutics Raises $15M Series A for Gene Editing Therapies
Brian
Gormley | Cambridge, Mass.
Atlas
Venture and Novartis AG are investing $15 million in Intellia Therapeutics LLC, one of multiple venture-backed startups looking to treat disease through the new science of genome editing.
Since
the sequencing of the human genome early last decade, understanding of genes and the genetic drivers of disease has improved, leading to several new approaches to treating disease. Gene therapy uses functional genes to compensate for defective ones. Another
approach, RNA interference, aims to silence disease genes to prevent harmful proteins from being made.
Intellia
and other genome-editing companies aim to modify the genome. Depending on the disease, this could involve deleting a disease gene, inserting a beneficial gene into the genome, or making a particular gene more or less active.
Genome
editing involves using Crispr-Cas9 system, which harnesses the body’s natural DNA repair machinery. Companies see potential to treat rare diseases, which often spring from one gene, and common, complex conditions that involve many genes. In April, Swiss startup
Crispr Therapeutics AG said it raised $25 million from Versant Ventures. Another genome-editing company,
Editas
Medicine,
said it had closed on $43 million in venture backing in November 2013.
Genomes
can be edited by using small RNA molecules to guide Cas9 enzymes to a specific DNA sequence of interest. It may be possible to create genome-editing therapies that make multiple changes to the genome. As a result, a single product could target multiple biological
processes involved in a complicated disease such as cancer.
Atlas
formed Intellia this year by teaming up with Caribou Biosciences, which has gathered intellectual property in the field of genome editing. With its initial therapies,
Intellia plans to collect cells from patients’ blood or bone marrow, modify them, and then return them to the patient. This “ex vivo” approach could enable
Intellia to develop cancer immunotherapies, which trigger the patient’s immune system to attack the tumor, and therapies for various other diseases.
Intellia
also expects to advance “in vivo” therapies that involve delivering genome-editing therapies directly into the patient. Potential “in vivo” therapeutics include treatments for central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, and diseases affecting organs
such as the eyes and the liver.
Intellia,
based in Cambridge, Mass., plans to develop its own pipeline of products and to form various partnerships, according to co-founder and Chief Executive
Nessan Bermingham.
http://www.atlasventure.com
Write
to Brian Gormley at brian....@wsj.com
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Menlo
Security Peeks Out With $10.5M
Deborah
Gage | San Francisco
Menlo
Security Inc. has raised $10.5 million for software that Chief Executive Amir Ben-Efraim says will turn the industry’s traditional approach to cybersecurity on its head.
The
Series A round was led by General Catalyst Partners and includes Osage University Partners.
Mr.
Ben-Efraim, a former vice president of cloud security at Juniper Networks Inc. who has worked on cybersecurity issues since 1998, declined to provide details on what his company is doing because the startup is still in stealth mode.
But
he said it will not take the usual approach of trying to detect whether something is good or bad before deciding whether to take action. That approach fails, he said, because cybercriminals have learned to outwit it.
Secret
workarounds that are built into malware so it can evade detection may include, for instance, the requirement that a user hit the letter “y” on the keyboard 100 times before a piece of malware, which has by now penetrated the user’s system, will activate.
“So
we’re back into the impossible games of cat and mouse that we’ve been playing for a long time,” he said.
Mr.
Ben-Efraim sold his previous company,
Altor Networks, which secured virtual machines, to Juniper in 2010. He said he took a pause after leaving Juniper and asked himself whether the world really needed another cybersecurity company.
But
he decided that current security tools aren’t working, and “it seems like the conditions for security keep getting worse,” he said. “The more I thought about it, the more I thought that as a security industry, we’re the furthest behind the bad guys that we’ve
ever been.”
Menlo
Security takes on two new board members with the funding—General Catalyst Managing Director Steve
Herrod, a former chief technology officer of VMware Inc.; and Bracket Computing Inc. Chief Executive Tom Gillis, a former general manager of security technology at Cisco Systems Inc.
Mr.
Ben-Efraim said he worked closely with both men in his roles at
Altor, which he founded, and then at Juniper and valued their experience.
Menlo
Security plans to have products in the market by early 2015, he said.
http://www.menlosecurity.com
Write
to Deborah Gage at debora...@wsj.com.
Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage
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Evan
Williams’ Obvious Ventures Backs Breezeworks for Blue-Collar Productivity App
Timothy
Hay | San Francisco
Obvious
Ventures, a new firm launched by Twitter Inc. co-founder Evan Williams and serial entrepreneur James Joaquin, has said its mission is to back startups with a “world-positive” business model, or companies that can do well while also doing good.
Now
the firm has led a $5 million Series A round for San Francisco-based Breezeworks Inc., a company coming out of beta with a mobile platform that aims to give independent, mobile, blue-collar workers some of the technological sophistication that has become the
norm in large organizations and enterprises.
The
round, which Breezeworks said comprised $3.1 million in new equity and the conversion to equity of previous debt financing, was joined by Marc
Benioff of Salesforce.com, James Murdoch of 21st Century Fox Inc., Jeff
Skoll, David Sacks, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel.
Breezeworks
this week will release its mobile application for iOS devices, which will automate many of the daily operations of plumbers, locksmiths, electricians, housekeepers, fence installers and other mobile service professionals, Chief Executive Mathew Cowan said.
“There
have been technology-driven productivity gains all over the place, but this segment has been left out,” he said. “This is a tremendous part of the U.S. economy.”
The
app, which costs a flat $20 a month, handles scheduling, invoicing, payments, customer follow-up and other functions that have been neatly automated for larger businesses for years, Mr. Cowan said.
The
company has also been funded by Allen & Co., CRV (formerly Charles River Ventures), Harmony Partners and
XSeed Capital, according to its website.
Breezeworks,
which is also developing an Android version of its mobile platform, will go on the hunt for customers with its Series A round, the CEO said.
Mr.
Joaquin of Obvious Ventures said Breezeworks’ platform can help individual businesspeople remain independent, which will have a positive social impact.
“It’s
a digital democratization,” he said. “It’s making big-business tools accessible to all.”
Mr.
Joaquin, who previously founded startups that were acquired by AOL Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Apple Inc., takes a board seat at Breezeworks in the Series A round.
Mr.
Joaquin and Mr. Cowan of Breezeworks have known each other for years. Mr. Cowan was a co-founder of venture firm
Bridgescale, where Mr. Joaquin worked as a venture partner in 2007 and 2008, Mr. Joaquin said.
Obvious
Ventures is still in the midst of raising its inaugural fund, he said, and is precluded from providing any details about it.
While
the firm aims to be the lead investor in Series A rounds, the Breezeworks investment is the first the firm has done as the lead backer, he said.
Obvious
Ventures joined in one
of the largest venture rounds ever raised,
a $542 million round for visual-display company Magic Leap Inc., VentureWire records show.
The
firm has also invested in Workpop,
an online site for listing hourly-wage jobs, according to VentureWire records.
http://breezeworks.com
Write
to Timothy Hay at timot...@wsj.com
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Khosla
Ventures, Real Ventures Lead $21M Seed Round for Bitcoin Project
Blockstream
Michael
J. Casey
Billionaire
entrepreneurs who helped lead LinkedIn Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are among a group of investors who have contributed $21 million to an unorthodox bitcoin project that has no clear plan for turning a profit. Their bet: that the
project’s A-list of cryptography experts and bitcoin coders will unleash a new wave of Internet disruption that decentralizes the entire economy.
The
company, known as Blockstream, aims to enhance bitcoin’s “blockchain”--the distributed, public ledger that is the defining technological featured--and turn it into a universal platform for multiple new
applications that go far beyond the digital-currency payments for which bitcoin is best known. The co-founders hope to turbocharge the development of so-called Bitcoin 2.0 applications, which will allow people to engage in “trustless” transactions without
having to pay fees to middlemen such as trustees, registrars and escrow managers.
The
decentralized blockchain is “extremely difficult to corrupt” and so has the potential to be “an efficient platform for trading pretty much anything of value,” said Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn who was one of three lead
investors in the seed round. Blockstream, he said, is “developing the bitcoin ecosystem” to facilitate these prospects.
The
other two leads were Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures and Canadian firm Real Ventures. Other contributors among the list of nearly 40 in total included Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and
Yahoo founder Jerry Yang’s AME Ventures. Other venture investors include
FuturePerfect Ventures, Mosaic Ventures and Ribbit Capital.
Blockstream
has no clear road map on how it will turn an open-source software engineering project into a corporate moneymaker. Instead, investors took a leap of faith, mostly based on the reputations of the company’s co-founders, who Tally Capital partner and co-contributor
Matthew Roszak described as the “highest caliber of human capital in the
blockchain planet.”
Blockstream
came from the initiative of Adam Back, a Malta-based British cryptographer whose “hashcash” and “proof of work” inventions were critical to the currency mining and transaction confirmation system developed by the mysterious inventor
of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. “Adam is second only to Satoshi in bitcoin,” said Mr. Hoffman.
Late
last year, Mr. Back flew to Montreal to recruit Austin Hill, a 1990s pioneer of encryption-based privacy-enhancing services, to his cause. The pair had first met as members of the early-Internet
Cypherpunk movement, a loose-knit community of cryptography enthusiasts and pro-privacy activists that included WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange.
Messrs.
Hill and Back then appealed to Belgian Pieter Wuille and American Gregory Maxwell, two members of the five-person team of software developers assigned to maintain and update bitcoin’s core software code, as well as to Matt
Corallo, one of the biggest contributors to core bitcoin development projects, and others.
The
money will go toward implementing these developers’ primary project:
Sidechains, which aim to bypass bitcoin’s rigid organizational structure by creating parallel
blockchains in which innovators can safely develop new Bitcoin 2.0 applications without jeopardizing bitcoin’s core computer code and putting billions of dollars’ worth of digital currency at risk.
Bitcoin
2.0 ideas include: “smart contracts” whose obligations aren’t managed by lawyers but are executed by a software program; stock trading that requires no brokers; and decentralized registries for transferring homes, cars and other assets without agents, notaries
or registrars. But there are many other possibilities, developers say. “We are just millimeters into a marathon in terms of developing the software that can use the
blockchain,” Mr. Hill said.
For
Mr. Khosla, smartphone apps offer the best analogy for the open-source
blockchain platform’s unimaginable prospects. “When Apple first announced the iPhone, nobody imagined there’d be a million apps and that the slogan would be ‘there’s an app for that,’” he said. The payoff for his investment in
Blockstream will come later when it allows him to conduct privileged due diligence on many of these future money-earning applications, he said.
Still,
the indeterminate nature of Blockstream’s business model made it a complicated investment for many venture capitalists, who typically must justify returns to their investors. The manager of one fund said he turned down the pitch
because he couldn’t invest in such a vague plan. Mr. Hoffman said he invested via his personal not-for-profit foundation, not his
Greylock Partners firm, because he felt strongly that
Blockstream’s first funding round “had to be invested in the development of the bitcoin ecosystem and not have, as its primary focus, economic returns.”
While
leading commentators from the bitcoin community have mostly praised
Blockstream, some commentators have worried that a private company with such intellectual clout could have undue influence in a bitcoin network that’s supposed to be community-owned and decentralized.
Mr.
Hill said that’s why it was paramount that Blockstream was set up in a transparent way, as “a public utility, and not a way to hijack bitcoin.”
http://www.blockstream.com
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Shopping
App Dressli Launching From Startup Backed by
TomorrowVentures
Yuliya
Chernova | Los Angeles
ShareRails
LLC, a startup backed by Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures and by Grace Beauty Capital, is launching its mobile app
Dressli for social shopping, the company told VentureWire.
The
app, scheduled to be available in the App Store on Tuesday, allows users to chat about products they are interested in purchasing.
Co-founded
by Joseph Nejman and Dmitry Chourpo, the Los Angeles and Melbourne-based company had raised $350,000 in seed funding. The lead investor is
TomorrowVentures, started by Mr. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google Inc. Grace Beauty Capital has previously invested in
Warby Parker, an e-commerce focused eyeglasses brand, and
BirchBox, which sells monthly subscriptions to beauty product boxes among other services.
Mr.
Nejman was an entrepreneur-in-residence at
TomorrowVentures and previously at Google.
Mobile
shopping is a category that several startups are pursuing.
Jello Labs Inc., released its app Spring in August after raising $7.5 million in Series A funds. The idea is that consumers are spending more of their online time on their mobile phones, and yet shopping via the phone is more cumbersome than online.
Dressli
is working with hundreds of e-commerce retailers including Neiman Marcus,
Wayfair, Bed Bath & Beyond and Restoration Hardware.
The
company makes money as an affiliate marketer via Dressli, and through selling subscription software to e-retailers. Next year, a spokesman said, the company plans to offer ways for consumers like fashion bloggers or professional
stylists to charge fees for personal shopping assistance.
http://www.sharerails.com
Write
to Yuliya Chernova at yuliya....@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @ychernova
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Boost
Media Raises $19M Inside Round
Lizette
Chapman | San Francisco
Boost
Media Inc. announced it has secured $19 million from investors to expand beyond its product from paid search and expand its footprint from North America.
The
San Francisco-based startup leverages thousands of freelancers and designers along with its own machine-learning algorithms to help customers create effective digital ad copy.
The
Series C infusion will be used to hire more product and engineering experts, expand its product from paid search to social, display and mobile ad optimization and offer customers deeper analytics and other services.
Exiting
investor Battery Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors including Javelin Venture Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and Webb Investment Network and individual investors
Based
in San Francisco and founded in 2009, Boost Media previously raised $12 million in equity and debt.
Battery
Ventures General Partner Roger Lee joins the board of directors.
Along
with the funding, the company announced two new hires: Michael Feldman joins as senior vice president of business development and Jeff McCarthy joins as vice president of customer success. Mr. Feldman previously served as the head of business development for
search ads at Google, while Mr. McCarthy was senior vice-president of client services at
Marketo.
http://boostctr.com
Email
Lizette Chapman at lizette...@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @zettewil
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Eyeview
Spots $15M for Video Advertising
Eyeview
Inc., a provider of video advertising technology, said it raised $15 million in financing from prior investor Marker LLC.
The
New York company said it would use the money to support growth to meet the needs of its Fortune 500 client base.
Eyeview
said it previously raised $19.5 million. Besides New York, it has offices in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles.
The
company also said it named Conversant executive Brian Pozesky as chief marketing officer, and News Corp. executive West
Naze as executive director of CPG sales.
http://www.eyeviewdigital.com
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Developer
Boot Camp Bloc Raises $6M in Series A Funding
Bloc
Inc. has raised $6 million for its developer boot camp that teaches people to code with one-on-one online apprenticeships.
Shasta
Ventures led the round. The company raised
$2 million
in seed funding in December. Previous investors include Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, Learn Capital and Harrison Metal.
Bloc
was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco.
The
company said the funding would be used to expand the company’s job preparation and placement programs for graduates, develop new technical training courses and expand its corporate training business.
http://www.bloc.io
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RealScout
Raises $6M Series A for Real-Estate Service
RealScout
Inc., a real-estate software company, said it has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
DCM
led the round, with participation from Formation 8 and individual investors. Both venture firms participated in the company’s
$1.1
million seed funding
in August 2013.
DCM
Partner Osuke Honda joined RealScout’s board with the financing.
RealScout
develops Web and mobile software for real-estate agents to help clients who are looking to buy real estate. It includes a search portal for home buyers, and natural-language email marketing and client engagement measurement for real-estate agents.
http://www.realscout.com
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OSIX
Raises $5M Seed Round for Web-Sharing Tool Speedshare
OSIX
Corp. launched its Web collaboration technology and said it has raised $5 million in seed financing, mainly from angel investors.
Its
Speedshare service enables two or more individuals to simultaneously view and interact on any website, share an application, complete a form, listen to music or watch a video. The product is aimed at consumers and businesses, with
free and premium plans for individuals and small and midsize businesses, as well as enterprise plans.
Investors
include Evan Goldberg, founder, chief technology officer and chairman of NetSuite; Mike
Lohner, chairman of Stella & Dot;
Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and managing partner of
Social+Capital Partnership; and Larry Bowman, founder and chief executive of Bowman Capital. Western Technology Investments also participated.
https://osixco.com
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Boston
Techstars Startup Indico Announces $3M
Machine
learning data science startup indico announced $3 million in initial funding as part of Boston’s
Techstars annual demo day.
General
Catalyst Partners, .406 Ventures, Two Sigma, Boston Seed and angel investors invested.
The
company provides application programming interfaces (APIs) that the company said on its website “put the power of deep learning algorithms in the hands of any developer, free of charge.”
http://indico.io
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Task
Service Alfred Raises $2M Led by Spark Capital
Personal
tasks service Alfred Club Inc. has raised $2 million in financing led by Spark Capital, with additional investors SV Angel and
CrunchFund.
Alfred’s
in-home service is now available in Manhattan and Boston on an invite-only basis, allowing local residents to get help from “Alfreds” who visit subscribers in their residences every week on set days to provide home services such
as laundry, dry cleaning, home cleaning, grocery shopping, package drop-off, picking up prescriptions and other services.
Alfred
plans to launch a consumer-facing mobile app in 2015. During
it’s six month beta, Alfred said it got traction with busy families, entrepreneurs and young professionals.
http://www.helloalfred.com
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Soci
Lands $1.5M Series A for Social Media Marketing
Soci
Inc., a social media marketing company, said it has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding.
Angel
investor Peter Fisher led the round with participation by Silicon Valley Growth Syndicate and other angel investors.
The
San Diego-based company said the funding would be used to expand the reach of its services, especially to national digital service providers, media outlets, marketing agencies, national franchises and enterprise clients.
http://www.meetsoci.com
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Bipsync
Raises $1.5M Seed
Bipsync
Ltd., a research automation platform for investment professionals, launched its enterprise product for
buyside investment teams and closed $1.5 million in seed financing.
Investors
include Russell Siegelman, partner emeritus,
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; David Eisner, founder of themarkets.com; and Steadfast Venture Capital.
Using
Bipsync’s open beta, investors can organize research, analytics, reports and visualizations on research assets and pipeline.
In
addition to opening up the service, Bipsync also announced two commercial tiers for larger investment teams with enhanced functionality such as multi-team support, advanced access control, compliance automations, advanced data management,
administrative capabilities, support and more.
https://www.bipsync.com
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Chinese
Social Network Renren Invests In Hong Kong Startup
GoGoVan
Yun-Hee
Kim | Hong Kong
Chinese
social network Renren took a roughly 10% stake in Hong Kong-based startup
GoGoVan this month, giving it an additional $10 million in funding to expand across Asia.
GoGoVan
is a free, van-hailing app available on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android devices. It was set up in July 2013 in Hong Kong by five co-founders including Steven Lam, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who wanted to solve a logistical problem
in big cities like Hong Kong. It aims to be the Uber of sorts for moving furniture, packages and other big items.
Gabriel
Fong, executive chairman of GoGoVan, said in a recent interview that the startup plans to expand the app to Seoul, Melbourne and Sydney in the fourth quarter and to Japan, India, China and Southeast Asia in the first quarter of
2015.
GoGoVan,
which makes money from ads on vans, currently has access to 20,000 vehicles and 74,000 drivers registered with the Hong Kong government. It has about 500,000 user downloads from both iOS and Android devices, said Fong. The startup, which partners with companies
such as Fedex Corp. and Kerry Logistics Network Ltd. to make deliveries across the city, employs about 40 people full-time out of a 600-square-foot office in Hong Kong.
The
Wall Street Journal recently spoke with Fong and Lam about the company’s expansion plans and ambitions in the U.S. Edited excerpts:
WSJD:
What does the investment by Renren bring to the table?
Fong:
Renren obviously understands China.
Renren also has a lot of expertise in businesses that we’re trying to do, the platform business. I think they can help with user acquisition and on the driver acquisition side. They know a lot of people and can source a team that works. Those are two
of the most important factors.
WSJD:
How did the idea of GoGoVan come about?
Fong:
Three of the co-founders went to universities in California. They had to work side jobs. One of the places they met was delivering takeout for Chinese restaurants.
Lam:
All of us came from low-income families and we needed to pay for school ourselves. We always thought of different ideas to make money – we sold first-generation iPhones on eBay, fixed cars for people, computers…all kind of things.
By
working in a Chinese restaurant, we had the idea of putting advertisements on lunch boxes. We thought the lunch boxes were boring. We wanted to do that, but opening a company in California was so complicated and we are international students so didn’t know
how to do it.
All
of us moved back to Hong Kong after the financial crisis. We started that company distributing lunch boxes and then we ran the company for about nine months. The biggest problem we had was logistics. It was really hard to source those vans and we didn’t have
the capital to get vehicles. We used to call call centers, but none of them would call you back. It was really complicated– that’s how we found the idea of
GoGovan.
WSJD:
What are your expansion plans?
Fong:
We are targeting about five cities in the first quarter of 2015 including Japan, China and Southeast Asia. We haven’t quite finalized our plans. We always wanted to be in China, but we wanted a really good partner. Now we will definitely accelerate our plans
with (the Renren investment).
WSJD:
How much more capital do you think you need to raise for expansion?
Fong:
We don’t need [additional] funding as we have about $4.7 million or more in the bank, but
Renren is a strategic partner. SoftBank is a large shareholder in
Renren. We also have access to networks in the West. Our first aim is really to try to dominate Asia. But this is by no means an Asia business only. Our business model extends to dense metropolitan cities all over the world – London,
Paris, San Francisco. Anywhere where there is a last-mile logistical requirement, our model works really well.
WSJD:
How do you work with Fedex, one of your partners?
Fong:
When Fedex uses us, we will drive into one of their fulfillment centers. They load up their truck and one of their guys jump into the passenger seat with us. Then we run the route and the guy delivers. For companies that own their
own vans, we’re picking up all their overflows.
WSJD:
Are you profitable? How do you plan to make money?
Fong:
Not yet. Sometime in the next six months, we will start charging a 10% fee.
WSJD:
Are you considering a listing at some stage?
Fong:
Yes. It depends on whether the market is receptable to a technology company like ourselves. Depending on what scale we are, there’s always the U.S. market. We would need to have a war chest before we go to the U.S.
WSJD:
When might you enter the U.S. market? There are a lot of competitors.
Fong:
Potentially next year. I see this logistical problem anywhere in the world. The
Guccis and Starbucks, they all need their supply replenished every day. We can be in there. We want to supply all the way from individuals to businesses. We want to see ourselves as the last-mile delivery-courier type of business.
WSJD:
Who would be a good partner for you in the U.S? Any talks right now?
Fong:
We haven’t explored them seriously, to be honest. We’ve just been focused on Asia. I think the time is coming soon. I feel like we’re getting increasingly confident of dominating Asia. From there, we will go out.
http://www.renren.com/
http://gogovan.com.hk/en/
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Roundup
of Form D Regulatory Filings--Nov. 17
Zachary
Cole | Washington
(The
following is a roundup of selected companies that have revealed securities sales in recent Form D regulatory filings. These companies are required to file a Form D notification within 15 days after the first sale of securities in an offering, which could indicate
fundraising, acquisitions or other securities activity. The filings don’t list the recipients of the securities being offered. However, they do list board members, so in cases where new investors have surfaced, we’ll report them below.)
Aegis
Mobility Inc., Burnaby, British Columbia, a developer of software that uses a phone’s GPS to detect when it is moving at driving speed and intercepts incoming calls and texts, has increased the size of an equity round to $1.2 million. An August filing showed
the company selling $600,000 in equity. The company had previously sold a total of $4.7 million in equity, according to earlier filings going back to 2012. Chicago Angel Group and Ventures West Capital are among the company’s investors.
Axcient
Inc., Mountain View, Calif., which provides cloud-based data backup services to small businesses, has sold $10 million of a $13 million round of Series E equity. Earlier filings since January 2013 showed the company issuing a total of $22.6 million in equity,
promissory notes, warrants and securities. In 2011, the company secured a $15.5 million Series C round led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Allegis Capital, Peninsula Ventures and
Thomvest Ventures.
QuorumLabs
Inc., San Jose, a one-click data-backup and recovery service, has issued $4.6 million of a $5 million round of equity, rights and securities. Last November, the company raised a $10 million Series C round from investors including
Airtek Capital Group and Toba Capital.
Semprius
Inc., Durham, N.C., a manufacturer of high-concentration photovoltaic solar modules, has issued $1.25 million of a $1.4 million debt and rights offering. The company previously issued a total of $5.8 million through similar offerings, according to filings
going back to April 2013. In 2012, the company received $23 million in Series C funding from investors including Applied Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, GVC Investment, Illinois Ventures,
Intersouth Partners, In-Q-Tel and Morgan Creek Capital Management.
http://www.aegismobility.com
http://axcient.com
http://www.quorum.net
http://semprius.com
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M&A/IPO
NEWS
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AxioMed
Spine Finds Buyer for Assets, Intellectual Property
Timothy
Hay | Garfield Heights, Ohio
AxioMed
Spine Corp., an Ohio-based medical-device company that put
all of its assets and intellectual property up for sale
last month, has been acquired, according to a statement from turnaround firm
Gerbsman Partners, which facilitated the deal.
Details
about the transaction, including who bought the company and for what price, weren’t disclosed. Attempts to reach several of
AxioMed’s investors weren’t immediately successful.
AxioMed,
founded in 2001, developed two spinal-implant products that the company said function more like the real discs of the spine than ball-and-socket type implants that are in use today. The two products--one of which is meant for the lumbar area, and the other
for the cervical area of the spine--feature a polymer core between two titanium-alloy endplates, company materials said.
Medical
technology giants--including Johnson & Johnson and Medronic Inc.--have disc-replacement devices under development or on the market. But
AxioMed’s use of polymers and titanium make the company’s implants more durable than rival products, the company previously told VentureWire.
The
company never disclosed the reason for its decision to put its assets up for sale.
AxioMed
in January 2013 raised
a $3.6 million round,
VentureWire records show. The company told VentureWire in 2012, as it closed a multi-tranched,
$20
million Series D round,
that its total venture backing had reached $61 million.
The
Garfield Heights-based company’s investors include Medical Venture Fund, Primus Capital Funds, Reservoir Venture Partners, CID Equity Partners, Early Stage Partners, Investor Growth Capital, MB Venture Partners, Charter Oak Equity, Blue Chip Venture Company
and Thomas McNerney & Partners, company materials said.
http://www.axiomed.com
Write
to Timothy Hay at timot...@wsj.com.
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Rubicon
Project Buys iSocket and Shiny Ads to Automate Ad Buys
Jack
Marshall | Los Angeles
Advertising
automation firm The Rubicon Project Inc. has agreed to acquire fellow ad tech providers
iSocket Inc. and Shiny Ads, the company announced Monday. Rubicon Project will pay less than $30 million for the two companies, mostly in stock.
Publicly
traded Rubicon Project has built its business offering complicated online ad systems that offer marketers and publishers the ability to buy and sell advertising in real-time auctions. This is often referred to as real-time bidding or “RTB.”
Technology
provided by iSocket and Shiny Ads helps power a different type of sale, however, often referred to as “automated guaranteed” or “programmatic guaranteed.” Their technologies enable marketers to buy ad space from publishers on an
upfront basis, without the hassle of picking up the phone or emailing their order to the ad seller.
Just
as a consumer might log on to Amazon.com to purchase a book for a fixed price, an ad buyer can log on to
iSocket or Shiny Ads to buy a specific amount of ad impressions for a price predetermined by the seller. The idea is that software helps streamline the sales process, potentially saving time and costs for both buyers and sellers.
Rubicon
Project, based in Los Angeles, is hoping the acquisitions will help kick-start its “automated guaranteed” effort, as it seeks to move beyond RTB to offer marketers and publishers the ability to buy and sell ad space in whichever manner they choose.
“Our
mission has been to automate the buying and selling of advertising. We started by offering automated auctions, now we’re moving up to order automation as well,” said Rubicon Project Chief Executive Frank
Addante.
Mr.
Addante estimated the automated guaranteed market will surpass $8 billion in the U.S. by 2016.
“iSocket
and Shiny Ads are both leaders in this category and we bought them both. We want to lock up this portion of the market,” he added.
Rubicon
Project has competition, though, especially outside of the digital advertising arena. Many industry observers predict the majority of TV advertising will one day be bought and sold using similar automated tools, and a growing number of tech providers are jockeying
for position in anticipation of that shift.
The
TV ad pie is certainly one Rubicon Project hopes to carve itself a slice of, too. “This gives us the capabilities to extend into different markets,” Mr.
Addante said.
San
Francisco-based iSocket raised
$5 million
in February. Its investors include Conde Nast, Foundry Group, Time Warner Investments and R&R Venture Partners.
Toronto-based
Shiny Ads was backed by Maple Leaf Angels, York Angels and
Intertainment Media, according to the company’s website.
http://www.rubiconproject.com
http://www.isocket.com
http://shinyads.com
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Biopharmaceutical
Company Juno Therapeutics Files for IPO
Juno
Therapeutics Inc., a biopharmaceutical company that is developing cancer treatments, has filed for its initial public offering after raising $310 million in just about a year’s time.
The
Seattle-based company said it could raise up to $150 million in the offering, though that is an estimate that is used to calculate the filing fees and is likely to change.
Juno
is among several companies that are advancing immunotherapies designed to treat cancers without causing as many side effects as chemotherapy or radiation.
The
company launched with a $120 million Series A funding round that was later increased to $176 million. It raised
$134 million
in August, which brought its total funding to $310 million.
Arch
Venture Partners is one of the largest venture shareholders in the company with 15.2% of the pre-IPO shares. Another large investor is Alaska Permanent Fund, which is managed by Crestline Investors. It holds 34.8% of the pre-IPO shares.
Other
investors in the company include Bezos Expeditions and Venrock.
The
company is developing its treatments, and it has yet to generate revenue. It has a net loss of $51.8 million from August through December 2013.
Juno
Therapeutics has applied to be listed on the Nasdaq under the stock ticker symbol JUNO. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs & Co. and
Leerink Partners are listed and underwriters of the offering.
http://junotherapeutics.com
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Groupon
Acquires Swarm Mobile for In-Store Analytics
Swarm
Mobile, which provides in-store retail analytics and customer engagement services, has been acquired by
Groupon Inc.
The
financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed in a website posting by
Groupon that announced the deal.
Swarm
Mobile is incorporated as Swarm Solutions Inc. The company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco. Investors in the company include Abundance Partners and Icon Venture Partners, according to the firms’ websites.
Groupon
said the Swam Mobile team will join the San Francisco office and work for the Merchant Operating System team.
http://www.swarm-mobile.com
http://www.groupon.com
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Histogenics
Looks to Sell 4.3M Shares at $13-$15 Each in IPO
Regenerative
medicine company Histogenics Corp. has estimated that it will sell 4.3 million shares at a price between $13 and $15 per share in its initial public offering.
At
the midpoint of the estimated price range, the Waltham, Mass.-based company would make $60.2 million from the offering. With 10.8 million shares outstanding after the offering, the company would have a market capitalization of $151.2 million at the midpoint
of the estimated range.
Histogenics
is developing a neo-cartilage implant, used to treat cartilage lesions in the knee. The company doesn’t have any products approved for sale.
The
company had a net loss of $16.9 million in 2012 and $25.7 million in 2013. Since the company’s inception in 2000 it has accumulated a net loss of $122.5 million.
Venture
firms that hold 5% or more of the company’s pre-IPO stock include
Sofinnova, 27%; Split Rock Partners, 18%; and Boston Millennia Partners, 5.9%. Other investors in the company include
Alimta Partners, BioMed Ventures,
FinTech, Foundation Medical Partners, GIMV, Inflection Point Ventures and
ProChon Holdings BV.
The
company raised a $49 million Series A round in 2012.
Histogenics
has applied to be listed on the Nasdaq under the stock ticker symbol HSGX. Cowen and Co., Needham & Co.,
Canaccord Genuity and BTIG are underwriting the offering.
http://www.histogenics.com
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LIFESCIENCE
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Intellia
Therapeutics Raises $15M Series A for Gene Editing Therapies
Brian
Gormley | Cambridge, Mass.
Atlas
Venture and Novartis AG are investing $15 million in Intellia Therapeutics LLC, one of multiple venture-backed startups looking to treat disease through the new science of genome editing.
Since
the sequencing of the human genome early last decade, understanding of genes and the genetic drivers of disease has improved, leading to several new approaches to treating disease. Gene therapy uses functional genes to compensate for defective ones. Another
approach, RNA interference, aims to silence disease genes to prevent harmful proteins from being made.
Intellia
and other genome-editing companies aim to modify the genome. Depending on the disease, this could involve deleting a disease gene, inserting a beneficial gene into the genome, or making a particular gene more or less active.
Genome
editing involves using Crispr-Cas9 system, which harnesses the body’s natural DNA repair machinery. Companies see potential to treat rare diseases, which often spring from one gene, and common, complex conditions that involve many genes. In April, Swiss startup
Crispr Therapeutics AG said it raised $25 million from Versant Ventures. Another genome-editing company,
Editas
Medicine,
said it had closed on $43 million in venture backing in November 2013.
Genomes
can be edited by using small RNA molecules to guide Cas9 enzymes to a specific DNA sequence of interest. It may be possible to create genome-editing therapies that make multiple changes to the genome. As a result, a single product could target multiple biological
processes involved in a complicated disease such as cancer.
Atlas
formed Intellia this year by teaming up with Caribou Biosciences, which has gathered intellectual property in the field of genome editing. With its initial therapies,
Intellia plans to collect cells from patients’ blood or bone marrow, modify them, and then return them to the patient. This “ex vivo” approach could enable
Intellia to develop cancer immunotherapies, which trigger the patient’s immune system to attack the tumor, and therapies for various other diseases.
Intellia
also expects to advance “in vivo” therapies that involve delivering genome-editing therapies directly into the patient. Potential “in vivo” therapeutics include treatments for central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, and diseases affecting organs
such as the eyes and the liver.
Intellia,
based in Cambridge, Mass., plans to develop its own pipeline of products and to form various partnerships, according to co-founder and Chief Executive
Nessan Bermingham.
http://www.atlasventure.com
Write
to Brian Gormley at brian....@wsj.com
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AxioMed
Spine Finds Buyer for Assets, Intellectual Property
Timothy
Hay | Garfield Heights, Ohio
AxioMed
Spine Corp., an Ohio-based medical-device company that put
all of its assets and intellectual property up for sale
last month, has been acquired, according to a statement from turnaround firm
Gerbsman Partners, which facilitated the deal.
Details
about the transaction, including who bought the company and for what price, weren’t disclosed. Attempts to reach several of
AxioMed’s investors weren’t immediately successful.
AxioMed,
founded in 2001, developed two spinal-implant products that the company said function more like the real discs of the spine than ball-and-socket type implants that are in use today. The two products--one of which is meant for the lumbar area, and the other
for the cervical area of the spine--feature a polymer core between two titanium-alloy endplates, company materials said.
Medical
technology giants--including Johnson & Johnson and Medronic Inc.--have disc-replacement devices under development or on the market. But
AxioMed’s use of polymers and titanium make the company’s implants more durable than rival products, the company previously told VentureWire.
The
company never disclosed the reason for its decision to put its assets up for sale.
AxioMed
in January 2013 raised
a $3.6 million round,
VentureWire records show. The company told VentureWire in 2012, as it closed a multi-tranched,
$20
million Series D round,
that its total venture backing had reached $61 million.
The
Garfield Heights-based company’s investors include Medical Venture Fund, Primus Capital Funds, Reservoir Venture Partners, CID Equity Partners, Early Stage Partners, Investor Growth Capital, MB Venture Partners, Charter Oak Equity, Blue Chip Venture Company
and Thomas McNerney & Partners, company materials said.
http://www.axiomed.com
Write
to Timothy Hay at timot...@wsj.com.
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Biopharmaceutical Company Juno Therapeutics Files for IPO
Seattle
Juno Therapeutics Inc., a biopharmaceutical company that is developing
cancer treatments, has filed for its initial public offering after raising $310 million in just about a year’s time.
The Seattle-based company said it could raise up to $150 million in
the offering, though that is an estimate that is used to calculate the filing fees and is likely to change.
Juno is among several companies that are advancing immunotherapies
designed to treat cancers without causing as many side effects as chemotherapy or radiation.
The company launched with a $120 million Series A funding round that
was later increased to $176 million. It raised
$134 million
in August, which brought its total funding to $310 million.
Arch Venture Partners is one of the largest venture shareholders in
the company with 15.2% of the pre-IPO shares. Another large investor is Alaska Permanent Fund, which is managed by Crestline Investors. It holds 34.8% of the pre-IPO shares.
Other investors in the company include Bezos Expeditions and
Venrock.
The company is developing its treatments, and it has yet to generate
revenue. It has a net loss of $51.8 million from August through December 2013.
Juno Therapeutics has applied to be listed on the Nasdaq under the
stock ticker symbol JUNO. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs & Co. and
Leerink Partners are listed and underwriters of the offering.
http://junotherapeutics.com
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Histogenics
Looks to Sell 4.3M Shares at $13-$15 Each in IPO
Waltham, Mass.
Regenerative medicine company
Histogenics Corp. has estimated that it will sell 4.3 million shares at a price between $13 and $15 per share in its initial public offering.
At the midpoint of the estimated price range, the Waltham, Mass.-based company would make $60.2 million from the offering. With 10.8
million shares outstanding after the offering, the company would have a market capitalization of $151.2 million at the midpoint of the estimated range.
Histogenics
is developing a neo-cartilage implant, used to treat cartilage lesions in the knee. The company doesn’t have any products approved for sale.
The company had a net loss of $16.9 million in 2012 and $25.7 million in 2013. Since the company’s inception in 2000 it has accumulated
a net loss of $122.5 million.
Venture firms that hold 5% or more of the company’s pre-IPO stock include
Sofinnova, 27%; Split Rock Partners, 18%; and Boston Millennia Partners, 5.9%. Other investors in the company include
Alimta Partners, BioMed Ventures,
FinTech, Foundation Medical Partners, GIMV, Inflection Point Ventures and
ProChon Holdings BV.
The company raised a $49 million Series A round in 2012.
Histogenics
has applied to be listed on the Nasdaq under the stock ticker symbol HSGX. Cowen and Co., Needham & Co.,
Canaccord Genuity and BTIG are underwriting the offering.
http://www.histogenics.com
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VC
FUND NEWS
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Harmony Partners Raises $85M Oversubscribed Fund II
Harmony Partners said it has closed Harmony Partners II, an $85 million second fund. The fund surpassed its $75 million initial target and turned away significant demand to keep the fund small and
focused, the firm said in a news release.
In addition to the core fund, Harmony raised a $30 million co-investment vehicle from its larger family office LPs.
Harmony also announced the addition of Michael Chou to its team as principal. Most recently, Mr. Chou was at Steve Case’s Revolution Growth. Prior to Revolution Growth, Mr. Chou was a technology
investment banker at Perella Weinberg and Barclays. He joins Managing Partner Mark
Lotke and General Partner Greg Eaton.
Harmony has made 20 investments since launching in February 2011. Recent exits include Intersect ENT Inc., which went public in July 2014; Divide, which was acquired by Google Inc. in May 2014;
and Aveksa Inc., which was acquired by EMC Corp. in July 2013.
http://www.harmonyvp.com
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Snapchat Debuts Way to Send Cash to Friends in a Snap
Douglas MacMillan | Venice, Calif.
Snapchat Inc. debuted a new tool with payment service Square that lets users of the mobile messaging app send each other cash with the swipe of a finger.
The service, called
Snapcash, will let users 18 and older connect a debit card to their Snapchat account and send money to anyone using the app free of charge. The tool was made in partnership with mobile-payment startup Square and relies on that company
to store payment information and process the transactions.
Though Snapchat won’t make any money from the transfers,
Snapcash could help the company build a business selling goods and services through the app. If even a small portion of more than 100 million users of the app provide their debit-card information, Snapchat could potentially sell
them stickers or other virtual goods.
Chief Executive Evan Spiegel has said he looks to
Tencent, and its success selling virtual goods in mobile messaging app
WeChat , as a role model.
Spiegel told technology blog Recode that he was inspired to develop the mobile payment tool after Square CEO Jack Dorsey sent him cash via email using his company’s Square Cash tool. “I really thought
that was cool,” he told Recode. “I wasn’t expecting that from email.”
Snapchat is facing pressure to make money from investors, including
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who valued the company at $10 billion in a round of funding that is not yet complete. The company began selling its first advertisements last month.
Benchmark, General Catalyst Partners, Institutional Venture Partners and
Lightspeed Venture Partners are among the company’s existing investors.
Mobile money transfers between friends have surged with the growing popularity of apps like
Venmo, now owned by EBay.
http://www.snapchat.com/
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NEWS
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Warby Parker Adds Storefronts to Its Sales Strategy for Glasses
Douglas MacMillan | New York
Warby Parker has made a name for itself by selling affordable, hipster-chic eyeglasses through a
website, avoiding costly store expenses and licensing fees.
While that business has thrived, the startup’s promising next act is taking shape in a chain of storefronts dotting trendy retail neighborhoods from Boston’s Newbury Street to Abbot Kinney Boulevard
in Los Angeles.
Warby Parker’s eight brick-and-mortar stores are now collectively turning a profit, says Dave
Gilboa, the company’s co-founder and co-chief executive. The stores sell an average of $3,000 a square foot annually, higher than most retailers not named Apple Inc.
It is quite a feat for a one-off experiment that began in April 2012, with
Warby Parker’s first physical retail showroom in Manhattan’s
SoHo district, where the company is based. Later this month,
Warby Parker plans to open its first San Francisco and Chicago stores.
“We quickly realized that while we were seeing all the benefits we expected from branding and marketing--the ‘halo’ effect of having a store open--stores could be a meaningful driver of sales and
profitability, which was really unexpected,” Mr. Gilboa says.
Many e-commerce players have tested the waters of physical retail, but most of these efforts are still experiments.
RentTheRunway has three shops where women can pick up high-end fashion to rent, and it plans to open its fourth, in Washington, D.C., this month. Amazon.com Inc. is expected to open its first brick-and-mortar location in New York
in time for the holidays.
New York-based men’s apparel retailer Bonobos aims to have 40 outlets by 2016, up from 10 at the end of 2011. The stores have limited inventory for sale and are designed primarily to help customers
try on clothes so they can order them from the website.
Mr.
Gilboa says the first stores it opened in 2012 have already generated enough cash to cover the initial construction costs, rent and staff salaries incurred over the nine months it usually takes for a store to open.
A payback period of two years or less is about average for retail shops in popular locations so it is a good sign that the stores will eventually be sustainable, says Anne
Zybowski, vice president of retail insights at Kantar Retail. “When they are able to hit that hurdle and they are able to overcome those costs in two years, as long as they are able to at least maintain that sales volume, it definitely
means that they’ve got a winning model,” Ms. Zybowski says.
In moving offline,
Warby and others face larger overheard costs and new challenges, such as hiring and training a sales staff. Mr.
Gilboa confronted another risk when it came time to sign a 10-year lease on his company’s first New York store. At the time, his company was just three years old. “It was scary in a lot of ways,” he says.
At the same time, the stores do help cut down on shipping costs.
Warby Parker sends customers as many as five frames to try on at a time at no cost. The company also donates one pair to charity for each pair it sells online or in stores.
Mr.
Gilboa declines to say how much revenue the company generates, whether the overall business is profitable, or what portion is coming from brick-and-mortar sales. He still expects e-commerce to always make up the majority of revenue.
Since it is a private company, there is no way to verify
Warby Parker’s estimate of its sales per square foot. But compared with the top 168 publicly traded retailers tracked by New York-based research analyst
RetailSails, that would be second only to Apple, which averaged $4,568 a square foot at the end of last year. Luxury retailers Tiffany & Co. and Coach Inc. make just below $3,000.
Unlike those retailers,
Warby sells most of its products for less than $100. It says its average store is 1,613 square feet.
Back-of-the-napkin math would suggest annual store sales of nearly $50 million if 10 locations were running for a full year at an average of $3,000 a square foot. As for the overall business,
Warby Parker said in June that it had donated its one-millionth pair of glasses, suggesting it had at least $100 million in sales in its four-year history, although a company spokeswoman cautions that milestone numbers like this
“don’t necessarily track with revenue.”
One advantage of brick-and-mortar stores is the potential for more personalized customer service. “Consumers want to be talked to in a personal way,” says Bruce Cohen, senior partner at retail consultant
Kurt Salmon. “Once you get a good retail Sherpa--your curator of good taste and fashion that knows you--you become incredibly loyal.”
Warby learned this early on. Soon after Mr.
Gilboa and co-founder Neil Blumenthal launched the site in 2010, while students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, they got calls from customers who wanted to try on the frames. The two invited the customers
into Mr. Blumenthal’s apartment, where they laid out glasses on a dining-room table.
“They loved being able to touch and feel the product,” Mr.
Gilboa says. “That was in some ways our first foray into brick-and-mortar retailing.”
Since then,
Warby Parker has raised more than $115 million from investors including Tiger Global, General Catalyst Partners and Spark Capital as well as credit-card company American Express Co. The company was valued at $500 million in its most recent round of funding
in December 2013, according to a report in Fortune. A spokeswoman for
Warby Parker declined to comment on the company’s valuation.
Its staff of nearly 400 includes executives poached from retail leaders like Nike Inc. Mickey Drexler, the CEO of J. Crew and a board member at Apple, joined
Warby’s board last year.
The startup’s new store in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood—set to open the week of Thanksgiving—is decidedly low tech. The 2,112-square-foot shop features chevron wood floors, original
murals painted by local artists, banquette seating and magazine racks boasting the latest issues of “The Paris Review” and “Lapham’s Quarterly.”
Customers can try on new
Warby Parker frames, including a limited-edition line of “Keene” sunglasses that will be offered only at that location. A squad of salespeople called “advisers” will roam the showroom in designer French worker jackets and fine-tune
spectacles at a “reference desk” that is made, like everything in the store, from sustainable materials.
http://www.warbyparker.com/
Write to Douglas MacMillan at douglas....@wsj.com
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