People Search Engine Ark Raises Biggest Y Combinator Seed Round Ever

People search start-up Ark.com has led a bit of a charmed existence. Part of Y Combinator’s winter class, it debuted to the public shortly after YC leader Paul Graham posted an essay about “frighteningly ambitious ideas” — with No. 1 on the list “a new search engine.”

At Y Combinator’s Demo Day a short Ark pitch delivered in the midst of 64 other start-up presentations got the company commitments for $2 million in funding in a single day. And more than 250,000 people have signed up for Ark beta invites.

Less than a month after Demo Day, Ark now tells me it has raised a $4.2 million seed round from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, Felicis Ventures, Lightbank, Salesforce, Tencent, Transmedia Capital and a bunch of individual angel investors.

That’s the largest seed round ever raised by a Y Combinator company. It benchmarks Ark as a clear frontrunner in the most recent batch of the program’s closely watched start-ups. (Though to be fair, I’ve heard other top companies in the winter class are also cleaning up.)

Ark is almost too good to be true — a search engine that combines public and personalized search for people. It promises to transcend the current stalemate in social search between Google, Twitter and Facebook.

And it actually is too good to be true — right now Ark is basically a simple interface to sort Facebook profiles by current city, gender, school, work, interests and other categories. Only 15,000 people have gotten beta access as Ark has already fully maxed out its Amazon Web Services account by searching their networks and public data.

Ark co-founder and CEO Patrick Riley

But Ark CEO Patrick Riley, who was previously working on his PhD UC Berkeley’s School of Information, is clear about his ambition. “Google seems so out of touch without the rest of us,” he told me last week. “They’ve lost their neutrality.”

The rift between Google and Facebook leaves social search dramatically underdeveloped, Riley said (and it’s a point I’ve argued as well).

“Politics have left open this enormous opportunity,” is how Riley put it.

Part of what’s hard about social search is that Facebook prohibits outside crawlers. But Riley said he’s confident that he can get Facebook data, because he’s gotten advice from Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and worked with Facebook’s legal team to make sure everything’s kosher.

So why should anyone care about “people search”? Beyond the age-old attraction of researching and stalking people, Riley described Ark as an automated “About.me of everyone,” that collates various social profiles.

Riley also said Ark is planning to beef up its social discovery tools, so users can find new activity and interest partners inside and outside their networks. There will also eventually be an Ark equivalent of Google AdWords, where users can pay to promote themselves, he said.

Riley wants to develop a reputation and validation tool that fingerprints a person by comparing their social graphs on different networks. Because many sites and apps improve with a better sense of who is using them, he plans to provide social data plug-ins to other companies.

After being founded just last summer and coming into focus during the three-month YC program, Ark already has a team of 16 employees, including co-founder Yiming Liu, also from Berkeley’s iSchool. And now it has a bunch of money to hire more.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Read more…

Omniture founder lands another $20 million for Domo

Just a few months after lining up $33 million in funding for his enterprise-software start-up Domo, Omniture founder Josh James has raised another $20 million, this time from Institutional Venture Partners.

“This is a pretty straightforward investment thesis,” said IVP general partner Todd Chaffee. “It’s called Josh James.” Chaffee invested in web-analytics business Omniture, which James sold to Adobe Systems for $1.8 billion in 2009, so he is familiar with James’s drive.

James’s new company, Domo, offers business analytics that can handle large amounts of data across different types of platforms. He’s selling it as a service, meaning companies can skip hefty up-front licensing fees in favor of pay-as-you go plans.

Although Domo is landing cash at a clip that brings to mind consumer-Internet plays, it likely won’t ramp as quickly as many companies in that sector,  said Chaffee. “This is an enterprise business,” he said. “Over a five or ten-year timeframe it’s going to grow to a very significant businesss.”

IVP’s investment in Lindon, Utah-based Domo came as add-on to the existing Series A funding rather than as part of a new, pricier round. Existing investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel.   Read more…

Scripps Networks Interactive acquires RealGravity Inc.

Top 15 U.S. Startup Accelerators & Incubators Ranked

There are a number of startup accelerator and incubator programs in the United States. We are fans of these programs (not to be confused with pure co-working spaces) as they offer entrepreneurs a way to spend a few months laser focused on a single idea. Through the accelerator or incubator they receive mentoring, guidance and a small amount of funding in return for a small stake in the company. With all the startup accelerator programs popping up across the country we were curious to find out which programs would offer the biggest bang for the time, money and effort spent in the program.

As a part of his field work for the Kauffman FellowsProgram, Aziz Gilani from DFJ Mercury, working in partnership with Tech Cocktail and the Kellogg School of Management, set out to determine the best startup accelerator programs in America and rank them. Assisting in the evaluation effort were Professor Yael Hochberg and MBA Candidate Kelly Quann from Northwestern University. Together there were numerous interviews with VC’s, Angels, and program graduates performed and then the data was aggregated. This is the first high-level published report of the findings – Aziz Gilani will be sharing a more detailed look at the findings in July, so stay tuned.

High-level Methodology
First, a list of startup accelerator programs across the country was compiled. To be part of the report, the programs had to meet a certain criteria. The programs were then ranked using a methodology that was created by the team, made up of three basic components. It weighed 25 percent by qualified financing events (i.e. companies that got funded after completing the program), 50 percent by the success of the companies that came out of an accelerator and finally 25 percent on accelerator program characteristics (i.e. money startups receive, equity accelerator takes, with a bonus for the size of the alumni base). Each accelerator was put through this methodology and then the rankings were generated. Additionally, these rankings were supplemented by interviews with classic VC’s, investors and past accelerator participants to better understand the perception and reputation of the various accelerator programs in the industry.

The Top Fifteen
After compiling that list, we were able to determine the following rankings for the top 15 startup accelerator programs in the United States. TechStars Boulder narrowly edged out Y Combinator for the top spot, so I’d say that if you are looking to jump into an accelerator program, take a look at these two first. We found this interesting because the two programs are very different when it comes to their approaches. TechStars takes a very hands-on approach giving founders a lot of guidance and mentorship, while according to some participants, Y Combinator has a more loose structure offering startup founders access to their strong Silicon Valley mentorship network and full-time advisors. Coming in very close in third and fourth place in the rankings respectively were Excelerate Labs in Chicago only in it’s second year of operation and LaunchBox Digital in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina (formerly based in Washington, D.C.). Taking a solid fifth place was another TechStars program, this time in Boston where there has been a resurgence of tech startup activity. Taking the sixth, seventh and eighth spots in the rankings were KickLabs in San Francisco, TechStars Seattle andTech Wildcatters based in Dallas, Texas. Dreamit Ventures and The Brandery rounded out the top ten. Ranked 11 through 15 were Capital Factory, NYC SeedStart, BetaSpring, BoomStartup and AlphaLab in that order. Considered but not ranked: I/O Ventures, LaunchHouse, JumpStart Foundry, Momentum, Shotput Ventures, NextStart, Extreme Venture Partners University. The full ranked list of the top 15 seed accelerator programs is listed below.

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Festival of Media

Outreach Initiative To Find Next Generation Media Businesses –

A brand new initiative launches today, in a bid to find the most exciting new media businesses in the world.  The Media Accelerator Program (MAP) is launched by the Festival of Media Global and will be reaching out to the global community of media innovators to find those new companies who are set to most impact the sector in the coming years. Entries are expected from companies spanning ad networks, social platforms and mobile app developers.  Those companies who enter prior to the 18th March deadline will compete for one of ten speaking slots at the Festival and for the overall title of Festival of Media Global ‘Hot Company Of The Year’. Confirmed judges for the initiative include Bernhard Glock, former President of the World Federation of Advertisers, Chris Redlitz, General Partner of Transmedia Capital, the leading digital VC, Tim Hanlon, CEO of Mediabrands’ partnership and investment arm Velociter and Russell Buckley, AdMob Evangelist for Google and Global Chairman Emeritus of the Mobile Marketing Association.   The new MAP initiative is the only way for early stage media and marketing companies to guarantee reaching them and up to 32,000 media professionals globally, who are the ultimate purchasers of their services.” MAP will be hosted at the Festival of Media Global 2011, which takes place in Montreux between 8-10 May.  Now in its fifth year the Festival brings together thought leaders from the international media & marketing industries to explore media and communications developments that are transforming the industry.  http://www.festivalofmedia.com/global/map

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Start up America

The Small Business Administration (SBA) will commit $2 billion as a match to private sector investment over the next five years in promising high-growth companies. Using existing authority, with no new cost to taxpayers, and through the operating infrastructure of the Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program, SBA-guaranteed bonds will match private capital raised by these privately-owned and managed investment funds and will focus on growth companies in underserved communities and those in the so-called “valley of death” in the innovation lifecycle. View Entire Article

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Chris Redlitz, a partner at TransMedia Capital, the VC firm behind Kicklabs, said its theme is online media – advertising, marketing, social media. “We’ve seen a proliferation in tech recently,” he said. “There is a lot of appetite for working in an open, collaborative environment.” Kicklabs will provide benefits both tangible and intangible, he said. “Obviously if we have a vested interest in these companies, we will do whatever we can to help them grow,” he said. Besides taking a single-digit equity piece of companies, TransMedia is setting up a fund to invest capital in them, he said. View Entire Article

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San Francisco entrepreneur Brian Wong has already hired two employees and secured $300,000 in funding for his start-up, and hopes to have a staff of 40 or more full-time workers by this time next year. But there’s at least one red flag in his business plan: Mr. Wong isn’t American; he’s Canadian. As such, his long-term immigration status is up in the air. That kind of uncertainty can spook investors and clients alike, says Mr. Wong, whose start-up, called Kiip, aims to develop a new mobile game advertising platform. “It’s already hard enough to raise funds and this is an added risk,” Mr. Wong says of his temporary visa status. View Entire Article