Startup Deals

Social media marketing company Brand Networks is announcing that it’s acquiring Optimal for $35 million in cash and stock.

This is an area where companies like Salesforce.com have been making acquisitions. In fact, when Brand Networks raised a $68 million round (its first outside funding!) earlier this year, Tedford cited the need to compete as an independent company against bigger competitors – so the acquisition also helps Brand Networks by growing its headcount.

Freelancer.com announced today that it has filed for its initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange. The company aims to raise $15 million AUD (about $14.2 million USD). Thirty million new shares will be offered to the public at $0.50 AUD per share. Its IPO values the online services marketplace at $218 million AUD (about $206 million USD).

Freelancer.com plans to use funds raised in its IPO to fund organic growth and acquisition opportunities. The company disclosed in its prospectus that it forecasts 2013 revenue at $18.3 million AUD (about $17.3 million USD), compared to $10.6 million AUD (about $10 million USD) in 2012, with gross margins of 88%. Consolidated net profit after tax is forecast at $471,000 million AUD, a 35% decrease from $728,000 AUD in 2012. Gross payment volume in 2013 is expected to reach $80.9 million AUSD.

Maveron's investment has already paid off. And it will likely only get better.

Pinterest today started its preannounced test of "promoted pins," a.k.a. the first-ever revenue-generating product for the company valued at $2.5 billion.

All Twitter needs to do is host long-form video, and it’s off to the races.

Yes, YouTube is the de facto video distribution provider on the Internet. More than six billion hours of video are watched each month, and its videos reach more U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 34 than any cable network. It’s because of numbers like these that more than a million advertisers are pouring dollars into pre-roll YouTube advertisements.

However, YouTube’s advertising value is derived from its massive distribution around the Web. Brands generally use YouTube as a vehicle to upload easily embeddable videos, but a brand’s YouTube channel is rarely where it invests and engages with its community in real time.

This weakness is Twitter’s opportunity: Tweets are just as easily embeddable as YouTube videos, with news stories and blogs regularly including embedded tweets of reactions to recent events. Embedded tweets are slowly becoming as ubiquitous as embedded YouTube videos across the Web.

Ownership rules prevented the company from making its highly anticipated, and potentially very lucrative, debut in Hong Kong, as it had wished.

RadiumOne is completing selection of which bankers will underwrite its IPO, which it plans to secretly file for soon, according to a source close to its Wall Street negotiations. The advertising tech company is said to have nearly $100 million in yearly revenue, and hopes to draft off of successful IPOs by fellow adtech provider RocketFuel and Twitter, which also filed a secret S-1.

Data and analysis for entrepreneurs, program founders, and investors

A centralized resource for all information on seed accelerators and the companies that have gone through them.

This paper is a slighly modified version of my MBA dissertation/Individual Project at Cambridge University.

Wix, an Israel-based company that helps people and businesses build websites, has filed for an initial public offering of up to $100 million.

In the lead up to the highly anticipated Twitter IPO, Wix is joining the ranks of companies moving to get their offerings into the public markets while the window is open.

Wix, with 37 million registered users, offers a freemium website creation service that helps people create a website using drag-and-drop tools without knowing any programming. About 680,000 of its users are paying subscribers.

Violin Memory IPO Flails, RingCentral IPO Soars Tomio Geron Tomio Geron Forbes Staff
FireEye Founder Banks Hundreds Of Millions In IPO Tomio Geron Tomio Geron Forbes Staff
Twitter Files For IPO - Confidentially Tomio Geron Tomio Geron Forbes Staff

In the first six months of 2013, Wix generated revenue of $34.1 million, up from $18.9 million in the year-ago period. Net loss in the first half of 2013, however, was $10.1 million, up from $7.8 million in the first half of 2012.

The latest company making a bid to bring the subscription model to the book world is one that may already be familiar to TechCrunch readers — social publishing service Scribd.

Scribd first launched in 2007, offering users a platform for users to share documents and other written content. We use it ourselves as a way to upload and embed documents that are relevant to our stories. For Scribd, moving into the subscription books business doesn’t seem like a huge leap, and several of the most important pieces are already in place.

For one thing, the company actually launched an e-book market back in 2009. And it already has users paying a subscription fee for access to premium content — in fact, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler told me the company “soft launched” this service in January by adding books to its premium offering, and that the service has been growing 60 percent for each month since.

Today Scribd its making its ambitions on this front clear, in part by announcing its first big deal with a major publisher — HarperCollins. The companies say that the “majority” of the back catalog for HarperCollins US and HarperCollins Christian will now be available in Scribd’s subscription service, with featured authors including Paolo Coehlo, Neil Gaiman, Marian Keys, and Elmore Leonard. That means Scribd subscribers won’t have access to most of the newest HarperCollins books — but the publisher’s full catalog, including new titles, will be available for purchase on an individual basis.

With the loosening of the SEC’s restrictions around general solicitation or public fundraising by startups, AngelList is launching a suite of products that could extend its influence (and its revenue model) in the tech ecosystem today.

Much has been made of how AngelList’s new ‘Syndicates’ program could revolutionize early-stage funding for startups. Regular angels can essentially raise a venture fund on the fly, bring in a group of friends who are accredited investors and provide a startup with an early round of reasonable size. Then the lead angel takes carry from the deal.