SOURCE Vokle

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Brand Affinity Technologies (BAT), the company reinventing endorsement and celebrity marketing, has closed a $20 million Series C round led by Miramar Venture Partners, with existing investors Newport Coast Investments, RimLight Capital, Fulcrum Venture Capital, and ad pepper media International also participating.  Also joining in the financing through their CGI Opportunity Fund II is the Ueberroth Family, experts in worldwide sports and marketing.

The funding comes as BAT is poised to double year-over-year revenues to $30 million in 2010, while expanding its celebrity endorsement roster by 177 percent.* BAT's technology and service offerings include: a sophisticated research engine that provides daily affinity intelligence on more than 38,000 celebrities; a Platform that advertisers use to identify and secure endorsement talent; and the recently launched netBAT (www.netbat.com), a consumer-facing service that transforms celebrity-related editorial images and articles on leading news and lifestyle websites into interactive experiences stocked with highly relevant multimedia apps. The investment will fuel the continued build-out of netBAT, extension of BAT's Endorsement Platform into music and other celebrity categories, and international expansion.

"BAT has quickly proven its ability to convert innovation to significant market penetration and revenue," said Bruce Hallett, Managing Director, of Miramar Venture Partners. "BAT understands the marketing power of celebrities from both a business and consumer perspective, and is using technology to address large-scale market inefficiencies with strong results."

BAT was created by Ryan and Chad Steelberg, who together founded and operated three successful companies prior to BAT: dMarc (sold to Google in 2006), AdForce (sold to CMGi in 1999), and 2CAN Media (also sold to CMGi in 1999).  Since 1996, the Steelbergs have raised more than $150 million in equity financing, managed more than 400 employees and created in excess of $3.0 billion in shareholder value through their previous ventures.

Since coming to market 18 months ago, BAT has powered innovative cross-media endorsement campaigns for powerhouse advertisers such as AT&T, Ford, Comcast, Intuit, and Samsung. More than 3,600 celebrities have signed on to BAT's Endorsement Platform, including marquee active and retired players in nearly every sport, such as Drew Brees (NFL), Jorge Posada (MLB), Rajon Rondo (NBA), Brooks Robinson (MLB – Hall of Fame), Walt Frazier (NBA – Hall of Fame), and Lennox Lewis (Boxing), as well as Olympic athletes.

"The power of celebrity is universal, and we are committed to providing advertisers and marketers with a diversified suite of technology solutions and services that leverage celebrity brands, and maximize their effectiveness," said Ryan Steelberg, President and CEO of Brand Affinity Technologies.  "This financing will provide the growth capital required to continue to expand and refine our market-leading service offerings, for our advertising, media, and celebrity clients."

San Francisco-based GCA Savvian Advisors, LLC advised Brand Affinity Technologies on the transaction.

*Represents year-over-year percentage increase in BAT talent roster from 2008 to 2009.

About Brand Affinity Technologies, Inc.  (BAT)

Founded in 2007, BAT (http://brandaffinity.net) unlocks the marketing power of celebrity through research, endorsements, and interactive experiences. BAT's research engine provides daily analysis of more than 38,000 celebrities and athletes. Advertisers use this analysis on BAT's Endorsement Platform to identify, license, and activate the most effective talent for their campaigns. Currently available endorsement talent includes more than 3,600 athletes and celebrities. BAT also leverages its research engine to engage consumers directly through netBAT (www.netbat.com), which transforms celebrity content into interactive app experiences on leading websites. Learn more about BAT in Fortune Magazine at www.fortune.com/bat. Connect with BAT on Facebook: www.facebook.com/BrandAffinityTech and Twitter: @BATimpact.

SOURCE Brand Affinity Technologies

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Felicis Ventures, founded four years ago as an angel fund by Aydin Senkut, today announced its first Institutional Fund in the amount of $40 million.  While most venture funds are delaying or shrinking their fund-raising, Felicis Ventures was oversubscribed by 33 percent with an investor syndicate that's more than 90 percent institutional.

"Felicis Ventures will continue to invest in groundbreaking startups in the consumer Internet and mobile sectors where there is room for tremendous growth," said founder and Managing Director Aydin Senkut.  "In the past we have correctly identified big winners in key markets ahead of most other players – great examples include Mint in online finance, Brightroll in video monetization, Powerset and Aardvark in search and Meraki in infrastructure. With this new fund, we plan to expand our reach in two ways: fast growing horizontal markets such as mobile applications and e-commerce, in addition to Internet and mobile companies in four verticals – education, healthcare, personalized medicine and energy conservation. In those four sectors, the market potential is in the tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars."

Felicis Ventures has made over 60 investments in seed stage consumer Internet and mobile companies to date, and within the last 12 months, more than a dozen have been sold. In total, 15 Felicis Ventures start-ups have been acquired by companies like Google, Microsoft, Disney, Intuit, AT&T, Twitter and IAC. The speed of these exits is notable – all happened within four to 44 months of Felicis Ventures' original investment. To put it in perspective, Dow Jones, Venture Source & Campton Capital report that most venture funds took, on average, six to nine years to bring exits to their investors in the last five years.

Recently named to BusinessWeek's list of top angel investors, Senkut is deeply committed to founder success.  "It's an incredible privilege to witness our founders realize their dreams of creating world-class businesses," said Senkut. "As an institutional fund, we can now play a bigger, more significant role in their development."

Felicis Ventures' strong track record and Senkut's reputation attracted institutional investors Flag Capital and Weathergage Capital. Individual investors include technology innovators Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal and Facebook board member), Joshua Schachter (founder of MemePool and Delicious), and Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail and co-founder of Friendfeed).

"Our knowledge of the micro-VC universe is extensive and in our view, Aydin's experience, reputation and accomplishments clearly position him as one of the top practitioners in this space," said Judith Elsea of Weathergage Capital. 

Felicis Ventures stands out in the venture community for remaining closely aligned with founders' interests. In that vein, it is creating a Founders Advisory Board, with Paul Buchheit and Joshua Schachter  being two of its first members.

"Aydin and I worked together at Google in the early days and we were some of the first investors in Mint. He is passionate about helping the founders he backs and he's great at spotting teams and technologies that are destined for success," said Paul Buchheit.

"Aydin immediately saw the vision we had for the company and the product," said Matt MacInnis, founder and CEO of Inkling. "His own operational experience, together with his ability to bring other key investors to the table, have made him an invaluable resource."

"Felicis Ventures is a partner in the truest sense of the word," said Ryan Howard, CEO and chairman of Practice Fusion. "Aydin is one of the smartest, most dedicated people I have ever worked with and his counsel has been invaluable. He brings thoughtful and pragmatic insights, which has assisted Practice Fusion in every stage of development. His involvement has been key to our success."

About Felicis Ventures:

Founded in 2006 by Aydin Senkut, Felicis Ventures is a super angel fund backed by institutional as well as high profile individual investors. It is focused on supporting the best and brightest technology entrepreneurs with capital, mentorship and connections. Felicis Ventures' portfolio is comprised of innovative mobile and consumer Internet companies including Brightroll, Bump, Crowdflower, Erply, Imageshack, Meraki, Milo, Posterous, Rapleaf and Richrelevance. Recent exits include Aardvark (acquired by Google), GeoAPI (acquired by Twitter), Mint (acquired by Intuit), Mob.ly (acquired by Groupon), Mochi Media (acquired by Shanda Games), Plusmo (acquired by AT&T), Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) and Tapulous (acquired by Disney). For more information, visit http://www.felicisvc.com/.  

SOURCE Felicis Ventures

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CloudCrowd, a Labor-as-a-Service provider, has announced the company has raised $5.1 million in a Series B funding round.  Led by Menlo Park-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), a leading global early-stage venture capital fund with deep domain experience in evolutionary Internet technologies, the new funding will enable the company to expand the services and features of its rapidly growing on-demand labor platform and drive its business development efforts.

CloudCrowd uses the Internet to tap into its workforce of more than 35,000 registered workers to complete tasks, helping clients reduce overhead, increase efficiency, and lower costs.  Tasks are distributed through a proprietary online platform, providing work and income to CloudCrowd's growing global workforce.

"CloudCrowd's platform allows businesses an unprecedented opportunity to have large volumes of work completed quickly and cost-effectively, while their peer-review process and robust credibility management ensure that tasks are done accurately," said Andreas Stavropoulos, a Managing Director at DFJ.  "We believe that CloudCrowd will redefine how companies source and manage a wide range of business processes."

"We're delighted to be joining with DFJ, who from the start embraced our vision for a transformational platform with the ability to reinvent business processes," said CloudCrowd CEO, Alex Edelstein.  "This funding is a great vote of confidence in the long term potential of our company. We are the fastest growing on-demand labor provider in our market, and we plan to use this funding to invest even more heavily in ensuring the success of our customers and to further accelerate our growth."

CloudCrowd is a Crowdsourcing 2.0 solution.  First generation outsourcing solutions offer a limited range of feasible tasks that require excessive management and deliver unreliable work quality.  CloudCrowd is evolutionary because it can handle much more complex tasks.  Utilizing a proprietary peer review and worker credibility system designed to ensure the accuracy of finished work, CloudCrowd can complete projects in a fraction of the time required by traditional outsourcing methods.  Since launching in 2009, CloudCrowd has already completed more than 1.5 million tasks for its customers and its EditZen service has proofread and edited more than 1 million words.  

About CloudCrowd

Committed to providing fast and reliable on-demand Labor-as-a-Service business solutions, CloudCrowd is a privately held company based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2009, CloudCrowd was started by experienced visionaries from breakthrough pioneers including Microsoft, Netscape, Inktomi, Napster, and Cloudmark. CloudCrowd powers EditZen, the low-cost leader in professional proofreading and editing services, and TranslationZen, which uses the power of CloudCrowd's workforce to translate documents in a fraction of the time and less than half the cost of traditional translation.  The company was named one of the "100 Most Brilliant Companies of 2010" by Entrepreneur Magazine.  For more information go to www.cloudcrowd.com.

About Draper Fisher Jurvetson

DFJ backs extraordinary entrepreneurs everywhere who set out to change the world.  DFJ achieves its mission through its DFJ Global Network of Partner Funds.  Together, DFJ and the Network manage over $7B and have invested in more than 600 companies.  With a 25-year history of success across diverse sectors and market conditions, DFJ has led the way investing in emerging technologies, from the Internet and life sciences to clean energy and nanotechnology.  DFJ has been proud to back industry changing successes in the Internet such as Hotmail (acquired by MSFT), United Online (UNTD), Overture (acquired by YHOO), Baidu (BIDU), Skype (acquired by EBAY); mobility companies such as AdMob (acquired by GOOG), Mobile365 (acquired by Sybase) and Good Technologies; cleantech companies such as EnerNoc (ENOC), Tesla (TSLA), SolarCity, and Brightsource Energy; and life science companies such as Athenahealth (ATHN) and ePocrates.  Named by TechCrunch as the "Top Networked Venture Capitalist," DFJ's Network covers more co-investors and geographic regions than any other venture capital firm.  For more information go to www.dfj.com.

SOURCE CloudCrowd

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Viridity Software, the leading provider of data center energy resource management (ERM) solutions, today announced that it has raised an additional $8 million in Series B funding from current investors Battery Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners.  This follows-on a successful Series A funding round of $7 million.  The additional funding will be used to expand the development of the company’s EnergyCenter software platform, as well as greatly accelerate its go-to-market activities.  

(Logo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20091109/NE07420LOGO )

(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091109/NE07420LOGO )

Viridity Software also highlighted additional recent important company milestones, further demonstrating the tremendous momentum the company is currently experiencing, including:

• Key Customer Accounts – Viridity’s list of customers across virtually every industry vertical continued its rapid growth - new key customers included LexisNexis, Highbridge Capital and F5 Networks.
• Bob Steinkrauss Joins Viridity as President and CEO – Bob Steinkrauss was named President and CEO, bringing with him a wealth of experience in leading early-to-mid stage companies to success - including dramatic organic growth, acquisition and IPO. 
• EnergyCenter Version 1.1 Release – the company delivered version 1.1 of its EnergyCenter software, featuring advanced discovery capabilities further automating the identification of IT assets and providing power profiles down to the device level.  
• Channel Expansion – Viridity entered into an agreement with the Excel Group of Canada – a group that develops, integrates and improves sustainable development in corporate strategies, products and business models.
• Named Red Herring North America 100 Award Winner – Viridity was recognized for its highly innovative EnergyCenter software technology, vision and drive.  

“Viridity’s EnergyCenter directly addresses our need for a tool to balance power, cooling and utilization in order to save money, enhance service levels and ensure data center sustainability,” said Marty Stephens, Director of Information Technology, LexisNexis.  “Moreover, it will help us to proactively prepare for the inevitable downstream regulation in this area.”

“Viridity has tapped into what we believe is a large, growing and prime market opportunity,” said Jamie Goldstein, Northbridge Venture Partners.  “That is, the need for business organizations to take control of the uncontrollable time and expense associated with managing data center power and cooling.”  

“We have been very impressed with the extraordinary progress Viridity Software has made to date,” said Sunil Dhaliwal, Battery Ventures.  “The additional funds underscore our unyielding confidence in the future of the energy resource management space, as well as Viridity’s ability to lead it from both a technology innovation and world-class customer service and support standpoint.”

“We are honored to have venture capital firms of Battery Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners caliber as our investors and as members of our Board of Directors.  They are organizations that are synonymous with innovation, creating value and enormous success,” said Bob Steinkrauss, President and CEO, Viridity Software.  

About Viridity Software

Based in Burlington, MA, Viridity Software is the leader in energy resource management (ERM) solutions that enable data center smart grids.  Its EnergyCenter™ data center energy monitoring, measurement and management software provides customers with a cross functional solution for understanding the connection between physical infrastructure, IT equipment and applications.  Once these connections are fully understood, actionable strategies are provided so that customers can run more efficient, less expensive, highly optimized, eco-friendly, sustainable data centers.  For further information, please visit: www.viridity.com, call: 781-425-2060, or email: info@viridity.com.

© 2010 Viridity Software, Inc.  Viridity Software and EnergyCenter are trademarks of Viridity Software, Inc.  All other brands and products names in this announcement may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holder.

SOURCE Viridity Software

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