Image via WikipediaAllThingsD: Khosla Wins the Bidding War for GroupMe, New York’s Startup of the Moment GroupMe, a New York startup that lets users send group text messages to to their cell phones, didn’t exist in April. Now it’s worth about $35 million..... Original investors including First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, who put some $850,000 into the company earlier this year, are all slated to invest again. ..... a bidding war for the right to fund GroupMe broke out in the past few weeks. The company ended up with multiple term sheets to pick from before signing with Khosla Monday. ..... GroupMe works on any run of the mill “dumbphone”, and part of the company’s pitch is that salt of the earth folks (Church groups! Hunters!) have been using it since it opened up in August. ..... Hecht and Martocci left jobs at very red-hot startups — Tumblr and Gilt Groupe, respectively ..... The two formally hatched their plan at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hack Day event in May. .... what investors are really hoping for, at least right now, is that GroupMe follows the same trajectory of another zero-to-hero New York startup — Foursquare. It’s worth nothing that Khosla tried very hard to fund that company’s last round, but missed out.
It is possible Vinod Khosla has other investements in New York, but I am not aware. I know he tried to get into FourSquare. But this GroupMe investment is noteworthy.
If you think about it, GroupOn and the clones are inventing in the inbox space. GroupMe is inventing in the text message space. Who knew your inbox was worth billions of dollars? I'd like a patent on that. What? The inbox.
I personally am very interested in the microfinance fund Khosla is working to set up as we speak. And so Khosla's investment in GroupMe is a very good sign.
Mark Zuckerberg Enlists Facebook’s Help To Plan China Trip
Facebook Testing New ‘Mention’ Feature On News Feeds
Boxee Goes Hunting for Big Bucks Boxee is at 1.4 million users now, but that’s not nearly big enough. It wants Pandora- or Netflix-like scale.... The existing TV industry is ripe for disruption. And the idea that consumers will watch Web video on their TV is moving from science fiction to reality, spurred on by the likes of Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV and now Google TV..... Google TV’s mission–to merge Web video with traditional TV on one screen–is pretty much the same as Boxee’s
No comments:
Post a Comment