Green Road raises $13 million from existing investors and appoints Jim Heeger, a silicon valley veteran as the new CEO.
According to the MoneyTree Report produced by PWC, Venture-backed companies raised $342 million in the first quarter of 2011, a dramatic 102% increase from the $170 million raised in the equivalent period in the previous year.
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The wave of Israeli startup exits continues. Analyzd, a startup started by two brothers in a garage, developing fraud detection algorithms for e-commerce sites, has been acquired by Swedish company Klarna for an undisclosed sum estimated at tens of millions of Dollars. Analyzd is less than one year old and completely self-funded by the Samet brothers, Ohad and Yuval.
In 2008, we covered the story of EyeView on VC Cafe. Three friends won the Harvard Business School business plan competition, carried on with the venture to raise money from respectable VCs in Israel and land clients like Yahoo and eBay. But since then, very little was heard about the company until now. Beet.tv reported that Innovation Endeavors, the VC fund led by Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, has invested an additional $1 million in Eyeview, bringing the total investment in the company to $6 million to date from Gemini and Lightspeed ventures.
IVC Research Center has released the Quarterly Survey of Israeli Private Equity Deals for Q1 2011. Eleven private equity deals in Q1 2011, amounted at $216 million, a 68% decrease from the $668 million in Q1 last year, and a 74% decline from the previous quarter ($826 million)
As every month, VC Cafe is re-posting the “Invest in Israel” Newsletter, published by the investment promotion center of Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, which offers many helpful tools for prospecting investors. See the April 2011 edition after the jump.
Yet another Israeli startup exit today, with the announcement on the acquisition of Picscout, provider of image copyright protection software, by Getty Images for ab undisclosed sum. Picscout was founded in 2003 by Eyal Gura and Offir Gutelzon and has raised approximately $1 million since inception.
VC Cafe asked entrepreneurs to tell us what type of help or support they wish they could get from the venture capital investors. What started originally as how can VCs differentiate themselves to stand out, quickly became an Entrepreneur’s wish list from its VCs.
Ybrant Media, an large Indian Media portfolio of companies, has acquired Israeli startup PicApp for an undisclosed amount. This is Ybrant Media’s second acquisition in Israel. The company has previously bought Advertising startup Oridian in 2007.
