According to an NVCA and Thomson Reuters report issued this morning, U.S. venture capital firms raised $4.1 billion from 35 funds in the first quarter of 2013, an increase of 22 percent. But compared to Q4 2012, there is a 14 percent decrease by number of funds.

The actual number of funds raised during the first quarter of 2013 is a 34 percent decline from the number of funds raised last year and marks the slowest quarter for venture capital fundraising, by number of funds, since the third quarter of 2003. The top five venture capital funds (three from Massachusetts) accounted for 57 percent of total fundraising during the first quarter of 2013.

“The first quarter venture fundraising activity represents more than just a “slow start” to the year and really demonstrates the contracting and consolidating nature of our asset class,” said John Taylor, head of research for NVCA in a release. He says the “the lack of a strong exit market is keeping many funds that would like to be raising money away from investors until they can demonstrate a track record. This dynamic is keeping the number of funds raised low. Many of the larger funds closed last year and won’t be back in the market until 2014 and beyond, keeping total dollar levels lower this year.”

There were 30 follow-on funds and five new funds raised during the first quarter of 2013, a 6-to-1 ratio of follow-on to new funds. The number of new funds raised during the first quarter marks the lowest level of first-time funds raised during a quarter since the fourth quarter of 2006 (A “new” fund is defined as the first fund at a newly established firm, although the general partners of that firm may have previous experience as a VC).

By dollars raised, follow-on funds account for 98 percent of total dollar commitments during the first quarter of 2013. By comparison, over the past five years, follow-on fund dollars have accounted for 92 percent of total venture capital fundraising.

The largest first fund to have raised during Q1 was Washington, D.C.-based NaviMed Partners, L.P. which raised $44.8 million. Other large raises in the quarter included Battery Ventures X, which raised $650 million, Third Rock Ventures III, which raised $516 million and Spark Capital IV, which raised $450 million.

The NVCA is predicting lower fundraising levels this year, so it should be interesting to see if this actually is reflective in the numbers. There were a number of large raises last year, so perhaps we’ll see a bigger 2014 for VC fundraising.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another busy week in tech has come and gone, so you know what that means: It’s time for CrunchWeek, the time when a few of us writers talk about the most interesting stories of the past seven days.

In this edition, Leena Rao, Anthony Ha and I (beaming into the TechCrunch TV studio via Skype as I was a bit under the weather) discuss how Apple’s first quarter earnings report has gotten a very chilly reception from Wall Street, Twitter’s big move into video sharing with the launch of Vine, and Quora’s recent expansion from its Q&A core to full-on blogging platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook priced its initial public offering at $38 per share, which is at the high end of the range it proposed on Tuesday. The price will raise $16 billion for the company and the social network a valuation over $100 billion.

The company plans to list 421. 2 million shares of its common stock on the Nasdaq on Friday under the symbol FB. Facebook is offering 180 million of its shares. The remainder of the shares come from existing stockholders — a number of whom decided Wednesday to sell a greater proportion of their shares. Additionally, IPO underwriters have the option to purchase up to 63.18 million additional shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments, which it they are expected to sell based on demand seen during Facebook’s roadshow.

The IPO will be largest ever for a technology company and the third largest overall in the U.S., behind Visa and General Motors.

Last month, the social network reported revenues of $1.058 billion for the first quarter of the calendar year — a 45 percent increase from the first quarter last year, but 6 percent less than the previous quarter. Facebook had $1 billion in net income on $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Video platform Brightcove just released its first earnings report after going public in March. Brightcove posted a net loss of $4.3 million – that’s down from $5.8 million last quarter. The company’s revenue for the first financial quarter of 2012 was $19.9 million, an increase of 53% compared to the first quarter of 2011 when the company made $13.1 million. Non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.17. Analysts expected a loss of $0.16 per share.

Brightcove’s gross profit for the first quarter was $13.6 million (up 56% from $8.7 million in Q1 2011). Non-GAAP loss from operations was $2.3 million for the first quarter of 2012, an improvement compared to a non-GAAP loss of $3.4 million during the first quarter of 2011. Brightcove also announced that it had 4,254 customers at the end of the quarter. That’s up 49% compared to Q1 2011.

“We are pleased to announce strong financial results, highlighted by 53% revenue growth year-over-year, in our first quarter as a public company,” said Jeremy Allaire, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Brightcove. “Brightcove continues to expand its market share leadership position, and we believe the company is well positioned at the center of multiple powerful growth trends – video, mobile, cloud and social.”

Brightcove raised $54.6 million through its IPO earlier this year. Thanks to this, the company currently has $60.6 million in cash and cash equivalents – up from $17.2 million at the end of 2011.

For the next quarter, Brightcove expects revenue to be $19.5 to 19.9 million and a non-GAAP operating loss between $3.5 and $3.8 million. For the full year, Brightcove currently expects revenue to be $81 to $82.5 million and a non-GAAP operating loss around $10 million to $11 million.

A few more highlights from the earnings report:

• Added 264 Express customers and 118 Premium customers during the quarter, including Allianz France, Pfizer International Operations, Toyota and Starwood Hotels & Resorts.
• Successful initial public offering raised $54.6 million in net proceeds through the sale of 5,750,000 million shares of common stock.
• Unveiled a major new release of Brightcove App Cloud, which adds new cloud services for intelligent cross-platform push notifications and content-level analytics that are intended to enable app owners to more easily engage their installed base, track campaign effectiveness, and identify their most impactful content.
• Announced that NBC chose the Brightcove App Cloud content app platform to support the first-ever Emmy screener app for iPad, NBCU Screen It. With App Cloud, NBC was able to quickly roll out a powerful native iOS app for the iPad that can also be easily extended to other iOS and Google Android devices in the future.
• Announced the Brightcove Content Exchange, which enables Video Cloud media customers to access libraries of third-party video content and to execute advertising strategies around licensed content. Third-party video content libraries that are making their content accessible include AOL Video, Diagonal View, Internet Video Archive, NewsLook, ScreenPlay Inc., and Touchstorm.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Professional social network LinkedIn has just released Q1 earnings. Revenue for the first quarter was $188.5 million, an increase of 101% compared to $93.9 million in the first quarter of 2011. Net income for the first quarter was $5 million, compared to net income of $2.1 million for the first quarter 2011, in increase of 140%. Non-GAAP EPS for the first quarter was $0.15. Analysts expected earnings of $0.09 cents per share, with quarterly revenue in at $179 million. Clearly, the company blew past Wall Street expectations.

“LinkedIn’s solid performance in the first quarter built on the company’s momentum in 2011,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “We saw strength across all key metrics from member signups and engagement to significant revenue growth across our three product lines.”

LinkedIn says this is the seventh consecutive quarter of revenue growth for the company.

Revenue from Hiring Solutions products totaled $102.6 million, an increase of 121% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 54% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 49% in the first quarter of 2011. Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $48.0 million, an increase of 73% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Marketing Solutions revenue represented 26% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 30% in the first quarter of 2011. Revenue from Premium Subscriptions products totaled $37.9 million, an increase of 91% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Premium Subscriptions represented 20% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 21% of revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

Revenue from the U.S. totaled $120.8 million, and represented 64% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012. Revenue from international markets totaled $67.6 million, and represented 36% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012.

Revenue for the second quarter of 2012 is projected to range between $210 million to $215 million.

For LinkedIn, it’s been nearly a year since the company’s IPO in May of 2011. And the company has been steadily increasing revenue and profits. In Q4 of 2011, LinkedIn doubled revenue and increased profit, surpassing Wall Street expectations. And the company is currently valued at over $11 billion.

From the product iteration standpoint, Q1 was a slightly slower quarter for the network.

In March, LinkedIn introduced a new version of People You May Know. LinkedIn also launched an embeddable “Follow” button that companies can add to their websites. And LinkedIn made the acquisition of contact manager Rapportive official.

Last week, the company debuted its iPad app, which was a key step in the company’s mobile strategy.

We’ll be following the earnings call in an hour and updating this post with additional details.

Earnings Call:

LinkedIn now has 161 million members, adding 15 million members over the past quarter. The company is seeing the fastest growth in Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Europe.

The company will refresh many of its pillar products this year. LinkedIn is expected to have 5.3 billion professional searches in 2012.

Mobile continues to be the fast growing product for LinkedIn.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook made an average $1.21 per user between Jan.1 and March 31 — a 6 percent increase from the first quarter of 2011– according to an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange commission.

The social network today reported revenues of $1.058 billion for the first quarter of the calendar year. That’s a 45 percent increase from the first quarter last year, but 6 percent less than the previous quarter. It also revealed it had 901 million monthly active users and 526 million daily active users as of March 31 — a 33 percent increase in MAUs and 41 percent increase in DAUs year over year.

Facebook reported that average revenue per user increased across all geographies, but it is also beginning to better monetize outside the U.S. In this most recent quarter, 50 percent of the company’s revenue was generated by users in the U.S. and Canada. That’s down from 2 percent from 2011 and 8 percent from 2010. Facebook notes that revenue growth particularly picked up in Germany, Brazil, Australia and India.

Facebook attributes the slight decline in revenue this quarter over last to seasonal trends. Advertising spending is typically highest in Q4 as a result of the holidays and companies using up their remaining budgets. At the end of February, Facebook introduced a number of new premium advertising options, including logout page ads, Reach Generator and Sponsored Stories that appear in the mobile News Feed. The effects of those products on revenue likely won’t be seen until next quarter, if not the end of the year.

The social network also updated its daily engagement statistic to 3.2 billion Likes and comments per day. In Q4 2011, the social network was generating 2.7 billion Likes and comments per day. It noted that there were 488 million users engaged with Facebook mobile products in March 2012. This is up about 13 percent since three months ago.

Facebook is expected to make its initial public offering on the NASDAQ in mid-May.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Google just released earnings this afternoon, reporting revenues of $10.65 billion for the first quarter ended March 31, 2012, an increase of 24% compared to the first quarter of 2011 ($8.58 billion). But minus traffic acquisition costs, Google pulled in $8.14 billion in revenue. Non-GAAP EPS in the first quarter of 2012 was $10.08. GAAP Net income came in at $2.9 billion, compared to $1.80 billion in the first quarter of 2011. The company was expected to report a profit of $9.64 a share, on revenue of $8.1 billion (minus traffic acquisition costs).

“Google had another great quarter with revenues up 24% year on year,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “We also saw tremendous momentum from the big bets we’ve made in products like Android, Chrome and YouTube. We are still at the very early stages of what technology can do to improve people’s lives and we have enormous opportunities ahead. It is a very exciting time to be at Google.”

The company also announced a new stock structure, revealing that the Board of Directors unanimously “approved a stock dividend proposal designed to preserve the corporate structure that has allowed Google to remain focused on the long term.”

Google-owned sites generated revenues of $7.31 billion, or 69% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2012, which is a 24% increase over first quarter 2011 revenues of $5.88 billion. Google’s partner sites generated revenues of $2.91 billion, or 27% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2012, a 20% increase from first quarter 2011 network revenues of $2.43 billion. Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $5.77 billion, representing 54% of total revenues in the first quarter of 2012,

Aggregate paid clicks increased 39% over the first quarter of 2011 and increased approximately 7% over the fourth quarter of 2011. Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, decreased approximately 12% over the first quarter of 2011 and decreased approximately 6% over the fourth quarter of 2011.

Traffic acquisition costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $2.51 billion in the first quarter of 2012, compared to TAC of $2.04 billion in the first quarter of 2011. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 25% in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 25% in the first quarter of 2011.

Last quarter Google came up short of Wall Street expectations, reporting earnings per share of $9.50 and revenue of $8.13 billion.

We’ll be listening to the call soon to give you more context and information around these numbers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Adobe’s earnings for the first quarter of 2011 were a mixed bag. The company met earnings expectations and revenue increased, but net income continued to fall.

Adobe reported revenue of $1.05 billion, up from $1.03 billion during the same period last year, as well as earnings per share (on a non-GAAP basis) of 57 cents, meeting analyst estimates. Operating income declined to $387 million (from $400 million), and net income fell to $285 million (from $298 million).

The earnings included $9.6 million in revenue from the acquisition of digital marketing company Efficient Frontier, which closed in January.

“Our strategy is to be the leader in Digital Media and Digital Marketing,” President and CEO Shantanu Narayen said in the earnings press release. “With the upcoming release of our Creative Suite and Creative Cloud offerings, and with the momentum we have in Digital Marketing, we remain confident about our ability to drive strong revenue and earnings growth.”

As of 4:59pm Eastern Time, Adobe’s stock has fallen 5.13 percent in after hours trading.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In LinkedIn’s first earnings call as a public company, CEO Jeff Weiner revealed that LinkedIn is adding two new members every second, which is up from one member per second in November 2010. In Q2 alone, LinkedIn added 14 million members, after passing the 100 million mark earlier this year.

Weiner also said that the network is now north of 120 million members, so LinkedIn has added 5 million members in the past month. While LinkedIn’s IPO is a financial event for the company, some of this growth in membership could be the marketing influence of now being a public company. And LinkedIn’s IPO received a ton of media attention, as it was the first major social networking company to go public.

LinkedIn also revealed that over a third of its users are active once a month. That would mean a little over 40 million users are using the network actively. The company also said that the majority of its members us its free product.

And traffic is up. LinkedIn is seeing page views of 7.1 billion, an increase of 80% from the second quarter of 2010. Mobile page views for LinkedIn have increased approximately 400% year-over-year. LinkedIn now has more unique monthly visitors than MySpace and Twitter.

Weiner also added that LinkedIn will continuing to invest in mobile and will adding new mobile specific services to the network in the coming year. Additionally, LinkedIn will be updating the features of the homepage and company profiles.

In terms of competitors, LinkedIn’s CFO Steve Sordello commented in the call, “When we talk to our members, we hear the same thing, they want to keep their professional and personal lives separate.” Clearly he’s referring to competition from Facebook.

When asked about the recent issues with LinkedIn cutting of API access to certain developers, Sordello said the startups were not compliant with the developer TOS and said that they were basically spamming users.

Another area where LinkedIn could play in is the social enterprise communications arena, and when asked about the possibility of the network entering this space, Sordello gave a roundabout answer. We’re focused today on creating value for individual professionals, and they work for companies. Over time, I expect us to create more relevant products and services for them and where they work. It sounds like a social enterprise product is something LinkedIn is evaluating.

Also read:

LinkedIn Beats The Street In First Quarter As A Public Company; Revenue Up 120 Percent To $121M

LinkedIn Share Buttons Now On More Than 100,000 Sites

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has just released its earnings statements for Larry Page’s first quarter as CEO, to positive results, namely that Google set a revenue record at $9.03 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2011.

Page began the earnings call outlining the “substantially increased velocity” of his product-focused management team which has accomplished “a lot in 3 months” Page said. No kidding. He glowed over Google+’s encouraging numbers, with over one billion items shared a day, and over 10 million users.

Perhaps to reassure shareholders on the viability of these new products and token experiments like self-driving cars, Page mused on the value of innovation, “When we started doing search people thought we were crazy,” he said. Page then essentially separated Google products into three categories:

1) Search ads and ad products.

2) Products with high consumer success like YouTube, Android, and Chrome.

3) New products like Google+ and Google’s local and Offers efforts.

“We’re only at 1% of what is possible,” Page said. After asking rhetorically how these services will be monetized, Page explained that the toggling between the three is a precarious balance between short term and long term, with the eventual goal of creating services that people “use twice a day, like a toothbrush.”

“We’re careful stewards of shareholder money,” he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch