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Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley has had a helluva April. The company just closed a $41 million debt round from Silver Lake Partners and Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures, and released a revamped iOS app. Yahoo M&A has also reportedly been sniffing around.

In an effort to foster promising web growth, the company launched a browser-focused redesign yesterday: “Foursquare is quietly breaking through as a place for information about venues,” wrote Drew Olanoff, “its most prized asset.”

The company has 33 million registered users and 50 unique monthly visitors and now has to come up with a plan to compel them to keep coming back. Is its value as a social company or as a massive location-data-review company? And though some, like Valley angel Keith Rabois, are skeptical of Foursquare’s future, existing investors have faith. “This will be a very important public company one day,” says Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital. “And I am in no rush.”

Perhaps this is because of the drive and passion of Crowley. His resilience in the past couple of months, let alone this year, is impressive, and we’ve made room onstage at Disrupt NY next week for him to talk about it. Just last and this week alone could fill up a whole conference day, as Crowley himself was also a participant in the Boston marathon, in addition to everything mentioned above .

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Dennis Crowley

Dennis Crowley is a co-founder of Foursquare. Previously, he co-founded Dodgeball, a network of the same nature which sold to Google in 2005.

He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Dennis holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

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Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” opens up February by hosting a former Wall Street derivatives trader turned early-stage venture investor in San Francisco. Renee DiResta, an Associate with O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), is relatively new to the West Coast startup scene. After finishing a CS degree in college, she worked in the fast-paced world of trading derivatives on Wall Street. During that time, DiResta began to explore an interest in technology and startups, slowly building connections with the New York City startup community. Interestingly, as DiResta notes in this discussion, she wasn’t comfortable interacting with tech folks online because, in finance, the culture is to remain quite and unseen.

In this conversation, DiResta talks about how she found out about the opening at OATV, how she was introduced to Bryce Roberts through friends at a startup, how she reflects on nearly two years as an early-stage investor, and what has surprised her most about sitting on this side of the table — such as the remarkable level of open discussion and collaboration among trusted investors that OATV seeks to work with. This discussion would be of interest to anyone (especially those in finance) who are interested in investing in early-stage companies, and what one may expect to functionally do in such a role.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures has announced its third fund, raising $85 million (you can see the SEC filing here). The firm, which makes seed stage investments, says that OATV Fund III is the largest fund to date.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which was founded by Bryce Roberts, Tim O’Reilly and Mark Jacobsen, has funded Foursquare, Bit.ly, Codecademy, Good Data, Get Satisfaction and others. The seed firm’s average investment size ranges from $500,000 to $1 million.

Managing partner Roberts wrote in a blog post that the reasoning behind raising more money was to “provide for greater time diversity within the portfolio.” O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will also be making a few more “Series A” stage investments beyond seed funding. And Roberts writes that the “little larger checkbook” will be able to help the firm “continue to spot and invest in trends that may take a little longer to make their way into the mainstream.

From Roberts’ blog post:

Since that first fund super angels have sprouted wings, accelerators have been, um, accelerating company formation and incubators have stopped being a 4 letter word. We’ve been deeply fortunate to have been able to catch the seed stage wave early and work with some of the most dynamic and thoughtful founders in our industry. Their hard work and vision have allowed our funds to perform quite well in relation to our peers and enabled us to have far more interest in our new fund than we were able to accomodate.

OATV had previously raised $59 million for its second fund in 2010, and $51 million for its first fund in 2007.

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First, online clothing retailer Betabrand announced plans to protect your privates with TSA-thwarting scanner-proof underwear. Then it offered up a solution to Mark Zuckerberg hoodie haters on Wall Street with the launch of its executive pinstripe hoodie. Now it’s looking to bring more sasquatch sweaters and disco pants to its customers by raising a new $6.5 million funding round, led by Foundry Group.

San Francisco-based Betabrand has an interesting business model. The online-only clothing retailer, which launched in August 2010, allows its customers and fans to participate in the creation and promotion of its products. Good examples are its Disco Open Source Project, in which users can create their own specialty clothing using its disco fabric, and its Model Citizen program, in which customers submit their own photos modeling the clothing they’ve bought. In both cases, Betabrand allows its customers and fans to act as pro bono designers and also its biggest advocates.

The startup is also fast-moving, by fashion standards, designing and manufacturing two or three new products each week. With the funding, it plans to ramp that up further, expanding production to 5-10 new products each week. It also plans to expand the Model Citizen program, and seek out new ways that customers can become involved in the creation of new clothing lines.

Along with the most recent investment, Foundry Group managing director Jason Mendelson will be joining the company’s board. I chatted with Mendelson today about the investment, asking what he found interesting in Betabrand. He pointed out that Betabrand dovetails nicely with other investments that the firm has made, such as Makerbot, which is pushing forward the “maker” movement, as well as its investment in the Cheezburger network. At the heart of that investment is the idea of crowdsourcing content, so why not allow users to crowdsource clothing?

Foundry was also impressed with Betabrand’s plans to scale up production and the way that it has been able to perfect the manufacturing process for what are relatively niche articles of clothing. “They’ve really cracked the code to producing small batches of clothing,” Mendelson told me.

The new funding comes up on top of a $1.3 million Series A round led by O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures in April of last year. Betabrand now has 17 employees, but founder Chris Lindland told me by email that the company plans to double that by next summer.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re clearly entering a time when ‘big data’ is increasingly crowd-sourced information. There are few better examples of this than what OpenSignal (formerly known as OpenSignalMaps) is doing. Via its Android app which runs in the background and ‘sniffs’ for signal strength, it’s bringing transparency to those maps the mobile carriers put out — and an iPhone app is on the way.

It recently closed $1.3 million in seed funding from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Passion Capital and Qualcomm Ventures, and is now opening up the first version of its API and hiring new staff.

Originally built out of a co-working space in East London two years ago, OpenSignal has since been downloaded over 2 million times, building coverage maps for over 200 countries across over 1,000 different networks. They say this is the largest independent assessment of wireless coverage assembled in the world.

The API is for its NetworkRank product. It can recommend the best network in any location. This could be rolled into things like property search (e.g. check the best network for a potential new flat location) or in the ‘m2m’ space so companies can check they are on the best network before rolling out a fleet of connected devices.

Coming soon will be a cell tower API and a WiFi access point API. Finding the nearest WiFi points can be useful in consumer applications and they can both be used in e.g. providing location as a service (as they translate cell towers and WiFi points to actual co-ordinates).

Coverage maps by mobile producers are notoriously vague. And with the roll-out of LTE/4G they are going to becoming increasingly important. This is especially important in the emerging world where 4G rollouts are often happening at a faster rate than they are in developed economies due to the lack of incumbent infrastructure.

Right now the maps mobile providers offer are like having restaurants write their own reviews. OpenSignal is clearly about tho change all that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Health insurance is the second biggest cost for businesses behind payroll, but picking the best plan is a nightmare. That’s why Sherpaa just raised $1.85 million to make the decision for you, cut your costs, and keep your employees healthy. With a yearly Sherpaa plan, your employees also get 24/7 telephone access to a group of doctors that can answer medical questions and prevent needless emergency room visits.

Sherpaa is only in New York City right now, but the funding will allow it to expand to SF, DC, and Chicago, build out its product and three-person team, and save more companies up to $4,000 per employee on insurance. It’s already helping Tumblr and 9 other teams be fitter, happier, more productive.

Most of the funding comes from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (making its first healthtech investment), Collaborative Fund, and one of my recent favorites First Round Capital, which is backing big shakeups of heavily regulated industries like student loans via Upstart, and venture capital via FundersClub. A few angels are in too, including the ex-president of Tumblr John Maloney, and OpenX and Jirafe founder Scott Switzer.

When you look at the stats, the need for Sherpaa is clear:

• Business pay $10,000 to $15,000 a year per employee for health insurance
• The insurance plans are incomprehensible 75 page documents that can trick buyers
• Many unwisely purchase low deductible plans that make them pay for healthcare their employees don’t use
• Premiums typically go up 15% a year, and some businesses get gouged with increases as high as 30%
• 70% of expensive emergency room visits aren’t emergencies, and 70% of primary care doctor visits didn’t require a visit at all

Sherpaa aims to solve these problems. It tries to reduce per employee costs by $1,000 to $4,000, and keep premium increases around 5% to 10% a year. The team’s insurance experts parse the available insurance plans and suggest the best one for each Sherpaa client. It typically suggests high deductible plans that most employees don’t exceed, and it recommends businesses give their teams $2000 pre-paid debit cards to make payment easy.

When employees get sick or hurt, they can call the Sherpaa doctors. They’ll suggest whether to go to the ER, primary care doctor, see a specialist, or just stay home. That gives employees peace of mind and keeps them on the job. It’s like having a doctor in the family.

Sherpaa is trying to get a little piece of a very sweet pie. Co-founder Jay Parkinson passionately explained to me “There’s a huge opportunity to disrupt the patient experience. Healthcare is a $2.5 trillion industry. You can’t just go in an disrupt [the whole thing] but you can play around the edges [and be] 100X bigger than Pinterest.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Bitly just announced that it has raised $15 million in new funding led by Khosla Ventures.

Back in May, The Verge reported that bitly was raising $20 million in new funding and preparing to launch a more consumer-oriented service. At the time, a company spokesperson said the story was “not based on any facts,” but the denial was worded in a vague enough way to leave the door open for future funding news.

And indeed, a couple of weeks later company launched a big redesign that placed a bigger emphasis on social bookmarking. It led to a backlash from users who criticized the redesign for deemphasizing link shortening (namely, the site’s original selling point). At the time, CEO Peter Stern told us that the criticism just came from “the vocal minority who are quick to complain about any change.”

The company mentions the redesign again in its funding announcement, calling it a “huge step” toward its broader goal of becoming “the primary online service for sharing and discovering interesting content.” As evidence, it says that daily registrations for the site have increased by 300 percent.

The new round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from past backers RRE Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company has now raised $28.5 million in venture funding.

Here’s the full statement sent by bitly:

“At bitly our vision is to be the primary online service for sharing and discovering interesting content. We took a huge step toward this goal with our recent redesign, with its focus on much broader uses of bitly. Since that launch at the end of May, we’ve already seen daily registrations increase by 300 percent.

Today, we’re happy to announce we’ve raised a $15 million strategic round of funding led by Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures to further develop bitly into the leading discovery platform. Vinod has long been a supporter of bitly and we’re thrilled to bring him on in this official capacity. RRE and OATV also participated in the round. This funding enables us to  focus on growing the team to expand our social web products.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Smoking hot startup Codecademy, a service which teaches you how to program online has launched its Labs feature today, as a sign of things to come.

Codecademy founder Zach Sims tells me that Codecademy, and specifically new hire Amjad Masad, built the feature because it wanted people to be able to play with what they’ve learned on Codecademy without having to download a desktop-based code editor or integrated development environment (IDE).  He says that most other online code-learning environments (like Treehouse) don’t yet offer a way for students freeform write and run the code they teach in-browser.

In addition to Javascript, which Codecademy already offers courses in, the interactive coding console allows you to program in both Python and Ruby as a way to practice languages and implement curriculum you may have learned elsewhere. Sims tells me that the startup plans on offering Python and Ruby lessons in addition to Javascript eventually.

In addition to editing, Codecademy Labs allows you to run, and download executable files so your programs can run elsewhere. “It eliminates the biggest hurdle. When they’re learning code, people want a super easy way to go do something with it,” Sims says “Labs makes it really easy to continue along the path of learning stuff without any of the complications that go along with programming.”

Codecademy recently received $2.5 million from an impressive array of investors including Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder Collective, CrunchFund, Joshua Schachter, Dave Morin, Naval Ravikant and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has apparently completed yet another small acquisition, snapping up HTML5 app distribution platform company Strobe.

In a blog post, Strobe founder (and creator of open source JavaScript framework SproutCore) Charles Jolley says the Strobe service will continue to exist in its current beta form. SproutCore will live on as an independent project, he adds.

We’re happy to announce that, as of this week, the Strobe team is joining Facebook!

Strobe was founded on the belief that HTML5 can transform the way average people use their mobile phones through apps that are available everywhere, anytime, on any device. Now we’re joining the talented people at Facebook to help develop innovative mobile experiences for their users around the world.

For now, the Strobe service will continue to be available to existing users in its existing beta form. We will provide updates by email if and when this changes. SproutCore, meanwhile, will continue as an independent project.

Strobe has been a fantastic adventure. Thank you to everyone who has supported us. We look forward to working with you again in our future roles.

Sincerely,

- The Strobe Team

Strobe’s platform, which debuted back in September, helps developers build HTML5-based Web applications for desktops, smartphones and tablets, and lets them centrally manage them using a single interface. Sarah took a close look at Strobe when the service made its formal debut.

The company had raised $2.5 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech and Hummer Winblad.

Update: as expected, this is mostly a talent acquisition. A Facebook spokesperson says:

We’re excited to confirm that we’ve completed a talent acquisition for Strobe Corp., a mobile app development startup based in San Francisco. Founder and CEO Charles Jolley will join our mobile engineering team, and we’re looking forward to the major impact the Strobe team will undoubtedly make at Facebook.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter has just announced a key engineering hire today. Adam Messinger will be joining the company as Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering.

Messinger was previously Vice President Development at Oracle, where he was responsible for managing the Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, and other web tier products. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a venture capitalist at Smartforest Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

At Oracle he was responsible, for the development Exalogic, Java SE, FX, ME, and Card, Coherence, Virtual Assembly Builder, Middleware Lifecycle and Applications Lifecycle. Prior to his time as a VC, he founded Gauntlet Systems Corp., which was acquired Borland.

It’s a big development hire for Twitter, as the company says Messinger “was doing web engineering before many used the web.”

In October, Twitter’s VP of engineering Mike Abbott left the company to join Benchmark as an EIR.

Photo Credit/Jaxenter

Article courtesy of TechCrunch