Nextdoor, the company that lets people create private social networks accessible only to their local neighbors, has launched its first native mobile app for iOS, Nextdoor for the iPhone.

The launch comes amidst an apparently strong period of growth for the San Francisco-based Nextdoor. In an interview this week, CEO Nirav Tolia said that Nextdoor now has private networks created for 12,600 neighborhoods across all 50 states, which is more than 50 percent up from just three months ago when Nextdoor had some 8,000 neighborhoods created on its system and a significant boost from late March when it crossed the 10,000 neighborhood line.

The launch should also be a welcome debut for Nextdoor’s users, as up until now 30 percent of visits to Nextdoor.com have been coming through mobmile browsers, with 30 percent of new user invitations occurring through a mobile browser as well. “A mobile app was our number one requested feature and has been for past year,” Tolia said. The company is currently working on an Android app that should be released at some point in the next few months.

In our phone interview, Tolia said that the mobile launch could be a “game changer” for Nextdoor’s usage, from being aware of urgent issues such as crime (like Alexia’s jog-discouraging local robbery) and natural disasters to more everyday neighborhood fare like lost pets. “When you have a camera and an instant content delivery device in your hand, all of these things become better,” Tolia said. You can also use the app to easily private message your neighbors.

Nextdoor, which first launched in 2011, has raised $40.2 million in funding from a heavy-hitting list of venture capital firms including Greylock Partners, Benchmark, DAG Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Allen & Company, Pinnacle Ventures, along with new investors Bezos Expeditions and Google Ventures. The company has around 50 staff.

Here are some screenshots of Nextdoor for iPhone (click to enlarge):

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Auvik Networks, a Canadian enterprise networking startup co-founded by repeat entrepreneur Marc Morin (co-founder of now-public Sandvine and of PixStream, sold to Cisco); David Yach, a former CTO of BlackBerry’s software division; and ex-Sandvine product manager Alex Hoff, is today announcing that it’s raised it first round of outside funding: $6 million from Celtic House Venture Partners, Rho Canada Ventures, and BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, along with more contributions from Auvik’s founders, who have been backing it internally it to date. Auvik is part of a wider trend of companies working in software-defined networking, in its case developing a cloud-based platform for enterprises to manage IP networks built out of hardware from multiple vendors. Auvik has yet to release a commercial product: that will only come at the beginning of 2014, according to Morin, who is the company’s CEO.

“We’ve been focusing on the core technology and bringing the product out and bring it to market,” he told TechCrunch, noting that this round is being led by investors that were also strong backers of his previous startups. “This should be enough until launch.” The plan, he says, is for Auvik to support “all major hardware.”

To match how Auvik plans to disrupt traditional networking, Morin says that Auvik will also be priced in a disruptive way: there will be three tiers — See, Tell and Do — ranging from free of charge to a fee of about $12 per month, covering such things as community membership, and data collection, through to configuration services, 24-hour support and deeper analysis.

Enterprise startups continue to remain a focus for VCs, even as their attention gets distracted by the buzz around the next big thing, be it bitcoin or 3D printing.

One of the reasons is because there are still so many areas left to tackle in the space, cluttered as it is with legacy IT services and hardware.  It is here that Auvik sits. Up to now, businesses (especially those that are big enough to have multiple locations, but perhaps not big enough to have huge IT support groups) have had to deploy people to reconfigure networks physically, partly because it’s difficult to get hardware from different vendors to “speak” to each other. Using an API-style approach by way of the open-standard OpenFlow, the idea is that Auvik will become easy for anyone, not just IT engineers, to reconfigure and control how a network operates.

“Networking has been about hardware and boxes, but the focus now is on how people use software to control things,” noted Morin. “No one should have to configure routers and switches anymore.”

While a lot of the early emphasis will be on operating devices and users on a company’s network of desktop devices, the plan is for this to also include the many mobile devices that are also becoming more powerful and more used by workers. This is one area where Yach’s expertise, which spans not just BlackBerry but also years at Sybase, should come in handy.

Morin says that at the moment Auvik counts companies like SolarWinds and Meraki (recently acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion) as among its competitors. But he contends that Auvik will be taking a different approach from them. Tackling the idea of multi-vendor architectures — a common occurence at many medium-sized companies — Auvik is trying to make it as easy as possible for non-engineering IT people to use its platform, also a crucial priority for the size of companies that it’s proposing to target. “The real promise is a dramatically simpler way to configure how an application can be run.”

The other important point is that Auvik says it will, for the first time, provide a cloud-based way for enterprises to go deep into how their networks are controlled.

He uses the instance of a finance group’s network access as one example, with the idea that these people may log in on more than one device. “Say you want to put a policy on the finance group so that they can go straight to the finance server, and you want to enforce that, but the network doesn’t identify users, just IP addresses,” he says. “Using our platform, you can now join these up and change network configurations based on that, and modify it during the day as users log in and log out. Network management has been around for a long time, but it hasn’t had a very deep level of abstraction for how it works.” Morin says that most of the capabilities of hardware are never exploited by medium-sized companies, and so its service will aim to take advantage of that well, extending the life and functionality of that equipment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video discovery startup Boxfish wants to help people find out what’s new and trending on TV, by scouring broadcast and cable networks to find out what people are talking about. After making its second-screen discovery application available for iOS, the startup has just released an Android version, and is opening up to allow other developers to take advantage of the technology it’s built.

To recap: Boxfish works by scanning network satellite signals for captions and figuring out which words or topics or phrases are being talked about across a wide number of TV programs. It started with a real-time TV search engine, letting its users say where and when certain topics are being mentioned. But it’s expanded to enable users to see which topics are most popular.

The result was an app for the iPad providing a “Live Video Guide” to what’s new and important on TV. That app, not surprisingly, was also designed with the idea of connecting to users’ set-top boxes or TVs and allowing them to control the TV and switch the channel to things that they find interesting on the app.

With the launch on Android, Boxfish will be available to even more phones and tablets and users, bringing all the same trending and favorites options that iPad users had. One big new feature that it added with Android, though, was the ability to use Google’s voice recognition technology to talk to the app and search for shows or whatever without having to type them out.

But Boxfish isn’t looking to just be another consumer-facing app. It’s realized that the data it collects could also be useful to third parties. So it’s making its real-time TV API available to some partners and allowing them to use it in their own apps. That includes big consumer electronics manufacturers which may seek to provide a real-time data or trending layer on top of their existing TV guides.

The data is also being made available to universities — like the University of California, Berkeley or Columbia University — for their media schools to better understand the topics that are being discussed on 24-hour news networks, for instance. Other applications include real-time fact checking and sentiment analysis.

Boxfish was founded in 2011, and has raised $3 million in funding led by T-Venture, the Venture Capital arm of Deutsche Telekom.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today in interesting moves comes the news that serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Russell Buckley – who co-founded AdMob (which sold to Google) is joining the UK government to accelerate its policies around startups, mainly funding. Specifically, he’s joining the UK Government’s Venture Capital Unit. The Unit, launched last year, is designed to help UK companies attract funding from abroad and thus help resolve the funding gap which often exists at early and mid-stages. The Unit is headed by veteran entrepreneur Chris Wade and embraces Clean Tech, Life Sciences and Hardware. Here’s Russell’s blog post on the matter:

My New Job

Exciting times!

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BDC Venture Capital, the leading major investment firm for accelerators in Canada, announced today that it would add its financial and expert support to ongoing Canadian Technology Accelerator programs being run in the U.S. by the Canadian government. The programs, spread across various major tech hubs, including Boston, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco, give Canadian startups the U.S. face time they need to make connections and product sales.

BDC says that the goal is to get the Canadian startups with the most potential into a high-growth market as effectively as possible and says this is a natural extension of its work with Canadian-based accelerators and incubators, including GrowLab, Extreme Startups, Hyperdrive and Founder Fuel. BDC’s Montreal VP Senia Rapisarda explained that, while startups participating in the CTA program will get access to its convertible note options for financial support, this is more about providing an experience for startups that they might not otherwise have.

“We understand that we can bring companies up to a certain level [with our Canada-based accelerators],” she said. “But then, the U.S. clearly being the first port of entry in terms of customers, it really made a lot of sense to pair up with the CTAs in New York, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia who were so close to customers that at that point a company could be seriously accelerated.”

Rapisarda uses an example an enterprise software startup that gained access to Fortune 500 companies located in New York and the Bay area through the program, where they were better able to learn exactly what those companies needed and then tailor their offerings for them. Overall, the whole program is about treating companies not as specifically “American” or “Canadian,” but about going after opportunity where it’s biggest, in order to give them the best start possible.

BDC is sending the “best of the crop” to these CTAs, she said, which is “producing results quite quickly.” The approach they’re taking is akin to how you run a startup, Rapisarda says. BDC is treating each case individually and tailoring its approaches to the vertical or industry of each startup they send in terms of how long they’ll stay in the U.S. and what kind of mentors they need and connections they’ll make. She says it’s about being flexible, and “evaluating” and “pivoting” the same way early stage startups do to properly meet the market’s needs. In other words, BDC Venture is very keen on eating its own dogfood when it comes to running these international accelerator efforts.

One key area to watch in the future is how Canada’s Startup Visa program affects the international dynamics of early stage companies, and of accelerators. “What I think is interesting is to see the impact of the Startup Visa on Canadian companies, which are able now to attract even more talent from different countries,” she said. “And how that will impact the relationship with the United States in terms of markets, because clearly the most promising markets are then South America, India and China.”

For now though, the U.S. remains the major gateway for Canadian businesses, and initiatives like this one hope to help them make sure that companies with the strength to succeed in that market get the chance to prove it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

More VC money sloshing around Europe. Creandum, the Stockholm-based VC best known for its early investments in the likes of Spotify and Videoplaza, has closed its third fund at €135 million (~$177m), laying claim to being the biggest technology venture capital fund in the Nordics.

The new fund, which was a year in the making and has already made around six investments, will target 25-30 early stage companies in the Nordics and wider European region, with a mixture of seed (€100k – 1m) and A-rounds (€1m – 10m). The majority of those will be in consumer and other software companies, with the rest being hardware and high-tech investments.

Maybe Europe’s Series A crunch — if there is such a thing — just got a little softer.

Creandum says the new fund was raised with “strong support from existing and new investors from the Nordics, rest of Europe and the US”, and that the number of Limited Partners doubled versus the previous €80m Creandum fund raised in 2007.

Interestingly, Unquote reports that only one investor from Fund II “did not re-up into Creandum III”, and that the new fund comprises 11 investors, with “approximately 50% of the capital coming from Sweden and the rest from elsewhere in Europe”. One of those investors is the Finnish government investment vehicle Finnish Industry Investment, which put in €7.5m. More generally, they are made up of family offices, and institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies.

Already active for a year, Creandum’s early investments from the new fund include the computer vision startup 13th Lab, mobile wine app Vivino, the price comparison service for sea freight Xeneta, last minute hotel booking app JustBook and Singapore-basd gaming company Non Stop Games – with a 6th Swedish investment yet unannounced.

I’m told that this accounts for no more than 10% of the new fund, with up to 24 more investments to go. Meanwhile, the VC says that 5 out of its first 6 deals have been seed investments.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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

Those who know in the Valley know the name Sam Pullara. Whether it was his time as a repeat entrepreneur and technical founder, or stints as an EIR at some of the Valley’s most premier venture capital firms, or his time as a lead technologist at two of the largest tech companies in the Valley (most recently at Twitter), Pullara has occupied nearly every seat at the table throughout his career. Now, after leaving Twitter and after years of being an angel investor, Pullara has moved himself and his blog, Java Rants, over to the venture capital side as a Managing Director of Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto, a firm which started back in the early 1960s and has focused on investing in SaaS, infrastructure, and other fundamental technologies.

I invited Pullara into the Studio because he isn’t the type to seek out attention, and I let the cameras run longer to capture the full arc of his career. He has started two companies, both of which were acquired, has been an EIR and consultant with Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, was the Chief Scientist at Yahoo!, and most recently was part of a small, senior team that helped rebuild Twitter’s codebase. In this discussion, Pullara details his career moves, what he learned being a technical operator, a technical founder, and now a venture capitalist (including angel investments), with the hopes of providing an example for many engineers out there today starting out in their careers. Specifically, Pullara touches on how his technical ability gave him C-level access to company leaders to pitch solutions directly to them. On a different track, he also (honestly) explains his lessons as an angel investor and shares details into the unique capital and LP structure of Sutter Hill Ventures, where he is now investing into the next wave of technology startups.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One of the common themes that we’re hearing from investors during Disrupt NYC has been that the areas that are ready to be disrupted might not be anywhere close to the sometimes sexier-appearing consumer space. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies and current partner at Formation 8, discussed some of his thoughts on what will be and should be disrupted by way of technology.

The areas of interest for him and his firm are government, finance, healthcare, energy and logistics. Lonsdale’s history is an interesting one: “I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the valley as a coder.”

Why aren’t more companies focusing on the areas that Lonsdale mentioned? He says it’s because younger entrepreneurs have no visibility into those verticals: “For example, there’s hundreds of problems in finance, but these kids haven’t worked with multi-million dollar backend security.” However, the need is clearly there, as any space with a lot of data flowing through it needs more tech: “There’s an explosion in information, so upgrading the technology in these industries is the fun thing now.”

Currently, Lonsdale’s Formation 8 firm is seeking out companies that are working on solving hard problems that turn into scalable platforms. The firm has raised a whopping 448M fund and has been heavily involved in the Asian market, a location that Lonsdale says more US-based entrepreneurs are starting to focus on.

Lonsdale even says that there might be more opportunities for smart ideas in Asia, due to a surplus of mobile devices among the population.

With a wider-than-tech worldy vision as a passionate former coder, entrepreneur and current investor and mentor, Lonsdale is very interested in Palantir’s pro-bono work against human trafficking and making sure that we don’t have a Cyber-9/11: “There’s a Cyber battle going on in the background, it’s good that we’re spending a lot of money to make sure that it doesn’t happen.”

Additionally, Lonsdale wants immigration reform immediately so that the US can stay competitive enough to give smart people the support system that they need, rather than sending them through a process that demoralizes them. He called the current system “disgusting.” He’s joined Zuck and crew at
It’s a fun thing, my main job became teaching people how to manage and inspiring them to build teams and mentoring them. Learning to be a manager and being an investor is the same thing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Ashton Kutcher took the stage with Guy Oseary to talk about their A-Grade fund. Arrington started right away about a rumor that the fund is raising money at a $100 million valuation. The two partners confirm the rumors, saying that they are raising “enough money.”

It means that financial institutions and companies will invest a certain amount of money in exchange for equity in the A-Grade fund, valuing the existing investments and activities at $100 million. With three partners (Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle), the fund has been investing for about two and a half years. Until today, the three partners only invested personal money. It is still unclear how much money they put into the fund to date.

Among its portfolio companies, the A-Grade fund has invested in Spotify, Uber, Shazam, Soundcloud, Fab and Airbnb. It mainly takes part in seed and Series A rounds.

When asked whether it is bundling current investments or creating a new fund, Ashton Kutcher answered that it is doing both. “We’re just somewhat formalizing what we’ve been doing,” Kutcher said.

The new fund will keep the A-Grade name. While the new funding is not official yet, Kutcher and Oseary said that it’s mostly a one-time investment. “We are pretty well filled up,” Kutcher said. The partners will make an announcement when the deal finalizes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at Disrupt NY, Ken Lerer and Ben Lerer took the stage to talk about Lerer Ventures and their respective entrepreneur stories. One thing that caught the attention of the audience is when Ken Lerer talked about gun control and a new StopTheNRA.com website.

“We are going to launch StopTheNRA.com,” Ken Lerer said. The site should be up in about two weeks. They already own the domain name and it’s now just a matter of time. It will be a partnership with Mayor Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Gabrielle Giffords’ Americans for Responsible Solutions initiatives.

The motivation behind this new site is to be more vocal about gun control. “We are doing something viral,” Ken Lerer said.

A significant gun control bill that would have expanded background checks for gun buyers was brought to a vote in the senate a few weeks ago, but the effort failed, and the government is now back to square one.

When asked about New York politics, Ken Lerer only had good things to say about Mayor Bloomberg. “Spectacular” was the word he used to describe him. “His or her successor may not be as knowledgeable as him,” he continued. That’s why he chose not to express a preference for the front-runners of the upcoming election.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch