Venture Capital News

At a cocktail party earlier this year, my friend's daughter took the initiative to tell me about her new startup venture.

Imagine a company backed by Fred Wilson, one of the top venture capitalists on the Internet.

The two founders of online travel website Via.com, Vinay Gupta and Amit Aggarwal, have moved out of active roles at the VC-backed company and will soon launch a travel related venture out of Singapore.

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography.

When tech investors from around the country convened in San Francisco last week for the annual convention of the National Venture Capital Association, spirits were high.

Shares of Tableau Software soared nearly 64% on Friday, promising a massive return for its venture capital backers New Enterprise Associates and Meritech Capital Partners .

Just since April, notable firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Google Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures have invested $9 million in three bitcoin-related companies: BitPay, CoinBase and OpenCoin.

The company's share price drops to $13.40, below the $13.65 price Michael Dell is offering in his $24.4 billion bid to take it private.

Marketing automation business Marketo made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange today, and early trading looks strong, with shares up 55 percent over initial pricing.

What do you think of when you hear " Silicon Valley? " California's Bay Area? Technology? Entrepreneurs and start-ups? All of these are associated with the area, which is home to tech giants such as Google, Twitter and Facebook as well as hundreds of tech start-ups. In fact, Silicon Valley has 35 percent more serial entrepreneurs and 20 percent ... (more)

One year after a record initial public offering that made Facebook more costly than almost every company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, its stock lags its $38 IPO price.

Tom Wheeler, nominated to become the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, pledged to divest stakes in AT&T Inc, Dish Network Corp, Google Inc and dozens of other tech and telecoms companies if he is confirmed.

Tableau Software co-founders Christian Chabot, left, and Chris Stolte are shown in this 2004 photo, a year after the company was founded in Seattle.

The pool, Atlas Venture Fund IX LP, closed earlier this month. The fund came in above its $250 million target, the person said.

Crocodoc has been gobbled up by Box. Crocodoc, an angel-backed startup that offers document-viewing software to enterprises, announced Thursday that Allegis Capital has begun raising a special opportunities fund, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

San Francisco's Yelp Inc. has so far been a typical Silicon Valley success story.

Jelly has raised a Series A round to continue hiring and prototyping the mysterious mobile product from ex-Twitter executives.

General Colin Powell became a venture capitalist after leaving public life and realizing one morning that his wife of 51 years, Alma, wasn't just going to let him stay at home and sit around with nothing to do.

Gathering at the National Venture Capital Association's VentureScape conference this week, venture and corporate investors met with executives leading top startup accelerators in a crowded session to discuss the health of the "startup ecosystem." Two main questions on venture investors' minds: "How do we know if accelerators are succeeding?" And: ... (more)

SAP Ventures has more than doubled the size of its HANA fund of fund and expects to shortly close a second venture capital fund larger than its first.