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Posts Tagged ‘venture financing’

Vyatta scores $12M as networking gets hot

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Java, Market research, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“Vyatta, a company providing open source networking software, has raised $12 million in expansion round financing as the entire networking field finds itself on the cusp of fundamental changes. The round, its fifth, was led by HighBAR Partners and brings Vyatta’s total fundingto $45 million. Also participating in this round are existing investors JPMorgan, Arrowpath Venture Partners and Citrix Systems.

Vyatta launched its first product in 2006, but has shifted from a focus on its open source routing software to delivering software that handles a wide range of networking functions. The company now has more than 1,000 customers and hopes this round of funding will help it expand as networking enters a new phase.

The networking world has changed drastically, thanks to a sharp increase in virtualized servers. Suddenly the static networking infrastructure no longer works as well when it is easy for developers to spin up a virtual machine on the fly. All those dynamic VMs however still have to connect to the network, as well as a lot of gear, such as firewalls. Plus, policies, such as those associated with HIPAA compliance or security issues all require knowledge of the network.

Kelly Herrell, Vyatta’s CEO, said that in the last six months or so, Vyatta has gone from seeing about 20 percent of its customers interested in its virtualization product to about 50 to 60 percent today. Herrell called it, “a head-snapping change.”

Vyatta’s software is an OS that allows a customer to program out its network topology on demand to adapt to the constantly changing underlying infrastructure. Other companies, such as Embrane, are trying to offer these tools, and still more are offering some type of holistic and abstracted network view. Vyatta believes its advantage is that its long history in building networking software helps it rise above the newcomers to the field as well as its many customers that are using its software in their data centers in production environments.”

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Salesforce.com Joins In Tech Buying Binge

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , on April 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is a piece from the Digits blog at wsj.com.

“Salesforce.com said Wednesday that it would pay at least $142 million to acquire lead-generation startup Jigsaw, the biggest acquisition to date for the online software company.

The move comes as companies throughout the industry gear up for a period of consolidation. Salesforce.com, which has made relatively few deals in its history, recently hired several mergers and acquisition specialists and in January raised $575 million in debt.

(The debt—and the notion that Salesforce was gearing up to make acquisitions—was the subject of a story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.)

Salesforce has had its eye on Jigsaw for several years, but only got serious about a possible deal a few months ago, says Kendall Collins, Salesforce’s chief marketing officer. Jigsaw is basically a big database filled with contact information for potential customers. It’s “crowd sourced,” meaning users submit, update and fact check the information themselves. There’s already a version of Jigsaw that’s built on Salesforce’s systems and allows for contacts from Jigsaw to be easily copied into Salesforce’s sales-automation software.

Salesforce.com has been marketing itself as a “platform” that other companies can build applications on. Does buying one of these companies send a bad message that it will play favorites?”

Read the full article here.

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Trouble Brewing for Cleantech IPOs?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, cleantech, tagged , , , , , on February 5, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is an interresting article from Seeking Alpha.

“By Rob Day

Haven’t had much time to go through the various recent cleantech IPO filings, and so haven’t talked about them much. Also just generally hoping they do well, for the sake of the overall industry.

But in a meeting today someone put up some stats that were pretty sobering.

Taking a basket of 4 high profile recent IPOs and filings, the total across the four companies was:

– Trailing twelve month revenues = $319M

– Trailing twelve month EBITDA = -($343M)

– Total venture dollars put into all four companies to date = approximately $1.5B

Like I said, I hope all of these companies do well and grow into great companies. But this type of profile for IPO isn’t the norm. So you have to wonder about it.

Someone today mentioned that they think these companies have to IPO now because they need yet more capital and the private equity world is tapped out. I disagree, I think companies with prospects like these would be able to raise more capital, if not from traditional VCs, then from non-traditional private equity players. Cleantech private equity is down, but far from tapped out.”

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Venture Funding Up 17.5%, M&A Rebounds Even More

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 15, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is some good news from TechCrunch.

“Last quarter, based on funding and M&A data we collect in CrunchBase, we signaled that we were cautiously optimistic about the rebound of the tech sector. Q2 trends were no worse than Q1 09: venture financings were up 20% and mergers & acquisitions held steady (excluding Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems) in comparison to Q1.

With another quarter of data under our belts, we’re feeling even better about the health of technology startups. The number of new startups, venture fundings and M&A are all on the rise. In addition to decent stats, there are lots of new tech products launching across diverse categories, coming from companies both great and small. The Layoff Tracker and Deadpool have quieted down in our sector. In short, we’re feeling like there’s a more rational and focused market for startups and tech.

Strategic M&A Is Back: 3x Q2 Levels

One of the strongest signals of the quarter was the resumption of activity in mergers and acquisitions. The acquisition market really rebounded in Q3 09 to over $45 billion from 231 deals, 3x greater than Q2’s $15 billion. We haven’t seen M&A activity at this level since Q2 08, which recorded 275 deals totaling $59 billion.

…

Most encouraging, acquirers are adding strategically to their businesses (Amazon-Zappos, Facebook-Friendfeed, Google-On2, Yahoo!-Xoopit, VMWare-Springsource, RIM-Torch Mobile, Intuit-Mint, etc.) Some acquirers are returning to the market with multiple strategic deals (Adobe, EMC, IBM, Thomson Reuters, Yahoo!, Google, etc.) Deal making was well distributed across business segments (consumer web, retail, mobile, advertising, enterprise, biotech, cleantech)”

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Six Year Low For Venture-Backed Liquidity, Despite IPOs

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 2, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a story I picked up at DowJones VentureSource;

“Dow Jones VentureSource is reporting today that Q2 of this year was “one of the worst” ever for venture capital backed firms, in terms of liquidity, since early 2003. According to Dow Jones, there was only $2.8 billion in exits for the quarter, including both mergers and acquisitions and IPOs, down 57% from last year’s numbers. Dow Jones said there was $2.57 billion in mergers and acquisitions of 67 companies in Q2, down from $6.48B and 89 transactions in Q2 of 2008. The three venture-backed IPOs on the market raised $232M. In terms of valuation, VentureSource reported the median amount paid for a venture-backed company in Q2 was almost $22M, down from $41M from the comparable period in 2008″


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