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January 16, 2008
Euro VCs Report Flurry of Online Deals Today
Index Ventures and Atlas notified us with news of a few new online service and ad-related investments.
Atlas Ventures, as well as several UK business angels, are backing the founders of a new real estate portal for the UK market called Zoopla. Fred Destin, a general partner at Atlas Ventures, has a post in his blog on the startup with info about the founders and the service it provides. He also provides some rationale for the investment, saying that thhere is competition but Zoopla claims better tech, such as its algorithm for analysing data relating to home prices, economic trends and property characteristics in given geographic areas. Estimates are refined by the firm's staff, according to a statement it issued this week.
The venture has raised over £1.5M to date and has plans to raise additional capital as the business develops, it said in a statement.
Over in France, Criteo, which develops a web-based recommendation engine, has raised €7M in Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures, joined by earlier local investment firms. The press release says that Criteo's real-time personalized recommendations targeted at consumers is attracting more than 50M unique visitors from more than 4,000 ecommerce sites over the past year.
And in London (corrected: not the US as stated earlier), OpenAds, raised a €15M Series B round, led by Accel Partners. Earlier investors in the Series A round (which was led by Index Ventures) also participated, including Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. OpenAds is an open source ad server software firm which it says is used by 20,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages. The new capital is to be used for a hosted version of the product, according to the press release.
Posted on January 16, 2008 11:36 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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