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January 22, 2008
VC Money Piles Into UK Web Ventures: W7 and TouchLocal
The European market might have seen a dip in Web investments in 4Q07 as TechCrunch writes, but this quarter is looking like that might change. After reporting a flurry of deal announcements last week, we've got two more to report today.
=> We7, a UK-based music download service driven by advertising sales, has raised a $6M Series ‘A’ round led by musician turned investor Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures. Also joining was early stage British VC firm Eden Ventures.
The founders of We7 are John Taysom, chairman, and CEO Steve Purdham. This is not Purdham's first venture. He was also the founder of SurfControl, a publicly-traded firm that was acquired by Websense last year for about £204M (about $400M at the time).
After one year of trading We7 reports it has 90,000 registered download users and delivery of over one million free to download, ad-supported music files from its growing music catalogue of 80,000 tracks.
The companyappears to have some interesting advertising technology to support it, with some finely tuned demographic targetting. So far, it has run advertising trials with Microsoft, for Xbox 360, and campaigns for Sony Ericsson, Café Direct and Sicko, the Michael Moore film.
Joining the board is Eden Ventures, Charles Grimsdale, who co-founded music distribution service OD2 (along with Gabriel), in Nokia's hands since 2006, and is a co-founder of Eden Ventures.
=> Another UK firm, TouchLocal has raised £7M (about €9.4M or $13.6M) from Balderton. It is going for a local search service, one that combines a yellowpages kind of business model (charging local business for positioning in its pages) with a community of recommending/reviewing users.
The company was founded back in 1999 and recently went through a Web 2.0 makeover. The Guardian has a good analysis of its position in the market and TechCrunch UK lists several rivals in an article entitled Qype launches in France, as local reviews space hots up, mentioning Qype, Welovelocal, Tipped, and Trustedplaces.
Posted on January 22, 2008 07:57 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | Permalink
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