April 10, 2008
Open Source Trading Platform Marketcetera Raises $4M In First Round
San Francisco-based Marketcetera has raised $4M in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Shasta Venturesand Jack Selby, managing director and co-founder of hedge fund Clarium Capital.
Marketcetera is an open-source trading platform that provides order routing and management for algorithmic trading.
The startup was founded in April 2006 by CTO Toli Kuznets and CEO Graham Miller, who both had graduated form Stanford and worked in financial software development. They hit on the idea that new exchanges are being built monthly at high cost by Wall Street firms and that an open source building block was missing.
This doesn't seem like an enormous business but should they succeed here, surely there are other opportunities to build open source financial software products.
View - site
Posted at 01:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 28, 2008
MSFT Buys Israeli Analytics Firm YaData
Microsoft has bought Israel's YaData, which sells micro-segmentation for several industries: online advertising, telecom, banking, insurance, and credit cards.
If you don't have some background in knowledge management, YaData is going to seen alien, but here goes. YaData's segmentation suite is comprises of 2 products, the Segment Discovery and Ranking engine (SDR) and the Segment Relationship management nodule (SRM). Based on customer data (usage, demographics, surveys, etc.), the SDR creates a list of segments ranked according to their business relevancy, and requires no hypothesis or ad-hoc model building. The SDR is governed by a ranking method which combines both statistical algorithms and business filters, to sieve through micro-segments and find the most actionable, business relevant segments.
YaData's CEO and co-founder is Amir Peleg who founded Unipier (fka Cash-U) in Jan. 2000 and was its CEO until February 2004.
Israels' business bible Globes reports that the selling price was in the $20-$30M range. YaData was founded in July 2006. Investors include Giza Venture Capital and Ofer Hi Tech.
View - site
Posted at 02:17 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 15, 2008
Personal Finance Site Spendview Raises $2M
Back in the '90s there were so many personal financial software application startups getting funded that we could do a whole issue on them at the Red Herring. Then for a number of years it was all about Intuit. Now it seems that investors see new opportunities in Web-based personal finance software startups. We have covered Cake Financial, Netbooks (true it has more of a small biz focus), Boxfer, Mint, Wesabe, and Geezeo. Now Houston TX-based Spendview has raised $2M in a first round from Meakem Becker Venture Capital says PEWire.
Several of these products solve a worthy problem for consumers - saving us time by bringing our various online financial data into one place and then putting that into perspective for us. For the life of us, it would be tough to chose which one to standardize on. The reason we want this is to save us time but there are too many choices for a quick decision so we'll let the market shake out and decide for us.
Nikhil Roy is the founder and CEO. In 2001, he co-founded eSoftware Solution, a CRM product that was acquired by Home Depot.
SpendView says it developed V1.0 with the help of an extraordinary but anonymous programmer.
View - site
Posted at 09:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 07, 2007
ING To Pay $220M For Sharebuilder
Dutch financial giant ING is acquiring ShareBuilder, a Bellevue, WA-based online brokerage, for $220M in cash. We have used Sharebuilder and it seems to us to be a solid service. It's a useful brokerage tool for people who don't want to day-trade. ShareBuilder allows investors to buy partial shares of stock in dollar increments. That means an investor could buy $50 in Google stock even though share trade above $700 per share. Investors also can set up weekly, biweekly or monthly automatic purchases of more than 6,000 stocks. The company claims 660K users.
ShareBuilder has strong co-marketed deals including Costco, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and Boeing Employees Credit Union.
ShareBuilder has raised around $75M in VC funding since 1996, from Madrona Venture Group, Safeco, Lake Street Capital, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.
View - site
Read - Marketwatch
Posted at 11:04 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 29, 2007
Judge Denies $10M Bribe To CEO
Versus Financial is a pretty shady story that casts an ugly light on both its CEO and its VCs. Here are the facts.
+ Verus Financial Management sold to a British company for $325M in 2005.
+ CEO Richardson M. Roberts said in a lawsuit that he only agreed to the deal because he had been promised a $10M from Verus' backers San Francisco-based Financial Technology Ventures.
+ "Under his own admissions, (Roberts) extracted a payment from another shareholder in exchange for supporting, as CEO, an action that he otherwise did not think was in the best interest of the shareholders," wrote presiding Judge AletaTrauger who denied Roberts his claim to be paid $10M from Financial Technology Ventures.
+ Roberts argued that he needed the $10M to help finance his divorce from his wife, however, he stood to make $50M+ from the sale of Verus.
Read - AP story
Posted at 01:53 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 10, 2007
Credit Card Scam Fighters FraudSciences Raises $11M
Bit by Bit it is getting easier for smaller online merchants to compete. Startups like FraudSciences help by giving merchants a low risk way to accept credit cards from the scary general pubic. FraudSciences offers a full order value guarantee against all fraud-related charge backs. The company ays it has tested in over 150K online transactions with 99.99% performance accuracy, and less than 0.01% of transactions approved incur any fraud-related charge back fees.
Customers include Ice.com, Diamond.com, NetShops, Adorama Camera and Goldspeed.com.
Today the company announced that it raised a 2nd round of funding at $11M from Redpoint and Israel's BRM.
Read - announcement
Posted at 06:19 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Israeli Trading Platform Traiana Bought For $238M+
Traiana has been acquired by ICAP (LSE:IAP) for $238M in cash plus $9M in ICAP shares. VC-backed Traiana sells automated post-trade processing services to financial institutions while ICAP is a large inter-dealer broker. Funded in 2000, Traiana has raised $42.5M from Pitango Venture Capital, Gemini Israel Funds, Evergreen Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and others.
Traiana says it expects revenues of $15M this year, up 40% from 2006.
Read - announcement
Posted at 06:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 25, 2007
Steve Case's Gratis Card Relaunches As Revolution Card
We ran a solid post on Steve Case's Gratis Card back in May. Now the company has changed its name to Revolution Health and is officially launching with $50M in funding. The company has been formed by Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, Larry Summers, David Pottruck, Russell Hogg. The $50M in funding comes from Citi, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Ted Leonsis, Case’s investment firm Revolution.
In addition to the Revolution Card, the startup is launching Revolution MoneyExchange, a Paypal competitor that will work via IM and social networks.
Let's rewind the tape on the story..,
In 2005, Visa and Mastercard generated $25.1 billion in what are called "interchange fees" on more than $1.1 trillion in credit card purchases, an average of 2.2% per transaction, according to The Nilson Report, a payment industry trade publication. Debit cards charge about 1.75%.
What if there were a credit card that charged merchants just .5% (half of 1%)? No chance, right? Visa, MasterCard (now public, NYSE: MA) and the gargantuan banks behind them like JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup, sitting atop 330M credit card accounts, are just too
muscular, correct?
But say the upstart firm (GratisCard, how Revolution Card) is backed by Steve Case's Revolution.com, where Case has put about $500 million of his money to work. And imagine that GratisCard's chief executive, Jason Hogg, not only was a founder of MBNA Canada, now part of Bank of America, but is also the son of credit card veteran Russell Hogg, chief executive of Mastercard in
the 1980s...and on the Board.
And in an era of rising nervousness regarding traditional plastic, say that Revolution Card transactions are encrypted and routed over the Internet.
And customers have to use a personal ID number, which can be changed
regularly, to authorize purchases. The oblong card has no name or account
number embossed on it.
A typical credit card purchase of a $100 pair of pants costs retailers
$1.80 in fees, eating into already thin profit margins. In fact, in 2003,
MasterCard and Visa settled a suit filed by Wal-Mart Stores-- later joined
in a class-action by hordes of other retailers— agreeing to pay back $3
billion in hefty interchange fees.
And yes-- Revolution Card also works within the existing point-of-sale
infrastructure so merchants don't have to buy additional equipment.
Indeed, reducing the costs for merchants gives them more leeway to provide
instant rewards to Revolution Card holders, instead of the profoundly complex
rewards programs that have been foisted upon us for years (and take years
to earn).
Sure, on paper, St. Petersburg, FL-based Revolution Card has no chance. It's
the "Tucker" car, and Visa/MasterCard/The Big Banks are Detroit. But the
web can help disrupt the most calcified of markets.
Read - Ted Leonsis Blog
Posted at 03:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 19, 2007
Pequot Takes Minority Stake in Restricted Stock Partners
NYC-based Restricted Stock Partners says it has secured Series A funding from Pequot Ventures. The startup operates a proprietary electronic trading platform or Restricted Securities Trading Network (RSTN) that is currently in beta with 300 institutional users.
Restricted securities are commonly issued through private placements, corporate mergers and reorganizations, and as compensation. But as their name implies, they present liquidity blocks that the RSTN is set up to get around. Restricted stock can not be sold on a public market such as the Nasdaq. It can only be sold it a private transaction to accredited investors.
Given the private equity trend-lines, these guys would seem to be riding a surge of potential business.
Read - announcement
Posted at 11:05 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 17, 2007
NEA & Friends Cough Up $100M For Forex's Oanda
Online forex or currency exchange is a sector that gets little attention, except by users and investors. New Enterprise Associates is cock-sure about forex and together with was joined by Legg Mason, Cascade Investment and T. Rowe Price. they invested $100M in an industry leader Oanda. Currency trading is a $2 trillion a day business (50 times the size of the US equities market), yet there is no eTrade for this market and it is still not common for consumers to trade currencies.
Oanda started life as a simple site for getting exchange rates and it evolved into a site for regular folks to buy and sell currencies and more recently it is going upstream to the banks. In September 2005, Index Ventures made a solo $17M Series A investment in Oanda.
Competition is getting stiff. Last April, NJ-based FX Solutions raised $100M from Francisco Partners in a recapitalization round. In January, San Francisco-based ETF Securities raised a $10M from FTVentures. In July, Technology Crossover Ventures bought a minority stake in bank-owned foreign exchange trading portal FXall for $77.5M. And Gain Capital raised $40M.
Read - CNET
Posted at 02:36 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 16, 2007
Golden Gateway Financial Raises First Round
Unless you are age 62 or nearing it you may not know what is a reverse mortgage. In short, its a tool for old-timers to get paid monthly sums from the mortgage banker. Emeryville, CA-based Golden Gateway Financial just closed $6M in Series A funding led by Menlo Ventures, says PEHub
Golden Gateway was founded by CEO Eric Bachman who was CEO of Pay By Touch Payment Solutions, which raised some big VC rounds.
While the reverse mortgage sounds appealing, it's not 100% clear why the industry needs a standalone company to do nothing but reverse mortgages. Golden Gateway is just getting underway and doesn't seem to have its marketing act together yet so we'll have to wait to see what they have in mind.
View - site
Posted at 05:16 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 05, 2007
QuickBooks Founder Launches NetBooks
Netbooks does not shy away from using the Quickbooks band to promote its software. The site even has a Netbooks vs. Quickbooks chart. Netbooks was after all created by Ridgely Evers who takes credit for launching Quickbooks and is now competing with that product with a Web-based offering.
Rohnert Park, CA-based NetBooks has raised $6.9M in Series A from CMEA Ventures, Integral Capital and angels. The company also secured a $2M line of credit from Square 1 Bank. NetBooks costs $200 per month for up to 5 users.
View - site
Posted at 10:49 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 22, 2007
Reuters Closes The Deal With Starmine
Reuters (Nasdaq:RTRSY) has bought San Francisco-based StarMine, which seeks to rank securities analysts. The amount of the buyout is unknown but StarMine is surely a bummer for its investors. Founded in 1998, reports are that StarMine had revenues of just $16.3M - which is respectable but not much after all this time. Startmine had raised funding from Hummer Winblad, Instinet and American Century Ventures.
Read - Reuters post
Posted at 01:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 10, 2007
CreditCards.com Files For $115M IPO
Austin, TX-based CreditCards.com has filed for a $115M IPO. The site allows consumers to search, compare, and apply for credit cards.
It plans to trade on the Nasdaq, with Credit Suisse and Citi as co-lead underwriters. Austin Ventures sponsored a recap of CreditCards.com in 2006 and holds a 65.6% pre-IPO position. It paid $133.8M at the time. Internet Real Estate Group sold the domain to Click Success in 2004 for just $2.75M. Daniel Smith pocketed $97.7M from the sale to an Austin Ventures.
During the six months ended June 30, the company's earnings lowered to $2.8M, from $9.6M in the prior-year period. During the same period, CreditCards.com revenue grew to $27.4M, from $18.7M. The company's revenue come from credit-card issuers or their affiliate marketing agents, who pay leads.
View - site
Posted at 11:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 08, 2007
Investment Social Network Cake Financial Launches
Hedge fund clones and investible hedge fund indices are the talk of wall street. That's because they give investors a way to potentially earn hedge find like returns without having to pay the high fees demanded by the industry, typically a 2% annual fee and a 20% performance fee.” Dow Jones and Goldman Sachs have both launched such funds.
Now a Web site called Cake Financial is jumping into the action by creating a social network to allow investors to watch and match what their peers are doing. For some time we have been following the San Francisco-based company which has been in stealth mode as Portfolia and before that was known as Project Hi-fi.
The startup is led by Steven A. Carpenter who was with Real Networks and before that was with MyCFO.
A mess of wealth individual investors are backing Cake:
+ Ron Conway's Baseline Ventures
+ Fred M. Gibbons, Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Engineering and Founder and CEO of Software Publishing
+ Thomas Eisenmann, Professor at Harvard Business School
+ Geoff Ralston, Former Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!
+ Aydin Senkut, early Google employee
+ Godel Capital, early PayPal backers
+ Nick Zaharias, Founder of The Field Check Group
+ Bonnie Cohen, Board Member at mutual fund company, Cohen & Steers
View - site
Read - Mashable post
Posted at 02:36 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 30, 2007
BillShrink To Launch Out of Bessemer
Yodlee founder Schwark Satyavolu has been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners for the past 10 months and the firm has now invested $1M in Series A funding into his new firm BillShrink, says PEHub. The pre-launch Menlo Park-based startup vaguely casts itself as a provider of online data to consumers for the selection of certain consumer services. Satyavolu was with consumer finance technology's Yodlee as co-founder and CTO for over 7 years.
Posted at 02:42 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 19, 2007
Investors Love Forex. Interbank FX Gets $40M
Investors love forex companies Spectrum Equity Investors loves to put a lot of money to work so this is a good match. Interbank FX says that it has received a $40M minority equity investment from Spectrum.
Interbank FX has over 17K customer accounts in more than 135 countries. If you are not a forex experts, Interbank's differentiation might be over your head. Its customers execute directly from a streaming quote feed, not from a dealing desk that trades against its customers, and the majority of company revenues are generated by a transparent agency-based spread on transactions. Interbank has partnership with big institutions, but traders have access to liquidity in micro-, mini- and standard lots sizes.
Other Forex deals that we have covered include:
+ In April, FXSol raised $100M in a recap round.
+ In January ETF Securities raised $10M.
+ Last July, Technology Crossover Ventures bought a minority stake in bank-owned foreign exchange trading portal FXall for $77.5M.
Read - press release
Posted at 05:30 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 12, 2007
Wall Street Research Platform TheMarkets Raises $30M
New York-based TheMarkets.com, which sells research and estimates to institutional investors, today has completed a $30M Series S offering to its existing broker-owners, eleven of the world's largest investment banks.
TheMarkets.com is owned by: Banc of America Securities, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank,
Dresdner Kleinwort, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan
Stanley, UBS Investment Bank, and Reuters.
TheMarkets sells its research to buy-side firms, primarily hedge funds, asset management, prop trading desks and private equity firms.
TheMarkets raised the cash to buy other companies, particularly those overseas. It even named an entrepreneur in residence to lead some companies.
Read - announcement
Posted at 01:28 AM | Permalink
June 20, 2007
At Powerpoint's 20th Anniversary Google Buys Its 2nd PowerPoint Startup With Zenter
Google has bought pre-launch Zenter for an undisclosed amount. Zenter makes Web-based Powerpoint-like presentation applications. Google is apparently finding that the best development of Web presentation software is taking place at startups - last April at acquired Tonic Systems. Either that or these are defensive buys to lock up Web-based spreadsheet IP. But we think that is unlikely.
Zenter raised a small amount of funding from incubator YCombinator and Evan Williams blogs that he owns some stock in the company. Williams explains that he bought the domain name Zenter as he had thoughts of creating his own online presentation startup.
Google continues to do M&A at early stages. The risk of course is that another startup will come along with a much better tool. This may have happened for example when Google bought Blogger and afterwards any number of startups have launched superior blogging platforms.
The purpose of Google's activity around Web-based applications, of course is to woo users off of licensed Microsoft Office applications to free, ad supported applications on Google. Microsoft bought the origins of Powerpoint in 1987 when it did its first acquisition, paying $14M for Powerpoint 1.0 for Macs. It took 3 years for Microsoft to publish a Windows version.
View - site
Posted at 12:45 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 01, 2007
Wanted: Consumer Financial Services Play In India
Indian angel investor Sanjay at Venturewoods says he wants to invest in a consumer financial service portal.
Also, in India, these startups are looking for funding.
Elsewhere in the VC world:
+ Joi Ito took a lot of photos of tech celebs at D5 and is posting them to Wikipedia.
+ Jeff Clavier seems to be at every conference on 3 continents.
+ Walden's Alex Gove lists some no-nos for founders presenting to VCs.
+ EIR at Atlas invites you to cold call him.
+ AskTheVC tracks compensation trends at VC backed startups.
Posted at 12:27 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Nasdaq Alternative BATS Raises $45M F/ Citi
Kansas City-based BATS Trading has raised $45M in second-round funding led by Citigroup. BATS launched in mid-2005 with $40M from Credit Suisse, Getco, Lehman Brothers, Lime Brokerage, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Wedbush.
The company was founded by David Cummings, a former wheat trader on the Kansas City exchange, who formed BATS when he noticed a void of alternative electronic trading sites that could compete with Nasdaq and hold down trading costs for brokers. Wall street brokerages have embraced the exchange with investments.
About 300 million shares trade daily through Bats Trading. The shares include customer trades executed by the brokerage firms that own most of Bats Trading, much in the way Nasdaq was industry-owned before it became a publicly traded company. Bats, however, is technically a broker-dealer firm and reports its trade volume through the National Stock Exchange, an electronic stock exchange based in Chicago. BATS says it has abandoned plans to buy a regional exchange like the National or Chicago stock exchanges. Instead, Chief Executive David Cummings has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to review its application for exchange status. Cummings also says that BATS is close to profitability.
View - site
Posted at 11:20 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 24, 2006
London's FXall And Online Foreign Exchange Making It Hand Over Fist
Technology Crossover Ventures is buying a minority stake in bank-owned foreign exchange trading portal FXall for $77.5M. The size of the stake that TCV is acquiring was not disclosed, but one trade pub circulates the rumor that FXall has agreed to sell a 20% share in the company.
Also, TCV is rumored to have won out over rival General Atlantic, which last year bought a 25% stake in forex specialist firm SaxoBank for $126.5M.
FXall is rated as the number one online foreign exchange for the fourth year running. Its market share has grown to more than 50% – double that of nearest competitor.
FXall launched in 2001. In Q2 this year, total trading on the platform surpassed $2.4 trillion, up 50% from Q2 2005.
