GigaOM » Sequoia Capital

MadeiraCloud nets $1.5M to paint a pretty picture of your Amazon cloud

Barb Darrow — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:00:33 +0000

MadeiraCloud, a startup in the crowded field of Amazon Web Services monitoring and management services, snagged $1.5 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital.

The company provides a graphical visualization of the architecture and resources used by a given application, not just a spreadsheet-like list of all the AWS instances on one page and all the databases on another, said CEO Daniel O’Prey via email. MadeiraCloud got its start in Beijing and now has an office in San Francisco.

That funding comes atop about $160,000 in seed funding, and will be used to beef up the development team and to market the product. The 11-person shop has done no marketing to date.

There are a raft of companies that provide AWS monitoring and management capabilities, but O’Prey said Madeira’s simple, self-service interface probably competes most directly with the AWS Console itself. Longer term, he sees MadeiraCloud taking on companies like RightScale and Enstratrius, just acquired by Dell.

Those are some pretty big rivals to contend with but the company most of these contenders have to watch is Amazon itself, which is rolling out more and more of its own management and monitoring tools, including OpsWorks.

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Chrysalix VCs: Well, we’re making money in cleantech

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:00:33 +0000

Not all venture capitalists lost their shirts in the cleantech investing cycle over the past five to six years. Canadian venture capital firm Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital actually put out a press release on Monday noting that it’s latest early stage cleantech fund — which it closed four years ago and which is chock full of young cleantech startups — has seen its collective value go up by 75 percent.

VCs at firms like Sequoia Capital or Andreessen Horowitz might scoff at the call for attention to a positive fund value, but in the cleantech ecosystem a significant positive growth in value is pretty rare. In fact, I’ve heard discussions of cleantech portfolios being waaay, way (way) down in valuation for many VCs’ funds.

Chrysalix put money into 18 follow-on rounds and one new investment in 2012, and the company’s overall portfolio includes startups like nuclear company General Fusion, micro fuel cell maker Angstrom Power, electric scooter company Brammo, solar steam generator maker GlassPoint, and GaN Systems, which makes power conversion chips. Chrysalix’s new investment in 2012 was Axine Water Technologies, which makes clean water technology.

Now that some of the generalist VCs are exiting making cleantech investments, investors that are sticking to their green guns are coming out of the woodwork to throw down their gauntlets. Vinod Khosla says his cleantech portfolio is doing just fine, thank you very much, and he will continue to invest in the space. Others like DBL Investors, which backed both Tesla and SolarCity — two of the most successful cleantech IPOs — clearly have done well (see my profile The Most Successful and Positive Greentech VC You Haven’t Heard of).

Still others that are investing in CleanWeb, or clean IT, continue to be excited about investing in companies that are using IT to manage resources, like energy, food and water. As Mitch Lowe of Greenstart, a digital green accelerator, said on a panel I moderated last month: “Cleantech is dead, like the Internet was dead in 2000.”

Images of Bridgelux and Brammo technologies. Courtesy of Bridgelux and GigaOM.

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Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone: on YCombinator, Instagram & Other VCs

Om Malik — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:52:18 +0000

We have co-opted seed funds. You know, Y Combinator, that was completely our money. We have secret handshakes with a whole bunch of people. Very dangerous, because word gets out that so-and-so’s money is Sequoia’s money, that would not be a good thing.

This is complete warfare. You have to have the Green Berets in the back line, you have to take the frontal approach, you have to do seeds, you have to do investments. You have to be willing to risk things, otherwise somebody else will put you out of business.

[Instagram] sold completely prematurely. A billion dollars sounded great to the founders. Imagine what Instagram could be. It could be the next Facebook on the mobile phone.”

Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital shares his thoughts on the VC business.

Okta gets $25M more to take on cloud identity management

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:00:08 +0000

Okta, an almost-four-year-old startup pushing a new type of identity management aimed at cloud-based enterprise applications, has raised $25 million in third-round funding. This round brings the San Francisco-based company to $52 million in total funding. New investor Sequoia Capital led the round with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate also participating.

Okta is part of the cohort of companies that have seen the shift to the cloud as an opportunity to rethink the way legacy enterprise software is built. Other players include Boundary, Aryaka and Workday. Each of these firms has seen the way that cloud computing and software as a service can disrupt the enterprise IT market and have made bold bets building out new services that take advantage of the decentralized nature of the cloud, cheaper compute or new business models. The real question as the startups gain customers and credibility is which of the IT giants will buy them and for how much of a premium?

Okta, for example, offers a centralized identity management platform that competes with services such as Microsoft’s Active Directory and Oracle’s Identity Management suite. Okta’s software works to establish user identity on both cloud applications but also for legacy and on-premise programs. This saves Okta’s customers from having to use two different identity management products for employees. Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta told me in an interview ahead of the announcement that it has seen a lot of success recently stealing customers from the established vendors, and that the funding will help it continue to invest in connecting its platform to older, legacy applications that its customers want integrated into the Okta software.

Otka says it has added more than 140 enterprise customers and 300,000 users to its service in 2012, including Allergan, BMC Software, Clorox, Groupon and National Geographic. Okta has developed relationships with more than 2,000 cloud applications, all of which come pre-integrated in the Okta Application Network, and counts leading enterprise SaaS companies such as Jive, Lithium and SuccessFactors as customers.

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Embattled video startup Color says it won’t fade to black (for now)

Ryan Kim — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:00:08 +0000

UPDATED: Video-sharing startup Color has been a popular punching bag after reports said CEO and co-founder Bill Nguyen was on sabbatical and workers were moving on. So when a report surfaced Wednesday saying the video-sharing company was “winding down” its business, it fueled fresh schadenfreude for the brash startup that came out of the gate last year with $41 million in funding.

But the company isn’t dead yet, said a spokesperson. “Color is not shutting down,” the spokesperson told me.

UPDATE II: The Next Web, quoting trusted sources, reported that Apple is about to buy Color for a price in the high double digits. Apple bought Nguyen’s previous startup Lala for $80 million and Apple SVP of internet services and software Eddy Cue knows Nguyen. (Original story continues below)

The report of Color’s closure was first reported by Venturebeat, which cited a company email sent to employees. In it, the company apparently announced to employees that “last week, the Board and major shareholders voted to wind down the company.” But we’ve heard from a couple of people who said that employees there have not received the email. The company is now trying to investigate where the email information may have come from.

UPDATE I: Venturebeat said the email was sent by Color’s vice president of finance Andrew Urushima and that it can’t confirm that more than one employee received it.

Make no mistake, Color is going through a lot of upheavals. Nguyen hasn’t been with the company for about three months, though he continues to retain the title CEO. The size of the staff has fallen from about 50 people earlier in the spring to a staff somewhere in the 30s now. And morale took a hit after Nguyen stepped back from day to day duties, sources have told me.

But the company has a deal with Verizon signed in May to embed its mobile video sharing app on certain Android devices. I’m told that the deal is still in place and Color is working on new product plans. It’s still possible, of course, that Color or its backers could call it quits all the same. But a lack of money probably isn’t the issue. Nguyen said earlier this year that Color had enough money for five or six years.

That’s as a result of Color’s huge $41 million funding last year from Sequoia, which was trumpeted at the same time it launched what was originally a photo sharing app. The app’s failure to catch on with consumers and the cocky promotion-style of Nguyen made Color the startup everyone loved to hate. But does it mean Color is doomed? It might be ultimately if no one can make Color’s pivot toward live video sharing work. And now with more founders stepping back, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. But it sounds like people will have to wait a little more before they break out their favorite Color jokes.

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iPad publisher Inkling expands to iPhone

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:00:40 +0000

iPad publisher Inkling is bringing its textbooks and cookbooks to the iPhone. (The company’s Frommer’s travel guides are already available for iPhone.) The books sync across devices and users can download one chapter at a time so they don’t take up too much space on their phones.

Inkling’s interactive ebook publishing platform, Habitat, also now supports iPhone.

Inkling is based in San Francisco and backed by Sequoia Capital as well as major textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

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Songkick’s Tourbox is a one-stop shop for live bands

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:18:41 +0000

Although it’s best known as a gig listing website, Songkick has long been planning to become a broader music destination. And it finally looks like it’s starting that expansion with the launch of a new feature called Tourbox, aimed at helping musicians manage their concert promotion right across the web.

The London-based site’s latest addition is a dashboard that allows bands and artists to promote their live dates across the internet with a single process, through a series of partnerships with other services like YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud. Through a string of integrations with other music sites (Bandcamp, Foursquare and VEVO are also on the list), the site can push viewers, listeners, or readers towards their gigs and try to sell more tickets.

The service is already being used by a series of notable groups, after a beta period with prominent U.S. booking service The Windish Agency, which looks after dates for the likes of Universal Music and Domino records and artists including M83 and Soundgarden.

CEO Ian Hogarth, who recently raised $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, previously told me that he wants Songkick to be the “public company for live music fans”. Looks like this is one of the steps along the way.

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Sunrun raises $60M for residential solar service

Ucilia Wang — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:29:38 +0000

Investors may not be so keen to put money into solar manufacturing these days, but they are pumping quite a bit of money into solar financing and installation. San Francisco-based Sunrun is benefitting from this investor sentiment and announced on Wednesday that it’s raised $60 million in equity funding.

The company provides leases or power purchase agreements to consumers who pay a monthly fee for the electricity from the solar panels installed on their rooftops. This way, the home owner doesn’t have to pay the expensive, upfront cost of the equipment and installation but still gets to use a cleaner source of power. Lease or power purchase agreements are long-term contracts – 20 years for those from Sunrun – that sometimes guarantee consumers lower electric rates than what they have been paying their utilities. This model has become popular in states such as California and Massachusetts.

Sunrun is part of a group of startups that set up shop about half a dozen years ago to tackle the emerging solar retail service market. Sunrun provides the financing and owns and maintains the solar equipment, and it’s built a network of contractors that do the installation work and help market Sunrun’s financial services. The company said it has has more than 20,000 customers in 10 states since its inception in 2007.

Since then, the solar retail service market has grown tremendously, and competition also has intensified. The company has run bill board ads and launched a new marketing campaign recently. Other solar service companies have used the same types of advertising as Sunrun. Some team up with nonprofits to market their services. Sungevity, for example, announced Wednesday it’s working with the Sierra Club, and customers who go to a Sierra Club website to sign up for Sungevity’s service will get a $750 cash gift card. Sungevity also will then donate another $750 to the Sierra Club.

Some of Sunrun’s venture-backed competitors include SolarCity, Sungevity and Clean Power Finance. SolarCity plans to do an initial public offering, and Sunrun, which recently hired a chief financial officer, could also be heading in that direction, too.

Overall, Sunrun has raised $145 million in venture capital. The latest round came from investors including Madrone Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and Foundation Capital.

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Super VC Mike Moritz diagnosed with rare medical condition, steps back

Om Malik — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:45:19 +0000

Mike Moritz, arguably one of the few super VCs, has been diagnosed with a rare, incurable medical condition and has decided to take a step back from active daily duties at Sequoia Capital. He still intends to continue making investments and also work with younger partners at the firm.

Moritz is part of a rare breed of uber-VCs who have had multiple billion dollar exits. Moritz, John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, Jim Breyer and Fred Wilson belong to this super club. Moritz, who spent early part of his life as a journalist and wrote for Time magazine, is well known for his investments in Google, Yahoo and PayPal. Moritz spoke at our RoadMap conference last November and is a big champion of finding investment opportunities in India, China and other parts of the world. Moritz also wrote the seminal Apple book, The Little Kingdom.

On a more personal note, I have gotten to know Mike over the years and I am stunned by this development. He informed the firm’s limited partners in a note earlier today. This is the text of the email that was sent out.

We have always tried to be straightforward with you and, in that spirt, I need to share something. Unfortunately, I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable.

I’ve been told that in the next five to ten years the quality of my life is quite likely to decline. Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of the lucky ones who can live a full life and defy the statisticians. But there is no way of predicting this with certainty and thus for me, life has assumed a different meaning and I am making some adjustments.

I am going to extract myself from the daily management of Sequoia Capital, a task that has consumed a large part of my time for the past sixteen years. I will become Chairman of Sequoia Capital and will be deeply involved with nurturing the fresh investments, ideas and relationships that can be of significant long-term benefit for all of us. I will also work very closely with some of our younger and newer members, will continue my role as Managing Member of existing funds and maintain all my current company responsibilities. I will use twelve to fourteen weeks – sprinkled throughout the course of each year – for various pursuits, diversions and trivial indulgences.

Nothing about this should cause much of a change because everything that has been achieved at Sequoia Capital has resulted from the teamwork and contribution of many people. Our overall business is in the best shape it has ever been and we are better positioned than at any time in our forty year history. Doug Leone will assume full responsibility for coordinating the business we have gradually developed over the past couple of decades and almost everything else remains entirely the same.

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Another $40 million for Jawbone from Kleiner Perkins, Deutsche Telekom

Om Malik — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:17:23 +0000

Jawbone, a San Francisco-based company that makes mobile lifestyle accessories such as Jambox and Up, a personal health device, has raised another $40 million in new funds from Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, private investor Yuri Milner (and not his investment vehicle, DST), and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management were amongst the earlier investors in the company. With this new slug of funding, the company raised a total of $160 million in new funds during 2011 bringing the total amount raised by the company to a whopping $210 million. The company is valued at north of $1.5 billion, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

The new funding comes shortly after the company faced a backlash and an uproar over its Up health device. The company decided to reimburse unhappy customers all their money and allowed them to keep the devices as well.

As part of the deal, Deutsche Telecom is going to distribute Jawbone’s mobile lifestyle products through its channel, especially in Europe. Hosain Rahman, chief executive of Jawbone (which till recently was known as Aliph) told us the company was seeing a huge surge in demand for its Jambox wireless speaker product and, at present, it is the number one selling portable speaker system in the US both by revenues and unit sales.

Jawbone started out making headsets for mobile phones and later expanded into new markets such as audio and latterly healthcare devices. The company has changed its focus to making connected personal & lifestyle devices. Rahman says the company is going to launch a series of new products both addressing the healthcare and audio market segments.

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