We are happy to announce that we've added another exciting company to our portfolio. EmSense, based in San Francisco, has created the first scalable physiological and brainwave measurement technology platform, which provides accurate and objective moment-by-moment analysis of how a large audience responds emotionally and cognitively to media messaging. EmSense marks Foundry Group's third investment in our Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) theme (joining Smith & Tinker and Oblong), as well as our second investment in a...

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Our portfolio company Zynga announced today that they have closed a $29 Million Round of Financing Led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP.   We participated in the financing alongside of our co-investors Union Square Ventures and Avalon Ventures.  Bing Gordon, a co-founder and former Chief Creative Officer of Electronic Arts and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins has joined Zynga's board. Brad wrote about the financing and Zynga's progress on his blog in a post titled...

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As you may have read in a prior post on Boulder’s Culture of Entrepreneurship, we feel that one ingredient necessary to create and sustain this culture is engaged university activity. We are lucky to have the University of Colorado in our backyard and fortunate that it has consistently engaged in activities that foster and create entrepreneurship initiatives. While none of us attended CU, we’ve all adopted it as our “other school” and have become very...

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We are extremely pleased to announce our investment in Topspin Media's Series B financing. Topspin is a media technology company headquartered in Santa Monica, California, dedicated to developing leading-edge marketing software and services that help artists and their partners build businesses and brands. Topspin's platform helps artists manage their media catalogs and other assets, connect with fans and generate demand for their music. Had our investment closed a couple of weeks earlier, we wouldn't...

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One of our recent investments, Gnip, has launched its first service. Gnip is all about making data portability suck less. Remember our friend the Ping server? Gnip is the next generation of it designed specifically for the many-to-many webservice-to-webservice world. Data sharing between two services is no big deal. It happens every day using RSS, Atom, XMPP, and open APIs. Two years ago this was still a novel idea and the power of an API...

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Among our core beliefs at Foundry Group is the idea that we bring more value to our business as a team than as individuals.  We believe that as a group we have more impact on our portfolio companies, are better at making investment decisions and are more thoughtful about the themes in which we invest. This is somewhat of a departure from the typical venture capital model, in which venture partners are often islands unto...

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It is time to announce the newest member of our portfolio: Smith & Tinker. Consider this more of teaser announcement since S&T is not quite ready to describe in detail just what it is they are up to. As a preview, we'll say this much: they fit within our human-computer interaction (HCI) theme and the tagline on their web site reads, "reinventing play for the connected generation". To quote further from their site, S&T says...

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If you saw our prior post about what Jason and Ryan learned by moving to Boulder, you read about the vibrancy of Boulder's entrepreneurial spirit. We decided to follow that post up with some specifics regarding the startup culture of Boulder and some of our related activities within it. TechStars: If you are a frequent reader of Brad's blog, you've probably seen some of his posts on TechStars. Brad's not the only Foundry Group partner,...

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As we’ve previously written, one of the things we intend to do with our blog is highlight the companies and entrepreneurs in whom we’ve invested. While it’s always nice to give our portfolio companies some exposure, it’s also a good way to provide concrete examples of the investment themes Foundry Group is pursuing. The purpose of today’s post is to introduce one of those companies—Lijit Networks. The company fits into our Implicit Web theme, which...

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All of us at Foundry Group try hard to be substantive members of our community. We have all chosen to live in Boulder, Colorado and we share the belief that giving back to the community in which we live is an important part of supporting this goal. In addition, we strongly believe in the cliché of "putting our money where our mouths are." As a result, we are proud to announce that we have recently...

Continue reading Foundry Group Joins the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado