Lijit Networks, one of our portfolio companies, just announced today that it closed a $7.1 million financing led by Foundry Group. This financing gives Lijit the financial resources to focus its efforts on rapidly growing its already sizeable base of publisher users, launching its search-powered ad network, and further expanding Lijit’s cool people-oriented search solutions. We’ve blogged previously about Lijit and the role it plays in what we call our implicit web theme. Foundry Group...

Continue reading Lijit Completes Series C Financing

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...

Continue reading Zynga Completes $29 Million Round Led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP

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...

Continue reading Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards

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...

Continue reading Our Investment in Smith & Tinker

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...

Continue reading Our Investment in Lijit

Since the launch of the Foundry Group blog, we've written at length about our thematic investing style, some of the specific themes we are looking at (HCI, Glue and Implicit Web), our backgrounds and our view of how geography factors into our investment criteria. We have yet to write about any of the companies we've actually invested in thus far - something we plan to do regularly in this space. Not all of our...

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