Foundry Group Blog
We are excited to announce that we’ve led a $10 million financing in MakerBot Industries, a Brooklyn, NY-based company that has developed the first low cost commercial 3D printer.
While 3D printing technology has been around for a while, to date it has been limited to high-end industrial printers costing between $10,000 and $500,000. While the applications of 3D printing are very broad and extremely compelling, the cost and complexity of the products and process has limited the application of 3D printing.
Over the past decade, the DIY (or “do it yourself”) phenomenon has resulted in an increasing number of people using 3D printing technology. Until recently, if you wanted to print a 3D object, you borrowed a high-end machine or sent a design to an outsourcing firm that did 3D printing on demand. Several years ago, three hackers – Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach Smith – teamed up and created the first open source 3D printer, known as the MakerBot Cupcake. While the Cupcake needed to be assembled by hand, it was a unique product that enabled anyone to own a 3D printer for around $1,000.
The Cupcake generated a wave of excitement among DIY hackers and the analogy was made between early personal computers such as the MITS Altair 8800 or the Healthkit H8 and the Apple II – namely that the Cupcake resembled the H8, and in a few years a 3D printer analogous to the Apple II would be created.
A similar analogy is at play in the laser printer market. The laser printer was invented by Xerox in 1969 but didn’t gain mass-market adoption until 1984 when HP created the Laserjet. As with the Apple II, the HP Laserjet marked the beginning of the creation of an enormous market for a new technology.
Last year, MakerBot came out with their second generation product, the Thing-O-Matic. At the same time, they’ve created an incredible community of 3D designs called Thingiverse. And they are hard at work on their third generation printer.
We believe MakerBot has the potential to be the Apple or HP of the 3D printing market and are honored that we get to be part of the effort.
For a limited time, Occipital’s Panorama 360 is free. If you don’t know why this is such an awesome app, watch the short video demonstration below.
We closed our investment in Occipital last week. The Occipital gang is going to create a bunch of amazing stuff and now’s your chance to get on board with a one minute iPhone download. And, if you are reading this after the free offer expires, it’s still worth getting for the couple of bucks they are charging.
We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2010, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Occipital Inc., (“Occipital”). Occipital, located in Boulder CO and San Francisco, CA is creating world-class computer vision products for mobile platforms.
As part of our Human Computer Interaction investment theme, we’ve become firm believers that computer vision technology is fundamentally changing many of the ways that people interact with computers. With our prior investments in Oblong and Organic Motion, we’ve seen the impact of this kind of technology and a future of applications built around computers being able to “see” what is going on in the real world.
As the performance of mobile computing devices continues to improve rapidly, computer vision technologies are ready to be implemented across these platforms as well. However, the technical hurdles are, in some ways, even more difficult given the inherent limitations in the mobile ecosystem including processing speed and network bandwidth.
Currently, there are companies that have introduced specific mobile applications that use limited computer-vision techniques, but until now, no one has produced a platform that allows developers to create dynamic content that automatically leverages best-in-class computer vision technology.
Occipital is creating this platform, while also creating highly popular applications as specific examples of their technology. Their goal is to make real world environments computationally interactive via the devices that we carry in our pockets every day. Their first three applications (ClearCam, RedLaser, and 360 Panorama) have all become best sellers in mobile application stores.
Occipital was founded by Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy. They were part of the TechStars Boulder program in 2008. We were active mentors to their company and have stayed in close contact since their graduation from the program. We are very excited to have the opportunity to continue to work with them.
This week, NVCA sent a letter signed by more than 70 of its member firms to the chairman and president of the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) supporting the recommendations of its Blue Ribbon Panel on Private Company Financial Reporting (BRP). Two of the significant recommendations are 1) the development of more relevant and useful private company accounting standards and 2) the creation of a separate board to develop and maintain them. Currently, private company and public company accounting principles and standards are under the purview of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).
Our partner and NVCA board member Jason served on the BRP along with a number of senior industry officials. He has been particularly involved with many of the frustrating private company accounting standards. For instance, the sheer stupidity of things like FAS 157 prove how disconnected the current FASB board is from private company accounting concerns.
Hopefully FAF will follow the recommendations of the BRP. Thanks to the NVCA for their support.
In 2001 I led Mobius Venture Capital’s investment in a company that was defying then-conventional wisdom in its approach to email security. Postini offered an anti-spam/anti-virus email security solution hosted in the cloud, as opposed to via on-premise software or an appliance. This was back before SaaS was even a generally recognized acronym; but what Postini was doing seemed intuitively obvious and their approach was then in the early stage of being validated by customers.
I remember from my reference calls at the time that their biggest customers at that point were Jim Beam Whiskey and a handful of law firms. This mid-size enterprise customer traction convinced us that Postini could grow substantially simply by addressing the mid-market segment, but we and the Postini team also believed they’d be able to move upmarket and eventually service Fortune 500 customers as well. Over time they eventually landed an enviable list of marquee customers like Merrill Lynch, UBS, Glaxo and Starbucks, ultimately securing over ten million enterprise email accounts. Postini continued to grow, and in 2007 the company was acquired by Google for $625m.
Today, I’m excited to announce that Foundry Group has invested in Authentic8, a direct descendant of the Postini DNA. Authentic8 is co-founded by Scott Petry (Postini’s founder) and Ramesh Rajagopal (Postini’s VP Corporate Development), and has the potential to have a similar transformational impact on a new segment of the security market.
Postini was founded to address the fact that email-borne viruses and spam were significant security threat to the enterprise and that IT departments didn’t have the necessary tools to deal with the problem. Authentic8 was created to address the dominant major threat vector in computing today: the browser, and the fact that tools don’t exist to adequately secure the user online.
The browser, the most frequently used application on most end-user computing devices, is subject to a variety of potential attacks including security flaws in the browser code itself, phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks and laundry list of other vulnerabilities.
To create a truly secure browsing environment, Authentic8 looked at the problem from a new perspective – they realized that the best way to remove browser-borne threats from a user’s computer is to remove the browser entirely.
Dubbed the Disposable Browser, the Authentic8 browser (currently based on the Firefox codebase) actually runs remotely on a virtual server in the cloud, though to the end-user it appears that the browser runs locally. Each time a user accesses Authentic8, a “fresh” browser is built from scratch in private server environment. As a result, any malicious code encountered hits Authentic8’s servers, not the end-user’s. When a browsing session is over, the server instance is trashed, leaving no trace of of a user’s personal data or browsing history behind. Finally, Authentic8 can manage a user’s login and password information, encrypting and submitting login credentials on the user’s behalf. Of course, all communication between the user and the Authentic8 service is encrypted, over their secure protocol.
All of these features add up to create a browsing environment that is dramatically more secure than the status quo, and is something we think will appeal greatly to both security-conscious end-users and enterprise CIOs.
The Authentic8 service is currently in closed-beta and will be opening up to larger group of beta users in the coming weeks. You can sign up here to be notified when access to the pre-release program becomes available.
We are looking forward to working with Scott and Ramesh and the rest of the Authentic8 team to build a great company.
