Charles River Ventures is a venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm focused on early-stage investments in technology and new media companies.

The firm, which is based in Waltham, Massachusetts

Waltham, Massachusetts

Waltham is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, was an early center for the labor movement, and major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, the city was a prototype for 19th century industrial city planning,...

 and Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...

, was founded in 1970 to commercialise research that came out of MIT. (Its name comes from the Charles River

Charles River

The Charles River is an long river that flows in an overall northeasterly direction in eastern Massachusetts, USA. From its source in Hopkinton, the river travels through 22 cities and towns until reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Boston...

 that runs through Boston.)

The firm has raised over $2.1 billion since inception across 13 funds. The firm's most recent fund, Charles River Partnership XIII, closed in April 2007 with $285 million of investor commitments. CRV's 12th fund raised $250 million of commitments.

Among CRV's portfolio companies are Cascade Communications

Cascade Communications

Cascade Communications was a Westford, Massachusetts based manufacturer of communications equipment.-Product:Cascade made a compact Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode communication switches that were sold to telecommunication service providers worldwide...

, Ciena Corporation

Ciena Corporation

Ciena Corporation is a United States-based global supplier of telecommunications networking equipment, software and services that support the delivery and transport of voice, video and data services. Its products are used in telecommunications networks operated by telecommunications service...

, Continental Cablevision, ChipCom

Chipcom

Chipcom was a company, early pioneering in the Ethernet hub industry. Their products allowed Local Networks to be aggregated in a single place instead of being distributed across the length of a single coaxial cable...

, Blippy

Blippy

Blippy is a social media sharing site operated from Palo Alto, California by a company of the same name, for users to post and follow each other's updates about their purchases of goods and services. It has been described as the "Twitter of personal finance", and is often compared with Twitter...

, iBasis

Ibasis

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, iBasis is a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal KPN, N.V., the Dutch incumbent telecommunications carrier. iBasis is a wholesale carrier of international long distance telephone calls, with enhanced services for mobile operators, and a provider of retail prepaid...

, Netezza

Netezza

Netezza designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning....

, Earbits

Earbits

Earbits is a commercial-free music streaming service & music marketing platform. The streaming service is available to consumers as a website in addition to clients for the iPhone, iPod Touch & Android mobile devices...

, Parametric Technology Corporation

Parametric Technology Corporation

Parametric Technology Corporation is a U.S.-based company that develops, markets and supports software for product development. Its main products are for CAD/CAM, engineering calculations, and product lifecycle management. Its customers include companies in manufacturing, publishing, services,...

, Sonus Networks

Sonus Networks

Sonus Networks, Inc. is a technology and telecommunications equipment company that provides voice infrastructure solutions for wireless and wireline service providers.-Corporate history:Sonus Networks was founded in 1997....

, SpeechWorks

SpeechWorks

SpeechWorks was a company founded in the late 1990s in Boston that developed and supported speech-related computer software. The company was purchased in mid-2003 by Peabody, Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications, which was then known as ScanSoft....

, Stratus Technologies

Stratus Technologies

Stratus Technologies, Inc. a major producer of fault tolerant computer servers. The company was founded in 1980 as Stratus Computer, Inc. in Natick, Massachusetts, and adopted its present name in 1999. The current CEO and president is Dave Laurello. Stratus Technologies, Inc. is a privately held...

, Sybase

Sybase

Sybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....

, Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

 and Vignette Corporation.

External links

• Charles River Ventures (company website)