First Round Capital
Encyclopedia
First Round Capital is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Managed by Josh Kopelman
, Chris Fralic, Rob Hayes and Howard L. Morgan
, the Philadelphia-based company typically provides seed-stage investment that ranges from $250,000 to $500,000. The company seeks to take an active role in the operations of the companies in which they invest, often investing in pre-revenue companies. "We think of ourselves as baby-nurses, not baby-sitters," says Howard Morgan, former professor at the Wharton School of Business, and partner at First Round Capital.
Since its inception in 2004, First Round Capital has backed more than 70 companies, including VideoEgg
, Outright
, Yummly
, ScanScout, myYearbook
, Knewton
, Wikia
, Weatherbill
, Yieldex Jingle Networks, Odeo
, LinkedIn
, Eventful
, Krugle
, Ambient Devices
, del.icio.us
, IronPort
, RockYou!, SkillSlate
, Catchfree and several other firms. First Round Capital, while still in its very early years, has already generated significant returns for its investors from acquisitions such as StumbleUpon
by eBay
for $75 million and Mint.com
by Intuit for $170 million .
For Christmas (2008) the company produced a video holiday card in homage to the hit YouTube video "Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)" in which its portfolio company executives were depicted dancing; the video became a viral hit. For its 2010 production, the firm created a series of YouTube videos spoofing the viral "Old Spice" videos .
In 2010, the company was ranked the third-largest venture-capital investor in the United States
, as measured by the number of deals. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20100825_PhillyDeals__First_Round_Capital_ranks_high_in_number_of_deals.html
Josh Kopelman
Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist.Kopelman is best known as the founder of Half.com, a fixed price marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of used books, movies and music products. In 2000, Kopelman sold Half.com to EBay for US $350...
, Chris Fralic, Rob Hayes and Howard L. Morgan
Howard L. Morgan
Howard Lee Morgan is an American venture capitalist, philanthropist, socialite, angel investor, author and contributing writer for Business Insider...
, the Philadelphia-based company typically provides seed-stage investment that ranges from $250,000 to $500,000. The company seeks to take an active role in the operations of the companies in which they invest, often investing in pre-revenue companies. "We think of ourselves as baby-nurses, not baby-sitters," says Howard Morgan, former professor at the Wharton School of Business, and partner at First Round Capital.
Since its inception in 2004, First Round Capital has backed more than 70 companies, including VideoEgg
VideoEgg
VideoEgg was a privately held advertising network, which re-branded itself in September 2010 as SAY Media. Their network is composed of over 100 million users across more than 500 sites, blogs, gaming and mobile environments.- History :...
, Outright
Outright
Outright is an accounting and bookkeeping application that assists small businesses and sole proprietors with managing their business income and expenses. It also provides them with a means to organize and categorize expenses for filing a Schedule C....
, Yummly
Yummly
Yummly is a semantic web search engine for food, cooking and recipes. It ‘understands’ food on a variety of levels, allows users to search by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources, and ‘learns’ about users based on their likes and dislikes....
, ScanScout, myYearbook
MyYearbook
-History:myYearbook was initially created by two high school students, David and Catherine Cook, and their older brother Geoff, during Spring Break of 2005. Catherine persuaded Geoff, who founded EssayEdge.com and ResumeEdge.com from a dorm in 1997, to invest in their project...
, Knewton
Knewton
Knewton is an adaptive learning company that has developed a platform to personalize educational content. The Knewton platform allows schools, publishers, and developers to provide adaptive learning for any student. Knewton recently announced a partnership with Pearson Education to power the...
, Wikia
Wikia
Wikia is a free web hosting service for wikis . It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki...
, Weatherbill
Weatherbill
WeatherBill is an online service, launched in January 2007, that helps people and businesses adapt to climate change. The company’s technology platform enables the real-time pricing and purchasing of customizable weather insurance using proprietary global weather simulation modeling and local...
, Yieldex Jingle Networks, Odeo
Odeo
Odeo was a directory and search destination website for RSS syndicated audio & video. It employed tools that enabled users to create, record, and share podcasts with a simple Adobe Flash-based interface....
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...
, Eventful
Eventful
Eventful is a web service which aims to help users search for, track, and share information about events. Eventful is a service of Eventful, Inc. from San Diego, California...
, Krugle
Krugle
Krugle is a search engine that allows computer programmers and other developers to search Open Source repositories in order to locate open source code, and quickly share the code with other programmers on the internet. It finished its beta phase and went live on June 14th, 2006.The engine...
, Ambient Devices
Ambient Devices
Ambient Devices, Inc. is a privately held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA that designs and markets various ambient devices for display of information ranging from weather to traffic reports to stock quotes. The company was founded by David L. Rose, Ben Resner, and Pritesh Gandhi,...
, del.icio.us
Del.icio.us
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...
, IronPort
IronPort
IronPort Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Bruno, California, was a company that designed and sold products and services that protect enterprises against Internet threats. It was best known for IronPort AntiSpam, the SenderBase email reputation service, and email security appliances...
, RockYou!, SkillSlate
SkillSlate
SkillSlate or SkillSlate.com is a New York City-based start–up firm with the purpose of matching up individual service providers with customers via the Internet. The firm raised $1.1 million in capital in October 2010 with investments from Canaan Partners and First Round Capital...
, Catchfree and several other firms. First Round Capital, while still in its very early years, has already generated significant returns for its investors from acquisitions such as StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.Toolbar versions exist for...
by eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
for $75 million and Mint.com
Mint.com
Mint.com is a free web-based personal financial management service for the US and Canada created by entrepreneur Aaron Patzer. Mint originally provided account aggregation through a deal with Yodlee, but has since moved to using Intuit for connecting to accounts...
by Intuit for $170 million .
For Christmas (2008) the company produced a video holiday card in homage to the hit YouTube video "Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)" in which its portfolio company executives were depicted dancing; the video became a viral hit. For its 2010 production, the firm created a series of YouTube videos spoofing the viral "Old Spice" videos .
In 2010, the company was ranked the third-largest venture-capital investor in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, as measured by the number of deals. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20100825_PhillyDeals__First_Round_Capital_ranks_high_in_number_of_deals.html
External links
- First Round Capital (company website)