Despite the gloom and the general pessimistic view in the venture community, among both investors and startups, excellent companies still manage to attract financing. Edgeware last week announced both a new $8M financing round led by Micron Ventures and the opening of a US office.
The new round was an significant upround to the last round and compared to our initial seed investment in Edgeware one order of magnitude up.
There are lots of lists right now, last week Internetworld selected Sweden’s hottest web entrepreneurs, this week two of Sweden’s most influential business and technology magazines, Affärsvärlden and NyTeknik, present Sweden’s 33 hottest technology startups (max 7 years old).
Although these kind of lists are highly subjective and a bit populistic, Affärsvärlden and NyTeknik have a thorough process where readers and the journalists nominate companies and then the magazines select the 33 most promising companies that have the potential to become internationally successful.
This year, 3 companies that we have invested in made it to the list: Spotify, Videoplaza and Edgeware. Congratulations to them and to the other 30 companies on the list.
An interesting fact perhaps is that out of the 33 companies at least 23 had received venture capital. The magazines also asked these investors (in the 33 companies) what their investment activity in 2009 will be like. 5 investors (Creandum, Industrifonden, Investor Growth Capital, Northzone Venture Partners & SEB Venture Capital) said that they will continue to invest as much in 2009 as in 2008 whereas 4 (Exero Capital, Jane Walerud, Kreos Kapital & Provider Venture Partners) mentioned that they would invest less.
UPDATED: The list in NyTeknik (Swedish Only) and Affärsvärlden (Swedish Only)
ZillionTv yesterday came out off stealth mode. In this Multichannel article, CEO Mitch Berman discusses their upcoming services. Interesting to note, is that they have five brand-name TV and movie studios as content partners and as investors, this should secure a significant amount of content, which so far has been the biggest hurdle for online media companies.
It is specially interesting to note that the service will be subscription free and that VISA is one of the backers, by linking the VISA card with service, users will be able to purchase products directly from their TV.
The interview makes it offcial that our portfolio company Edgeware delivers key components of the solution, a result of excellent work by the Edgeware team for more than a year.
