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| Startup: Chicago Startup Doggyloot Raises $2.5M In Funding (Chicago Tribune) |
Startup: Chicago Startup Doggyloot Raises $2.5M In Funding (Chicago Tribune)
Doggyloot, a Chicago-based pet products e-commerce company, said Monday it has raised $2.5 million in funding.
Northbrook-based Origin Ventures, which has invested in local tech companies such as GrubHub, led the round. Chicago-based Sandbox Industries, which operates a venture fund called the Sandbox Advantage Fund, also participated.
Doggyloot was developed as an internal project at Sandbox, which incubates its own startups in addition to investing in companies. Marbles: The Brain Store, the retail chain, came out of Sandbox. Doggyloot, which offers deals on pet products for members and sells other items on a subscription basis, grew out of Dashmob, a now-defunct Sandbox company focused on highlighting real-time, location-based deals at nearby merchants.
Northbrook-based Origin Ventures, which has invested in local tech companies such as GrubHub, led the round. Chicago-based Sandbox Industries, which operates a venture fund called the Sandbox Advantage Fund, also participated.
Doggyloot was developed as an internal project at Sandbox, which incubates its own startups in addition to investing in companies. Marbles: The Brain Store, the retail chain, came out of Sandbox. Doggyloot, which offers deals on pet products for members and sells other items on a subscription basis, grew out of Dashmob, a now-defunct Sandbox company focused on highlighting real-time, location-based deals at nearby merchants.
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Post Site: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/
Post Arthur: WailinWong
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| Start: Minas Gerais Kicks Off Multimillion-Dollar Tech Startup Program (Zdnet) |
Summary: Initiative will see the acceleration of 120 early-stage ventures by the end of 2014
The government of Minas Gerais will inject R$15mi ($6.2mi) in a startup acceleration program designed to retain talent and bring investments to the Brazilian state.
The Startups and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development (SEED) program will provide up to R$80,000 ($34,000) in equity-free funding to 40 startups led by one person to three people each. Three rounds of the program are expected to take place until the end of 2014.
The acceleration and mentoring program will last six months and during that time, the entrepreneurs will be based in Minas Gerais capital Belo Horizonte and be part of a tech cluster dubbed "San Pedro Valley." To start with, the initiative is not targeting any specific segments.
"We are open to any technology-based idea that is scalable and sustainable," says the chief executive at the Minas Gerais State Office for Strategic Priorities, André Barrence.
Local and international startups are encouraged to apply for the program and the application process will commence in late September. The best ideas will be selected in October and the first intake of entrepreneurs will start on the program in December.
A private sector consortium has been chosen through a tendering process to deliver the startup acceleration initiative. This group of companies includes coworking firm The Hub, which is where the entrepreneurs will be based during the six months of the program.
As well as the government investment, other partners will support SEED in ways other than hard cash, including Google and Amazon, with resources such as cloud storage. The Minas government is also looking to attract investors to benefit from the startup ecosystem that it is working to create.
"While we will accelerate startups, we want investors who believe in those ideas too. We already have a group, albeit limited, of investors, angels and so on, but we want to turn Minas Gerais into a destination for any investor looking for digital enterprises," Barrence says.
"And after a program like ours, those companies will had a 'seal of approval' of sorts - of couse not all of them will be funded, but backers will be much more comfortable when choosing their investments among the ideas we will accelerate and mentor," he points out.
A Paradigm Shift
A six-month period saw Barrence's team maturing the idea for SEED and establishing the framework for the program. He says that there were limitations that had to be overcome, such as the inability for the government to support individuals financially for the development of a tech-based business idea. A bill was put forward to make those changes possible, which then became law.
"[The ability to fund individuals] is something that only the state of Minas Gerais has; we will not require that the entrepreneur has a formalized company to be part of the program. All we want is the ideas and the knowledge they will bring," Barrence says.
As well as fostering the creation of a center of innovation excellence in Minas Gerais, SEED is also intended to tackle a brain drain that has been affecting the state for decades.
"A major problem that bothers us a lot is the fact that we have talented people with very good educational backgrounds in Minas Gerais but end up leaving the state and going elsewhere. And we want to retain this human capital," Barrence says.
"We want to do that by bringing in companies that will create attractive jobs for these young people. At the same time, we will create an environment where they will create their own jobs by developing business ideas. The ideal scenario is to get people to think 'Why would I leave Belo Horizonte if there are plenty of interesting jobs here?'," he adds.
As the government will take no shares in the future companies, Barrence says the program's measure of success will be the creation of a whole new mindset when it comes to entrepreneurship and a thriving startup scene in Minas Gerais.
"We want Minas to become the birthplace of digital technology entrepreneurs in Latin America and develop a tradition of nurturing people who turn great ideas into reality."
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| Startup: Startup NoRedInk Raises $2M In Venture Capital (ChicagoTribune) |
Startup: Startup NoRedInk Raises $2M In Venture Capital (ChicagoTribune)
When Scheur's ninth-graders turned in compositions with error-ridden sentences like the one above, he would dutifully mark every extraneous comma and misplaced modifier. But his students didn't seem to be processing the feedback. Some just glanced at the grade without bothering to look over his comments. And many repeated their mistakes in subsequent papers.
Frustrated with the broken feedback loop, Scheur started tracking common grammar errors and posted a Craigslist ad seeking an engineer to build a Web-based tool that students could use in the classroom. That project turned into a startup, NoRedInk, which is expected to announce Thursday that it has raised $2 million from investors such as Google Ventures and Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners.
"I'm really excited that we're going to stay a free, personalized app," Scheur said, noting that more than 12,000 U.S. schools are using NoRedInk. "We're not worried about charging, but just focused on building these tools that help kids with every misconception of grammar."
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| Startup: Startup NoRedInk Raises $2M In Venture Capital (ChicagoTribune) |
Scheur, 33, left his eight-year teaching career in 2012 to focus full time on NoRedInk and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. He said he's not thinking about how to generate revenue from his company, whose product is free.
"We're super lucky that (our investors) buy into the big picture of what we're trying to do for schools and education," Scheur said. "So our sole focus is on adding value and building user engagement. We're not at all focused (on) anything to do with monetization. We're just all focused on content."
Catapult welcomes Scholastica
It's back-to-school time, and Catapult, a shared office space for startups in the River North neighborhood, is bidding farewell to its latest graduate and welcoming its newest class member.
Catapult opened in late 2011 in a space donated by Foley & Lardner LLP, and offers six-month leases for startups that are past the idea stage and generating revenue or have raised venture capital. When openings come up, tenants interview companies that want to join.
Catapult held its third such selection process last week, looking for a startup to replace TempoDB, a cloud computing company that has been there since May 2012. Its successor at Catapult will be Scholastica, a startup that makes an online publishing platform for academic journals.
"There's this sense of momentum that I felt with the Scholastica team and their business," said Justin DeLay, TempoDB's co-founder and chief marketing officer. "And I think there is, to a certain extent, a bit of a Catapult culture, which is, everyone here is here to build a big business and a business that matters. You can sense a certain seriousness in (the) founders."
TempoDB, which was founded in December 2011, makes technology that stores and analyzes large amounts of "time series data," or time-specific information captured by thermostats and different types of sensors. The company is planning to expand its team of six full-time employees, and "it wouldn't have been fair or in the spirit of Catapult to try to overstay our welcome," DeLay said.
Three-year-old Scholastica, meanwhile, is ready for somewhat more permanent digs after having worked out of apartments, coffee shops and the office of a River North software firm. The startup's three founders are former University of Chicago graduate students in separate disciplines (sociology, political philosophy, history) who traded the academic track for an entrepreneurial one.
"The great thing about Catapult is, everyone who's there has some traction," said Scholastica co-founder Rob Walsh, who also heads product design. He added: "We can bounce ideas off of them and they can bounce ideas off of us."
Scholastica plans to move into Catapult next month. The space houses 13 companies, and TempoDB will be its 10th graduate. Foley & Lardner has invested in several companies through a fund made up of contributions from partners. The firm's primary interest, though, is courting fast-growing startups as clients.
"At the end of the day, they're always more interested in building legal business than their investments," said Galen Mason, special counsel at Foley and a Catapult co-founder. He added: "There's an appetite and a need for big-firm lawyers … to really roll up their sleeves and understand how to work with these digital technology companies and lean companies. Catapult is the tip of the iceberg."
Three-year-old Scholastica, meanwhile, is ready for somewhat more permanent digs after having worked out of apartments, coffee shops and the office of a River North software firm. The startup's three founders are former University of Chicago graduate students in separate disciplines (sociology, political philosophy, history) who traded the academic track for an entrepreneurial one.
"The great thing about Catapult is, everyone who's there has some traction," said Scholastica co-founder Rob Walsh, who also heads product design. He added: "We can bounce ideas off of them and they can bounce ideas off of us."
Scholastica plans to move into Catapult next month. The space houses 13 companies, and TempoDB will be its 10th graduate. Foley & Lardner has invested in several companies through a fund made up of contributions from partners. The firm's primary interest, though, is courting fast-growing startups as clients.
"At the end of the day, they're always more interested in building legal business than their investments," said Galen Mason, special counsel at Foley and a Catapult co-founder. He added: "There's an appetite and a need for big-firm lawyers … to really roll up their sleeves and understand how to work with these digital technology companies and lean companies. Catapult is the tip of the iceberg."
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Post Arthur: Wailin Wong
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