NEW PLATFORMS

iDreamsky (Nasdaq: DSKY) is the largest independent mobile game publishing platform in China.

NEW PLATFORMS

It`s about time to reinvent how we buy and sell cars. Today, we`re proudly introducing Beepi, a new way to buy or sell a car. The Beepi experience is built entirely around transparency and trust so that we can make your car buying or selling experience simple, fast and maybe even a little fun.

ENTERPRISE, CLOUD & MOBILE

Zendesk, a SaaS customer service platform provider, has raised $100 million by offering 11.1 million shares in an initial public offering.  Zendesk is listed on the NYSE under the ticker ZEN.

Launched in 2012, DraftKings paid out $50 million in prizes in 2013 to thousands of players who excelled in weekly fantasy sports. In just the last four months, the Boston-based upstart’s user base has grown fourfold, with nearly 50,000 active daily users and as many as one million registered players. Even better, DraftKings users spend an average of more than two hours every day on the site. With just 32 employees thus far, accomplishing so much so quickly is no easy feat. In a candid interview, Robins opens up about what he believes has been key to DraftKings high-octane growth and about the unique challenges that lie head.

NEXT GEN MEDIA

Portfolio company Kabam, the leader in free-to-play games for traditional players, announced 2013 gross revenues of more than $360 million, a 100 percent increase over 2012.

NEW PLATFORMS

We’re excited to welcome Homejoy to the Redpoint portfolio.  Launched just 18 months ago by sister-brother duo Adora and Aaron Cheung, Homejoy has quickly emerged as the leader in the on-demand home services market. Initially focused on home cleaning, Homejoy delivers to consumers a hassle-free, quality cleaning service at a fraction of the cost typically seen with traditional maid services. As they grow, Homejoy has the opportunity to become the go-to company for a multitude of services associated with the home. 

NEW PLATFORMS

Led by Google Capital, financing will accelerate rapid growth of global enterprise customers using the top-ranked distribution for Apache Hadoop

ENTERPRISE, CLOUD & MOBILE

Refresh, the first mobile application to deliver an instant dossier about people you meet, announces today that the company has raised $10M in financing from Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Foundation Capital. Refresh is currently in beta and available for download in the US at the Apple App Store.

We’re thrilled to promote Tomasz Tunguz to Partner and are excited to bring Ryan Sarver on board as a Partner. Lastly, we’re welcoming Jamie Davidson to the team as a Senior Associate. All three have an invaluable mix of experience in the most important emerging trends in the consumer Internet, and are part of our continued work to evolve to meet the demands of a changed investing landscape.

DATA EXPLOSION

Looker is the tool to drive the critical last step of big data adoption. Looker enables anyone within an organization to ask and answer questions of their company’s data. That’s why we invested. It’s rare for us to hear as persistent a refrain as the excitement among Looker’s customers, especially at such an early stage.  From a portfolio company which exclusively powers its operations-heavy business on Looker, to a travel company whose sales team adopted the product and became profitable overnight, Looker customers consistently operate their businesses more effectively with Looker.

ENTERPRISE, CLOUD & MOBILE

Lastline has raised $10 million in funding led by Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures. Lastline was founded in 2011 by a team of computer science professors and world-renowned researchers in the malware analysis field to protect enterprise networks against advanced malware across all vectors including Web, download and Email. With the new funding, Lastline will focus on executing its sales strategy and further develop new solutions that use its innovative approach to identify threats that traditional anti-malware solutions cannot and provide organizations with a comprehensive system to protect their networks from advanced persistent threats (APTs), targeted attacks and zero-day threats in real time.

ENTERPRISE, CLOUD & MOBILE

Twilio is part of a broader trend towards services and APIs catering directly to developers. At Redpoint, we believe in the power of the developer in both early stage companies and large enterprises. More and more, developers are making critical decisions regarding the nature of the products they are building. Like Redpoint’s earlier investments in Heroku and Stripe, Twilio is at the forefront of this movement, and we can’t wait to watch what they will continue to do.

NEW PLATFORMS

At Redpoint, we like marketplace models a lot. If done right, there are natural network effects to marketplaces which provide barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantage and, with a little luck, winner-take-most dynamics in terms of market share (and ultimately, company value). The growing organic demand and high customer satisfaction levels that Scripted is enjoying gives us encouragement that we will see it in the content creation market as well. We’re thrilled to be in business with the Scripted co-founders Sunil Rajaraman and Ryan Buckley, and look forward to working together to scale the Scripted platform for content creation.

NEW PLATFORMS

Education is being transformed globally with new online models. From graduate school programs to language instruction and now skills-based learning like Curious offers, all forms of education are now re-imagined online. Curious empowers teachers with a platform that makes it easy to build/monetize lessons and a rich experience for students to learn and socially interact with other learners.

DATA EXPLOSION

We believe the Infer team is building a category defining SaaS company  that leverages data science to help businesses identify their most valuable potential customers. Infer is a customer intelligence platform built by crawling your own historical selling patterns and matching it with the vast swaths of data on your potential customers available across the web.

NEXT GEN MEDIA

Today, Tastemade formally launched and we are thrilled to be part of their vision. We believe Tastemade represents the best of the new breed of Internet video networks, and will deliver exceptional content and services to consumers worldwide.  In the short 6 months they have been in business, Tastemade has 100 channel partners, 9 million monthly viewers, and 1300 hours of compelling content. We are excited to see what the team accomplishes next.

Congrats to Redpoint portfolio companies BlueKai and Datameer - both listed in the Fast Company Most Innovative Big Data companies round up.

NEXT GEN MEDIA

Today, our Redpoint portfolio company, Bluefin Labs, is announcing its merger with Twitter.  When we invested in Bluefin about two and a half years ago, we bought into the vision of matching and measuring social response to TV viewing; and deriving insights into engagement and reactions to ads and programs.  A spinout out of the MIT Media Lab, Bluefin uses heavy data science to gain never before available understandings to reactions to TV by matching millions of people’s social postings, such as tweets, to actual programs and ads.  By doing so, Bluefin is able to create the world’s largest and first ad hoc, real time focus group.

Redpoint V -  a $400M early stage fund, has closed. We are looking forward to supporting more bold entrepreneurs with the fund as they create industry defining businesses. With Redpoint V, we now manage over $3.3 billion across our multiple funds, and will focus investment in emerging and new markets.  

NEW PLATFORMS

AOL announced it`s purchase of Adap.TV for $405 million. The combination of AOL On and Adap.tv will give AOL a unique end-to-end solution and video stack for publishers and advertisers – from premium original production, to content aggregation and syndication platforms, robust video CMS technology,  and now a leading programmatic video platform. The strength of Adap.tv’s comprehensive platform and team has enabled its rapid expansion, resulting in a large and growing customer base of publishers and advertisers. In 2012, Adap.tv supported more than 26,000 global ad campaigns, which ran on approximately 9,500 websites and was used by many top brand advertisers.