Wyld About Business 2.0: Xconomy Venture Capital

FirstFuel Scores $2.4M to Put Toward Software for Remote Energy Audits

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:49 AM PDT

Erin Kutz wrote:

FirstFuel Software, a developer of energy auditing analytics technology for commercial buildings, announced today that it has nabbed $2.4 million in first round funding, led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power. The money will go to scaling and fueling customer adoption of FirstFuel?s software, which can profile the energy performance of buildings using data on electric consumption and building characteristics, without the need for an on-site audit.

Boston-based FirstFuel, formerly named iblogix, is led by serial entrepreneur Swapnil Shah, a founder of three IT companies that either went public or were acquired. The FirstFuel?software offers recommendations to building managers to adjust their energy consumption practices for immediate savings, and suggests building retrofits to be performed by utilities. The company fits into Boston?s cluster of IT startups developing software geared at lowering energy consumption.

Recently, the Cambridge, MA-based Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (which I profiled last week) conducted an independent study of the accuracy of FirstFuel?s auditing technology, and found that it ?has the potential to be a valuable engine for the large scale benchmarking of buildings and to identify energy-saving opportunities without on-site audits,? according to FirstFuel?s announcement today.

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Visible Measures Sees $13M Series D, Goes After Social Video Advertising

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:48 AM PDT

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

What the heck is social video analytics and advertising?

Whatever it is, Visible Measures has closed a Series D financing round worth $13 million, based on the strength of its software platform in that field. The Boston company, which started in 2005, has raised a total of more than $45 million to date. DAG Ventures led the latest round, and new strategic partner Advance Publications (which owns Conde Nast) and previous investors General Catalyst, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital also participated.

The concept behind Visible Measures is to help advertisers and publishers track online video performance?how Web viewers interact with videos, which segments they watch, when they share it with others (hence the social bit), and more broadly how the content spreads across video sites like YouTube and AOL. At stake is billions of TV advertising dollars that many predict will shift to online as the audience for Internet video grows and software tools allow for better ad targeting.

Visible Measures has nearly 80 employees, according to CEO and founder Brian Shin (see photo above). The team is split between Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Ottawa, Wyoming, and London.

The company operates at the intersection of entertainment, digital media, software analytics, and advertising. Other firms with complementary or related approaches in video and ads include Akamai, comScore, Quantcast, Bluefin Labs, Brightcove, DataXu, Extreme Reach, and Wistia.

It was refreshing to hear Shin speak at a FutureM event last week about how he didn?t have it all figured out back in the early days of Visible Measures.

?We said, ?Let's try this advertising thing,?? he said. ?When you?re trying to create a new market, there aren't a lot of great examples. You have to have advisors, people you trust, to help you grow.?

Advertisement:

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:48 AM PDT

How to Build a Web Startup: Lean LaunchPad Edition

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:29 AM PDT

Steve Blank wrote:

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development.

One of the problems they run into is building a website. If you?re an experienced coder and user interface designer you think nothing is easier than diving into Ruby on Rails, Nodes.js and Balsamiq and throwing together a web site. (Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.)

But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, ?How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a web site?? And the most important question is, ?How do I use the business model canvas and Customer Development to test whether this is a real business??

My first attempt at helping my students answer these questions was by putting together the Startup Tools Page ? a compilation of available web development tools. While it was a handy reference, it still didn?t help the novice.

So today, I offer my next attempt.

How To Build a Web Startup ? The Lean LaunchPad Edition

Here?s the step-by-step process we suggest our students use in our Lean LaunchPad classes.

1. Set up the logistics to manage your team
2. Craft company hypotheses
3. Set up the Website Logistics
4. Build a "low-fidelity? web site
5. Get customers to the site
6. Add the backend code to make the site work
7. Test the "problem" with customer data
8. Test the "solution" by building the ?high-fidelity? website

Step 1: Set Up Team Logistics

Step 2. Craft Your Company Hypotheses (use the Lean LaunchLab)

• Write down your 9-business model canvas hypothesis
• List key features/Minimal Viable product plan
• Size the market opportunity
• Pick market type (existing, new, resegmented)
• Prepare weekly 7-minute class progress summary: business model canvas update + weekly Customer Development summary (described after Step 8.)

Step 3: Website Logistics

• Get a domain name for your company. To find an available domain quickly, try Domize
• Then use godaddy or namecheap to register the name. (RetailMeNot usually has ~ $8/year discount coupons for Godaddy You may want to register many different domains (different possible brand names, or different misspellings and variations of a brand name.)
• Once you have a domain, set up Google Apps on that domain (for free!) to host your company name, email, calendar, etc

For coders: set up a web host

BTW: You can see the hosting choices of Y Combinator startups here

?Next Page ?

Ambrx Grabs $24M Upfront in New Diabetes, Heart Failure Research Deal With Bristol-Myers

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:27 AM PDT

Luke Timmerman wrote:

There?s lots of interest in the protein drug engineering crowd to come up with new-and-improved forms of biotech drugs, and today we?re seeing another example in a new partnership between San Diego-based Ambrx, and New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY).

Under the deal, Ambrx said today it will get $24 million upfront, plus undisclosed milestone payments and royalties if any of its work materializes into marketed products. In return, Bristol-Myers is getting exclusive worldwide commercial rights to a couple of Ambrx?s research programs. One is the Fibroblast Growth Factor 21 (FGF-21) protein, which scientists think might be useful for treating type 2 diabetes, and the other is on the Relaxin hormone, which is being studied as a treatment for heart failure.

Ambrx has been around since 2003, working on some hard chemistry that seeks to make new amino acid building blocks to create new biotech drugs. These drugs are thought to have great versatility to swap in and out certain desirable properties, such as features that make them last longer in the body, or carry potent cell-killing agents. Ambrx has raised more than $100 million in venture capital in its history, and built a broad network of partners that includes Merck, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Merck KGaA of Germany.

Even while pharma research budgets have been tightening, there has been increasing interest in some of the new tools startups are developing for engineering protein drugs. South San Francisco-based CytomX Therapeutics, South San Francisco-based Sutro Biopharma, and Cambridge, MA-based Eleven Biotherapeutics are a few of the companies that have raised $30 million or more in venture capital in the past couple years, and Vancouver, BC-based Zymeworks struck a partnership earlier this month with Merck. And the seasoned hands of protein engineering at companies like Amgen, Roche?s Genentech unit, and Biogen Idec are working on all kinds of protein drug configurations, like those that can be engineered to hit two targets instead of just one. Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) recently won FDA approval for an engineered antibody linked to a toxin that makes it a far more potent drug for rare lymphomas, which has prompted multiple pharma companies to license the technology against other tumor types.

Ambrx has been pretty quiet on the news front for the past year, since CEO Steve Kaldor left. Ambrx still doesn?t list a new CEO on its website, although chief business officer Simon Allen was quoted on behalf of the company in today?s deal announcement.

Cocrystal, Led by Icos Vets and Stanford Nobelist, Hunts for Next Big Thing for Hepatitis C

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 05:20 AM PDT

Luke Timmerman wrote:

One of the older tricks in biotech is to sign up a Nobel Laureate as a scientific advisor, and hope some of his or her credibility impresses investors. Never mind if the renowned scientist only shows up for a company meeting a couple times a year. But Gary Wilcox, the CEO of Cocrystal Discovery, didn?t duck when I asked him how much time Stanford University?s Roger Kornberg actually spends on advising the startup.

?He?s involved every day,? Wilcox says. ?Roger e-mailed me just 15 minutes ago. He?s incredibly excited.?

Cocrystal has kept a low profile since it was founded three years ago, but this startup with labs in Bothell, WA, and Mountain View, CA, struck an interesting deal last week. Cocrystal said it had formed a collaboration with Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical, the giant generic drugmaker, in which Teva is investing $7.5 million upfront to gain development access to a hepatitis C compound in early development, among other assets. Cocrystal has now raised a little more than $18 million from Teva, government grants, and a founding equity round led by The Frost Group, the investment vehicle of billionaire Philip Frost.

Cocrystal was started in 2008 by a couple of veterans of Bothell, WA-based Icos, as well as Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work in describing how DNA gets copied into RNA. The big idea at the startup is to use new X-ray crystallography technology to get vivid pictures of replication enzymes within viruses that are critical to making the viruses dangerous. The crystallography techniques provide images with resolution down to the level of individual atoms, and enable Cocrystal to account for how atoms move in real-time, as opposed to taking a more simplistic snapshot image, Wilcox says. Once scientists have that deeper understanding of every nook and cranny in the target, and its range of motion, Cocrystal uses proprietary software to select the ideal small-molecule candidates to bind with the target, Wilcox says.

This approach has enabled a small company like Cocrystal, with about 20 employees split between its Bothell and Mountain View labs, to avoid the massive small molecule screening campaigns that Big Pharma companies have been finding notoriously costly. It?s too early for Cocrystal to get cocky since it is still probably a couple years away from its first clinical trial, but it has been enough to keep Kornberg interested, and for Cocrystal to set up a lab not far from his office at Stanford.

?We have a really good molecule in preclinical development,? Wilcox says. ?But probably what?s equally important is we have a giant step forward with our general approach. We have a way of doing things different and better.?

Kornberg himself offered a pretty straight-laced reply when I asked for his comment, but he made plain he?s interested in the broad potential of the Cocrystal platform: ?Our technology offers a systematic approach to the development of exceptionally effective drugs against any targets for which crystal structures may be obtained,? he wrote in an ?e-mail.

Getting teams in two different cities working together ?Next Page ?

Source: http://wyldaboutbusiness2.blogspot.com/2011/09/xconomy-venture-capital_23.html

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