TECH CRUNCH – Jan 14 - SNAP Interactive, the publicly listed company behind social dating apps and services like AreYouInterested, is to raise $8.5M in a private placement transaction. Under the terms of the transaction, SNAP has agreed to sell ~4.25Mshares of its common stock to institutional investors at $2 per share and warrants to purchase up to ~2.125M additional shares of its common stock. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
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TECH CRUNCH – Nov 22 - Smartdate announced a €2M round in Feb of this year so that people can start dating friends of their Facebook friends. But now Smartdate has raised an additional €3.5M with the fonders of PriceMinster, Pierre Kosciuscko-Morizet and Pierre Krings. Smartdate is rapidly developing and already has a 25 person team in place. The company is very similar to Zoosk in that it is basing its online dating service on Facebook. Smartdate has users connecting via Facebook Connect and requires that you be at least 18 in order to access the Smartdater community. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
Mark Brooks: Smartdate started out with a 300k Euro round, then quickly added an additional 1.7m Euro in February.
BENZINGA – Nov 4 - Online dating startup "HowAboutWe" has raised $3.1M in funding led by RRE Ventures. HowAboutWe is focused on proposing and accepting specific date ideas that complete the sentence "How about we…" The site is pushing towards a national rollout in the next few months. FULL ARTICLE @ BENZINGA
PR NEWSWIRE – Oct 28 - FriendFinder Networks announced the completion of its $551,235,000 financing. FriendFinder Networks has 125M unique monthly visitors. The Company owns ~30,000 websites with ~405M registrants in 185 countries and offers a wide variety of online services. FULL ARTICLE @ PR NEWSWIRE
Mark Brooks: 29500 landing pages? Who financed them?
PAID CONTENT – July 27 - Triangulate, a startup trying to build an online dating business on Facebook, has raised $750,000 from Trinity Ventures and Playdom Chairman Rick Thompson. Triangulate is the latest so-called “social dating” site to attract interest from investors; Zoosk, the most established player in the market, has raised more than $40M, while SmartDate, raised $2.2 M in March. Triangulate’s Facebook app, called Wings, uses data from a member’s Facebook profile, as well as from their accounts on Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Twitter and Foursquare, to automatically generate a basic dating profile for them, which includes topics they are interested in, where they like to hang out, and who their friends tend to be.
The full article was originally published at Paid Content, but is no longer available.
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK – June 29 – EasyDate, Edinburgh-based online dating business, goes public with a £10m placing on London’s junior market. Founder Bill Dobbie and business partner Max Polyakov are floating their niche-focused dating business on AIM to fund acquisitions and international growth as they attempt to win more of a global market worth an estimated £1bn. Tomorrow’s listing will give the company, which has a turnover of £11.5M, a market cap of approximately £45M as it issues 75 million shares at 60p. EasyDate is currently adding 200,000 members a month, and projects revenues will hit £19M next year. FULL ARTICLE @ TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
TECH CRUNCH – June 22 - ReputationDefender, an online security startup,
has announced a $15M Series C round led by JAFCO Ventures with existing
investors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers participating in the round. This brings the company’s total
funding to $24M. The startup, which just raised $8.65M last year, helps
you monitor your reputation on the Web and take actions to make sure
that when someone Googles you they see you in the best possible light. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
CNN MONEY – May 20 - Thread.com is a new site that lets singles view profiles of their friends' pals on Facebook and request introductions. Facebook already has all the raw ingredients of the largest dating site in the world. More than 400M people worldwide have profiles. And since Thread relies on users' pre-existing profiles, rather than asking them to create new ones, it takes less effort to get started than most online dating outlets. Last year, Thread landed $1M in venture funding from First Round Capital and Sequoia Capital. Angel investors, including RottenTomatoes.com CEO Joe Greenstein and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, also put in additional $200,000. Thread's close ties to Facebook bring a few risks. "If Facebook decides to do something, Thread must follow along, and in one fell swoop it could take their bottom line with it," says Mark Brooks, an Internet dating industry consultant. Facebook is already at the center of a firestorm over privacy issues. Thread still has to figure out how to monetize its matchmaking, whether through advertising, subscriptions or virtual gift-giving. Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, had already tried his hand at Facebook matchmaking — cutting and pasting his friends' profiles and sending awkward e-mails back and forth — when the Thread business plan hit his desk. "A lot of people were doing this manually, so I thought, 'What a wonderful idea,'" he says. Brooks, the Internet dating industry consultant, agrees: "They're bottling what we already do in the real world." FULL ARTICLE @ CNN MONEY
This is the news for February 23rd through March 2nd, 2010. Here is the news we covered:
TECH CRUNCH – Mar 3 - Paris based dating service Smartdate has raised €1.7M with European VC 360 Capital Partners. Smartdate, which previously secured Angel investment from four international Business Angels for a total of €300,000, was founded by Fabrice Le Parc, who also launched be2.com in France and Benelux in 2006-07. This €2 million total amount of seed funding will be mainly used to market the service as they have an objective of one million users before the end of the year. Smartdate wants to use Facebook Friends as a criteria for your dating search. Using Facebook Connect to log in to Smartdate, you search for single people among friends of your friends. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH