Washington D.C. based LaunchBoxDigital, a Y Combinator-like startup incubator that will invest small amounts of capital in very early stage startup ideas, is now taking applications for their first program. They’ve also raised their own first round of funding - $250,000 from Jonathan Miller (former CEO, AOL), Reed Hundt (former FCC Chairman), Raul Fernandez (CEO Object Video) and Chris Schroeder (CEO HealthCentral).
LaunchBoxDigital says they’ll invest $15,000 - $30,000 in six to ten startups, in exchange for 4% to 8% of the equity. Founding teams must spend the summer in Washington D.C. to participate in a twelve week incubation program. Applications must be received by March 14, 2008.
The model is based on the much emulated Y Combinator, which has now funded dozens of startups. London based SeedCamp and Colorado based TechStars have nearly identical business models.
Startup fund/incubator TechStars is now accepting applications for its 2008 intake (see our coverage of them a year ago).
TechStars offers up to $15,000 in seed funding ($5,000 per founder, max $15,000) to broke entrepreneurs with a good startup idea. Ten winners will be selected, and winners will need to spend most of their time in Boulder over the Northern summer building out their ideas. In return, TechStars takes 5% of the equity in each startup. Winners have full use of TechStar’s offices, access to legal advice, and are able to tap into a strong list of startup mentors to help them build their idea (list here). Non-US companies can apply, although must be able to legally spend most of summer in Colorado.
Of last year’s winners 8 of the 10 companies are now angel or venture backed, are profitable, and/or have had acquisition offers, and 6 of the 10 winners heard about the opportunity on TechCrunch (according to TechStats).
The Techstar’s program is similar to YCombinator, and both are solid ideas, giving wannabe startups a helping hand in turning their dreams into reality. The associated support is first rate and particularly for those not well connected in the Valley would be difficult to replicate; ultimately the $15,000 may be the headline figure but the related support makes it much more valuable.
The first TechStars company to launch, MadKast has raised a $300,000 series A round of financing from EONBusiness Venture Capital and several Angel investors in California and Colorado. Another TechStars company, EventVue, closed their own round of funding last week.
MadKast is an embeddable widget that lets you easily share links with your friends on any of 15 link sharing sites (Digg, Delicious, Reddit, …). But unlike other link-sharing widgets such as AddThis, MadKast also lets you send links via email, SMS, or IM. It’s a rather simple, yet useful, tool for letting your readers spread your posts.
Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage - ten of them - to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring.
Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each - and see Don Dodge for his take:
EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding.
Intense Debate - see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding.
socialthing! is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k.
J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here.
Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching.
Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who may have similar interests as you. Raising $500k.
MadKast has the honor of being the first TechStars startup to launch. Our previous coverage is here. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad. Once the widget is installed, readers can send a blog post via email, mobile MMS, or social bookmarking networks to friends. They are raising $300k in capital.
FiltrBox is a content monitoring and filtering service for blogs, news sites and other websites. Content is filtered by topics, keywords and context and then delivered to the user via RSS, email and/or text messages. Filters can be adjusted via sliders and will learn what you like over time. Raising $500k in capital.
KBLabs is developing Facebook applications and widgets. Wah! Cool was their first application, which launched four weeks ago. It now has 100k subscribers and is generating 1.5 million page views per week. Other applications include Post Secrets, Motivate Me and Track Bot. The founders are going back to college this Fall but will continue to consult and build Facebook applications. They are not looking for funding.
BrightKite serves location based notifications (”place streaming”) over email, instant messaging of text messages. The idea is to stream content about a place, from a place. Friends are alerted when you are nearby. You receive offers from local businesses. Etc. Targeted towards conferences, bars, parties and public places. It is also a platform for third party applications. Raising $500k in capital.
TechStars is doing something similar to what YCombinator has done – they’re funding 10 teams with up to $15,000 in seed capital and providing office space, operational support, and mentors from business leaders (and potential follow-on investors) in Boulder, CO. In exchange for the investment and everything else, the teams give up a meager 5% equity position in their companies. Our previous profile of them is here.
Ten startups ideas have now been selected out of 300 applicants.
All start-ups move to Boulder on May 15 and the program starts May 21 for 3 months. There will be 3 evening sessions each week that’ll give the teams access to 40 mentors for personal meetings and panel discussions. They’ll also have extensive meetings and access to the four founders of TechStars – notable VC Brad Feld, David Cohen, Jared Polis (founder of BlueMountain and ProFlowers) and David Brown.
Information is vague at this point on the selected start-ups, but two of them are Socialthing! and Intense Debate. Socialthing! is going to be doing something in the social networking space and Intense Debate has something to do with real-time debating online.
YCombinator’s model is similar – they give $5,000 plus another $5,000 per founder and take 2-10% of the start-ups’ equity. The model has worked – one of their investments, Reddit, went on to be acquired by Condé Nast last Halloween.
Of the selected teams, founder ages range from 20-36 with median age at 25. Seven of the teams are B2C (social learning, social networking, social media, mobile, social media sharing, alerting/messaging, local/community) and the other three are B2B (SMB/new media, infrastructure / VOIP response, enterprise social networking). One team has a partner coming from Sweden, while the other teams are all from USA (NYC, Philadelphia, St. Louis, South Carolina, Denver, Seattle, Jacksonville, LA).
Of the applicants, 80% were between 20-30 years old – youngest was 14 and oldest was 62. Of the ideas, 75% were B2C, 20% B2B, and 5% “public good”.
Got an idea? Willing to hustle for a summer to see it grow? Y Combinator just announced their summer application drive. Applications are due by April 2nd and by the 10th, a few will be selected to present in Mountain View on April 21-22nd. If selected, your team will relocate to work and learn in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For those of you unfamiliar with Y Combinator, it’s the seed financing fund guided by Paul Graham’s philosophies that helps young startups launch through mentoring and investing a base $5,000 plus $5,000 per founder. In exchange they take a 1-10% stake in the company. The teams are usually composed of young college grads with some programming skill. It’s not not a program meant for industry veterans. Some have criticized the program for taking too much ownership for such a small investment. Some readers have also called shenanigans on the operation. Here are some of the companies we’ve covered before. Kiko, Reddit, and Loopt are some notable Y Combinator companies. Exits, so far, have been through acquisition. Kiko died, and was then acquired by Elliot Noss. Conde Nast bought Reddit.
Some other programs such as TechStars have adopted the model. TechStars is another well backed program based in Boulder, Colorado also offering experienced mentors and cash to aspiring startups. While not the same ground floor financing as Y Combinator or TechStars, the venerable VC firm Charles River Ventures also adopted a smaller financing program (up to $250K debt) called Quick Start.
TechStars is a new startup fund/incubator that’s generated a good discussion in the TechCrunch Forums. Like YCombinator, TechStars is looking for flat broke entrepreneurs with just a seed of a good startup idea.
They are taking applications now, out of which ten winners will be selected. The thirty of so winning entrepreneurs (TechStars anticipates an average of three founders per idea) will travel to Colorado on May 21, 2007, and spend the summer in Boulder building out their ideas. TechStars will also give each founding group $15,000 in seed funding, and help them locating housing at the nearly University of Colorado, Boulder. TechStars will take 5% of the equity in each startup.
This is comparable to YCombinator’s model, where they give $6,000 per founder and take 6-8% of the startups equity. And the model has worked so far, with a number of promising startups launching, and YCombinator-funded Reddit being acquired by Condé Nast last Halloween.
TechStars is solidly backed, with investments from David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jared Polis (founder of Blue Mountain and ProFlowers) and David Brown. There’s a long list of mentors as well who’ve promised to help guide startups over the summer.
We are seeing a dramatic shift as (some) investors are lurching away from providing big capital to over funded web startups to these structured, mentor-driven angel investments. YCombinator and TechStars fill a definite niche, as does Charles River Ventures recent foray into small (and quick) investments as well.
I’m definitely going to take at least one trip to TechStars this summer and do some interviews and meet this new crop of startups. TechStars will repeat the program each summer.
Washington D.C. based LaunchBoxDigital, a Y Combinator-like startup incubator that will invest small amounts of capital in very early stage startup ideas, is now taking applications for their first program. They’ve also raised their own first round of funding - $250,000 from Jonathan Miller (former CEO, AOL), Reed Hundt (former FCC Chairman), Raul Fernandez (CEO Object Video) and Chris Schroeder (CEO HealthCentral).
Got an idea? Willing to hustle for a summer to see it grow? 
