Startups

The barrier to entry for the Unity game rendering engine for developers on iOS and Android has gotten lower, as use of Unity tech is now free on both mobile platforms. Unity CEO David Helgason announced the changed terms today during the Unite Nordic trade conference, according to Pocket Gamer’s Keith Andrew. The dropping of licensing fees for the engine’s basic tier means that features which once cost $800 now carry no charge at all. The change in pricing structure is all about building momentum for indie game creators and studio, according to Helgason. Unity has shifted to a free licensing structure on the web and on desktop platforms, and has long hoped to bring the same model to its mobile platform products, according to Pocket Gamer. Later on, the same deal could be made available to Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10, the company says. Unity 4 on iOS and Android offers a number of impressive features, including real-time shadows and multi-screen AirPlay support for building unique game experiences. For Unity, offering the basic license free to game devs is essentially also lowering the barrier to their revenue-generating paid tiers and offerings, including assets for in-game use and Pro and Basic add-ons, team licenses and more. For mobile devs, it gives them a level of access to tools used by some of the biggest and most successful gaming studios on Android and iOS, including Rovio (which uses Unity for Bad Piggies), as well as those used by hit indies like Year Walk, The Room and more. This is a good thing for the independent games development community, and hopefully it means we’ll see even more top-tier titles coming out of brand new places. The iOS and Android mobile software stores aren’t quite the Wild West of new and exciting indie content they once were, but they still provide small developers more exposure and opportunity than other platforms, and maybe this will help that continue to be true in the face of increasing investment in mobile software from big name game studios.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013San Francisco, CAEarly Bird Tickets on Sale Leading corporate performance management (CPM) company Adaptive Planning has raised a massive $45 million in its fourth and final round of funding with a goal to further dominate the CPM space, the business said Tuesday. Adaptive Planning offers a suite of budgeting, planning, forecasting, and data discovery software in the cloud. Its software works for small businesses all the way up to large enterprises, which now represent 25 percent of its business. The company had 1,500 customers at the end of 2012 and it estimates it will have 2,000 customers at the end of this year. Big name customers come from all kinds of industries including Box, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Jive Software, NBC News, Nissan, Red Hat, Toyota, and Zipcar. “We address all of the CPM market — and it’s a huge market,” Adaptive Planning CEO John Herr told VentureBeat. “Most of our new customers move to us from Excel. We help customers upgrade from ‘Excel hell’ to Adaptive.” Adaptive Planning competes with solutions from Oracle, IBM, and SAP, but its software-as-a-service has made it a leader in its space. And now the company will have more cash to hire more employees, further refine its software, and create more partnerships with resellers. That last point is particularly important for the company, as it already has a strong reseller network of more than 400 “channel partners.” These partners help sell the product to more businesses and give it better access to international customers. One such partner is NetSuite, which offers Adaptive-based Financial Planning service that is integrated with NetSuite’s software. The huge new funding round was led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), with participation by existing investors ONSET Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, RBC Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, and Monitor Ventures. BVP partner Byron Deeter will join the company’s board. “The business is on fire and this investment is a strong endorsement of what we’re about,” Herr said. “Many BVP companies are also customers of Adaptive.” Including the new round, Adaptive Planning has raised about $85 million to date, including a $22 million round a little over a year ago. Herr said this will be the last round of venture capital funds raised for the company and that it will explore the option of going public “in the next couple years.” He also indicated other “exit opportunities” were on the table. “We’re open to all positive outcomes,” Herr said. Mountain View, Calif.-based Adaptive Planning was founded in 2003 and has 200 employees. Herr said the company aims to double its number of employees in the next 12 to 18 months. Businessman with tablet via ollyy/Shutterstock Filed under: Cloud, Deals .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate img { float:left; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); backgr

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Early Bird Tickets on Sale While messaging app MessageMe just raised $10 million in funding, that announcement was missing key info about the app’s growth. Now the company has come forth with some new stats that are impressive including that the service now has 5 million users just 75 days after launch. Competing with popular apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, MessageMe offers iOS and Android applications that let you share rich messages and content with family and friends. On top of standard text, you can also send images, YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, and more. Ten days after launch, MessageMe users were uploading two images per second. Today, they are uploading eight images per second. More than 1,500 notifications are sent to Message users each second. “At MessageMe, our ambition lies in the goal to change the way people communicate around the world, and the mediums through which they connect,” the company said in a blog post today. “From a text message, to a song clip, to those personal moments with your best friends, we’ve built a product which is now used by more than five million people to communicate one day to the next.” MessageMe only launched its apps in early March but already has attracted $11.9 million in funding. Investors include big names like Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, and SVAngel. Next up, the company says it has “groundbreaking additions in the pipeline.” We’ll see if it can deliver on that promise. Photo via MessageMe Filed under: Mobile .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1f80e4', endColorstr='#1862ae',GradientType=0 ); }

Last week we reported that MessageMe, one of the latest messaging apps to hit the smartphone market, had picked up a $10 million Series A round of funding, and today, the company is officially confirming the news, along with some more details on how it’s been doing in the 2.5 months since it launched. It now has 5 million users across both iOS and Android — a five-fold increase on the 1 million that downloaded the app in its first 10 days. MessageMe aims to carve out a name for itself by offering more ways than the rest of the pack for users to communicate with each other on its messaging platform. In its case, notifications — via text messages, pictures, doodles, video, voice, location and music sent from one user to another — have risen three-fold, to 1,500 per second from 500 65 days ago. From what we understand, although MessageMe is partly founded by people with extensive gaming experience — Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal both worked together at social games company LOLapps (acquired by 6waves in 2011) — it will be messaging, not games, that will be the revenue driver for the company. Also: no plans to add in advertising, nor to charge for the app. Instead, it will build out premium messaging features such as stickers and money transfers. The latter is shaping up to be a particularly interesting area, with not only Google swaggering into the ring, but as of yesterday Square as well, alongside a number of other companies like Venmo and established names like PayPal and Western Union already dabbling in features like this. As we reported last week, and as confirmed by the company today, this latest round was led by John Lilly, the former CEO of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock; Lilly now joins the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe. Other investors in the round include previous backers True Ventures (where MessageMe was first incubated), First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, and Social+Capital Partnership. The company’s angels also include Airbnb’s Brian Pokorny, Hiten Shah, Eric Wu and TinyCo CEO Suleman Ali. The company is still in an early and small stage: currently there are only 10 people working for TinyInc Labs. I caught up with co-founder Sethi to speak a little more about the direction of the company: About those greyed-out tabs on your app. When are you launching stickers and money? We’ll start rolling out new features in about a month, although we’re already doing some staged rollouts in beta. Stickers will feature our own content, as well as branded content, from companies that we’ll be working with. Money will be done in partnership with someone. A lot of the new features will come first on Android. Although it’s an app that we launched only last week, it’s easier to add and develop new features on Android. What about Windows Phone and BlackBerry? We are taking a close look at all the platforms out there, including web, Windwos and BlackBerry. We’ll see where most of the demand is and what users are asking for to decide what the next step will be for MessageMe. Talk to me a bit about your thoughts on paid messaging services like WhatsApp or those that rely on adds for revenue. There is no paid version planned. We’re definitely adamant on keeping it free, simple and fast. We’re also not doing any banner ads or third-party data stuff. We want to make sure that everything you do is private and secure. Even with premium services, you will pay or have option to opt out before you see or use it — that will come into play with how we roll out stickers and accessing content. WhatsApp has stolen a march on the messaging apps world with its seemingly global appeal, with Facebook Messenger also doing this to a lesser extent. Meanwhile others have a very regional focus. Where do you sit in that spectrum so far? Outside of the U.S. most of our growth has been in Europe, and the UK specif

Web security firm AVG has already demonstrated its dedication to user privacy by adding Do Not Track capabilities to its software. Now it appears to be doubling down on that with the purchase of small web privacy firm PrivacyChoice. PrivacyChoice was founded in 2009 offers one flagship product — a powerful browser extension called Privacyfix that analyzes your activity on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google and shows you how exposed your information is. For example, PrivacyFix analyzed my Facebook info and found that my exposure to Graph Search is quite high and that Facebook tracks my activity on 89 percent of sites I regularly visit. (Yes, this freaks me a out a little.) “Since founding, our mission has been to deliver more effective and more informed choices about how your data is collected, used, and shared,” PrivacyChoice founder Jim Brock said in a statement. “We saw strong synergies between our approach and the efforts AVG continues to make in empowering people when it comes to their online privacy.” Privacyfix is currently available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but it will soon be available for Internet Explorer as well. AVG also promises that Privacyfix will come to iOS and Android phones and tablets some time “this year.” The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brock will become Vice President of Privacy Products for AVG along with the acquisition. Check out an example of the Privacyfix dashboard below: Privacy sign via rpongsaj/Flickr Filed under: Deals, Security

Who needs SQL? In fact, who needs databases? Apparently no-one, including those who are building complex web applications. And new startup Orchestrate.io just took a massive $3 million seed round to prove it. Orchestrate takes the queries that developers would typically write in order to build an application, such as geolocation, time-series, social graph, full-text search, and more, and unifies everything a developer would need in a single API. In other words, all the time and resources that would typically go towards designing your data solution can now be redirected to building your application. “Complex apps require highly optimized queries, so much so that major companies such as Facebook and Google wrote custom big data databases like BigTable to manage them,” founder and CEO Antony Falco told me yesterday. “Typically you would devote 20-25 percent of your resources to data management, so there’s lots of savings. But when creating new apps, you can also reduce the time barrier to building services, getting multiple weeks of savings.” Antony Falco, CEO and founder One of those savings is found in that often companies have had to run or access multiple databases to enable their applications. All of them have to be monitored and maintained, scaled as your app grows, and distributed geographically and across multiple service providers to ensure high availability and low latency. With Orchestrate, that’s all built in, Falco told me, including geographical distribution. He used to be a VP at Akamai, the content delivery network, so he knows a few things about scalability and access. Talking about scalability, Orchestrate is looking to fill a pretty big niche: “Database and operating system licensing, servers, storage, power, labor, outsourcing and professional services represents a market that exceeds $100B annually,” Falco said in a statement. “We believe our service will save our customers significant time and money, allowing them to instead focus on what matters most — the end-user.  With Orchestrate.io, our customers can build better apps, faster.” The $3 million is for getting Orchestrate’s existing solution into production and hiring more engineers. It’s a largish seed round — you typically see $750,000, $500,000, or less for seed rounds, but Falco, who acknowledged that it had some aspects of an A round, says that it will help the company expand farther. And, for a company with global aspirations, some expensive requirements are just table stakes. “With $3 million we will be globally distributed,” he says. Falco is a serial entrepreneur, also founding Basho Technologies, makers of the open-source distributed database, Riak. Orchestrate was founded just three months ago, in March 2013, and is based in Portland, Oregon. The investment was led by True Ventures with Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners joining in. photo credit: adesigna via photopin cc Filed under: Big Data, Business, Cloud, Dev, Enterprise Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013? on the form. .blurb-cat-dev hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

The job’s board this week features an associate position at Goldman Sachs; a private markets consultant post at Strategic Investment Solutions; a Silicon Valley portfolio manager at Microsoft and a financial analyst position at ThomVest Ventures. Goldman Sachs is recruiting for a New York-based associate within its Alternative Investments & Manager Selection (AIMS) private equity group. For further information click here. Also in New York, Fifth Street Finance Corp., a lending partner to private equity firms, is on the look out for a vice president – credit portfolio management / restructuring. If you have experience with pension funds, the following position may be of interest. San Francisco-based Strategic Investment Solutions is hiring for a private markets consultant to work directly with a small number of institutional clients to provide advice and expertise on private market investments, including strategic planning, investment policy development, and implementation, and to present investment recommendations. If you’re interested in applying send an email to staff@sis-sf.com. Also in the San Francisco Bay area, Microsoft is looking for a Silicon Valley portfolio manager to “work with key VCs and startups in Silicon Valley to uncover synergies with Microsoft.” And finally, early stage tech investor Thomvest Ventures is searching for a Financial Analyst in San Francisco Bay Area. To apply, click here. Image credit: Photo courtesy of Shutterstock The post Jobs of the Week: Goldman, Strategic Investment Solutions, Microsoft and Thomvest Ventures Hiring appeared first on peHUB.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Louis Bacon is placing a big bet on mid-market lending by backing a new firm that is seeking to raise a $750 million debt fund aiming at the lower end of the middle market, two sources told sister magazine Buyouts. Bacon, the founder of Moore Capital Management LP, a New York-based hedge fund, has committed to provide an estimated $200 million cornerstone pledge to MC Credit, a firm that has been reconstituted to reflect its new source of capital, said a person familiar with the fundraising effort. MC Credit launched in May as the successor to Cyan Partners, a lower mid-market lender founded in 2008 by Ashok Nayyar, who had been co-head of global leveraged finance at Morgan Stanley from 2006 to 2008 and before that a managing director in the leveraged finance group at Citigroup from 1997 to 2006. Cyan Partners has sourced and invested in approximately $900 million of loans and other credits since its inception, according to a cached Web page. (The Web site domain appears to have been decommissioned.) The team, which Nayyar is bringing with him to MC Credit, will now operate as an affiliate of Moore Capital but will maintain its independence in making credit decisions, said a second person who was familiar with the arrangement. MC Credit, like Cyan Partners, plans to focus on companies with $15 million to $75 million in EBITDA, primarily serving the North American market, with a strategy of growth capital through senior secured loans, with some second-lien loans, said the second person. MC Credit plans to emphasize its proprietary origination for its investments, the first person said. The firm then will syndicate the loans to hedge funds or banks, the person said. While MC Credit will work with some sponsors, that is likely not to be core to the firm’s approach, the person said. With a net worth estimated at $1.3 billion, Bacon ranks No. 347 on the Forbes 400 list, the magazine reported in March. Known as a green billionaire and conservationist, Bacon has set plans to donate a conservation easement on 90,000 acres of land in Trincherea Ranch in Colorado to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Top stock holdings in Bacon’s Moore Global Investments fund as of Dec. 31 include 7.6 million shares of the Powershares QQQ Trust, 5.1 million shares of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., 4.7 million shares in Citigroup, and 11.8 million shares of Bank of America Corp, according to 13F filings cited by InsiderMonkey.com. The investment banking boutique Greenhill & Co. is acting as placement agent for the fund. Michael Zimmerman, a senior managing director at Moore Capital, wouldn’t comment on the size of the commitment but did confirm that an entity affiliated with the hedge fund had made a commitment. Steve Bills is a senior editor at Buyouts Magazine. Any opinions expressed here are entirely his own. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Bills. Follow Buyouts tweets @Buyouts. For information on how to subscribe, contact Greg Winterton at greg.winterton@thomsonreuters.com. Additional reporting by David Toll and Steve Gelsi. Image Credit: Shutterstock.com The post Moore Capital Founder To Anchor $750M Senior Loan Fund appeared first on peHUB.

Uncovet, a startup that wants to be the recommendation engine for indie designer clothing and accessories, has raised $1.3 million from Javelin Venture Partners, Siemer Ventures, and L.A. angel investor Paige Craig. A graduate of Science, Uncovet is an accessories and home décor site that is building a style graph to personalize product recommendations. With more than 500,000 monthly visitors, the startup uses Facebook Connect to allow users to invite friends to the site and also takes a users’ Facebook Likes into account when recommending products if a user allows. The result is a personalized and curated group of products that act as a style graph. The company, which launched last year, also features “Daily Finds” and will be launching its first native iPhone app early June (half of the startup’s daily visits already come from mobile device. Android and iPad apps will be released later this year. Uncovet shoppers visit the site more than six times per month and will open an Uncovet email nine times per month. Uncovet delivers a more engaging experience by targeting specific consumer segments with products that resonate with their specific tastes. Uncovet is a next generation version of Urban Outfitters; filled with unique items from independent designers, targeting a young, trend-conscious audience, and leveraging a new world of social data to fuel growth and loyalty,” says Michael Jones, CEO of Science.

This story is part of a series exploring the themes of our upcoming health tech conference, May 20-21 in San Francisco. Read the full series here. Reputation.com founder Owen Tripp is not the kind of entrepreneur who wants to solve small problems. For his new venture, Tripp tells me he has an ambitious solution that will someday “fix health care.” Tripp’s startup, ConsultingMD, has secured a $10 million funding round led by venture firm Venrock, the health-focused venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family. The mission is to create a virtual clinic where patients are served by the top doctors in the world. ConsultingMD founder Owen Tripp “We don’t believe you need a network of thirty thousand doctors to be effective,” said Tripp [pictured above with cofounder Dr. Lawrence "Rusty" Hoffman] in an interview with VentureBeat. “We would rather use the same 750 doctors who achieve successful outcomes again and again.” Tripp unveiled ConsultingMD’s first product on stage at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today. ConsultingMD offers patients the opportunity to consult a leading medical expert for a second opinion — and receive a detailed response in about 48 hours. Patients are asked to submit some brief details about their case, and sign a release. ConsultingMD’s team will begin assembling a file with a full medical record, demographic information, relevant images, tests, and so on, and select a specialist from the network to take a closer look. The technology is HIPPA-compliant and cloud-based, so doctors can safely review a case in any location. Specialists like Dr. Berchuck, director of Gynecologic Cancer Research at Duke University, are already signed up. ConsultingMD offers top doctors the opportunity to review a higher volume of medical cases. Even in its trial period, physicians were able to access and share opinions on rare cases they might not otherwise have been exposed to. Another draw is the boost in income for top-notch physicians.”As our brand grows, so too will the celebrity of our doctors,” said Tripp. For patients, it means avoiding flying halfway across the country, or paying exorbitant medical fees for an in-person visit. ConsultingMD won’t accept just any doctor to its network. “We never went out and perused the phone book for doctors,” Tripp explained. “We made invitations based on recommendations and are getting more in-bound requests each week than we can handle.” This exclusivity makes sense in light of the business model. Tripp expects the richest and biggest companies like Pepsi and Home Depot to pay for its employees to access ConsultingMD. Large enterprises pay $6 per employee each month; some cases may be covered by insurance. Individuals can also pay for a second opinion – the average cost is $3,750. “I am a little allergic to the term ‘corporate wellness,” he explains. “I think wellness is something we ought to do as a country.” But corporations are increasingly offering top-quality and concierge health care to retain employees. An Adecco SA study stipulated that 55 percent of corporate execs view health care benefits as their biggest challenge. Tripp’s long-term goal with ConsultingMD is to create a “virtual clinic.” In an interview, he revealed plans for a second product, an online service that helps patients locate and schedule a visit to the top specialist in their area. “ConsultingMD has decentralized this medical expertise and improves the lives and health of people through technology,” said Bryan Roberts, the Venrock partner who will join the company’s board. Filed under: Business HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and regi