You’ve identified a pain point. You’ve come up with a solution. You’ve thought through your offering—and it’s a winner. You’re ready for next steps. You’re ready to raise some funding.
Or are you?
Finance
Bottom line is that you’re in business to make money. If your customers aren’t paying you, that’s a serious cash flow problem. If they’re slow to pay, that’s a problem as well. While late invoices are fairly common for many businesses, that doesn’t mean you can’t fight it. The key is process.
Silicon Valley’s big VC firm’s The Social+Capital Partnership, Andreessen Horowitz, Formation8, Ron Conway, and Anand Rajaraman have today launched Data Elite, to help tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges through data science.
Honestly fundraising can oftentimes feel like you’re navigating a minefield: one false step and the money blows up! That’s why you need to be clear on what you’re looking for, where to look for it, and what you need to get it.
Silicon Valley may still be the capital of technology with a mix of new (Google, Facebook) and old (Apple, HP) sprinkling the landscape. However, Silicon Valley isn’t the only place to grow technology innovators from the ground up. Los Angeles has seen its own startup scene develop with Silicon Beach, which stretches between Santa Monica and Playa Vista.
Social analytics and personalization platform GraphDive has closed $2 million in its first ever equity round from Crosslink Capital, Correlation Ventures, Plug & Play Tech Center, Start Capital and angel investors Pejman Nozad, Ullas Naik and Scott Banister.
Clean, safe and reliable natural gas company Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) has established $1 million innovation fund in partnership with Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), to speed the development of clean technologies to meet current global energy needs and become a sustainable energy source.
CoinMKT has launched in public beta to make buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies convenient. The startup aims to take advantage of the increasing use of digital, peer-to-peer currencies that let users buy or sell online instantly. CoinMKT works simply. Open an account, deposits USD or cryptocurrency into the account. The CoinMKT then becomes their trading account so that they can begin trading cryptocurrencies.
El Segundo, CA based JumpStarter Inc., a crowd-powered platform that gives accredited investors access to exclusive deal flow and technology transfer opportunities has launched in beta its crowd-powered portal for startups, JumpStartFund. Helping solicit new business ideas and patents from individuals, federal research labs, universities and other R&D organizations countrywide.
IndieGoGo and other crowdfunding sites have been on the rise on becoming the new medium to gain capital for businesses and projects. Many new startups and small businesses are shooting to crowdfund their campaign. But some larger companies, such as Canonical, came to the crowdfunding community to help them fund projects like the Ubuntu Edge. Even if Canonical did not reach its goal, the campaign has given other larger companies to look into crowdfunding other future projects. Kate Drane, hardware category lead at IndieGoGo joins us and talks about IndieGoGo and crowdfunding.
