National Venture Capital Association Blog - The NVCA profiles the Battery and Sprinklr relationship.

TechCrunch -- The latest round was led by Battery Ventures and Battery General Partner Dharmesh Thakker. Thakker will join Gong’s board of directors.

Wall Street Journal -- Global, open-source software company protects banks, other large organizations from malicious attacks on vulnerable mobile apps.

TechCrunch -- Kustomer nabs $35M to take on Zendesk and Salesforce with its Slack-like approach to CRM.

Bloomberg -- Cision Ltd., a public relations software company, agreed to buy analytics startup TrendKite for $225 million as it continues to invest in software automation to improve social media campaigns.

TechCrunch -- Global leader in Augmented Reality experiences continues its momentum from blockbuster Pokémon GO; grows portfolio including the highly anticipated Harry Potter: Wizards Unite; expands focus on Niantic Real World Platform.

BusinessWire -- Logan Bartlett, Sanjiv Kalevar and Shiran Shalev promoted to principal for work with tech companies in the U.S., Europe and Israel; Justin Rosner promoted to VP.

BusinessWire -- Ireland-based Firm to Operate Alongside Existing Companies Within Process Sensing Technologies Group: Michell Instruments, Analytical Industries, Rotronic, LDetek and Dynament

PRNewswire -- Creating One of the Largest VMS, PSIM and Video Analytics Providers for Mid-Market and Enterprise Organizations

TechCrunch -- Quebec company provides cutting-edge solutions for new wave of lightweight robots that free humans from repetitive tasks.

BusinessWire -- Market demand for AI that enhances human behavior fuels accelerated company growth.

TechCrunch -- Battery participates in funding round to support Workato, a startup that offers an integration and automation platform for businesses.

BusinessWire -- Thundra, the newly launched observability company for serverless environments,  announced the release of Thundra Layers for AWS Lambda.

TechCrunch -- Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup launched by three Ph.D. physicists, announced a $5.5 million seed investment with participation from Battery Ventures.

PEHub -- Habana Labs is a fabless semiconductor company located in Tel-Aviv, Israel and San Jose, California.

BusinessWire -- Company co-founded by former Facebook CIO Tim Campos launches first product with $4.8 million in seed funding from Battery Ventures, Amplify Partners, and Felicis Ventures.

BusinessWire -- The Portland, Oregon-based company will use the partnership to fuel growth and acquisitions.

BusinessWire -- Battery Ventures has acquired software company SigmaTEK Systems, the maker of SigmaNEST, a “nesting” product with advanced CAD/CAM functionality that helps professional fabrication and manufacturing companies operate more efficiently on the shop floor.

PRNewswire -- Paperspace, a cloud AI company, announced it has closed a $13 million Series A financing round led by Battery Ventures to further innovation of the company's high-performance cloud computing and ML development platform.

BusinessWire -- New artificial intelligence company Machinify to radically reduce the cost and complexity of deploying AI that improves business performance.

BusinessWire -- TTP Labtech Ltd, an international leader in the design and development of automated instrumentation and consumables for life science research announces that investment has underpinned aggressive growth plans.

BusinessWire -- UK-based Firm, Focused on Material-Property Testing, Joins James Heal in Group and Will Use New Resources to Fuel Growth

The Record -- Bonfire, which specializes in software that streamlines the procurement process for governments and other public and private institutions, has been acquired for US$108 million.

PRNewswire -- The 'Stock Market of Things' also adds noted investors to lineup, including Steve Aoki, Karlie Kloss, Don C, Marc Benioff, and others.

Business Insider -- Clubessential Holdings, the leading provider of membership and club-management solutions to the private club, college athletic and health and fitness markets, today announced two strategic acquisitions: Performance IQ and Black Diamond IT Services.

BusinessWire -- Paul Morrissey promoted to principal for work with software companies in Europe and the US; Dallin Bills, Dan Nguyen-Huu promoted to VP.

BusinessWire -- OpsGenie, whose technology helps DevOps and IT-operations teams more seamlessly manage critical IT alerts and incidents, has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Atlassian, a leading provider of team-collaboration and productivity software.

TechCrunch -- With $40 million for AuditBoard's risk and compliance toolkit, LA's enterprise startups notch another win.

Boston Globe -- Excellent profile of Battery's Wayfair in the Boston Globe.

BusinessWire -- Kodiak Robotics aims to bring new technologies to the long-haul trucking market and to revolutionize freight transportation.

WebWire -- Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire Mendix, a pioneer and leader in cloud native low code application development.

Business Insider -- Two Battery general partners make the elite list of top enterprise investors.

BusinessWire -- UK-based Firms to Operate Alongside Existing Process Sensing Technologies Companies Michell Instruments, Analytical Industries, Rotronic and LDetek

TechCrunch -- Cheq raises $5M for a proactive, AI-driven approach to safe ad placement

WSJ -- Roger helps unpack the "Top 25 Tech Companies to Watch in 2018."

CNBC -- Canadian Firm to Operate Alongside Existing Process Sensing Technologies Companies Michell Instruments, Analytical Industries and Rotronic

PR Web -- Ireland-based Learnosity is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company specializing in digital learning technology. General Partner, Russell Fleischer, will become part of the Learnosity Board of Directors.

PE Hub -- Clubessential, which is backed by Battery Ventures, has acquired Phoenix, Arizona-based Stretch Internet, a streaming provider of college sports.

GlobeNewswire -- Emphasis will be on to promoting industry group’s goals of innovation, capital creation and economic growth.

Wall Street Journal -- Cash deal brings a leading employment startup inside a full-service human-resources powerhouse.

PRNewswire -- BounceX Secures Series B Round Led by Battery Ventures to Help Marketers Unlock the First New Scalable Revenue Channel in 10 Years

GlobeNewsWire -- Glassdoor Partners With Battery Ventures for Second Year to Reveal the 25 Highest-Rated Public and 50 Highest-Rated Private Cloud-Computing Companies to Work For.

TechCrunch -- Sensu is an open source, full-stack operations monitoring and management system based out of Portland, OR.

Forbes - For the eighth year running Battery's Neeraj Agrawal makes the list, coming in at spot number 21.

PRNewswire -- Investment to Strengthen EDR's Leadership Position in Real Estate Data and Software-as-a-Service

Wall Street Journal -- Battery portfolio companies ServiceTitan and Upkeep featured in story on software for the blue-collar workforce.

GlobeNewswire -- Tech Executive Jeff Lindholm Joins Maine-based Company as CEO; Plixer Helps Customers Better Parse Network Data to Prevent Business Disruption, Security Hacks

PRNewswire -- Global supply chain content provider will enhance S&P Global Market Intelligence's robust data and analytical offerings

BusinessWire -- Deal brings comprehensive end-to-end clinical and business solution to outpatient rehab therapy market

GlobeNewswire -- Global Firm Continues to Pursue Early- and Late-Stage Technology Investments With 12th Family of Funds; Elhafed Promoted to General Partner

TechCrunch -- Prodigy raises $5.4M to unify the in-store and online car-buying experience

PRNewswire -- Battery's Wag! announces $300 million investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund and recruits Hilary Schneider as CEO. Battery's Roger Lee sits on the board.

Wall Street Journal -- Abundance of late-stage capital still keeps many private companies in private markets, despite the rally in share prices.

GlobeNewswire -- Battery Ventures has reached an agreement to make a significant investment in PageUp, a Melbourne, Australia-based maker of cloud-based, enterprise talent management software. Battery General Partner Chelsea Stoner and Vice President Paul Morrissey will join the PageUp board of directors as part of the transaction.

TechCrunch -- Quinyx, a Stockholm-headquartered company that offers cloud-based software to help businesses manage things like employee scheduling, communication, task-management and payroll integration, has raised a $12 million in funding from Battery Ventures.

TechCrunch -- Clubhouse just got a boost to bring efficiency to software development teams across the world, securing a $10 million series A investment from Battery Ventures.

Business Insider -- Software for home service professionals company, ServiceTitan, lands a spot on Business Insider's Top 50 Startups to Watch in 2018 list.

Forbes -- Midas Europe 2017: Meet The 25 Best Venture Capitalists In Europe

Business Insider -- In a move that sends a subtle signal to US travel titans Expedia and Priceline, Chinese travel giant Ctrip has bought US startup Trip.com. The purchase indicates the global ambitions of Ctrip to move into Western markets.

TechCrunch -- Berlin-based travel activities booking platform GetYourGuide announces $75M Series D round led by Battery Ventures.

Forbes -- Representation of collegiate athletic departments for their media rights and exploitation of their intellectual property is dominated by two companies -- IMG College and Learfield -- But what about the small schools that are found outside of Division I?

BusinessWire -- New investment will accelerate InVision’s efforts to define the future of digital product design and help companies around the world put customer experience at the center of their business strategy.

BloombergBNA -- Cross River Bank, which boasts just one branch in suburban Teaneck, N.J., has become an outsized player in fintech less than 10 years after its founding on the eve of the financial crisis.

Forbes -- Database company MongoDB has given the New York tech community a much-needed win on the public markets. Forbes interviewed Battery's Dharmesh Thakker on the promising IPO.

Press Release -- Round led by Battery Ventures validates “self-protecting” software and sets standard for application security; Equifax breach shows criticality of sector.

Globe Newswire -- Battery Ventures announced it has made a significant investment in Latitude Geographics Group Ltd., a Victoria, B.C.-based provider of web-based mapping software and related Geographic Information System (GIS) capabilities.

Forbes -- Every year for the past three, Forbes has gone looking for 25 young U.S. companies with a strong shot at reaching a valuation of $1 billion or more.

TechCrunch--Pendo helps businesses understand and assist their customers with tools like analytics, polls and walkthroughs. The company has made its first acquisition buying Insert, a mobile marketing startup based in Israel.

Bloomberg TV -- In this interview with Bloomberg TV, CEO Ali Ghodsi discusses Databricks’ recent $140 million Series D investment round and how Databricks is at the forefront of AI.

The Financial Times--Sage Group has made its largest-ever acquisition with the purchase of US cloud-based financial software company Intacct for $850m.

Global News Wire--Battery Ventures, a global, technology-focused investment firm, announced it has completed its acquisition of Bonn, Germany-based AED-SICAD, a provider of high-end geographic information systems (GIS) for the public-sector and utilities markets.

CNBC--Other investors are diving into cryptocurrency in a big way. Forbes published a piece this week highlighting 15 new crypto hedge funds that are launching between this summer and the end of the year.

PYMNTS--Some innovative entrepreneurs are just born that way.

MarketWired--Battery Ventures, a global technology investment firm, has reached an agreement for its platform in the process-measurement market, Process Sensing Technologies (PST), to acquire Rotronic AG, a global developer and manufacturer of humidity- and temperature-measurement solutions.

Forbes--I once worked with a startup that wanted to hire a new VP of engineering. When I asked the CEO what he was looking for in a candidate, he said, “Someone who can play the drums.”

Wall Street Journal--Bonfire Interactive Ltd., which takes procurement online for public entities like schools and municipalities, has raised $11 million in Series A and seed funding.

Forbes--Many companies view social media as simply one part of their marketing strategy--using it to tweet or otherwise share company announcements, comment on relevant news, and distribute company-authored content.

Sand Hill--For decades, there’s been little doubt that technology plays a major role in economic expansion around the world. The latest data on the software market was presented by Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett of Battery Ventures at the recent CloudNY event cohosted with FirstMark Capital.

The Wall Street Journal--These startups are part of the eclectic mix that makes up The Wall Street Journal’s ranking of 25 technology companies to watch—companies that show signs of becoming emerging leaders in some of the most dynamic parts of the tech industry.

Entrepreneur--Here are seven things to remember when competing for high-level talent.

MARTECH Today--A powerhouse panel of marketing technology investors came together at the 2017 San Francisco MarTech Conference to discuss and debate the future of the marketing tech investment landscape.

Seeking Alpha--Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS) seems equally unstoppable. Having built a large infrastructure needed for its e-commerce business, Amazon opened this infrastructure up for third parties in the form of AWS in 2006.

Slideshare--Software 2017: Where are we now and where are we going?

Enterprise Tech--If it is true that "software is eating the world," then cloud software appears to have the most voracious appetite, according to a new industry report that estimates software technology generates $1.4 trillion in economic value and represents nearly 8 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

MarketWired--Battery Ventures, a global, technology-focused investment firm, announced today it has completed the acquisition of Concurrent Real-Time, a business segment of Concurrent Computer Corporation (NASDAQ: CCUR), a software and services company. The transaction creates a new, independent operating business named Concurrent Real-Time, Inc.

Boston Globe--One of the Internet’s enduring cultural gifts is the ability to anonymously review just about anything, from that undercooked burger you had for lunch to the hotel bed that gave you a stiff back.

Forbes--The next time Gainsight raises money from investors, it will likely be as the first billion-dollar startup in customer success.

CNBC--According to an index published last month by Battery Ventures, Docker is the fifth most popular open source project in tech, one spot ahead of Hadoop. Docker says it has close to 10,000 contributors.

TechCrunch--Hibob, a HR and employee benefits platform for small to medium-sized businesses, has raised $17.5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is U.S. VC firm Battery Ventures, with participation from Arbor Ventures, and Fidelity’s Eight Roads Ventures.

San Francisco Business Times--Meet the Bay Area’s Best Places to Work for 2017. This prestigious annual ranking shines the spotlight on 130 local companies that rise to the top in terms of having a happy and engaged workforce.

Forbes--To break into the top echelon of the world's best tech investors requires the kind of special return that most venture capitalists spend a career chasing.

TechCrunch--Sisense introduced a new tool today called Pulse, which uses machine learning to trigger an alert when it detects results outside of normal parameters for a particular metric.

TechCrunch--Many of today’s hottest new enterprise technologies are centered around free, “open-source” technology. As a result, many big companies — from financial giants to retailers to services firms — are building their businesses around new, community-based technology that represents a sea change from the IT practices of the past.

Forbes--New, more-modern manufacturing processes, including the use of robots, have gutted the number of high-paying factory jobs in the U.S. and caused economic angst in large portions of the country.

CBS This Morning--Half of all hotel bookings in the U.S. are made three days or less before arrival. The app Hotel Tonight helps last-minute travelers find deals on rooms. Last year, the company earned $300 million in gross booking volume. Hotel Tonight co-founder and CEO Sam Shank joins "CBS This Morning" to discuss the app.

The New York Times--Which 20 venture capitalists — the investors who unearth the tiny start-ups that turn into tomorrow’s behemoths — are on the winningest streaks?

TechCrunch--Last minute hotel booking app HotelTonight has closed a $37 million Series E round of funding — having last raised in early 2014. The 2010 founded company has raised a total of $117.69M to date, according to CrunchBase, with a valuation pegged at $463M.

MarketWired--Battery Ventures, a global investment firm, has reached an agreement for its platform in the process-measurement market, Process Sensing Technologies (PST), to acquire Analytical Industries Inc. (AII), a manufacturer of electrochemical oxygen sensors and gas-analysis products.

TechCrunch--It’s the first enterprise tech IPO of the year and it’s off to the races.

The Wall Street Journal--The state of Kentucky’s $16 billion pension fund has long invested a portion of its assets in commercial-real-estate funds managed by private-equity firms, but lately it is more interested in funds that make loans than those that buy property.

The Wall Street Journal--The next assistant in many offices could be named Alexa or Cortana. In 2016, Silicon Valley obsessed over how text-based bots in apps like Slack could make employees more efficient, turning complicated tasks or forms into conversational texts. Now, following the success of Amazon Inc.’s Alexa and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Home, people in the technology industry are increasingly thinking about how such voice-activated devices can be made useful in the workplace.

The Wall Street Journal--Move over, managers, there’s a new boss in the office: artificial intelligence. The same technology that enables a navigation app to find the most efficient route to your destination or lets an online store recommend products based on past purchases is on the verge of transforming the office—promising to remake how we look for job candidates, get the most out of workers and keep our best workers on the job.

Mobile World Live--Raviv Melamed, Vayyar Imaging presenting at Mobile World Congress.

CNBC--The inaugural Upstart 25, CNBC's first-ever list of promising young start-ups, features a diverse group of companies that are building brands and breaking industry barriers on the path to becoming tomorrow's household names.

CNBC--More than $680 million was invested in cybersecurity companies in 2016. But it wasn't in Silicon Valley. It was Israel.

TechCrunch--Social networks may be the most valuable and durable types of businesses powered by “network effects,” the phenomenon of products or services becoming more powerful the more people use them. The social-networking companies in our recently launched Network Effect Index — a group of current and formerly public consumer-Web companies valued at $1 billion or more — outperformed the S&P by over 170 percent in the last five years, the most of any business category in the index.

TechCrunch--Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo.

In the last nine months, something unusual has happened at our investment firm: We hired three women as CEOs to run companies in our portfolio.

Geektime--Israeli-American fintech startup CrediFi will have a very happy Valentine’s Day indeed after receiving a $13 million Series B financing round from new investors, the company announced Monday.

TechCrunch--The next time you go to your favorite restaurant or cocktail bar, talk with the manager about bookkeeping. Chances are that they’ll tell you that they waste a ton of time collecting and recording various documents. German startup Zeitgold wants to automate this pesky process so that you can spend more time on your actual business.

MarketWired--Fungible Inc., a company co-founded by Pradeep Sindhu, founder of Juniper Networks, and Bertrand Serlet, former Apple software engineering leader, today announced a $32.5 Million Series A financing to fulfill its mission of providing a full-stack solution for cloud data centers.

The Wall Street Journal--The founder of network specialist Juniper Networks Inc. has teamed up with a former Apple software engineer in a bid to accelerate next-generation cloud computing.

MarketWired--Battery Ventures, the global investment firm, launched a new index to track the stock performance of consumer marketplace companies and social networks, including large global brands like Facebook, Alibaba, Yelp, eBay and OpenTable.

TechCrunch--“Category kings,” defined as market-share leaders in particular business sectors, often wind up creating the majority of the market value relative to their competition.

Reuters--Silicon Valley venture capitalist Kate Mitchell said her startup companies have a message for their employees who are foreign nationals: Don't travel outside the country right now.

VentureBeat--Artificial intelligence has captured public imagination, dominated media coverage, and driven furious volumes of investment and acquisition activity. In the midst of this hype cycle, spotting the difference between phony wannabes and true investments can be a challenge.

The Wall Street Journal--The prospect of change to the visa system for highly-skilled foreign workers has some executives in the technology industry on edge, though impact on the industry could vary widely depending on how any adjustment is made.

TechCrunch--I watched our new administration’s immigration policy play out this weekend with a sense of dread (along with much of the rest of America).

Forbes--AppDynamics' coming out party was supposed to be today. After raising price targets and with high demand for its app performance software during its investor roadshow, AppDynamics was expected to list on Nasdaq on Thursday as the first big tech IPO of 2017.

TechCrunch--Data governance and management startup Collibra — originally founded in Belgium but now based out of New York to help businesses in sectors like finance and healthcare to manage and comply with data retention policies — has raised $50 million in its latest round of funding.

BBC News--A large radar imaging system, previously used in breast cancer detection, has been shrunk and turned into technology which can be used in the home.

Forbes--The members of this year’s 30 Under 30 Europe list are culled from over one thousand online nominations and research by a team of reporters at Forbes and across Europe.

VentureBeat--With Snap’s IPO reportedly imminent and the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas now wrapped up, many in the tech world have been focused on innovations in consumer technology lately.

Forbes--Back the right company as a venture capitalist, and you can find yourself in the boardroom of tech's next big thing, working closely with entrepreneurs as they build the next Facebook, Uber or Airbnb and reaping rewards that have turned a select few into billionaires.

TechCrunch--Raising venture capital is tough for any startup. But it can be a little more difficult when you’re located outside of Silicon Valley. More difficult, but definitely not impossible.

The New York Times--Jeff Bezos of Amazon, along with a couple of his rivals, may eventually control much of the $1 trillion global market for business computers and software.

VentureBeat--Intuit is making another effort to help people save money with a new offering that benefits third-party applications. Today, the financial service provider announced that it has opened up its platform, allowing developers to build connections with its popular TurboTax Online service. The first to partner with Intuit is the online lender Earnest.

Business Insider--2017 is almost here and it's once again time to predict which startups will take the tech industry by storm. Who better to ask than the startup experts, the VCs that watch the industry, guide the startups, hear their pitches, and invest in them?

TechCrunch--AWS held its annual re:Invent customer conference this week — and as it revealed one new service after another, one thing became clear: the company with a marketshare lead that is by Gartner’s estimate 10 times bigger than its 14 closest competitors combined, has no plans to slow down or rest on its laurels.

Forbes--According to research firm Statista, revenue in the smart home sector accounts for $9.7 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $20.8 billion in 2020.

Forbes--You’ve seen those Dos Equis beer ads starring “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” That’s not me. In fact, I might be The Most Boring Man in the World.

Marketwired--Battery Ventures has reached an agreement to acquire Michell Instruments Group, a designer and manufacturer of sensors and instrumentation for the precise measurement and analysis of humidity, moisture, and oxygen throughout industrial processes. The company has more than 40 years of experience in the field.  

Wall Street Journal--Startups aiming to disrupt banks have been a decent bet for venture capitalists. But what do some think might be an even better bet? Banks.

NYSE--Battery Ventures has been making venture capital and private equity investments globally in emerging technologies for more than 30 years. General Partner Michael Brown discusses his continuing optimism about Europe after the Brexit vote, the implications of Blockchain, and why mobile workforce technology is part of Battery’s long-term investment strategy.

CNBC--Neeraj Agrawal, Battery Ventures general partner, and Keith Weiss, Morgan Stanley analyst, discuss the effect of Microsoft's cloud business on its earnings and stock price.

Forbes--Startups are the spark that lights the engine of the U.S. economy. The most successful of them, companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Snapchat, change the way we live, travel and communicate.

Phoenix Business Journal--Phoenix-based rehab therapy software company WebPT Inc. named a veteran healthcare technology executive as its new CEO today.

Business Insider--Cloud computing has taken the IT industry by storm and given rise to a number of public companies. One big investor in the trend is Battery General partner Neeraj Agrawal.

Marketwired--Battery Ventures, a global investment firm that backs cloud companies, and Glassdoor*, the world's most transparent jobs and recruiting marketplace, have partnered to reveal the 25 Highest Rated Public Cloud Computing Companies To Work For.

Forbes--Which cloud companies have the happiest employees? By one reckoning, the leader is far from Silicon Valley. Just inland of Fort Lauderdale, you’ll find Ultimate Software in Weston, Florida.

Bloomberg--It’s tougher out there for New York City’s commercial real estate developers seeking cash for their latest projects.

Forbes--Most big technology companies are embracing artificial intelligence these days. Last week, Oracle opened its user conference in San Francisco with a product called “Oracle A.I.”; Salesforce announced an AI initiative earlier the same day.

VentureBeat--Berlin-based GoEuro is proving that a European-focused company can still draw top investors from Silicon Valley.

Forbes--It’s the type of investment that returns an entire fund and can make a career. When venture capitalist Ravi Mhatre met enterprise cloud company Nutanix in 2011, he felt strongly enough about the category to write founders Dheeraj Pandey and Mohit Aron a $10 million check.

TechCrunch--Imagine for a moment that you’re riding in one of John Zimmer’s proposed autonomous sleeper cars and you’re fast asleep on a road trip across the state. All of the sensors on the vehicle are collecting data so that standard components like the engine and steering systems don’t kill you.

TechCrunch--The last time you had a key cut, you probably experienced a retro service, which included speaking to a real human (ugh!). KeyMe puts the kibosh on the old-fashioned key copying user experience with a series of new kiosks and just landed a $15 million Series C round to fund aggressive expansion.

CNBC--It's tough when mammoth corporations rush in to copy a disruptor's success formula and grab market share. The entrepreneurial venture can only hope its first-to-market advantage will continue to give it an edge.

Fortune--Coupa Software, a specialist in software for managing corporate spending on everything from travel to office supplies, has officially filed plans to raise $75 million in an initial public offering.

Business Insider--Coupa, a financial software company last valued at over $1 billion, has just filed to go public.

CNBC--During last year's imbroglio over Amazon.com's hard-charging culture, Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz wrote a blog post titled "Work Hard, Live Well," promoting a very different kind of tech environment.

Fortune--What do Asana, Greenhouse Software, WalkMe, Chef Software, and Sprout Social have in common? They’ve been deemed the very best privately held “cloud” companies to work for, according to new rankings compiled by Glassdoor and venture capital firm Battery Ventures.

MarketWired--Battery Ventures, a global investment firm that backs cloud companies, and Glassdoor*, the world's most transparent jobs and recruiting marketplace, have partnered to reveal the 50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Computing Companies To Work For.

MarketWired--ClearCare, a leading software platform for home care agencies, today announced a $60 million growth-equity investment led by global investment firm Battery Ventures.

Bloomberg--Last summer, Sam Shank set out to raise a new round of funding for his last-minute hotel booking startup, HotelTonight.

Forbes--In the private sector, no one thinks that great investments are easy to find. A 2010 study found that the median private equity or venture capital fund requires more than three investment team members reviewing 80 companies for a year to close a single transaction.

Fortune--Jet’s acquisition could be good news for others in e-commerce. Unless you are Amazon, things have been somewhat bleak for e-commerce startups of late.

Forbes--Employees are most recommending aPriori Technologies, Gainsight, Kaminario, Tanium, nCino, Taulia, Okta,Revinate, Zenoss and Elementum to their friends interested in joining an enterprise software.

TechCrunch--The market for mergers and acquisitions, particularly in software, is red-hot: Big private-equity firms, flush with cash, did 170 software deals worth $27.22 billion in the first half of 2016 alone.

TechCrunch--Insert is the new startup from the team behind app development company Worklight (which was acquired by IBM for $70 million). Today it’s announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding.

EIN News--Battery Ventures, a global investment firm, has reached an agreement to acquire Bluepoint Solutions, a privately-owned, financial technology company based in Henderson, NV.

Fortune--The Oracle-NetSuite deal may mean the sky’s the limit for more big tech mergers.

The San Francisco Chronicle--For the Bay Area’s technology sector, initial public offerings are more than a financial event. They’re a rite of passage for young companies, a vote of confidence in the bets placed by Sand Hill Road’s venture capitalists, and a payday for employees and investors that feeds the economy.

The Mercury News--While women and minority venture capitalists are still few and far between, the industry is making some progress -- particularly by admitting that diversity is an issue -- according to the National Venture Capital Association's first report on the subject.

NBC--The hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, which were then sent out to the world via WikiLeaks, is embarrassing for the party - and potentially dangerous, according to one Silicon Valley data security expert who was actually named in the Wikileaks post.

Entrepreneur--“Going green” is by no means a modern movement, but technology has certainly modernized our approach to sustainability.

Fortune--Building a business is challenging, and mistakes are inevitable. Sometimes those mistakes are catastrophic, and your entire business model gets scrapped.

Fortune--Cloud HR software pioneer Workday, which has been aggressively pitching its financial management applications, is buying big data analysis startup Platfora to lend more credibility to that message.

TechCrunch--Berlin-based startup Number26 is trying to reinvent the bank. This might sound crazy, and that’s why the startup has processed step by step.

MarketWired--Battery Ventures, a global investment firm, has made a significant growth-equity investment in Clubessential LLC, a fast-growing provider of Web-based software for golf, city, yacht and other private clubs.

Forbes--Managing the social media of the world’s biggest brands is a valuable business. Sprinklr announced on Wednesday that it has raised an additional $105 million from Singapore investment firm Temasek and global investor Wellington, valuing the company at $1.8 billion.

GeekTime--Tel Aviv-based GuardiCore announced today the close of their Series B funding round, bringing in $20 million in new financing.

VentureBeat--Big companies can too easily become victims of what I call “innovation tourism”: They partner with startups and VCs in an effort to innovate, but they wind up merely sampling new technologies and practices and failing to drive innovation and change throughout their organizations.

The Mercury News--Beating out hundreds of teams from around the world, two teenage girls from Redwood City have won $10,000 in seed funding to develop their mobile app.

TechCrunch--Sisense, a company which helps customers link multiple data sources and summarize them in a single dashboard view, has been working on ways to understand the data outside of the context of a computer.

Forbes--Is that smart light bulb spying on you? Connecting household objects to the Web – the “Internet of Things”, or IoT for short – holds amazing promise and is spawning new applications all the time. In the world of IoT, light bulbs turn on automatically while you’re at home and turn off when you leave.

The Washington Post--A Fall Church company that specializes in split-second notification of software problems has raised $10 million in financing led by Massachusetts-based venture capital firm Battery Ventures.

TechCrunch--Battery Ventures led a $22 million, Series B investment in Narvar Inc., a company helping internet retailers keep their customers happy post-purchase, meaning until their packages are delivered, and if need be, successfully returned for an exchange or refund.

SiliconANGLE--Infrastructure monitoring tools have grown immensely sophisticated over recent years, but they can still be difficult to deploy and manage on a large scale. The issue is driving organizations towards providers with a more user-friendly approach like Dataloop Software Inc., which raised $5 million today from Battery Ventures and Finald’s Open Ocean to fuel its momentum.

Northwestern University--Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering celebrated the graduation of its undergraduate Class of 2016 on June 17 and 18 as part of the University’s 158th Commencement.

VentureWire--There’s nothing like a multibillion-dollar liquidity event to inspire investors. Even before Monday’s news that Microsoft Corp. would pay $26.2 billion to buy LinkedIn Corp., the merger-and-acquisition climate surrounding cloud-related business software had been heating up lately.

The Mercury News--Cloud communications company Twilio is poised to end Silicon Valley's tech IPO drought next week with a $130 million market debut.

The Wall Street Journal--Microsoft Corp. has purchased more than 150 companies. But those acquisitions have been largely overshadowed by deals that didn’t get done—and those that management may have wished didn’t.

CNBC--While venture capitalists are waiting for the tech IPO window to crack open, buyout shops are having a field day taking public software companies private.

Fortune--We are just one month away from Fortune Brainstorm Tech, our annual gathering of senior tech executives, investors and thinkers at the Aspen Institute campus in Colorado on July 11-13.

TechCrunch--Amplitude announced this morning that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

TechCrunch--Most entrepreneurs focus on the hard economics of the deal when they negotiate with investors: percentage ownership, valuation, preferences and other terms.

Newsweek--On the morning of August 10, 1999, Buford Oneal Furrow Jr. walked into the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles, and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon.

Computerworld--Virtual and augmented realities aren't just for gaming. Wayfair Inc., a Boston-based, 14-year-old e-commerce company that sells home furnishings, is working on an app based on Google's Project Tango technology that would put augmented reality, and one day virtual reality, squarely in the enterprise.

ZDNet--Email security company Agari has raised $22 million in Series D funding. The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup, which specializes in preventing "malvertising" campaigns and targeted phishing attacks, has raised $44.7 million in total.

PRWeb--Pendo and Gainsight announced today a new strategic partnership to deliver an integrated Product and Customer Success solution.

Forbes--Paxata, Qubole, Gainsight, InsightSquared, Trifacta, Kyvos Insights, SiSense, ThoughtSpot, Google, and Looker are the ten most recommended big data and business analytics companies by employees to friends today.

AdExchanger--Mobile marketing automation platform Appboy is on a quest to steal some market share from the CRM incumbents with $20 million in Series C financing led by Battery Ventures.

VentureBeat--We’re no strangers to mobile marketing automation (MMA) here at VentureBeat. It is the technology that Urban Outfitters uses to know that you bought a jacket and boots in-store yesterday, and how the publisher behind Subway Surfer finds ways to make you play a little bit longer.

PR Newswire--Leadspace today announced it has been selected by Gartner as a Cool Vendor for 2016. Recognized in the Tech Go-to-Market category, Leadspace is one of the only B2B lead enrichment platforms to receive the recognition.

MarketWired--Spinout of Bank-Technology Unit to Boost Alogent's Reach and Expand Mobile Business; Battery Names Dede Wakefield CEO of New Company

TechCrunch--Venture capitalists will tell you that a lackluster IPO market and struggling tech stocks mean that they are being more cautious, but the data suggests otherwise.

The Mercury News--Venture capitalists raised more money last quarter than they have in 10 years, even as they pulled back on what was once a whirlwind of spending.

Xconomy--Venture capital firms invested $12.1 billion in 969 startup deals nationwide during the first three months of 2016, marking the ninth consecutive quarter when VCs invested at least $10 billion in new companies, according to the MoneyTree Report.

PC Magazine--The deep linking space is one you likely haven't heard much about and that's by design. If deep linking does its job, the technology is nearly invisible to the end user. Without a deep link in place, you're likely to run into one of the dead links, wonky redirects, or chain-breaking application install pages that's plaguing the booming mobile app economy.

Geektime--Israeli-American startup PowerInbox announced today the close of has raised $6.5 million in new Series A funding.

Silicon Angle--Encryption is the name of the game when it comes to securing data at rest, in transit and in use. The problem is enterprises often have trouble integrating encryption into their applications.

Forbes--When the virtual assistant Siri showed up on iPhones four years ago, the technology felt like the first glimpse of those scary-smart, talking robots you’ve been reading about in science fiction for years.

Geektime--It is not every day that two founders have both made previous exits. This is the story of how Israeli Stratoscale has soared to such heights.

Fortune--Google Cloud Platform needs more data centers, more applications, and more corporate accounts.

Forbes--Diablo Technologies is spruiking a new kind of memory. Diablo’s new product, Memory1, is a larger, cheaper form of main memory that uses flash storage instead of DRAM to provide a cheap-and-deep option for in-memory applications.

Fortune--Amazon dominates. Microsoft is next in line. What about Google? How big is the cloud business? Big. Really big. The global market for public cloud services will grow 17% to $204 billion this year, estimates market researcher Gartner, more money than General Motors makes in a year.

Fast Company--In the first demo, Raviv Melamed, CEO and cofounder of Walabot, uses the camera on his phone to see through our conference room table and detect the number of fingers he's holding up beneath the surface.

Silicon Valley Business Journal--Dharmesh Thakker moved from Intel Capital to Battery Ventures last year, but that hasn't necessarily meant a whole new portfolio for him.

The New York Times--In 2010, Kris Hammond, an experienced artificial intelligence researcher, and a few partners founded Narrative Science. The Chicago start-up’s software ingests and interprets numbers for things like investment holdings, billing records and sports statistics and transforms them into written summaries or stories.

Silicon Valley Business Journal--E-commerce analytics startup Reflektion raised $18 million in new funding led by a familiar face at a new venture firm.

MarketWired--Brightree, a Home-Healthcare SaaS Innovator, Agrees to Be Purchased by Medical-Device Company ResMed to Promote Connected Healthcare

MarketWired--Main Fund, Battery's 11th, Capitalized at $650M and Side Fund at $300M; Battery to Continue Strategy of Investing in Technology Across Stages Globally

LBO Wire--Battery Ventures put its business-development prowess to work as it steered health-care software-as-a-service company Brightree LLC to an $800 million sale to ResMed Inc.

Boston Business Journal--Battery Ventures, a Boston-based private equity and venture capital firm, has raised $950 million for two new funds. The funds raised include Battery Ventures XI, a $650 million fund, and Battery Ventures XI Side Fund, a $300 million fund for larger investments.

TechCrunch--Battery Ventures, a 33-year-old investment firm with offices in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Boston, and Herzliya, Israel, has raised $950 million across two new funds: a main fund, Battery Ventures XI, which is a $650 million pool, and a side fund that will support the company’s larger investments, which closed with $300 million.

Fortune--New cash to invest in tech companies, young and old. Venture capital investments and valuations may be on the decline, but venture capital fundraising is doing just fine. Case in point is Battery Ventures, which today will announce that it has raised $650 million for its eleventh flagship fund, plus another $300 million for a side fund to support larger investments.

The Wall Street Journal--Battery Ventures has raised $950 million in two new funds, in an example of another name-brand venture firm attracting large commitments from limited partners despite a rocky environment for startups.

PR Newswire--ResMed (NYSE: RMD), the world's leading tech-driven medical device company and innovator in sleep-disordered breathing and respiratory care, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Brightree^®, a leader in business management and clinical software applications for the post-acute care industry.

Silicon Valley Business Journal--Data security startup Vera raised $17 million in Series B funding to provide enterprises with data protection and encryption solutions.

The New Stack--The concept of microservices is fueled by the need to develop apps faster, be more resilient and offer a great experience for the customer. It’s a concept equated with scaled-out, automated systems that run software on simple, commodity infrastructure.

TechCrunch--It’s no secret that open-source technology — once the province of radicals, hippies and granola eaters — has gone mainstream. According to industry estimates, more than 180 young companies that give away their software raised roughly $3.2 billion in financing from 2011 to 2014.

PE Hub--Jask, a provider of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics for cybersecurity, has secured more than $2 million in seed funding. Battery Ventures led the round with participation from other investors that included Vertical Venture Partners.

Xconomy--An office worker who usually spends time in programs like PowerPoint suddenly logs into the company expense records system. Data-sifting computers are on the alert for unusual behavior like this across the globe, and Dharmesh Thakker thinks they’ll help thwart criminal hackers who pose a growing threat to companies.

CBS DFW--The Dallas-based Topgolf entertainment group has acquired online sports gaming company World Golf Tour.

The Wall Street Journal--Sinclair Broadcast Group, the owner of the most TV stations in the country, said Wednesday it agreed to buy the Tennis Channel for $350 million, marking the local broadcast TV powerhouse’s first foray into the national cable television market.

VentureBeat--Vidyard, the business video platform, today announced it has closed a $35 million Series C round.

Forbes--Ragy Thomas has a saying about attendance at Sprinklr’s weekly customer review meetings, held every Monday at noon across the startup’s 11 offices worldwide. Senior staff and board members know it by heart: “The only excuse is if you’re attending your own funeral.”

Forbes--DevOps software maker JFrog has closed a series C round of $50 million, which it is claiming is one of the largest investments in a DevOps focused company.

TechCrunch--KeyMe, a startup that could ensure you never get locked out again, has raised $20 million in Series B funding.

Geektime--Israeli data recovery and migration company Zerto announced on Wednesday that they have closed their Series E round, bringing in an impressive $50 million in capital.

Silicon Valley Business Journal--CEO Amir Aharoni co-founded the company in 2014 in Israel and is now based in San Jose. Elastifile builds high-performance, scale-out solutions for virtualized data centers and private clouds. The company’s tech is an all-flash storage solution, bridging current and emerging data center architectures.

The Wall Street Journal--Flash memory vendor Diablo Technologies Inc ., exonerated of all legal charges, raised $19 million to give the company what its investors hope will be a fresh start.

TechCrunch--Recruiting software engineers is a massive headache for both startups and established companies. For a while now, HackerRank has tried to make both applying for these jobs and hiring the right talent a little bit easier.

The Wall Street Journal--Less than a year after replacing its CEO, Sisense Inc. has raised $50 million for technology that speeds and simplifies the analysis of large, complex data sets so that businesses can make faster decisions, adding hundreds of customers last year, the company said.

TechCrunch--According to Gartner, worldwide information security spending reached $76.9 billion in 2015. As the frequency and intensity of hacks worsen, security spending is expected to reach $170 billion by 2020. That’s more than 100 percent growth in 5 years!

Boston Globe--Summing up the IPO market for technology companies isn’t the toughest financial analysis that Scott Tobin has done this year. “Pretty easy: It was a stinker,” said Tobin, a general partner at Boston venture capital firm Battery Ventures.

Silicon Valley Business Journal--Venture-backed company exits via IPOs and big acquisitions were down dramatically in 2015 but investors think that is likely to change in the coming year.

Fortune--Clouds, unicorns, and fast data. Worlds created entirely of clouds. “Unicorns” racing through new landscapes. Data moving faster than the speed of light. For those of you who don’t work in enterprise technology, this may sound like a fantasy world—or a little like the latest Star Wars movie.

The Huffington Post--Battery General Partner Chelsea Stoner shares how her life experience has helped her find promising companies and how she maintains her work/life balance.

Forbes--How do you build a billion-dollar SaaS enterprise software company? For one thing, you might start with a CEO who looks less like Box’s youthful Aaron Levie and more like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff—and stick with him for the long term. The current obsession with millennials running things doesn’t pencil out when it comes to one particularly important slice of the tech economy.

CNBC--Silicon Valley is cooling, not crashing. Valuations are falling. The era of cheap money is over.

The Wall Street Journal--Venture capitalists are generally united that the Federal Reserve’s quarter-point rate increase will have very little immediate impact on the startup fundraising environment.

Wired--Easy money is about to end in Silicon Valley. After seven years of near-zero interest rates, the Federal Reserve is expected to announce an interest rate hike this afternoon. That will make it more expensive for startups to borrow capital, and potentially harder for them to raise it, which could trigger a long-awaited reckoning for startups that have seen their valuations soar in recent years.

Fortune--Over the past few months, while Amazon, Microsoft and IBM took turns unveiling new cloud computing data centers in China, India, Germany, the U.K., South Korea, and elsewhere, one public cloud provider remained eerily silent: Google.

TechCrunch--While on-demand startups like Uber and BlaBlaCar continue to pack warchests with massive funding rounds as investors bet big that leveraging individual car ownership is the key to powering gigantic transportation/logistics businesses, other startups are taking a different route.

San Francisco Business Times--Roger Lee of Battery Ventures believes late-stage venture-backed companies are in a bubble. But he doesn't think it is something that arrived with the coining of the word "unicorn" in the past couple of years to describe those whose valuation has grown to $1 billion or more.

TechCrunch--Big cities like San Francisco and New York are digital meccas, home to many of the world’s largest technology startups — and to hordes of smartphone-toting, app-using consumers. But when it comes to making a name for themselves, many of the companies hoping to influence these techie urbanites are going decidedly analog.

PE Hub--Sabre Corp has agreed to acquire the Trust Group of Companies from Battery Ventures for about $154 million. The deal is expected to be completed in early 2016. The Trust Group is a a central reservations, revenue management and hotel marketing provider.

Business Insider--Battery Ventures technology fellow Adrian Cockroft is almost always the smartest guy in the room.

The New York Times--At the start of this year, Earnest was an intriguing but small entrant in an emerging field of start-ups using new tools of data and software to analyze credit risk and make consumer loans. Its loans were typically a few thousand dollars for things like relocation expenses and professional training.

The Wall Street Journal--Late-stage investors in private tech companies are seeing smaller returns, and a new survey suggests that professionals expect the trend to continue.

Business Insider--Looking at the JMP's annual "Hot 100" list, which tracks the best private companies in the software industry and the venture capital firms investing in them.

Forbes--It’s June, and the summer zucchini are just starting to poke out from the vine. Their owner, a farmer named Patrick Johnston, explains to his eager guests from a startup called Blue Apron that the zucchini have already been sold to someone else and that the corn Blue Apron has contracted to buy is farther down the road.

Boston Globe--Dell Inc. said it agreed to buy EMC Corp., Massachusetts’ biggest technology company, in a cash and stock deal valued at about $67 billion, removing independent ownership from one of the last surviving companies that made New England a tech hotbed in the 1980s.

The Information--Less than one percent of senior VCs involved in investment decision are Black—four of 552 people. And only 1.3% are Hispanic.

MarketWired--Russell Fleischer, a longtime technology-industry operator and CEO, and Morad Elhafed, a seasoned software dealmaker, have been promoted to new roles at Battery Ventures, a global investment firm.

BetaBoston--With private technology startups racking up investment stakes and paper valuations that once seemed unthinkable, some investors actually don’t care if they’re part of the latest hot financing deal.

Entrepreneur--Last week, I was lucky enough to attend a panel session on Technology, Entrepreneurship and Leadership at the Brightedge Share15 conference in San Francisco.

Los Angeles Times--All millennials are hooked on social networks like Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram, right?Maybe not, according to survey results recently published by investment firm Battery Ventures.

Business Insider--The always-hot Israeli startup scene has been going even more bonkers lately.

CNBC--At the end of July, Homejoy, a start-up company that used the Web to offer house cleaning, hung up its mops, leaving customers in the lurch and Google Ventures and other top-tier private equity backers out the more than $35 million they had sunk into the company.

The Wall Street Journal--Max Schireson, the startup executive who became a poster child last year for efforts at better work-life balance, is making a comeback, of sorts.

PE HUB--Battery Ventures announced today that it has hired Max Schireson, the former CEO of open-source database company MongoDB, as an executive-in-residence.

Fortune--As executive in residence at Battery Ventures, Schireson will look for promising enterprise IT-focused startups

Reuters--The waves of cash surfed relentlessly by some of Silicon Valley's largest venture-backed businesses are showing signs of receding amid concern the companies may already be worth more than their likely valuations once they finally go public.

eWEEK--Venture capital execs discuss where they see opportunities in the cloud and container space. They believe investors should take a long-term view, not chase hype.

TechCrunch--What does it take to build a billion-dollar SaaS enterprise-software company? We gave a 30,000-foot answer to this complex — and fascinating — question in a recent TechCrunch post, The SaaS Adventure.

BetaBoston--Private companies and the investors who back them are a bit insulated from the jitters that have plagued public stock markets in recent days. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention.

USA Today--Venture capitalists will pledge concrete measures to bring greater diversity to their predominantly white male profession during a high-profile event at the White House.

GeekTime--Boston’s Battery Ventures acquires smart surveillance solutions NICE Systems’ PSBU for up to $100 million: Here are its applications

CNBC--Assessing a storm's damage to a house; responding to a prospective buyer's concerns about a property; designing offices that suit the needs of its tenants—all are key tasks of the real estate business that are rapidly being made faster and less expensive as the industry adopts lessons from technology, lessons that have already dramatically changed industries such as finance and health care.

Reuters--Israeli software provider Nice Systems is selling its video surveillance technologies unit to private equity firm Battery Ventures for up to $100 million, its second divestment in three months as it focuses more on its analytics business.

MarketWired--Battery Ventures, a global technology investment firm, has reached an agreement to acquire the Physical Security Business Unit (PSBU), part of the security division of publicly listed NICE Systems, in a transaction valued at up to $100 million. Under the deal, PSBU, which provides video- management, video-analytics and situation-management solutions, will be spun out into an independently operating business.

Private Equity Analyst--The pioneer spirit runs in Chelsea Stoner's blood. The first female partner at Battery Ventures credits her career success partly to traits passed down through her family, starting with her great-grandparents. The pair first settled in Montana as homesteaders in the early 1900s.

Forbes-- It has now been 25 years since Mikhail Gorbachev, with his Soviet Union crumbling, decided to open the emigration gates and allow 1.6 million Jews to leave for Israel, Germany and the United States.

Forbes--There were more than 12,000 financial technology startups worldwide at the end of 2014, according toMcKinsey & Co., and the sector is still booming.

The Wall Street Journal--The hottest technology in Silicon Valley isn’t from Uber Technologies Inc. or Instagram. It is from a startup called Docker Inc. that is charming the coders behind the world’s websites and apps.

Forbes--Here are three FinTech startups that are already making their mark in 2015 and are worth keeping track of in the upcoming future.

The San Francisco Chronicle--Apple Watch owners use their devices most frequently for the same old things their smartphones and Fitbits can do: fitness tracking and e-mail, according to a survey commissioned by Battery Ventures.

The New York Times--Warning: Some unicorns may be smaller than they appear.

The Wall Street Journal--Docker, one of the fastest-growing open-software projects ever, has swept through enterprise IT during the last 18 months, making an impact on the way many companies develop applications.

The Wall Street Journal-- As technology deal valuations continue to rise, private equity investors must pick their targets carefully and seek to be useful agents of change for the businesses they back to avoid shocks when the market turns.

San Jose Mercury News--Tucked away in a warehouse here is a startup working to overhaul one area of the housing market not already shaken up by Airbnb and Zillow.

CNBC Squawk Alley--Shares of Hewlett-Packard topped analyst estimates, saying it expects lower expenses after the split. Roger Lee, Battery Ventures partner, thinks a split makes sense for the company's operations.

CNBC Squawk Alley--According to a report by the WSJ, Uber is seeking a $1 billion credit line from banks. Roger Lee, Battery Ventures partner, discusses a potential IPO.

CNBC--In the third annual Disruptor 50 list, CNBC features private companies in 16 industries—from aerospace to financial services to cybersecurity to retail—whose innovations are revolutionizing the business landscape. These forward-thinking upstarts have identified unexploited niches in the marketplace that have the potential to become billion-dollar businesses, and they rushed to fill them.

Wall Street Journal--Credifi Corp. has aggregated data and analytics on more than 10 billion square feet of commercial real estate across the U.S.  

CNET--Battery Ventures General Partner Chelsea Stoner: "The forced-mentor relationship doesn't work. You have to seek folks with whom you have some commonality ... even if they're not from one of your portfolio companies."

CNET--When a man was fired from his job in Minneapolis, Minn., last May, he inadvertently touched off a boom in Silicon Valley.

The Wall Street Journal--When Amazon.com Inc. reports its quarterly earnings Thursday, it will, for the first time, provide financial information on an important division: Amazon Web Services.

Bloomberg--In 2004, Sun Microsystems revealed a radical plan to shake up the computing industry. It would build a series of large data centers and sell access to the computers inside them for $1 per hour.

TechCrunch--Sprig, a food delivery service that specializes in healthy on-demand meals in San Francisco, has raised $45 million in a funding round led by Social+Capital and Greylock Partners.

Atlanta Business Journal--Atlanta-based PrimeRevenue Inc. has raised $80 million in a financing round led by private equity firm BBH Capital Partners. The supply chain finance firm plans to add about 100 jobs in the next several months.

Forbes--At F8 last month, Facebook rolled out new features aimed at giving friends more reasons to chat. With Messenger Platform, developers can now build apps for the service, in turn, giving users more ways to share media without leaving their chat screens. Facebook featured about 40 apps in the Messenger launch, including two from video startup Joya: FlipLip and Cleo.

BetaBoston--The last big wave of venture investment in clean-tech startups has long since crashed and rolled back. But if you’re making software instead of something produced by a factory, private investors are still willing to open up the checkbook.

TechCrunch--Veradocs came out of stealth today, renaming itself Vera to reflect the fact it doesn’t just protect documents on the move, but other types of data as well.

Fortune--Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing startup, has raised $46 million in new funding from existing investors Intel Capital, Battery Ventures and Iconiq Capital. The round, which brings Sprinklr’s total funding to $123.5 million, values the 700-person company at $1.17 billion.

TechCrunch--In the past year, we saw a string of companies release diversity reports that exposed the numbers behind the underrepresentation of women and minorities in tech roles. Along with those reports came commitments to do better.

Forbes--Forbes Magazine’s annual Midas List ranking of top VC dealmakerswill be out next week—and Forbes writers, as well as a few ambitious quants, will undoubtedly slice and dice the data to analyze every possible angle.

The Wall Street Journal--Fast-growing business software companies are as hot as ever in venture capital. Public market investors, by contrast, cooled considerably to such businesses over the past year, a recent research report from Barclays BCS -0.25% shows.

CNBC--We all have Australia to thank for a number of delights: The Great Barrier Reef, Vegemite, "Crocodile Dundee" and Ugg boots come to mind. A surprise edition to that list of exports has emerged of late—in the form of software.

TechCrunch--Visa announced today that it’s planning to acquire Mountain View-based TrialPay, an e-commerce payment platform which sits in between payments and advertising, providing consumers with an alternative way to pay for items by agreeing to take advantage of another merchant’s offer.

VentureBeat--If you had your own predictive analytics platform, you might already know what this story will be about. You’d know, for instance, that less than a year after it launched its B2B predictive intelligence platform for marketing and sales, San Francisco-based 6sense is announcing today a new investment of $20 million.

TechCrunch--Tag management is not, perhaps, the sexiest problem for a startup to tackle, but Tealium seems to have turned it into a successful business, as indicated by the ever-growing funding rounds that it raises every year like clockwork.

Wall Street Journal CIO Journal--Many CIOs say the benefits of shifting business applications to cloud services is far more complex than lining up a partner and flipping a switch.

Wall Street Journal--Infosys Ltd. on Monday said it would buy privately-held automation technology provider Panaya Inc. in an all-cash deal for an enterprise value of $200 million.

Geektime--Israel’s venture capital sector is on fire as it marks its seventh exit in ten days. Panaya announced today it has been acquired by India’s Infosys for $200 million.

LBO Wire--Battery Ventures is betting it will clean up in more ways than one with its recent acquisition of Enviance Inc., a software company focused on environmental, health and safety compliance.

BetaBoston--Boston-based private equity and venture capital firm Battery Ventures announced today that it has acquired environmental, health, and safety software company Enviance.

LBO Wire--Data Innovations LLC , a Battery Ventures -backed provider of software for medical laboratories, said it agreed to be acquired by publicly traded technology company Roper Industries Inc . for an undisclosed sum.

TechCrunch--“What does it take to build a billion-dollar SaaS enterprise-software company?” I hear this question a lot in my work as a tech investor, and it’s incredibly tough to answer.

LBO Wire--Battery Ventures wants to make waves with a new platform focused on companies that test and measure noise and vibration. The Boston firm is acquiring Lansmont Corp . and its subsidiary Team Corp ., which it will operate independently within a single platform alongside Data Physics Corp ., a San Jose, Calif.-based company that Battery acquired in early 2014, according to General Partner Jesse Feldman.

Business Insider--Box has finally started trading on the public market Friday and things are looking good. On its first day of trading, Box is up more than $9, showing an impressive first day pop of nearly 70%.

Bloomberg West--Roger Lee, general partner at Battery Ventures, discusses Box's IPO and business model with Bloomberg's Cory Johnson on "Bloomberg West."

Gigaom--Battery Ventures will soon have a new general partner: Dharmesh Thakker, formerly of Intel Capital, will join Roger Lee and Chelsea Stoner in Battery’s Menlo Park, California office.

Wall Street Journal--Battery Ventures has hired a new general partner, Dharmesh Thakker, to boost its investments in startups creating technology for big data and the cloud.

USA Today--Big data has permeated almost all aspects of the enterprise today — from sales and marketing to product management to back-end IT. Now, the smartest companies are using big data to help fuel next-generation HR operations.

Fortune--Some enterprise software valuations may soften in 2015, but there’s still good reason to be bullish on the sector.

TechCrunch--Succeeding as a modern, high-tech marketer means adapting to accelerating changes in technology — whether that’s leveraging Facebook’s newest features, segmenting customers with even more granularity or finding a new platform for viral distribution before the rest of the business world takes notice.

Bloomberg--On Deck Capital Inc., a Web-based lending platform for small businesses, surged in its trading debut after raising $200 million in an initial public offering.

Forbes--Less than a week after Lending Club's 60% pop in its public trading debut, investor appetite for marketplace lenders remains strong: OnDeck Capital, an online service providing small business loans, jumped more than 30% in its own market debut Wednesday morning.

The Business Journals--When venture capitalist Chelsea Stoner first met entrepreneur Heidi Jannenga, she was excited — "really, really excited," she said.

Forbes--The turkey leftovers are long gone and the holiday shopping season is moving into crunch mode. And though Thanksgiving-weekend retail sales were a little disappointing, I’m more intrigued by—and upbeat about—an emerging, high-tech aspect of this annual winter spending orgy: the smart use of big data.

LBO Wire--A bet back in 2010 that heightened emphasis on industrial safety and would create investment opportunities for Battery Ventures has paid off sooner than expected for the firm.

BostInno--Congratulations to these incendiary companies and individuals.

Bloomberg Businessweek--Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., is synonymous with venture capital in the way Washington’s K Street is with the lobbying industry. Since Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers became the first to hang its shingle in 1972, more than 20 other VC firms have set up headquarters there. Almost every prominent Silicon Valley company has received early-stage backing from one or more VCs on Sand Hill Road.

Wall Street Journal--The founders of Fusion-io, one of the first companies to bring flash memory chips to the data center, have a new company called Primary Data — and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has jumped aboard.

TechCrunch--Boost Media announced earlier today that it has raised $19 million in Series C funding. The company allows advertisers to find the best version of their search ad — it tests variants created by a network of freelance copywriters and designers, identifies the versions with the most clicks or highest conversion rates, then promotes them in a broader campaign.

Wall Street Journal--Cloud apps like Box and Dropbox make it easy for anyone to store and share documents. But they create worries for corporate IT departments, whose job is to prevent sensitive information from being leaked. Veradocs Inc. emerged Tuesday with $14 million in funding and a way to tackle the data leakage problem without forcing customers to shut cloud apps down.

New York Times--When Greg Marsh moved to New York three years ago, he discovered that his girlfriend often lost her keys and he had to spend hundreds of dollars changing the locks on their apartment. So Mr. Marsh founded KeyMe, a service that lets customers store digital copies of their keys, order them from a computer or iPhone and have them sent to their home or office.

Chief Marketing Technologist Blog--Why is this man smiling? Well, if your firm had invested in Omniture, ExactTarget, Marketo, BlueKai, Tealium, Sprinklr, Neolane, Optimizely, Bazaarvoice, BrightEdge, and a stack of other successful marketing technology companies, you’d be smiling too.

Gigaom--Stratoscale, which builds software that it says will morph standard servers into converged data center appliances, now has $32 million in new Series B funding.

TechCrunch--Cloud document editing company Nitro just got $15 million from Battery Ventures. Nitro previously raised two undisclosed rounds from Australian venture capital firm Starfish Ventures, bringing the total up to $21.6 million now.

Los Angeles Times--For years, the big question facing mobile payment systems was whether enough shoppers would use them. Turns out, they will. IPhone 6 users rushed to register more than 1 million credit cards on Apple Pay in the first 72 hours last week, making it the most widely used contactless payment system available.

Inc.--I don't buy hotel rooms in advance anymore. I don't drive my own car. There's just no need. Technology has disrupted those industries and more is on the way.

Wall Street Journal--What is it that makes people so quick to pit New York against Boston — in sports, politics and, lately, technology?

Reuters--Boston-based Battery Ventures said it hired software executive Russell Fleischer as a partner for its private-equity business amid a buyout environment that offers rich returns but hard-to-find deals.

Boston Herald--Shares of Cambridge-based software company HubSpot shot up on their first day of trading yesterday, marking the third successful initial public offering for a Boston tech company in the past three weeks.

TechCrunch--Interana, the stealthy startup founded by a who’s-who of programmers behind the new architecture of today’s brightest tech businesses, is taking the covers off its technology to turn event data into the lingua franca of business intelligence.

Fortune--Battery Ventures is best-known for backing early-stage tech startups, but the bi-coastal firm also has a vibrant buyout practice that focuses on more established companies. But perhaps none quite so mature as James Heal, a 142 year-old UK company that designs and manufactures test instrumentation and test equipment for the textile and garment industry.

Wall Street Journal--Silicon Valley, the center of the U.S. tech industry, watched the Alibaba IPO with a mix of anticipation, awe and dread.

Forbes--Speed. When it comes to the Internet, we have an insatiable desire for it. The number of people who claim that they're happy with the speed of their Internet and don't want faster pipes is pretty much zero.    

CNBC.com--Lost in all the chatter about the inflating tech bubble is an important detail: Most of technology's most notable names aren't participating. For the incumbents selling into the enterprise, the picture is downright bleak.    

Wall Street Journal--Light Cyber Ltd., an Israeli based cyber-security start-up, has raised $10 million in a new funding round led by Battery Ventures.

Wired--Twitter engineer Mazdak Hashemi says the Japanese tweet like no one else on earth.

Wall Street Journal--GoEuro Corp., a Berlin-based online travel start-up, has closed a $27 million investment round. GoEuro’s platform lets users plan and compare travel routes between European cities by bus, train, or plane. Each option comes with trip details and costs, including transit times to and from airports.

Wall Street Journal--Venture investors and the public markets are increasingly out of sync.  

VentureBeat--We all know that blocking attacks from accessing data centers is not effective. Just think of the snooping government agencies have been able to do. Now companies have to acknowledge that activity and find better ways to deal with threats.    

CNBC--Xenex Disinfection Services hopes to fight the war against Ebola. Its CEO Morris Miller shares a demonstration of the company's disinfection robot Sara, which he claims can destroy a deadly virus in 5-10 minutes.

Boston Business Journal--Boston-based venture capital firm Battery Ventures has announced three new promotions. Principals Alex Benik and Brian Lieber are now partners at the firm, and Morad Elhafed, formerly vice president for the venture firm, is now a princpal.    

7x7--According to a Fortune Magazine analysis from February 2014, just 4 percent of senior partners at venture capital firms are women; and only 12 percent of women, based on a study led by The National Venture Capital Association, are generally employed in the tech business. The Bay Area is still one of the most dynamic tech ecosystems where people are looking for more diversity: the quantity of VC firms that is starting to include women on their staff is increasing.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek--AppDynamics, a startup that develops software for companies to monitor applications, has become the newest member of the $1 billion-plus valuation club.

MarketWatch--Hexagon AB (sto:HEXAB), a leading global provider of design, measurement and visualisation technologies, announced today the acquisition of Vero Software, a world leader in Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software.

New York Times--An interview with Phil Fernandez, chief executive of Marketo, a maker of marketing automation software, conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.  

InfoQ--Video interview with Battery Ventures Technology Fellow Adrian Cockcroft.

TechCrunch--Hotels can double their profitability by successfully marking up rooms just 10 percent. That’s why Accel Partners is betting hotels will pay for Duetto, a price optimization SaaS that uses big data to dynamically surge or discount rates for rooms. 

TechCrunch--In 2012, about 7 percent of all people aged 16 or older in the U.S. experienced identity theft, with their financial losses totaling $24.7 billion. Christopher Morton is familiar with the crime because in 2007, he had his identity stolen. With co-founders John Backus and Alain Meier, Morton created BlockScore, an identity-verification startup and member of Y Combinator’s latest batch that is launching today with $2 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Atlantic Ventures, Boost VC, Y Combinator, and several angels.

VentureBeat--WebPT, the leading web-based electronic medical record (EMR) solution for rehabilitation therapists, today announced it has received a significant investment from Battery Ventures. WebPT intends to use the new capital to accelerate growth.

GigaOm--When Adrian Cockcroft talks cloud, people listen. Or they should. He's the former cloud guru at Netflix and drove that company's use of Amazon Web Services. Since he left Netflix in January to join Battery Ventures as a technology fellow he's been traveling the world, talking to IT buyers about their tech plans. He will reveal what he learned at the Cloud Trends session at Structure Thursday.

TechCrunch--With a new $26 million late-stage financing for disaster recovery and data management, software provider Zerto can now help businesses join the meta-cloud.

Newsweek--Evan Rose's cancer should have killed him. He now breathes through a hole in his neck, a stoma, and when he speaks he sounds as if he has a nasty case of laryngitis. Rose describes the doctor's initial response to the outlook for his cancer--a type so rare that there are only 200 cases worldwide--as grim. "They didn't want to do anything dramatic if I wasn't going to live that long," he recalls.    

Forbes--It is no secret that Silicon Valley has a virtually inexhaustible demand for programming talent. It is also no secret that the most important tech companies in the Bay Area recruit primarily from a very small group of prestigious U.S. universities, namely Stanford, MIT, Berkeley and CalTech. These schools do indeed produce great engineers who go on to start up and staff the companies that produce the software that is eating the world. But not only are there not enough of them to satisfy the ravenous tech behemoth—but they may not even be the best hackers these companies can find.

TechCrunch--SiSense, a business intelligence startup that is among those making big data analytics accessible to ordinary business users (and not just data scientists) is today announcing more funding: a $30 million Series C round led by DFJ Growth — the VC’s arm dedicated to later-stage investments that recently announced a new fund we understand to be totalling over $500 million (in May, its size was ‘only’ $470 million).

InformationWeek--Netflix's former cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft and other cloud experts weigh in on the realities of hybrid cloud.

Wall Street Journal--Want to be more competitive? Then empower your most technologically disobedient employees.

GigaOm--RiskIQ, an enterprise security company, just closed $25 million in Series B funding. The company provides security monitoring services so clients can uncover and deal with malware, malvertisements and malicious mobile apps that could plague their customers and hurt their brands.

VentureBeat--Amanda Kahlow didn’t have the easiest childhood. Her parents divorced when she was two years old. Her mother never made more than $19,000 a year. Kahlow and her two older brothers lived in 22 different homes before she was 18. There wasn’t always plumbing — or heat. Last week, her startup 6Sense emerged from stealth mode with $12 million in venture funding. It also won the innovation showdown contest for early-stage companies at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference.

Reuters-- A cloud software boom has nudged startups into unlikely realms such as dairy farms, yoga studios and back-of-the-building loading docks, leading venture capitalists to hope for stratospheric returns.

TechCrunch--Of the many ways that big data analytics is impacting how enterprises do business, one of the most interesting has been in the area of predictive intelligence — the idea that by looking at all of the data being created in and around your organisation, you can help figure out what to do in the future.

Re/code--It’s fun to study the differences between iPhone and Android users. BlueStacks, for example, once created a portrait of what the typical Android user looks like. But in an era where companies are spending big money on mobile advertising, understanding the demographics can make a big difference to the bottom line. With that in mind, Battery Ventures decided to do its own research.

Wall Street Journal--Investors are still bullish on bitcoin, with Battery Ventures, Tim Draper, Steve Case, and other individuals seeding Vaurum with $4 million.

TechCrunch--Catchpoint Systems, a web and infrastructure performance monitoring company, has expanded its monitoring locations to 206 backbone nodes, and plans to add more to Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

TechCrunch--Sprinklr, which describes itself as “the largest independent social relationship platform provider,” just announced that it has raised $40 million in Series D funding. It’s also launching its first “paid social media solution,” i.e., a product for managing ad campaigns on Facebook and Twitter.

FORTUNE -- You might not have heard of Tealium, but that's the point. The company dubs itself an "enterprise tag management" company, and aims to serve as a layer of standardization between companies' marketing departments and the dozens of digital marketing tools they want to use.

Forbes--There are a lot of journeymen (and women) in the startup and tech game. Matthew Bellows would probably qualify as one of them.

BBC News--New Microsoft boss Satya Nadella reckons the "data dividend" could be worth $1.6 trillion (£950bn; 1.2tn euros) to big business over the next four years. But what about the little guys?

Forbes--Wayfair is an e-commerce site selling home furnishings. But with 1,600 employees, its physical presence is rapidly outgrowing its space in an obelisklike skyscraper in Boston’s Back Bay–which happens to be a former hub of the Christian Science church. Long gone are the white shag carpets, wood paneling and executive-floor elevators that once allowed church higher-ups to avoid hoi polloi. Flat-panel TVs on each of 12 floors beam not messages of faith healing but maps of the U.S. and Europe that light up whenever there’s a sale.

Wall Street Journal--What is it about the Israel-Boston connection that works so well in the world of tech startups?

New York Times--Entrepreneurs are lucky to have one big score. Richard Barton has had a string of them, by repeatedly asking the same simple question: What piece of marketplace information do people crave and don’t have?

Fox Business--Continuuity CEO Jonathan Gray chats with Fox's Stuart Varney about how free mobile messaging apps make money, and the future of his own company, which helps developers build big-data applications.

VentureBeat--Life revolves around software, and software revolves around databases. So you’ve got to keep an eye on those databases. VividCortex is totally on it. Today, during an appearance at the DEMO Enterprise conference, it launched with a nifty management tool for implementations of the popular open-source MySQL database.

Wall Street Journal--Battery Ventures has launched a new content site called Powered by Battery that will serve as “a new source of ideas, insights and introductions for entrepreneurs seeking to smartly grow their businesses.” Battery is the latest venture firm to start producing content in an effort to expand beyond mere investing.

Fortune--Move over social media. The next hot tech sector might just be the very unsexy-sounding energy efficiency business. Companies in this industry use sophisticated algorithms to analyze how much energy a home or building uses and then suggest energy-saving solutions.

TechCrunch--Security company Palo Alto Networks has bought Cyvera, a cyber security company out of Israel. The deal is worth $200 million. The acquisition is expected to close during the second half of 2014. Cyvera had raised $13 million from Battery Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Prof. Ehud Weinstein and Dr. Ofir Shalvi.

USA Today--Shares of Q2 Holdings jumped 28% Thursday to $16.68 in early trading, kicking off what's expected to be a strong slate of technology IPOs in coming weeks.

Bloomberg News--Battery Ventures has been on a winning streak with investments in digital-marketing startups, with two of the venture capital firm’s companies — FreeWheel Media and BlueKai — being bought out in two weeks.

Wall Street Journal--Wayfair, an online purveyor of home goods, says it raised $157 million from a group that includes T. Rowe Price and other mutual funds, en route to a planned initial public offering in the coming months.

Re/code--Comcast has wrapped up its deal to buy FreeWheel, the Web video ad-serving company.

Re/code--Business software giant Oracle announced its second acquisition of the year, saying it will acquire BlueKai, which specializes in managing marketing data. Oracle didn’t disclose the price, but Business Insider pegged it at around $400 million.

VentureBeat--Battery Ventures is betting big time on the retail intelligence space. The Valley venture heavyweights poured $7 million into Smarter Remarketer, an Indianapolis-based startup whose flagship SR2 Big Data platform provides e-commerce sites with actionable intelligence on customer trends and buying habits. Battery was the only investor.

Advertising Age--The consolidation of social marketing companies continues. A couple months after Apple bought social data provider Topsy, social marketing software company Sprinklr has acquired social analytics firm Dachis Group to help marketers wrap their heads around the meaning of social media mentions. Sprinklr founder and CEO Ragy Thomas declined to disclose the terms.

TechCrunch--Fifteen years and one popped Internet bubble after it was first launched, the accounting software company Intacct is still alive-and-kicking… and raising new venture dollars.

Wall Street Journal--Chelsea Stoner has continued her march up the ranks at Battery Ventures, becoming the first female general partner in the history of the 30-year-old venture firm.

Silicon Valley Business Journal--Battery Ventures has bought a controlling stake in San Jose-based Data Physics Corp and named a new CEO.

New York Times--Almost three months after the collapse of the personal computer industry forced it to become a private company, Dell is moving on its new strategy. It involves destroying the computer-networking business.

TechCrunch--Mendix, an app builder platform for the enterprise, has closed a $25 million Series B, led by Battery Ventures. Existing investor Prime Ventures also participated. Mendix raised a $13 million Series A back in 2011, according to CrunchBase. It was founded back in 2005.

Forbes--Nutanix has reached "unicorn" status in Silicon Valley in just four years, raising a $101M Series D funding round Tuesday led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures that values the datacenter-infrastructure company at about $1 billion.

GigaOm--There’s been a ton of action around flash storage, but Israeli startup Elastifile is betting that there’s still a huge untapped market for solid-state storage, and it has $8 million in Series A funding to attack it.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek--It used to be good enough for venture capitalists just to hand out money. Well, not anymore. The latest example of this arrives on Tuesday, with Battery Ventures announcing the hiring of Adrian Cockcroft as the company’s first “technology fellow.”

Seattle Times--Scott McFarlane has always found the idea of accounting and sales tax boring, but that didn’t stop him from starting a business to “make sales tax less taxing” for other businesses. That business is Bainbridge Island-based Avalara.

Wall Street Journal--As the battle for financing heats up, some startups are making big promises to their early investors: a guaranteed return on their money when the company goes public.

TechCrunch--Taking on Amazon when it comes to e-commerce can be a futile effort. There are only a handful of e-commerce companies that have successfully been able to build a billion-dollar-plus business in e-commerce (without having physical stores) in a post-Amazon world. Zulily is one of those companies. Another one, which has stayed relatively under the radar, is Boston-based Wayfair.

Have a little fun and test your VC jargon knowledge with our game of Holiday Snowman!

Boston Business Journal--Michael Brown doesn’t claim to excel at early-stage startup investing. But give Brown a tech company with a promising product and some revenue, and he says he will figure out how to make the company dominant in its category.

Wall Street Journal--By the time Greg Lambrecht told me that unpaid customer evangelists are fundamental to the success of his wine-technology company,Coravin, I’d already become one.

GigaOm--Educational startup Koru, armed with $4.35 million in Series A funding, wants to help millennials get their first jobs.

GigaOm--Opscode, the company behind the popular Chef configuration management tool set, has a new name (it’s Chef, duh); a new CFO in Microsoft alum Curt Anderson and $32 million in new Series D funding to make the most of that new identity and to promote itself as an IT management “platform.”

Boston Business Journal--Battery Ventures will open its new headquarters in the South Boston Seaport on Monday after moving from its office in Waltham on Friday.

USA Today--Glassdoor, a popular jobs and career website, said Thursday it raised $50 million for international expansion. The financing round was led by Tiger Global Management and a new investor Dragoneer Investment Group joined. Existing investors Battery Ventures, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated.

CNBC--StellaService CEO Jordy Leiser discusses holiday shopping, and customer service.

Forbes--Guest post by Battery Ventures General Partner Roger Lee.

GigaOm--Guest column by Battery Ventures Principal Alex Benik.

USA Today--'Tis the season for cyberscams — and it's stacking up to be one of unprecedented plunder for cybergrinches.  

Forbes--Last May, startup founder Steve Chung got 200 MBA students at Stanford University to try a new mobile messaging app he was working on. It was a social platform that let them send photos, videos and texts to one another, along with an odd-side feature: messages that self-destructed after a few seconds, a la Snapchat.

VentureBeat--In an age when shadowy three-letter organizations monitor all traffic in and out of Google and Facebook, tap phone lines, and generally watch everything, a little secrecy is a valuable thing. Especially if you’re sharing juicy office gossip. Which is why Powerinbox is launching SecretInk today, a privacy, self-destructing messaging service.

Forbes--Ziv Kedem knows something about recovering from disaster. But with help from his brother, Oded, he has managed to turn that knowledge into an impressive payday once. And he is on track for a bigger exit in the next three to four years as their most recent startup accelerates towards $100 million in revenue.

Fox Small Business Center--In a week dominated by social media news thanks to the Twitter IPO, social media management company Sprinklr also made headlines closing a $17.5 million Series C round of funding from inside investors Battery Ventures and Intel Capital. The two firms have now invested a total of $37.5 million in the four-year-old startup, which is based in New York City.

StrictlyVC--Yesterday afternoon, I sat down with Brian O’Malley of Battery Ventures in the gleaming marble lobby of San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel. Despite having a cold, O’Malley – who has led Battery’s deals in a long line of solid companies, including Bazaarvoice, which helps e-commerce companies manage customer reviews; SkullCandy, which makes headphones and earbuds; and the hotel booking service HotelTonight — spoke animatedly on a wide variety of topics.

BloombergTV--Roger Lee, general partner at Battery Ventures, explores the ecosystem that has sprung up around Twitter, the steps being taken to transition into a mature public company and what this means for the valuation of tech companies. He speaks with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.”

AllThingsD--For all its vaunted importance to large companies, working with big data is kind of hard. Everybody sort of gets the point: Mine huge troves of data gathered over time through the course of normal business operations, and eventually you get to recognize patterns that turn into new insights that, in turn, can lead to changes that either make or save money. It’s the kind of problem that Jonathan Gray (pictured) solved for Facebook, where he built an internal system called Puma that gave developers a platform that let them easily build applications to work with that data, without first becoming data scientists.  

Forbes--For three years, startup JBara Software toiled in the ‘customer success’ software business, looking to management of existing clients for businesses focused primarily on acquiring new ones. As the rebranded Gainsight, however, the company’s moving faster–and taking on cash to do it. Gainsight announced a new funding round of $20 million on Wed., led by Bain Capital Ventures.

BloombergTV--Sprinklr founder and CEO Ragy Thomas discusses Twitter's IPO and the enterprise side of social media with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television's "Money Moves."

VentureBeat--Flash storage has gotten lots of attention in the past few years, as it serves data to users more quickly than hard disk drives. But flash typically still costs more than disk, and issues with reliability and management complexity could be factors in the price difference. A stealthy startup called Primary Data is aiming to deliver storage that isn’t hampered by those issues, and a healthy $50 million round of venture capital should help a bit.

VentureBeat--One of Israel’s most successful entrepreneurs is back with a stealthy new startup, dubbedStratoscale, that is building new software for large data centers.

Forbes--The next big thing in the $1.5 trillion exchange-traded funds business is being cooked up in a small office sharing an entrance with a beauty salon in the bucolic town of Bedminster, N.J. There, in a loftlike space outfitted with whiteboards, comfy chairs and a pool table, the four principals of Precidian Investments run what amounts to a lab for designing and patenting new forms of ETFs. Few investors have heard of them, but to mutual fund firms like Fidelity and American Funds, Precidian may well be the messiah of new growth.

TechCrunch--In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we welcomed Battery Ventures’ general partner Brian O’Malley into the studio to talk about his perspective on the latest topic du jour,AngelList Syndicates.  

TechCrunch -- Influencer marketing company Pursway is announcing that it has raised $7.2 million in Series B funding. Pursway says that it takes a unique approach to helping businesses reach the people most likely to drive sales — an approach it describes as “socializing data.” The company has built a database (pulled from online sources like alumni lists, event attendees, and employment history) mapping the social relationships of more than 100 million U.S. consumers.

WIRED -- Everyone knows the workplace is more mobile, global, visual and collaborative these days. People use ubiquitous, two-way mobile phone and tablet cameras to communicate with colleagues in remote offices and “visual analytics” apps to create and present information, among other new technologies. But one of the most basic office collaboration tools, video-conferencing, has been lagging behind -- until now.

Bloomberg TV -- Krish Ramakrishnan, co-founder & CEO at Blue Jeans Network, explains the success behind his company’s networking business and how they’re turned a $50 million investment into a push to offer work from home network services. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.”

FORTUNE -- Battery Ventures investor explains why Blue Jeans is poised to battle both Cisco and Skype. Blue Jeans Networks this morning announced that it has raised a whopping $50 million in VC funding, to help expand its cloud-based, system-agnostic videoconferencing business. In other words, one videoconference participant could be using a Cisco telepresence system while another uses Skype while another uses just a basic browser.

PandoDaily -- The last several years have seen billions of dollars worth of value created in the marketing automation category with companies like Omniture (sold to Adobe for $1.8B), Bazaarvoice ($683M IPO), ExacTarget (sold to Adobe for $2.5B), NeoLane (sold to Adobe for $600M), Marketo ($465M IPO), and others. Another thing these five companies share in common, other than being responsible for ushering marketing from the realm of art into the data driven digital age, is that they were all backed by Battery Ventures. Today, Battery is making a large bet that a similar transition is poised to occur in the sales category. The firm is leading a $13.5 million Series B investment into three-year-old, sales-focused email productivity platform Yesware.

San Francisco, CA — Sept. 6, 2013 — BoostCTR, the leader in online advertising creative optimization, has raised $8 million in Series B funding from investors led by Battery Ventures. As part of the financing, Battery General Partner Brian O’Malley will join BoostCTR’s board.

GigaOM -- BoostCTR, which pairs a stable of 1000 copy writers with core optimization algorithms, now has money to boost its sales presence.

PandoDaily -- Just when we thought we were doomed to a world of Web 1.0 online travel agencies, it seems as if one online travel company may just have the chops — or at least the ambition — to aim for an IPO. It’s a surprising one. Are you ready? It’s Hotel Tonight.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 14, 2013) - InstaEDU (www.instaedu.com), the leading online service for on-demand, high-quality tutoring, today announced that it has closed a $4 million Series A financing from top-tier investors. Battery Ventures led the round, and General Partner Brian O'Malley will be joining InstaEDU's board of directors.

GigaOM -- Massive open online courses (MOOCs) that instruct tens of thousands of students at once may get the lion’s share of attention in online learning these days. But San Francisco-based InstaEDU is gaining traction with a far more intimate approach: teaching students one at a time.

TechCrunch -- Of all the IT threats facing consumers and organizations today, zero-day attacks are some of the most serious: by definition, security teams do not have patches in place for zero-day vulnerabilities; and that means zero-day attacks can take, on average, 10 months to bring under control.

GigaOM -- VividCortex sees the need to watch and manage database performance, starting with MySQL and now has $2 million in funding from Jaffray Woodriff, Battery Ventures and angel investors to take on that task. It also has a noted MySQL expert in CEO and co-founder Baron Schwartz, a veteran of Percona, a professional services business based on MySQL.

Waltham, MA – July 29, 2013; Battery Ventures portfolio company Industrial Safety Technologies (IST) has reached an agreement with Industrial Scientific Corporation for the proposed purchase of its Oldham fixed-point gas detection business.  Oldham provides a comprehensive portfolio of fixed system gas detection monitors and controllers and will be the fifth acquisition for IST since its inception in 2011.

Rosh Ha'ayin, Israel, July 28 – Scodix Ltd, the leading provider of digital print enhancement presses for the Graphic Arts industry, has secured $5M in fresh capital from Battery Ventures.  The additional funding will be used to continue product innovation and fuel the company’s rapid growth into more markets and customers worldwide.

San Jose Mercury News -- In our latest installment of Elevator Pitch, we talk to Roger Lee, who’s been a Silicon Valley tech investor since 2001. Before that, he spent a decade co-founding companies like Corio and NetMarket.

Fortune-- Wayfair.com could have gone public by now. Some might say should. The Boston-based online retailer generated $600 million in revenue in 2012 and an IPO would create liquidity for Wayfair's 1,300 employees, not to mention boost the company's position in the online home furnishings market. But the company's co-founder and CEO Niraj Shah is not ready to pull the trigger quite yet. "It's certainly something we think is in our future," Shah says. "There are a few more things we want to accomplish while we're private first."

AUSTIN, TX; BOSTON, MA; MENLO PARK, CA, JULY 18, 2013 —OpenIncubate, a new accelerator program formed to fund teams using open source IP to transform the IT infrastructure layer, launched today with commitments from Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures and The Valley Fund.

Waltham, MA, Menlo Park, CA, Herzilya, IL – July 17, 2013 – Battery Ventures, a private investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced the acquisition of Frankfurt, Germany-based IHS GmbH, a provider of technology and marketing solutions to the global hotel industry.  The transaction will enable IHS and its brands to build upon its customer-centric focus, drive continued organic growth, and pursue acquisition opportunities.  In conjunction with the investment, Battery Executive in Residence Steve Rowley joins IHS as Chairman and CEO, and Battery’s Dave Tabors and Morad Elhafed join its Board of Directors.

Retail Customer Experience -- In a recent Q&A with Ran Shaul — co-founder of Pursway, a company that specializes in data analytics for retail — we asked about the benefits of Big Data, and whether the recent NSA controversy could cause a backlash from those consumers who deem the process a breach of privacy.

Wall Street Journal -- RelateIQ, a big data startup that has raised $29 million, despite being in so-called stealth mode for two years...

PE Hub -- The venture landscape has been altered in recent years...

ATLANTA and Research Triangle Park, NC –  May 23, 2013 – CareAnyware, a Brightree company and leading provider of home health and hospice software solutions, and Cornell University announced today results of a recent study that showed significant reductions in rehospitalization rates for clinically depressed home health patients treated with Cornell’s Depression Carepath protocol incorporated into CareAnyware’s EMR system.

Forbes -- Forbes' annual ranking of the venture industry's top tech dealmakers includes Battery General Partners Neeraj Agrawal and Roger Lee...

Forbes -- For the third year in a row, TrueBridge Capital has partnered with Forbes to cultivate the most exciting billing in venture capital, The 2013 Midas List, which rumor has it will be published shortly. ...  As in 2011 and 2012, we have also selected the best of the best from the next generation of venture capitalists, based on quantitative data and qualitative references confirming the sentiment throughout the industry.  ... After joining Battery Ventures in 2006, [Chelsea] Stoner quickly became a part of some of the biggest winners for the firm, including Groupon, Guidewire, and RealPage.  She specializes in SaaS and healthcare IT ...

London, United Kingdom – May 7^th 2013: FTBpro, the largest fan-generated media platform in online football, has secured $5.8 million financing from Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Ventures, as the new media company continues to expand into key geographical markets.

Silicon Valley Business Journal -- Facebook and Apple mobile veteran Charles Jolley jumped from the social networking giant to Battery Ventures this month, but don’t expect to see him there for very long.  Jolley, 34, sees an opportunity to launch an idea he has been brewing for several years and took the entrepreneur in residence gig on Sand Hill Road...

WALTHAM, MA, MENLO PARK, CA and HERZLIYA, Israel; April 23, 2013 - Battery Ventures today announced that Charles Jolley, most recently Facebook’s Mobile Platform Head of Product, and co-founder of mobile software company Strobe (acquired by Facebook), has joined as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) in its Menlo Park office. Jolley is a well-known and seasoned technologist and entrepreneur, who will bring his deep background in mobile, software and tablet engineering to work alongside the Battery investment team.

Forbes -- Venture capital firms raised more dollars from their limited partners in the first quarter of 2013 than in the prior quarter, showing that it may have stabilized the larger trend of a shrinking industry. ... The largest funds raised in the quarter were from Battery Ventures, Third Rock Ventures, Spark Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Nokia Growth Partners.

All Things Digital -- Meet Gainsight. Until yesterday, it was a startup known as JBara Software. Today it changed its name, announced the closing of a $9 million Series A round of venture capital funding and named a new CEO. So it’s something of a big day for this small company.

The New York Times -- This interview with Marcus Ryu, the C.E.O. of Guidewire Software, a maker of software for the insurance industry, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Q. Tell me about the culture you’re trying to foster. A. A little background about our origins as a company will help....

GigaOM -- While the rest of the world is agog about big data and in-memory analytics, SiSense is taking a different tack. It’s rethinking business intelligence with higher-speed analysis on smaller (relatively speaking) data sets by taking advantage of multicore, 64-bit processors. The approach has been paying off with some impressive customer uptake, and on Wednesday SiSense announced a $10 million series B funding round from Battery Ventures along with Opus Capital and Genesis Partners.

TechCrunch - Marketo, a marketing software platform, has announced its plans to file a $75 million IPO to further expand and build out its marketing software platform. Marketo will trade under “MKTO” on the Nasdaq exchange. Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse are listed as leading the offering. Marketo has raised $108 million. In November 2011, the company raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures.

CHICAGO – March 25, 2013 – SingleHop, a global leader in highly automated hosting, cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service, reported today revenue and company growth highlights for the 2012 calendar year.

TechCrunch -- ...a new player emerges today, attempting to do almost exactly the same thing – but this time GoEuro, based in Berlin, will have a $4 million seed round to do it with. The round was led by Battery Ventures and Hasso Plattner Ventures (HPV), and joined by notable industry leaders including Dave Baggett (ITA Software – a leading provider of innovative solutions for the travel industry) and Jeff Sagansky (Global Eagle Entertainment – largest provider of entertainment for worldwide airline business).

TechCrunch - Social voting app Polar has raised $1.2 milliom from Yahoo founder Jerry Yang at AME Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners’ John Lilly, LiveOps Chairman and former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Ash Patel at Morado Ventures, Brian O’Malley Mike Dauber at Battery Ventures, Google’s Don Dodge, Sam Pullara, and others.

Wall Street Journal - Battery Ventures has raised a new $650 million fund plus a $250 million side fund, just as it completes an internal intergenerational shift. The venture-capital firm, which invests across technology sectors and across different stages of private companies’ life cycles, last raised a $750 million fund in 2010.

Battery Ventures X Capitalized at $650M, Battery Ventures X Side Fund Capitalized at $250M; Firm will Continue to Invest in Technology in Early, Growth and Buyout Stages

VentureBeat -- The top 20 technology venture capital firms of 2012 have been tabulated by PrivCo, a company that provides financial analysis of private companies. Based on the number of private tech company exits in 2012, Intel Capital ranked No. 1. Next up were Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Battery Ventures, DFJ, Greylock Partners, Ignition, Google Ventures...

Wall Street Journal - Some big Silicon Valley venture-capital firms are bringing in more entrepreneurs-in-residence, seeking an earlier entry into companies as investing grows more competitive. The programs—in which an executive or entrepreneur works informally at a venture-capital firm developing their next idea—are a low-risk and low-cost way for firms to get exclusive access to a new startup.

New York Times - Call it the Facebook effect. Until recently, investors had been all too eager to pour millions into any Web start-up with rapid growth, regardless of whether it made money or even had plans to do so down the road. But after Facebook’s rocky initial public offering and flameouts at Zynga and Groupon, venture capitalists are entering a picky phase.

GigaOM (Alex Benik contribution) -- As startups race to become the next big thing, they often downplay the successes and sales of those they hope to replace. But large companies spend billions on old technology because they don’t have the resources to try something new.

Combination creates the largest provider of SaaS-based healthcare IT (HCIT) software solutions for the post-acute care industry   ATLANTA – January 4, 2013 – Brightree LLC, the leading provider of billing and business management software solutions for the home medical equipment (HME) market, announced today that it has acquired home health and hospice software provider CareAnyware, Inc. of Raleigh, N.C.

Forbes - The overall IPO market in 2012 was modestly better than 2011, but it was driven largely by a few big deals such as Facebook. Here is a more detailed look at venture-backed technology IPOs in particular in 2012.

Bloomberg -- After leaving the software enterprise company he helped take public in 2009, Bryan Burkhart spent months mulling one question: What was the biggest industry that hadn’t been reinvented by technology? Title insurance was a possibility. So was property management. After interviewing flower shop owners in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, Burkhart became fascinated with flowers -- a $32 billion market still sometimes managed on notepads in retail shops and grocery stores. He found that despite shop owners’ talent for arrangements, as much as half their product often went unsold.

Have a little fun with our annual tradition ~ play Boardroom Bonanza!

FORTUNE -- The next time you upload a photo to Facebook, consider this: All those pictures have to be processed and stored somewhere, presumably forever. Some 3 million data centers occupy more than 600 million square feet of space in the U.S. alone to help do so.

Wall Street Journal - Wayfair, a Boston-based network of retail sites that focuses on home decor, has raised $36 million in its second round of funding amid rapid expansion of its third retail branch: a flash-sales site called Joss & Main.  

Enterprise Storage - Every few months, we bring you the latest crop of hot storage startups. The good news is that interesting newbies just keep on coming. Here are a few to watch.

GigaOM - Less than a month after unveiling its Hadoop analytics engine to great fanfare, Platfora has raised $20 million to realize its mission of displacing the business intelligence and data warehouse incumbents. It’ll need every dime: although the competition is old, it’s also rich, entrenched and determined.

Battery Original Research - In order to better understand evolving trends in online commerce, we commissioned a detailed survey to get a pulse on what/when/how people are buying and selling, what is influencing their online purchasing behavior, and how social is changing the face of e-commerce.

Wall Street Journal - Calxeda Inc ., a start-up that provides chips for a new breed of server systems, has raised an additional $55 million as computer makers like Hewlett-Packard Co . prepare to offer its technology.

WIRED - You might think given all the handwringing following Facebook’s (FB) IPO, that Trulia (TRLA), a company that has never enjoyed a profitable quarter since its founding in 2005, would be a tough sell as an IPO. But it wasn’t. Investors ate it up.

Bloomberg Businessweek - Venture firms such as New Enterprise Associates and Accel Partners are stepping up investment in e- commerce as shoppers increasingly turn to niche websites for custom-made clothes at prices that undercut department stores.

CDC Software (CDC) and Consona Corporation (Consona), both enterprise application software (EAS) providers of on-premise and cloud technologies, today announced they have merged to form Aptean.

San Francisco, CA; July 24, 2012 – Chute, the Y Combinator backed company that helps apps and sites capture, manage and display media files, today announced it has secured a new round of early stage venture funding. Freestyle Capital (who led), Battery Ventures, USVP and a handful of strategic investors including Salesforce.com, Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran (the CEO and CTO of Klout), and Joshua Reeves (CEO of Zen Payroll) contributed to the round.

TechCrunch - Tealium, the leader in enterprise tag management, today announced that it has received $10.5M in Series B financing from Battery Ventures to help fund growth across the entire company as it continues to build on its market leadership and momentum in enterprise tag management.

All Things Digital - The third wave of e-commerce is officially here, and it may have already jumped the shark.

Wall Street Journal - Battery Ventures has promoted Chelsea Stoner from principal to partner, VentureWire has learned, making her the first female partner in the history of the nearly 30-year-old firm.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced it has led a $20 million growth financing in Avalara, the market leading provider of sales tax automation services in the cloud.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced that Chelsea Stoner has been promoted to Partner.

All Things Digital - Retailers often have a hard time figuring out how much customers need to pay in sales tax.  Not only does it depend on what state or country the customer lives in, but now consumers are also increasingly shopping on the phone, so it also depends on where the purchaser is — down to the city block — and where the packages are being shipped.

MENLO PARK, Calif. – June 6, 2012 – Delphix, the market leader in agile data, announced it has received $25 million in its oversubscribed Series C funding round, led by Jafco Ventures. Summit Partners and Battery Ventures joined Jafco as new investors in Delphix.

VentureBeat - Last-minute hotel booking is proving to be big business for HotelTonight, a one year-old San Francisco-based startup that just closed $23 million in additional funding.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced that it has acquired Jeeves Information Systems, a Stockholm, Sweden-based leader in ERP software for small to medium enterprises.

GigaOm - Modern web-scale applications like Google, Twitter, Netflix, LinkedIn, and others are implemented as distributed systems as opposed to single monolithic codebases. Surprisingly, modern startups are generally built the same way. So what can startups learn from web apps?

Danaher Corporation today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire VSS Monitoring, based in San Mateo, CA. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mass Relevance, the technology leader in social curation and integration, today announced that it has closed $3.3 million in venture capital funding. Mass Relevance will use the new financing to accelerate growth for the company’s platform among media, entertainment, consumer brands and retailers.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, hosted its 2nd annual Big IT Meets Big Web event on May 2nd.

Rogue Wave Software announced today that it finalized an agreement to acquire IBM’s ILOG Visualization for C++ Products. For Rogue Wave customers, this acquisition adds high-performance data visualization capabilities to the company's existing portfolio of cross-platform, HPC development tools and embedded components.

Forbes - Last year when Forbes released its Midas List, an annual ranking of the best venture capitalists, March Madness was in full swing.

Boston Business Journal - You have to go more than one third of the way down Forbes' 2012 Midas List of the top 100 venture capital investors, before you meet anyone from Boston. According to Forbes, just seven of the top 100 VCs are Boston-based, this year.

Forbes - Atop this year’s Midas List of technology’s best investors is once again Accel Partner’s Jim Breyer, with Greylock’s Reid Hoffman (left) holding steady at number three. They head our definitive roster of the best-performing moneymen fueling a bull market for hot young companies.

On May 2, 2012 at Stanford, Battery brought together today’s leaders in the “Big IT” and “Big Web” movements—leading architects and technologists who have designed, built, and operated the systems that power both the capital markets and the most notable properties on the Internet.

GigaOM - In a cloud computing market dominated by large, well-known companies such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, it’s difficult to find much upside investing in the competition. However, Battery Ventures has done just that, leading a $27.5 million round in SingleHop, a Chicago-based infrastructure-as-a-service provider.

SingleHop, a privately-held company focused on providing highly automated Internet infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and cloud computing, today announced that it has completed its first ever institutional financing, a $27.5 million round led by Battery Ventures.

VentureBeat - Meet Sprinklr, the New York-based social media management startup that’s quietly won over more than 100 top-tier companies, including Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, SAP, Target, Nike, and Virgin America.

The financing round, which was oversubscribed, will be used to fuel Opscode's rapid expansion of its software engineering, sales, marketing and business development efforts.

ExactTarget, a global provider of cross-channel interactive marketing solutions, announced today the pricing of its initial public offering of 8,500,000 shares of common stock at a price to the public of $19.00 per share.

Boston Business Journal - At Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners, two of its tech companies have pulled off initial public offerings in the past month — Brightcove and Demandware — and done so with strong demand from investors.

BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, announced today that it has raised $12.6 Million in a series C round led by Intel Capital and joined by existing investors, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

Wall Street Journal - Sprinklr, a start-up that helps big companies manage the way they engage with social media, has raised $5 million in funding from Battery Ventures.

Drilling Info today announced a $165 million equity investment.

The New York Times - Any intrepid consumer can’t help being intrigued by the promise — and nerve — of Angie’s List.

TechCrunch - QVC, a home shopping network and e-commerce site, has acquired Send the Trend, a recently launched e-commerce site that brings personalization to the world of fashion accessories.

Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM), a global innovation leader in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications, today announced it has completed its$3.7 billion acquisition of NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NETL), a leader in high performance intelligent semiconductor solutions for next generation networks.

Daily Deal Media - Brian O’Malley, General Partner at Battery Ventures sits down with Daily Deal Media Founder and CEO, Boyan Josic, at the Business Insider Social Commerce Summit 2012, to discuss his Venture Capitalist outlook of the social commerce industry.

Today, Backplane announced it closed a Series A round of financing with new investors Sequoia Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Battery Ventures, Formation 8, Advance/Newhouse Investment Partnership an affiliate of Conde Nast, as well as continued participation from Google Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, i/o Ventures, and a group of individual investors.

GigaOM - Former Yahoo VP and chief cloud architect Todd Papaioannou is working on a stealth-mode startup called Continuuity, which aims to make it easier for developers to create data-focused cloud applications. The company has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz.

Battery Ventures today announced it has invested in Continuuity, a Big Data startup born out of the firm's Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program and founded by Battery EIR Todd Papaioannou.

Conversational marketing technology provider Neolane today announced it has closed a $27 million financing round.  Battery Ventures led the round, joining initial Neolane investors Auriga Partners, XAnge and Gilles Queru.

Wall Street Journal - During his tenure at Battery Ventures, Brian O’Malley has led the firm’s seed practice, where’s he’s found success testing ideas contrary to the day’s deal trends.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced two promotions to General Partner: Jesse Feldman, based in Battery's Waltham, MA office, and Brian O'Malley, based in the firm's Menlo Park, CA office.

Reuters - Consumers spent a record $1.25 billion on Cyber Monday, according to comScore, highlighting how much people love shopping online.

Venture Capital Journal - Venture capitalists in growing numbers are backing startups founded by women that target female consumers, often in sectors that traditionally attract a female following: fashion and beauty as well as sites that sell home and family-related products. It should come as no surprise.

The New York Times - Last year, two software geeks who’d never been anywhere near the flower business — in fact, one of them is, quite literally, allergic to it — started H.Bloom, an online, subscription-based floral delivery service that operates in New York, Chicago and Washington.

Bloomberg Businessweek - Battery Ventures’ investments in Angie’s List Inc. and Groupon Inc. have produced more than $440 million in paper profit after the Internet-commerce companies sold shares to the public this month.

Marketo, the fastest-growing provider of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) technology, today announced it has secured $50 million in new venture financing. Battery Ventures led the round, with existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund and Storm Ventures also participating.

Kontagent, the leading enterprise user analytics company, today announced that it has closed $12 million in Series B financing. The investment was led by Battery Ventures, with continued participation from Maverick Capital and Altos Ventures.

Boston Globe - Online Venrock is having a good run. The venture capital firm is among several investors that will receive a windfall from last week’s $1.1 billion sale of Cambridge’s Endeca Technologies Inc. to computer software giant Oracle Corp.

The New York Times SHELBY CLARK, the founder of a start-up called RelayRides, was honored last week as a rising star in clean technology. But as he took the stage alongside companies creating new kinds of energy, he felt out of place.

Greentech Media It will be the last birthday that the incandescent bulb will have has before the national phase-out and efficiency standard starts (with the 100-watt model) in the U.S. in January.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, congratulates Andrew Mason and Jesse Robbins for their inclusion on Technology Review’s 2011 List of 35 Innovators Under 35 – the TR35.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, hosted an educational, networking event on Smart Building Technology on September 15th in Palo Alto, CA.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced that it has acquired Planit, a leader in CAD/CAM software for the specialist manufacturing sector, headquartered in the UK.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced the acquisition of Houston-based Detcon, a leader in fixed gas detection products.

FirstFuel Software, the commercial building energy analytics company, today announced that it secured a $2.4 million initial round of financing led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power, with participation from individual investors. The company, formerly called iblogix, Inc., will use the financing to quickly scale and accelerate adoption of its Rapid Building Assessment (RBA) platform, which provides zero-touch analysis of the energy performance of commercial buildings.

The Registry (San Francisco) Clean tech meets real estate Sept. 15 at Stanford Faculty Club where Battery Ventures sponsors “Spotlight on Smart Building Technology,” an event to explore emerging know-how in commercial-property lighting, mechanical building systems and managing the electric grid.

Tech Crunch Luxury floral subscription service H.Bloom $4.7 million led by Battery Ventures with participation from existing angel investors, including Brian Lee, the founder of ShoeDazzle and LegalZoom; and Anton Levy, partner at General Atlantic, and board member of Gilt Groupe. This brings H.Bloom’s total funding to $8 million.

Earlier this summer, Zerto launched a bold reinvention of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) technology in order to meet the needs of today's virtualized data centers and cloud environments. Today, the company announces the successful completion of a $15 million Series B funding round led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) alongside existing investors Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.

The New York Times - Online Most of the world’s video is now shot on smartphones, but hardly anyone shares their videos widely. That’s partly because it takes too many steps and results in too many error messages, but also because many people aren’t convinced their hand-shot clips are worthy of the Internet.

Papaioannou will work alongside Battery’s Enterprise IT investment team to help identify and create new opportunities in Cloud Computing, Big Data, analytics and the Enterprise software environment.

Giga Om Todd Papaioannou, the VP and chief cloud architect at Yahoo, has left the company for a role as entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced the majority purchase of Gas Measurement Instruments, Ltd (GMI), a global leader in portable and fixed gas detection products.

TechCrunch What would Craigslist look like if it was a mobile app? It might look a little bit like Blockboard, a neighborhood app which is expanding today from its initial neighborhood of the Mission in San Francisco to the rest of the city.

TechCrunch Send the Trend, a recently launched e-commerce site that brings personalization to the world of fashion accessories, is launching a new way for shoppers to curate their favorite items and make money at the same time, MyStyle.

JOOR will use the capital to expand internationally and rapidly accelerate the growth of its online network of boutiques, buyers and brands.

GigaOm What would Craigslist look like if it was a mobile app? It might look a little bit like Blockboard, a neighborhood app which is expanding today from its initial neighborhood of the Mission in San Francisco to the rest of the city. Co-founder Stephen Hooddemoed the app at our Mobile First CrunchUp today.

Zerto today announced the official launch of the company and provided the first details of its replication technology.

Bloomberg Radio Network Roger Lee, a managing director at Battery Ventures, speaks with Bloomberg's Douglas MacMillan about how initial public offerings are fueling venture capital investments in Silicon Valley.

All Things Digital Bad things happen in business, so you have to have a plan to keep things running. In enterprise IT circles this is called “disaster recovery” and “business continuity.” Fire, floods, earthquakes, terrorist attacks: You name it, every type of unplanned disaster known to man has its business impact, and that puts businesses in the uncomfortable and often expensive position of having to plan for the worst kind of “what-if” scenarios.

XtremIO, developer of next generation storage solutions based on Solid State technology, announced today that it has secured a $14 million financing round led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Giza Venture Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).

Forbes Of Web 1.0’s most memorable implosions, Webvan still takes the cake. The online grocer raised $375 million in an IPO, descended upon eight major U.S. cities, peddled a 26-city expansion plan and somehow warranted a $1.2 billion market cap—all with the burn rate of a ticking time bomb.

Sports Illustrated Tennis Channel has come of age, and at the perfect time: during a Grand Slam event, with the whole world watching.It has been a remarkable thing to witness. At this early stage of the French Open, TC has scored a clear-cut victory over ESPN, and this is no TKO. It's a full-blown knockdown.

The popular last-minute mobile hotel-booking app today announced it now offers last minute deals at several Las Vegas hotels.

TechCrunch Zynga is continuing its shopping spree today with the acquisition of social game developer DNA Games, marking its 14th acquisition in the past 12 months. It’s important to note that this is an actual acquisition of both the talent and company, as opposed to the recent ‘acq-hires’ Zynga has been making in the past few months. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The New York Times When Emily McNish shopped for jewelry online, she was overwhelmed by the options while searching for “gold necklace” on e-commerce sites or Google. Then she found a Web site called JewelMint that she lets shop for her.

HotelTonight, specialists in last-minute mobile hotel bookings at quality hotels, today announced it has secured a $3.25 Million Series A investment.

Send the Trend, an innovative e-commerce company that offers a customized selection of women’s fashion accessories, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures and supplemented by several other industry executives and entrepreneurs as well as Founder Collective.

TechCrunch Send the Trend, a recently launched e-commerce site that brings personalization to the world of fashion accessories, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures with a number of angels participating in the round, including Founder Collective. Send the Trend is also launching an updated site, featuring a new UI and more social experience, including voting, social sharing, one screen checkout and more.

ExactTarget, a global provider of interactive marketing solutions, announced today it continued record performance in the first quarter, increasing revenue 52 percent year over year.

TechCrunch Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has raised$30 million in new financing led by Technology Crossover Ventures with Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Greenspring Associates participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding up to$208 million.

Giga Om Viddy, an iPhone app for editing and sharing mobile videos, is set to close on $1.5 million in first round financing from a group of investors that includes Battery Ventures, Bessemer Ventures, and Qualcomm, according to CEO Co-founder Brett O’Brien.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced that Google has acquired Cambridge, MA-based portfolio company ITA Software.

Forbes Much has changed in two years, when Forbes last published its list of top venture capitalists. Secondary markets surfaced. Founders dragged their feet to exit. Fresh competition emerged abroad and from a new flock of angel investors. Firms shrank and returns declined. These 100 investors buck those trends, create wealth and fund the new ideas that keep our economy vibrant.

San Francisco Chronicle Where, wondered Maggie Bankson, should she go on her honeymoon? There were a couple of factors to consider. Her fiance wanted to spend some time relaxing at the beach. Bankson, a travel lover who prefers hostels over resorts, wanted to immerse herself in a country's culture.  

TechCrunch Can you see the difference between these two shirts? One is an off-the-shelf Zegna men’s dress shirt that sells at Neiman Marcus for $395. The other is a custom-fitted shirt from men’s clothier startup J. Hilburn made from exactly the same material, but it only costs $99. And it’s made to measure.

TechCrunch STELLAService, a startup that measures,rates and highlights the quality of customer care of online businesses, has raised $2 million in early stage funding.

STELLAService, the first independent customer service ratings provider for online retailers, today announced that it has raised $2 million in early stage funding, led by institutional investors Battery Ventures and DFJ Gotham Ventures.

TechCrunch Exclusive - STELLAService, a startup that measures, rates and highlights the quality of customer care of online businesses, has raised $2 million in early stage funding.

Press release Glassdoor Inc., which owns and operates Glassdoor.com, today announced it has secured $12 million in Series C funding led by Battery Ventures with participation by existing investors Benchmark Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures.

FirstFuel Software, the commercial building energy analytics company, today announced the closing of a $10 million round of financing. RockPort Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors Nth Power and Battery Ventures. The investment will support FirstFuel’s rapid expansion in the utility and government markets, and will accelerate product development efforts to expand the capabilities of its Rapid Building Assessment (RBA) platform.

List of Top Private Digital Media and Ecommerce Companies Names Eight from Battery; BlueKai Named B2B Company of the Year

TechCrunch This year’s fourth annual Crunchies Awards have just concluded, and we’re happy to say that it was an overwhelming success. For those who weren’t at the event or watching our livestream, we’ve included the list of nominees and winners below.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced the promotion of Chelsea Stoner from Vice President to Principal. She is based in the firm’s Menlo Park, CA office, and focuses on growth equity and buyout investments in the software and digital media markets, with a particular emphasis on SaaS and healthcare software.

NRF: Retail's BIG Blog Can we trust our consumers to know what they want? Brian O'Malley of Battery Ventures posed that question to the panel in Monday's session on crowdsourcing. He recalled that Henry Ford had once said that if asked for their opinion, people would ask for faster horses. However, comparing today's consumers with Ford's customers isn't really fair.

Today Groupon announced that it has completed a $950 million round of financing. Groupon will use the funds to fuel global expansion, invest in technology, and provide liquidity for employees and early investors.

Forbes- Online In the mid-1990s, Ariba was among the first companies to show how the Internet could be a strategic business tool,  helping companies save money on their “indirect spend” on paper clips, printer paper and janitorial supplies every business procures.

AlwaysOn The venture capital industry is clawing its way back after a ten-year drought. AlwayOn's editors unveil the top 100 venture capital firms that are leading the comeback and proving that high-growth private company investment opportunities still exist for the wise and disciplined VC.

Forbes So you’ve scored an introduction to a Venture Capitalist and need to pull together a pitch deck that conveys the dire investability of your revolutionary, billion-dollar idea.

GigaOm Both corporate IT and web operations geeks matter greatly to you if you are building a technology start-up because these are your customers but, depending on what you are building, you may not be able to or want to span web/corporate IT divide in version 1.0.

All Things Digital Last week, BoomTown sat down with former Myspace exec Travis Katz to talk about the private beta launch of his new start-up, Gogobot. No, it’s not a robot from Google–it’s a social travel site, which uses friends to enhance the travel-planning experience.

TechCrunch In a city like New York, there are two main options to get floral bouquets in your home on a regular basis. You can make arrangements with your neighborhood’s floral shop, which can easily run north of $125 per pop. Or, if price is a factor, you can drop by the local bodega or deli shop to pick up a few bunches. The prices can be as little as $10 for a dozen roses— but as they say, you often get what you pay for.

Battery Ventures today announced it has led a $2.1 Million Series A investment in H.BLOOM, Inc., (http://www.hbloom.com), the first locally-focused flower subscriptionservice, with participation from H.BLOOM’s existing investors.

On October 28, we assembled a unique panel of pioneers, experts and visionaries from Gawker, Thrillist, Spanfeller Media Group, and Guardian News and Media North America in front of some of NYC's brightest: the curators, publishers, technology buyers and entrepreneurs who are rethinking content publishing.

Wall Street Journal It seems about time for private equity investors to take a closer look at venture-backed companies. Let us count the reasons: Many venture funds raised during the dot-com bubble are nearing the end of their natural life and raising new funds is difficult for all but the top firms. Limited partners seem to be losing patience with some general partners.

Bloomberg Businessweek Shoppers cannot buy shirts by J. Hilburn, a Dallas startup that sells custom-made menswear, in any retail stores, on Amazon.com, or anywhere else online, for that matter. Nonetheless, the company expects to sell 60,000 of them in 2010.

Redwood Systems, a pioneer of network-based lighting power and control systems, today announced it has secured $15 million in Series B financing to enhance its innovative commercial lighting technology, grow its footprint in key markets, establish strategic sales channels and expand into international markets.

Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced it has purchased Data Innovations, the worldwide leader in clinical laboratory middleware software.

Press release Battery’s Distinguished and Consistent Track Record in Backing Technology Companies and Flexible Approach to Investing Among Criteria for Selection

TechCrunch Angie’s List, which offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web, has raised another big round. The privately-held company this morning announced that it has secured a $22.5 million equity financing round from “multiple institutional investors”, including Silicon Valley firm Battery Ventures.

Press release Angie’s List today announced that it has closed on a $22.5 million equity financing round. The privately held, Indianapolis-based company said multiple institutional investors contributed to the round.

Wall Street Journal A rise in networking speeds is breathing life into a new category of network monitoring products, and VSS Monitoring Inc. has benefited as venture capital firms take notice.

GigaOm VSS Monitoring, a network traffic monitoring company, has taken $20 million in funding from Battery Ventures. The funding was the first for the company which was founded in 2003 and the funding will be used for R&D and company expansion. Its investors call it a unicorn.

Press release

Forbes

Andrew Mason figured out how to inject hysteria into the process of bargain hunting on the Web. The result is an overnight success story called Groupon.

GigaOm A rift has developed between the web and enterprise IT. Changes in the source of IT innovation and enterprise purchasing habits mean a business plan focused on selling to Google and Facebook is just as likely to fail as one aimed at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

GigaOm Smooth-Stone, an Austin, Texas, based company building servers using the chips found inside cell phones, has raised a $48 million initial round of funding from ARM, Advanced Technology Investment Company, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Texas Instruments.

The New York Times A group of investors, including companies from the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates, has formed in a bid to disrupt one of Intel’s most lucrative franchises.

Press release

Wall Street Journal

Press release RealPage, Inc. (Nasdaq:RP) today announced its initial public offering of 12,300,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $11.00 per share. The shares will begin trading on Thursday, August 12, 2010, on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "RP."

Press release

Inc. For one reason or another, you're going to need an attorney at some point. Here are tips on finding the best one to fit your needs.

Press release Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced it has sold its ownership stake in online elder care referral service, A Place for Mom, to international private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

ABC News- Online Every company starts small. Facebook began as a Harvard networking site, Starbucks as a small Seattle coffee shop and Microsoft was famously started in a garage by a college dropout. It's easy to explain in retrospect what made these companies succeed. But looking in real time at a cluttered landscape of fiercely competing small businesses, it's difficult to pinpoint potential winners. ABCNews.com asked savvy venture capitalists for their predictions for the big companies of the future. Here are five of their top choices.

Press release

Press release

AlwaysOn Introducing 50 East Coast venture capitalists who get it—and have the ROI numbers to back it up.

Press release Battery Ventures Leads New Round in Infrastructure Automation Start-up; Sunil Dhaliwal to Join the Opscode Board of Directors

Press release SafetyWeb (www.safetyweb.com), the leading Internet safety, identity and reputation protection service for parents, announced today that it has completed an $8 million round of funding led by Battery Ventures with participation from First Round Capital.

GigaOm So far this week two storage startups offering a hardware product have launched in as many days, both offering variations on the theme that more data requires more storage and faster networks require faster access to stored data. The trend has been building for years.

The New York Times SPACKLE should never be used as toothpaste. And Spanky was the only member of the Little Rascals brave enough to donate his brain to science during World War II.

GigaOm While at some point, dynamically moving VMs inside a single data center or between two data centers will be a seamless process, it’s not now. In the meantime, however, there are numerous opportunities for startups to offer solutions that will help make such seamlessness a reality.

Press release

GigaOm VC investing in networking and communications has fallen out of favor, decreasing faster than VC investment in technology overall. Indeed, there just aren’t that many new ideas walking in the door. So can networking be made cool again. It can, and here’s why.

The New York Times Social buying, the hot trend in e-commerce today, had an inauspicious beginning. Eighteen months ago, it seemed like Andrew Mason’s site ThePoint.com wasn’t going anywhere.

All Things Digital Groupon, the social buying site that has become one of the hotter start-ups of late, has gotten a giant round of funding from the same Russian investors that backed social networking powerhouse Facebook and game phenom Zynga.

Press release GROUPON RECEIVES $135 MILLION FROM DST AND BATTERY VENTURES Investment to Support Rapid Growth of Social Commerce Globally

Forbes The next time Google's search users go hunting for, say, a new flat screen TV or a video camera, they'll notice something new: a floodgate of user recommendations.

Silicon Alley Insider A few weeks ago, we highlighted many of the cool startups that have popped up in New York City in recent years. And now we turn to Silicon Valley.

WSJ VC Dispatch The semiconductor industry has been falling out of favor with venture capitalists, especially during the recession, since these companies often require huge amounts of upfront capital to design and manufacture the chips, while investment returns remain less than stellar.

Press release MaxLinear Inc. (NYSE:MXL), a provider of radio frequency (RF) and mixed-signal IC solutions for broadband communications applications, today announced the pricing of the initial public offering of 6,444,100 shares of Class A common stock at a price to the public of $14.00 per share.

Press release Battery Ventures Partner and Former Google Manager Leads Latest Round of Financing

Press release Noted technology executive, former CEO of BladeLogic and former president of BMC Software brings more than a decade of senior executive level experience in leading software companies through rapid growth.

Press release Battery Ventures, a multi-stage investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide, today announced that is has closed its ninth fund, BV IX, at its $750M target. This brings total committed capital in Battery’s nine funds to nearly $4 Billion. Battery invests out of offices in Waltham, MA, Menlo Park, CA and Herzliya, Israel.

The New York Times The venture capital industry may be shrinking, but Battery Ventures is growing. Battery, which has offices in Massachusetts, Silicon Valley and Israel, has closed a $750 million fund, the firm’s ninth. It will invest the money in both new start-ups that need a few hundred thousand dollars to get off the ground and mature companies that need $50 million.

CNBC

Press release ITT Corporation (NYSE: ITT), a global leader in the transport and treatment of water, wastewater and other fluids, today announced its agreement to purchase Nova Analytics Corporation. Nova Analytics is a privately held, leading manufacturer of premium quality laboratory, field, portable, and on-line analytical instruments used in water and wastewater, environmental, medical, and food and beverage applications. Financial terms of ITT's agreement were not disclosed.

Xconomy If you change your tech startup’s name, you might get a one-line notice from the business press. If you get a prominent firm to invest in your technology, particularly if it’s a sizeable amount or if it’s your first big round of funding, we’ll probably write a paragraph or two.

TechCrunch We wrote about the power of brand buzz on social media sites yesterday, and one contributing aspect to buzz are individuals who are “influencers,” similar in some ways to the trend that Malcolm Gladwell highlighted in The Tipping Point.

Press release

Reuters Venture capitalists were never very interested in the retail sector, but they are now taking a second look, focusing on a new generation of online retailers and the next wave of technology to help stores optimize how they run their businesses.

AlwaysOn Magazine

The Wall Street Journal Late last week, Lawson Software announced it would pay $160 million to buy Healthvision Solutions, a healthcare software maker owned by parent Quovadx Holdings and backed by venture-capital firm Battery Ventures. While the companies aren’t well known and the sums involved aren’t huge, the deal exemplifies how some venture capitalists are profiting by deviating from investing in young companies and instead doing buyout-type deals with more mature companies.

Press release

The New York Times After hibernating for the last year, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are beginning to stir.

WSJ VC Dispatch At last week’s VentureWire Technology Showcase, a number of cash-rich tech companies – Cisco, Qualcomm, SAP and Symantec, to name a few – signaled they’re hungry to buy start-ups. Other tech giants, like Google and Microsoft, have also declared a planned step-up in their acquisition paces.

Press release Partner from Goodwin Procter Brings Broad Technology Experience with Public and Private Companies, Private Equity Firms

Press release Former Kagoor Founder and Battery Entrepreneur in Residence Joins Team; Firm Expands to New Office in Herzliya

The Financial Times  

Wall Street Journal Venture capitalists are not exactly known for backing fashionable clothing retailers, but lately they’ve been dressing up these companies for success. In April, Battery Ventures invested $4 million in men’s clothier J. Hilburn LLC, whose product line includes custom-tailored dress shirts made from luxurious Italian fabric. That same month, Bonobos Inc., an online retailer for what it calls “awesome-fitting trousers,” secured $3 million from Sandwith Ventures and others.

Forbes Traditional brands may get the last laugh--or at least the richest laugh--on social networks. So far, companies such as Facebook and Twitter have attracted all the buzz for creating social networking. Making money, however, has proved more challenging. Using Facebook and Twitter is something like hosting a big cocktail party, observes Brett Hurt, founder and chief executive of Austin-based Bazaarvoice, which offers user-generated review platforms and expertise to other businesses. "But nobody shops at a cocktail party."

MIT Technology Review Financial conditions for technology startups have been cool, to say the least, since the economic crisis began. But now, buoyed by two recent public offerings, venture capitalists are showing a renewed interest in fledgling technology firms.

WSJ VC Dispatch A closed-off IPO market is allowing some later-stage venture capital firms to buy into private companies that in past years might already be public. Such is the case for Battery Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, which have participated in a $70 million venture capital round for ExactTarget Inc., an email marketing company that has been in registration for an initial public offering since 2007.

Press release Company to Use Funds to Fuel International Expansion, Accelerate Customer-Focused Innovation

The Marker

Three American Immigrants related industry start - ups and venture capital are trying to characterize, on the occasion of Independence Day, the high Israeli culture - Tkistit good and bad

Wall Street Journal Venture investors have rarely paid much attention to clothes retailers, but with three recent deals they’ve assembled an entire outfit – and quite a chic one at that.

Press release Custom Men’s Clothier Delivers Luxury Products to Consumers for Half the Price of High-End Retailers Funds Will Fuel Expansion into New Cities and Product Lines

Wall Street Journal: Digits The venture capital community is feeling some culture shock as it prepares to go after billions in government stimulus funds for tech and telecom startups.

Press release

Press release Online Data Exchange Business Prepares for Growth and Increasing Demand for More Efficient Marketing

Press release Four Investors Promoted as Firm Continues Growth

Press release

Press release General Partner & Additional Investment Team Member Relocate from US; Firm Views Israel along with India as a Strategic Hub of its Global Investment Platform

Bloomberg Businessweek

Venturebeat Aerial surveillance startup Insitu surprised everyone Tuesday when it said that it would sell to Boeing, one of the world’s largest aviation firms. The company, which makes unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), had been expected to go through an IPO within a year or two.

Press release

Press release Market leader in business management solutions for medical industries secures strategic financing to fuel organic growth and acquisition strategy

Press release

Press release

Press release World Golf Tour (www.worldgolftour.com), creators of the world’s most authentic online golf experience, today announced Panorama Capital, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm, as its lead investor in the Series B funding round. The new funding also includes participation from current investor Battery Ventures.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Fox Business

USA Today As the signs of a recession increase, start-ups and their venture capital backers aren't panicking. But they've learned the harsh lessons of the great dot-com crash of 2001, and they're girding to endure some economic pain.

Boston Globe Battery Ventures, which has offices in Boston, has invested $35 million in Angie's List, a Web site that reviews and rates service providers.

Press release Additional capital to be invested in aggressive growth and marketing

Press release Battery Ventures Leads B-Round for SaaS e-Procurement Leader; Mark Sherman to Join Boar

Bloomberg News Initial public offerings for startup businesses fell to the lowest level in almost five years in the first quarter as the stock market slump kept investors from providing capital to fledgling medical and technology companies.

Wall Street Journal After falling for two years in a row, the percentage of venture deals with five or more investors rose in 2006 as firms scrambled to back companies poised to go public or be acquired.

The Wall Street Journal Michael Berkley likes to joke that he is responsible for Sen. Hillary Clinton's March 4 presidential primary wins in Texas and Ohio. Berkley is the chief executive of SplashCast Corp., a start-up that builds advertising campaigns around social media widgets than can spread virally through the Web. And, it just so happens that a group of Clinton supporters launched a Web site the week of the primaries using SplashCast technology.

Red Herring  

The New York Times ONLINE shoppers who can’t decide whether to pull the trigger on their next purchase may be surprised at a new alternative: an offer to get it free.

paidContent.org Lotame, a behavioral targeter that focuses on social networking sites, has raised a “multi-million” first round funding; a source tells us it’s roughly $10 million. The round was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Hillcrest Management and Betaworks. The company raised around $2 million in angel funding in November 2006.

Press release

Press release

Boston Globe

Venture capital investment in computer software start-ups is flattening as the software industry consolidates, a weakening economy clouds its sales outlook, and other sectors gain fresh attention.

GigaOm The time to prove that widgets can make money is here. But much like the early days of banner advertising, when people just sold whatever unused space they had, the world of widget ads is a Wild West with no set sizes, rules about placements, or even defined success metrics.

Fortune

A web-friendly golf game is teeing up in offices everywhere. U.S. productivity, meet your new worst enemy.

Forbes Anybody can fund a Web company. Silicon Valley venture capitalists pumped $30 billion into 2,600 new ventures last year--surely there were some surprises among all those social networks and green technology plays?

Forbes Anybody can fund a Web company. Silicon Valley venture capitalists pumped $30 billion into 2,600 new ventures last year--surely there were some surprises among all those social networks and green technology plays?

Forbes

The young stars of venture capital aim to do in alternative energy what their bosses once did in computing.

The New York Times Chris Sacca had a plum job as the Wi-Fi guru atGoogle. But with his stock options fully vested, he left the Internet search company this month for a new career as a venture capitalist.

Press release Company Focuses on Power Electronics for Renewable Technologies

Wall Street Journal

Bazaarvoice, Others Offer Customer-Rating Service; More Sales, Fewer Returns

Bloomberg Businessweek

Press release Series A Financing to Fuel Team and Operations Growth of Israeli Fabless Semiconductor Firm

CFO

After a long dry spell, the market for IPOs may be ready for a resurgence.

Businesswire Battery Ventures Completes Acquisition; Leadership Team Primed for Growth

Boston Globe Battery Ventures has a lot on its plate over the next couple of weeks. The big Waltham venture-capital firm has one company in its investment portfolio, Netezza Corp. of Framingham, on the schedule to go public Wednesday. Another Battery portfolio company, BladeLogic Inc. of Waltham, is expected to launch its initial public stock offering the following week.

The Deal

Neeraj Agrawal, Michael Brown and Sunil Dhaliwal Appointed General Partner; Firm Closes Eighth Fund at $750 Million

Press release Fund VIII will Focus on Technology and Technology-enabled Businesses at all Stages; Firm Promotes Three Partners to General Partner

Entrepreneur Entrepreneurs were the big winners in 2007, receiving more than $7 billion in venture capital a quarter for four straight quarters--a phenomenon not seen since 2001. Venture capitalists invested $29.4 billion in 3,813 deals in 2007, a 10.8 percent increase in dollars and a 5 percent increase in deal volume over 2006.

Press release VeriSign’s Matt Niehaus Joins as Partner; Google’s Satya Patel Joins as Senior Associate

The Deal

Reuters Quovadx Inc. QVDX.O said it has agreed to be acquired by Quartzite Holdings Inc., a unit of Battery Ventures, for $136.7 million.

Press release Former Portfolio Company Executive Joins Team to Pursue Opportunities in Optimization Software

Dealmaker Magazine Midsize Battery Ventures — quietly performing groundbreaking work — has won the support of private equity’s biggest player.

The New York Times FACING down stiff competition to win fame and big prize money? Forget singing for Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul. Try sequencing DNA for a panel of technology investors.

San Jose Mercury News Last year was the best for venture-backed initial public offerings since the bubble burst, and this year looks even better. So why are venture capitalists so gloomy about IPOs?

Wall Street Journal Venture capitalists are reaching into a new bag of tricks to cash out of their investments.

SiliconBeat

Wrap: Kashya wins, Servgate loses, Google's problem, Vonage's panic

Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal Battery Ventures said Monday it led a $23 million third-round investment in The Insitu Group Inc., which makes unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.