Category: Corporate Finance

VC Alternatives Needed

It’s time for more alternatives to venture capital cash, argues the Omidyar Network’s Sarah Drinkwater — and for more startups focused on making positive contributions to the world.

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Mrs Wordsmith’s words weave £2m funding story

There’s not many tech firms where the star player on the team is its art director, but such is the case with reassuringly named London-based edtech startup Mrs Wordsmith, whose cast includes Craig Kellman, the award-winning artist behind a vast cast of characters including those from Dreamworks’ blockbusters Madagascar and Hotel Transylvania.

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Welcome to the New Era of Commerce

Just as “social networking” is a bland term that doesn’t really capture the layers of what happens underneath (and on top of) social networking platforms, “crowdfunding” is a broader phenomenon than what the term and tools implies.

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The Real Data on Equity Crowdfunding Performance

Crowdfunding is a key growth area for the funding of small and medium sized enterprises in the UK.

Access to capital has traditionally been an extremely difficult challenge for start-up companies to face. Even with a large number of angel investors in the UK market, achieving a fully funded investment round was time consuming, clunky and often the result of luck, as opposed to access to the right people. Crowdfunding has revolutionised that process.

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Making Sense of Dell + EMC + VMware

Dell recently announced an agreement to acquire EMC – and with it, control of VMware – in a deal valued at $67 billion.

While analyses of the deal so far have been devoted to the implications for the computing, storage, and networking industries or financing of the transaction, analyzing these threads together reveals a far more interesting story.

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Herds of starving unicorns…

The Wall Street Journal has reported that tech companies made up only 11% of year-to-date IPOs, the lowest percentage since 2008. Amazingly – or rather disturbingly depending on your viewpoint – VC investors now have at least 117 companies valued at US$1Bn or more (ie the Unicorns), and the investors may be facing an IPO market that will not allow them to cash out.

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If you can’t beat them, buy them

What do a Braille printer made out of Lego and a drone that helps farmers monitor crops have to do with chipmaking?

The Economist examines how fear of being displaced by startups is turning firms into venture capitalists.

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