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Posts Tagged ‘Dcm’

Augmented reality startup Tonchidot raises $4 million, will use virtual goods for revenue

Finally, a decent fundraising round size for an augmented reality startup.

Tonchidot, the Japanese startup behind the augmented reality browser Sekai Camera, raised $4 million from DCM and existing investor ITOCHU Technology Ventures. Augmented reality is a young field that allows you superimpose data and graphics over the real world in a camera viewfinder.

There are two things that are interesting about this round — Tonchidot becomes the second of several augmented reality startups to raise a venture-backed round this year. It’s a decent size for a first round, and four times what Dutch competitor Layar raised this fall. Although a number of startups have launched products this year on the iPhone and Android-based phones, few venture capital firms had gotten their feet wet in the space. That seems to be changing now.

The second thing to note is that Tonchidot sounds like it will take a very different route to monetization than all of its competitors. It will use its augmented reality browser for more game play. Other competitors like Layar and Wikitude will take the advertising route, letting businesses pay for augmented reality tags or ads or sponsor layers in the browser that point to nearby places like fast-food locations or coffee shops.

Like many other mobile technologies, augmented reality will probably evolve very differently in Japan. Users can tag locations with data and comments in the browser that other people can pick up later if they use Sekai Camera in the same place. Ken Inoue, Tonchidot’s CFO, suggests that there might be special virtual goods that users pay to leave in different places.

“We think augmented reality provides a really interesting user interface, and a place to combine social interaction, marketing and content creation,” said Osuke Honda, a principal at DCM. Specifically, Honda says Tonchidot’s technology could be used to stage game play in the real world. For example, you could have robots battle each other through your phone on a real physical location like a playing field. Or it could be used in cosplay, a type of performance art popular in China and Japan where people wear elaborate costumes.

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Look Up, Don’t Look Down! TC50 Star Tonchidot Raises $4 Million Series A

There were quite a few memorable presentations during 2008’s TechCrunch50 (that’s the conference before last). But if you had to pick one, there’s a good chance you’d think of Tonchidot, the startup behind the Sekai Camera. Tonchidot captured the audience’s attention with a totally zany presentation and answered judges’ questions with non sequiturs like “Look up, don’t look down!” The result was hilarious, but there were some who wondered if the technology behind the company was the real deal. Rest assured, it is. And the company has closed a $4 million series A funding round led by DCM, with existing investor ITOCHU Technology Ventures (ITV) also participating.

The Sekai Camera service launched in Japan a few months ago, and has already become a national hit as the top app on the iPhone app store. The service leverages augmented reality and adds a social layer to it, allowing users to add virtual items in the real world (you hold the device up to your face as a viewfinder, then look at the world around you as tags pop up). The company says that within four days, 10% of all iPhones in Japan already had the app installed, though the number of devices in Japan is a small fraction of those in the US and worldwide. Major companies have already formed partnerships with the site — partners can insert sponsored tags into the virtual world created by Sekai Camera.

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RockYou raises $50 million in venture funding

RockYou, one of the largest developers and ad networks built around Facebook’s platform, just raised $50 million in venture funding from Softbank. That brings RockYou’s total funding to $119 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International and DCM. Softbank was the only participant in this round, the company says.

Venture capital firms have got to be a bit emboldened about companies built around Facebook’s platform given last week’s sale of Playfish to Electronic Arts for as much as $400 million. RockYou is a bit different — it operates a distributed ad network across Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5 and Friendster. The company is pushing into virtual goods with a new gifts app on MySpace.

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Bill.com Raises $8.5 Million To Streamline Business Bill Payments

Bill.com has closed an $8.5 million funding round led by August Capital, with previous investors DCM and Emergence Capital also participating in the round. As part of the deal, August Capital’s David Hornik will be joining Bill.com’s board. Bill.com has now raised a total of $17 million.

Bill.com looks to help businesses streamline the convoluted processes that are often involved in paying bills at large companies. Unlike your typical personal bill payments, which simply require hopping onto your bank’s website and transferring funds, large busineses typically have fairly complex approval processes in place before a bill gets paid: various managers have to sign off on the bills, and then they have to get sent to the finance department that handles the actual payments. Even worse, most businesses still use inefficient paper documents throughout the process.

Bill.com takes the process digital. To use it, you fax your bills to a specified phone number (any bills that come in digitally can simply be Emailed into the service). Bill.com automatically scans the document, and lets you Email it to anyone who needs to sign off on the bill before it is paid (mangers click a special link to indicate they approve). Once everyone has signed off, the finance department can use Bill.com’s payment system to make the actual transactions. The service uses OCR to archive all documents for later searching. And while the service caters in part directly to businesses, Bill.com also appeals to accounting firms, as it can streamline the way they process their clients’ bills.

Bill.com charges a base fee of $24.99 a month for one user, with each additional user running $9.99 (there’s also a small fee associated with each check payment). It’s hard to gauge just how much money companies are saving in terms of time saved using the system, but VP Marketing Jeff Schultz says that companies are reporting upwards of 50% deductions in the amount of time taken to pay bills.

Bill.com was founded by René Lacerte, an entrepreneur who has proven he knows what he’s doing in this space — he previously founded online payroll service PayCycle, which was just acquired last month by Intuit for $170 million.

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