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Posts Tagged ‘Menlo Ventures’

PowerReviews Lands $6 Million To Power Customer Reviews For Retailers

PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $6.1 million in funding led by current investors Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million.

The additional funding will be used fuel customer acquisition and for new product development. The company’s original products let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. Last year, PowerReviews launched two more social technologies for retailers to integrate: BrandConnect and Social Megaphone. BrandConnect tracks what consumers are saying about a company and/or brand on the social web and Social Megaphone allows customers to post their reviews to Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Last fall the company also brought on a new CEO, Pehr Luedtke.

PowerReviews, which launched in 2007, also powers a consumer-facing site, Buzzillions.com, that aggregates reviews from its partners retailers. The site includes over ten million product reviews. Customers include Staples, Drugstore.com, Walgreens, Diapers.com, Callaway and Jockey.

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Avere Systems raises $15M to build cheaper, more powerful enterprise storage

As tech companies wrestle with ever-increasing amounts of data, a startup called Avere Systems is preparing to launch what investors are describing as a “new class” of storage technology. The Pittsburgh startup (yes, Pittsburgh) just raised $15 million in a first round of funding.

Avere plans to announce its first products in October, so it’s still a little coy about the details. Still, we know it’s going to be entering the network-attached storage (NAS) market, i.e., storage devices attached to a computer network. It claims that through innovations like the use of different storage media, its technology will be cheaper and more powerful than storage products already on the market. I asked Norwest Venture Partners general partner Matthew Howard, who sits on Avere’s board, about what the company is doing differently. He wrote:

The dynamic nature of Avere’s products, combined with the team’s technical innovations regarding the use of multiple media types, will drive up the current performance of storage networks while significantly driving down the cost of existing architectures. While we think Avere’s technology is absolutely unique, we believe what really separates the company from the pack is the business value in providing solutions that enable high performance and high efficiency to the storage network simultaneously.

Avere’s founding team — chief executive Ron Bianchini, Chief Technology Officer Michael Kazar, and Vice President of Engineering Daniel Nydick — already has a track record in the storage industry. They were the founders of Spinnaker Networks, which NetApp acquired for $300 million. Howard was also an investor in Spinnaker.

The funding was led by Norwest and Menlo Ventures.

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MOG Raises Another $5 Million As Traffic Nearly Doubles Since January

MOG, the very popular music portal and blog network, has closed a new $5 million funding round led by Menlo Ventures, with existing investors Simon Equity Partners and Scott Jones also participating. Menlo Ventures’ Sonja Hoel Perkins will join the company’s board as part of the deal. The company has raised a total of $12.5 million since it was founded in 2005.

MOG has been having a stellar year. In April the site launched a completely overhauled homepage, which now includes music news, reviews, a selection of top posts from its blogs, and a variety of other content. The MOG network now sees over 8 million unique visitors a month, with over 700 blogs that generate over 6,000 posts a week.

MOG’s existing products are obviously doing quite well, but I can’t help but wonder if the new round was in part helped by its unlaunched music streaming product, which we previewed back in January. At the time we called it Ultimate Streaming Music App that may never launch, because it only had two of the four major labels signed on. If MOG managed to get the remaining holdouts on board, the company would be a ripe target for investors. The company declined to comment on the matter, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for more on this.

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