Twitter reaches its $35m Benchmark - 19/02/2009

Welcome to the weekly Entrepreneur Country briefing - your inside line on the week's essential news, views and issues for Europe's start-up community.

Twitter gets new cash injection

Barack Obama and Britney Spears’ favoured web-messaging service Twitter has raised $35m (£24.5m) from venture capitalists.
The new funding, from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, comes despite the increasingly gloomy funding prognosis for small technology firms. The San-Francisco based internet company now boasts more than 55 million daily users. It has grown explosively – active users rose 900 per cent last year – and plans to use the new injection of cash to expand products and grow its team of 29 staff.
The new round of funding follows on from investments by Spark Capital and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos last June, and brings the total raised so far to more than $50m.
Benchmark partner Peter Fenton who will join the board says that they invested because they ‘absolutely love the team’. And he added: “As a business opportunity, it jumped out to us as having many potential revenue streams that support, and don’t undermine, its success.”
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone claims he wasn’t looking for financing. He says: “It is obvious that we have the world ahead of us.”

Technology firms in £1bn funding plea

Technology firms are calling on the UK government to set up a £1bn fund of funds for venture capital investments. The bailout is needed to stop hundreds of young UK technology companies going bust due to lack of funding.
In a recent interview Richard Anton, a partner at Amadeus Capital, said many fast-growing companies could go under this year, threatening jobs. “Starved of capital. companies will go to the wall or they will be forced to cut back too far, reducing jobs and losing competitiveness,” he said. “The question is of great importance to the UK, as these are fast-growing companies that will create jobs.”
At the end of last year the government committed £20m to the Enterprise Capital Fund, managed by specialist seed stage investment firm TTP Ventures and set up to support British small firms in the UK IT and cleantech sectors.

Irish technology riding high

Funds raised by Irish technology firms hit their highest level since 2002. The figures produced by the Irish Venture Capital Association Venture Pulse survey revealed Irish technology companies raised €242.9m (£217.2) last year, up 7.5 percent on 2007.
Although the level of fund raising fell back on the final quarter of 2008 - €68.6m compared with €84.5m in the same period of 2007 – the number of companies that raised funds in the period rose to 40 from 32 a year earlier.

Mobile intent

Research and Markets has launched Mobile Banking: Strategies, Applications & Markets 2008-2013 to track key trends in the market. It includes six-year forecasts across eight key regions including North America, Western Europe and the Far East & China.
The report provides the most up to date analysis of the mobile banking market. It includes a forecasting suite projecting vital data on mobile banking subscriber take up, mobile banking user-level messaging traffic and user-level transaction volumes.
The report compares and contrasts banking applications and software vendors as well as detailed case studies, vendor profiles and interviews with key players on the market.
Key questions answered in the report include:

• How many mobile subscribers will use their mobiles for mobile banking information services over the next five years?
• How many mobile subscribers will use their mobiles for mobile banking transactions over the next five years?
• Which will be the leading regions in the mobile banking market in 2013?
• What will be the size of overall mobile banking transaction values?
• What are the trends, drivers and constraints affecting the development of the market?
• How are leading banks incorporating the mobile into their distribution channel strategies?
• What are the strategies of leading mobile commerce application and financial system vendors as they address this growing market opportunity?
• What will be the trend in mobile banking traffic volumes over the next five years?

Slicethepie secures further investment

In a reversal of the recent trend that has seen investors shying away from new music ventures, online music industry financing platform Slicethepie has secured over £1m in private equity funding.

The finance will be used to drive a range of commercial partnerships, exposing Slicethepie to hundreds of thousands of new artists and audiences, and to deliver significant marketing support to artists already financed through the site.

Since launching in June 2007, over 2 million music reviews have been submitted to the site and 22 artists have been financed.

Slicethepie recently launched SoundOut (www.soundout.com), a fully automated online consumer insight and analytics service for recording artists, record companies and music publishers. SoundOut provides detailed, comprehensive and objective reports generated directly from consumer feedback on new tracks – a first for the music industry.

David Courtier-Dutton, Slicethepie CEO, commented: “We are delighted to close this latest round of funding which will enable us to fulfil the potential of Slicethepie and SoundOut. We have some very exciting developments in the pipeline and are now perfectly placed to capitalise on these.”