Oak Investment Partners (Greenwich and Norwalk), along with Giosis Holdings, is leading a $7.1 million Series A investment round in B5M, a next-generation social shopping search engine in China. B5M will use the funds for website development, marketing and ongoing innovation.
The Financial Times reports that the leaders at Freepoint Commodities are “definitely the most aggressive guys in the market at the moment” in terms of hiring… Of Freepoint’s 130 employees, two-thirds worked at Sempra, which a year ago became a joint venture with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The new firm is considering a move back to Sempra’s old trading floor in Stamford. Senior Freepoint employees have been offered stakes in the company, which is backed by $300m in equity from investment firm Stone Point Capital (Greenwich) and employees.
(from the NYT…) Building at breakneck speed, and seemingly heedless of the deep recession, the Stamford-based developer has completed 900 apartments, half a million square feet of office space, 12 acres of parkland and 4 miles of new sidewalks and roadways on the long-neglected peninsula just south of the city’s downtown. read entire article
Stamford-based LiveClips automates the process of creating highlights from sporting events, and pumps out the game-changing plays to its Apple and Android app. WestfairOnline reports that the firm has raised $2.1 million. $1 million of this amount came from Connecticut Innovations through its Eli Whitney Fund. LiveClips recently relocated from New York City to Stamford.
What? You missed this week’s edition of the NY Tech Meetup, largest regular meetup in the world? Don’t despair. You can watch videos of the event at Livestream.
These companies presented: BestVendor | CartoDB | Everything Butt Art | Lenddo | MVF | MyMatchmaker | Scroll Kit | Paperlex | Umami
P.S. Here’s a list of over 265 companies whose offerings were mostly coded in NYC.
If not, here are some excellent online resources… TechCoFounder | Foundrs | PartnerUp | StartupLinkup | FoundersHookUp | CoFounder Network | Startupers
How’s this for a good 2011? Orange-based Tangoe acquired three companies, raised $88 million in an IPO, and ended the year with a market cap of about half a billion dollars. The firm helps over 500 corporate clients manage their telecom costs.
The firm’s CEO, Al Subbloie, told Conntact.com, “In business, in witnessing the sell you learn everything. It’s the hunt — you’re in the middle of it. In the room you’re going to witness all the elements of the proposition — you’re going to feel it and see it. And if you’re smart, you walk away and you begin to learn the model that can win.”
P.S. In 2000, the firm had two employees.
In January, Norwalk-based Kayak handled over 100 million user requests for travel information. Through their web site and mobile apps, the firm processes flight, hotel, car and other travel searches.
Their 12 million downloads in January also made Kayak the #1 travel app.
Here’s a ridiculously honest (and detailed) slide deck in which founder Jason Goldberg chronicles his firm’s pivot. After seven months of online sales, the company has over 2 million members, 450,000 of which have signed up in the last month.
Want more? Here’s a tour of their cool offices on 38th Street in Manhattan.
This 2011 Norwalk-based startup is a cloud based Social CRM tool that solves “one of the last problems in business focused networking; how companies and government agencies are structured.” WikiOrgCharts provides access to anyone looking to learn about and share information about company organizational structures.
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