Highest funded US Startups from 2006 to 2008

http://revotra.com/2008/10/highest-funded-startups-from-2006-to.html

by prakash • 18 years ago

43 32 18 years ago

vaksel3• 18 years ago

Out of those 161, I've only heard of 32. Out of those 32, I only use 3 more than once

Sam_Odio• 18 years ago

You'd be surprised. You probably use several of these startups without even realizing it. For example, CDNetworks is a large content delivery network. And if you've ever stumbled across those annoying parked domains you've probably availed yourself to OverSee's services.

markessien• 18 years ago

On reading your comment, I'm sure the VCs of the none-32 are kicking themselves at making such bad investments.

Eliezer• 18 years ago

I bet that the companies on this list that actually make good-old-fashioned material things, like Nanosolar, pay off triple the average return of the Net startups.

axod• 18 years ago

I'm not sure solar has really taken off big time yet has it? Surely there is a massive investment into research+design before any return is seen?

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

Solar is pretty much in the process of taking off.

The world market grew by 62% year over year last year.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/Marketbuzz2008-intro.htm

nostrademons4• 18 years ago

I'm really tempted to take that bet...

The virtue of web startups is that marginal costs are effectively zero. So once you've paid off your fixed costs (i.e. have basically any revenue model that actually works), you're profitable. If something like FaceBook, with $150M in revenues, is not profitable, it's usually because they're empire builders and hire many more people than they actually need to keep the site going. That's easily fixed by laying off people.

Solar companies, in addition to having large R&D costs, also have large variable costs. And they're competing against fairly low-cost alternatives, like oil and natural gas. To be profitable, their variable costs need to undercut oil prices, and they need to have enough left over to pay for R&D, overhead, and cost of capital.

"Make something people want" is only a golden rule of startup success in software. For everything else, it's "Make something people want, cheaply".

potatolicious2• 18 years ago

Web startups have costs that are far from zero - as your example mentions, Facebook is not profitable because they retain too many people - but it is precisely their large work force that maintains their competitive lead in the social networking sphere. If they pared down their headcount to merely "sustain the server farms and fix bugs" size the company would disappear very quickly, having been out-done by someone else.

They're not empire building, they're doing what they need to survive.

The lack of costs on the web is precisely why web startups have some of the highest costs of all. Hosting is cheap, bandwidth is almost free. The only way Facebook avoids being out-done by two college kids in a garage is because they have big money backing them, and are building out like mad.

On the flip side, traditional startups sell something that is of intrinsic worth. Most web apps have very little intrinsic worth, and is easy substituted - they have no patent-protected edge over the competition, and the COST of cloning an innovative feature is FAR less than the cost to reverse-engineer an ingenious new solar panel.

hugh• 18 years ago

A well-timed reminder of something that a lot of people here seem to forget: not all startups are frivolous webapps.

Some of the interesting ones:

Nanosolar: High-efficiency solar cells

Gridpoint: Something to do with power grid management

Plastic logic: Flexible displays

eSolar: Solar thermal power

HelioVolt: More solar cells!

SulfurCell: More solar cells!

GodTube: Christian Videos. Seriously, this one sounds like a joke, but it exists and somebody gave it $30 million.

Fisker: Electric cars.

Admittedly a rather high percentage are still web-based software of some kind. And an awfully large percentage of those remaining are related to energy.

Another interesting (if worrying) trend: I couldn't find any biotech on the list at all (there might be a few, I didn't look at everything but I checked the names for bio-sounding things).

vaksel3• 18 years ago

godtube is funny, its kinda like conservapedia. Its a good business decision for the guys who did it, because they cash in on rightwing ignorance, who think youtube/wiki produces all its content and spin it with liberal bias.

Its the same people who think blogspot needs to be sued because someone made an offensive post on one of their accounts

fallentimes4• 18 years ago

If you ever want a laugh, read conservapedia's terms of use.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

If you believe that viewing certain things is wrong, then pre-filtered content is of value to you. Does Godtube particularly cater to "ignorance"?

Now, Conservapedia is ridiculous, but the only people I've seen take it seriously are liberals in search of a caricature to attack.

incomethax• 18 years ago

It seems as though this list is more accurately a list of web and energy startups, as there are companies that have raised money between 2006 and 2008 that is greater than 25 Million. Pacific Biosciences for example has raised ~$100 Million

(http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/fast-gene-sequencing-in-tw...)

It seems to me as though the list is not of the companies that raised the most money in the past two years, but rather the a list of companies that raised the most money that TC follows.

toby• 18 years ago

That's because this list is incomplete. This guy appears to have just gone through crunchbase and made a list of companies, sorted by the size of their latest funding round.

I know of several startup biotech companies that have been funded recently. None of their executives blog or twitter, however.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

Nanosolar actually makes low-cost printed solar cells.

teej• 18 years ago

How is Slide so low on the list? Their public $50M was a SECOND round of funding.

dmix2• 18 years ago

I went through most of them and I found Plastic Logic the most interesting. They have a very thin "epaper" coming out next year that looks like it has potential to be a great disruptive product.

CNN seems to like it too, http://www.plasticlogic.com/

noor420• 18 years ago

Also interesting and related :

a) Sony's "Flexible Full Color Paper Screen"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6bkmPjVF-k&feature=relat...

b) Readius's "Polymervision 3GSM e-paper"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_m36Gr4jzM&feature=relat...

dawie• 18 years ago

I would like to see a list of the LOWEST funded US Startups from 2006 to 2008.

cellis• 18 years ago

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

nostrademons4• 18 years ago