August « 2010 « Fluidinfo

August 23, 2010

Fluidinfo receives an additional $170K in Series A second closing

Filed under: Progress — Terry Jones @ 12:00 pm

We’re happy to announce a second closing of Fluidinfo‘s Series A investment round. We’ve raised another $170K, taking the round to just under $1M in total. Some of the people investing in the second closing are:

Michael Parekh: A Wall Streeter for over 20 years and former partner at Goldman Sachs, Michael founded and helped to build the Internet Research effort at the firm (twitter, more info).

Esther Dyson: who seed funded Fluidinfo in late 2007, and who’s been a huge source of help ever since (and before). We’re thrilled to have her following on in this round (twitter, more info).

David Snow: the Editor in Chief of PEI Media. David also participated in the seed funding of Fluidinfo (twitter, more info).

Ted Carroll and Earl Macomber: who were both also seed-stage backers of Fluidinfo. Ted and Earl are the managing principals of traditional information and media focused private equity firm Noson Lawen Partners, and have again made personal investments (twitter, more info).

Ed Carroll: who was also a seed stage Fluidinfo investor. Ed is now entering his senior year in high school and hopes to attend USC next year as a freshman at The Marshall School. Ed spent a month at Marshall this summer and walked away with Top Five honors in their Entrepreneurialism program. Good luck Ed!

There are three other new investors who also came into the round, but who prefer not to be mentioned publicly at this stage (so you’ll have to ask us about them privately :-)). The above all join Betaworks, IA Ventures, RRE Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Chris Dixon & Founder Collective, Joshua Schacter, Andrew Rasiej, Ross Williams, and Esther Speight as Fluidinfo Series A investors.

Our thanks to everyone!

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August 10, 2010

Tim O’Reilly joins the Fluidinfo advisory board

Filed under: Awesomeness,Happiness — Terry Jones @ 7:42 pm

Tim O'Reilly - out standing in his field

The wild rumors are all true. Tim O’Reilly has joined the Fluidinfo advisory board!

I’m an unabashed fan of Tim, his company, and everyone I’ve ever met who works at or has worked at O’Reilly (especially Sara Winge). I’ve been talking to Tim on and off about FluidDB since March of 2007 after being introduced by Esther Dyson. Tim would blog about something, and I’d email him and say “FluidDB will be able to do that” or (more recently) “FluidDB can do that.” When we first met, we spent 90 minutes together and I showed him a demo of a few things. He drilled down hard in the first 2 minutes: “Tell me what’s different about it.” So I went for it. When the meeting was over, Tim left the room and went to the elevator to leave. I was packing up my stuff when suddenly he was back, wanting to ask and suggest more. He came back to the room four times, lastly to get my phone number 🙂

Since then, Tim has been extremely generous, introducing us to many great people. You can see who very easily in the graph of introductions I put together over the years as I talked to people about FluidDB. He made the introduction that led through Gerry Campbell to John Borthwick and Andy Weissman at Betaworks who led the Fluidinfo investment. Tim invited me to the Social Graph Foo camp in 2008, to a Science Foo camp, and to two general Foo camps, and he’s been helping me in the (ongoing) attempt to get a US visa.

It’s a personal thrill to have Tim formally involved with Fluidinfo. During years working on what at times seemed like the dark side of the tech moon in Barcelona, to have had Tim and Esther (and others!) behind us along the way has been wonderful. I often feel I want us to succeed as much for them as for anyone else.

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