The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · Dec 2010

Prima Cinema installs a proprietary Prima box in customers' homes to enable downloading and private screening of first‑run films. The company charges $20,500 for the initial installation/first movie and $500 for subsequent titles. Founder Jason Pang is leading the effort to broaden access to early releases beyond entertainment‑industry elites. Prima secured capital to support deployment and commercialization of the service. The company received $5 million in funding from the venture arms of Best Buy and Universal. Reporting notes Prima's pitch to wealthy consumers and its aim to generate revenue for studios by monetizing early home screenings.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2010

Viewdle has built a patented facial recognition system that automatically identifies faces in videos and photos across mobile phones, computers and in the cloud. The technology is the result of over fifteen years of research and three years of commercial productization. Its platform performs real-time, cross-platform visual analysis at the point of capture. The company plans to use new financing to launch consumer products in the coming months. Viewdle has earned early industry recognition, winning startup competitions such as Plugg and Le Web. The articles do not disclose revenue or user metrics. Viewdle builds facial-recognition technology for video, providing tools to index and identify people in video archives. Its platform is used by Reuters to index people in that organization’s video archives. The company has entered a partnership with ROO, a KIT Capital portfolio company focused on IPTV broadcasting, granting ROO full and exclusive access to Viewdle’s white-label technology. Both companies will also work together to promote each other’s services. Viewdle presented at the TechCrunch40 conference. The company has received an unspecified amount of funding from KIT Capital as part of this deal.

Participated · Series D · Mar 2010

SiBEAM designs millimeter-wave (60 GHz) chipsets that enable lossless, high-speed wireless transfer of HD video within rooms, with current speeds above 10 Gbps and theoretical throughput up to 28 Gbps. Its chips have been shipped in add-on devices and integrated inside TVs, and the company is launching a second-generation chipset later this year. SiBEAM is a founding member of the WirelessHD consortium, which includes about 50 consumer electronics companies. The chips are optimized for short-range, line-of-sight use (roughly 10 meters) and do not reliably transmit through walls. Customers named in the article include Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Geven, Monster, LG Electronics, Best Buy, and Vizio (which will ship TVs with SiBEAM chips this summer). The company employs about 80 people and aims to reach profitability with the new financing round.