• Market Force Information

  Participated · Equity · Sep 2011

  Market Force Information is a Louisville, CO-based customer intelligence solutions company led by CEO Karl Maier. It provides multi-location businesses — including major retailers, restaurants, grocery and convenience stores, financial institutions, entertainment studios and consumer packaged goods companies — with a suite of customer intelligence services supported by 600,000 field associates across North America and Europe. Services include mystery shopping, merchandising and retail auditing, real customer surveys and proprietary decision-support tools. The company secured $15M in combined debt and equity financing and is using the funds to grow organically and through acquisitions, bring new products to market and expand its global client roster. Recent acquisitions cited by the company include Retail Eyes in the UK and Continental Europe and Tell Us About Us in Winnipeg (acquired in March 2011).

• ExteNet Systems

  Participated · Equity · Jan 2010

  ExteNet Systems designs, builds and operates fiber network infrastructure that is widely implemented by wireless service providers. Its networks enable providers to expand coverage into hard-to-reach spots. The company is Chicago-based and focuses on deploying infrastructure to support wireless coverage expansion. ExteNet has raised funding from strategic and venture investors to support its build-out activities. Its new financing will support further development of infrastructure for wireless service providers. The company’s total funding now exceeds $150 million.

• VDURA

  Participated · Equity · Jul 2008

  Panasas delivers high-performance computing (HPC) data storage solutions and recently launched ActiveStor Ultra and PanFS 8, a new generation of its ActiveStor storage running on industry-standard commodity hardware. ActiveStor Ultra is a scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) appliance designed for extreme performance and scalable configurations. The platform targets workloads that process large, complex data sets, including climate modeling, computer-aided engineering simulation and analysis, energy exploration, precision medicine, and emerging AI and autonomous driving workloads. The company intends to use the new investment for ongoing technology and product development, expansion into new markets, and exploration of OEM relationships. Leadership cited in the article includes Faye Pairman (president and CEO) and Elliot Carpenter (CFO). Panasas, located in Sunnyvale, CA, provides hybrid scale-out NAS appliances (ActiveStor) optimized for demanding big data workloads. Its ActiveStor solutions leverage the patented PanFS storage operating system and are now in their fifth generation. Products are positioned to deliver high performance, reliability, and easy management across sectors including bioscience, energy, finance, government, media, manufacturing, and research universities. The company reports ActiveStor has been deployed in more than fifty countries worldwide. Panasas recently secured a $10 million working capital line of credit from Avidbank Corporate Finance to support execution on growth opportunities in scale-out storage. Company executives highlighted the tailored, flexible credit solution and a positive financial partnership with Avidbank. Panasas develops a parallel file system and ActiveStor appliance line designed to deliver high-bandwidth storage performance for simulations, modeling, oil & gas exploration, and product design. Its architecture provides parallel access to files—avoiding bottlenecks of serial NFS systems—and resembles unified memory approaches used in supercomputing. The company sells through major resellers including SGI and Dell and competes with NetApp, EMC, Sun, and IBM in the parallel storage market. Panasas was founded in 1999 by Garth Gibson (currently CTO), shipped first products in 2003, and is on its third-generation ActiveStor hardware. Products can store up to 200 terabytes per rack and support up to 100 petabytes in a single file system. The company is expanding its market for parallel storage systems and recently raised new funding to support that effort. Panasas is a data storage systems company based in Fremont, California. ORIX Venture Finance loaned Panasas $10 million in debt, according to VentureWire. Since 2000, Panasas has raised nearly $75 million. Past investors include Centennial Ventures, Intel Capital, Novak Biddle Venture Partners and the Carlyle Group. The financing was reported by VentureWire and the item was originally published 5/23.

• Slacker

  Participated · Equity · Jun 2007

  Slacker operates a "personal radio" streaming service with mobile apps across BlackBerry, iOS, Android, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile/Phone 7. The service is available in the United States and Canada and the company holds licensing agreements with all major labels. Slacker offers a premium subscription tier (about $4.99/month or $3.99/month on an annual plan) that enables unlimited skips, station caching, and no ads. The company positions itself as a rival to Pandora and says it will soon debut a true music-on-demand service similar to MOG, Rhapsody and Rdio. Slacker has indicated plans to leverage mobile and automotive relationships and to partner with car makers to equip vehicles with its service. Slacker is a popular internet radio provider and maker of a customizable radio-listening device, based in San Diego, Calif. Its core hardware product is the Slacker G2, a $199 portable player that plays unlimited music from Slacker radio stations and can be preloaded with a user’s selected stations. The device lets users enter an artist name to hear similar music and mirrors Slacker’s online radio selection. Slacker also offers applications for BlackBerry and iPhone to deliver the same stations and capabilities. The company has raised $9.6 million toward a hoped-for $10.2 million third round and has raised about $65 million in total to date. It brought in roughly $5 million at the end of last year. The company has not disclosed the investors in the recent round. Slacker operates a three-prong music service and has released two of the three components: a web player and a desktop player. The company plans a WiFi portable music player and a satellite car kit as the remaining product pieces. It recently raised a substantial financing to accelerate product development and manufacturing for those devices. The article frames Slacker as taking on incumbents like Last.fm and iTunes and compares Last.fm’s earlier $5M raise and $280M sale to CBS. The additional capital is intended to fund growth and build out the hardware components still to come. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the coverage. Slacker launched a web-based music player that customizes stations based on likes and dislikes, similar to Pandora, and the basic service is free and ad-supported. The company offers a $7.50/month paid tier that saves favorited songs to users' computers and removes ads. Slacker plans PC-based software that will organize local music and play the same stations as the web player. The company also intends to ship a Wi‑Fi portable device with a large color screen that caches songs for offline play, priced between $150 and $300 depending on storage. Additionally, Slacker is developing a satellite car kit to provide in-car access. The founding team includes former music startup CEOs Dennis Mudd, Jim Cady, and Jonathan Sasse, and the company is based in San Diego.

No current team members are available.