Common Paradox Tech Blog

Autodesk, the developer of software design applications, has acquired PlanPlatform, a competing company. According to reports, Autodesk shelled out between $20-$30 million for the Israeli startup. Autodesk, a publicly traded company, provides software design applications for a variety of industries, including Architecture, Engineering, Media and Entertainment.

PlanPlatform, formerly known as Visual Tao, develops SaaS that provides engineers with two-dimensional and three-dimensional software drafting tools. The startup recently $4.3 million, with Sequoia Capital leading the round. Autodesk has acquired a number of companies, including Algor, SoftImage and 3D Geo.

Startup CloudShare, formerly known as IT Structures, has raised $10 million in series B financing from Sequoia Capital, Gemini Capital, and Charles River Ventures. This brings CloudShare’s total funding up to $16 million.

That amount of funding isn’t shabby for a company that has been in stealth for nearly two years. Cloudshare, which launched to the public, last week, has produced a service for demoing software in the cloud. Organizations can instantly deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing demos or training environments from CloudShare’s platform.

Service-now.com has raised $41M of a $66M funding round, the company disclosed in an SEC filing today. The company was founded by Fred Luddy in 2004 to provide on-demand Enterprise IT services and 2009 has been a boom year for the company. Service-now.com specializes in cloud-based Software as a Service (Saas) IT service management solutions. They cover everything from licensing compliance to the service desk all with a built in analytics system.

On July 21 of this year a company press release detailed some of the company’s accomplishments including: recurring revenue of more than $28 million, 105 percent growth in recurring revenue and a variety of accolades. We’re awaiting word from Service-now.com about the funding. In the meantime we can deduce that some of the funding is probably from Sequoia Capital.

Venture capitalists like to hire well known entrepreneurs and executives as “entrepreneurs in residence.” These are short term jobs, a place for someone to park themselves for up to a year or so after they’ve sold their company or otherwise have moved on. They sit in on pitch meetings, advise partners and portfolio companies, and plan their next move. And the VC generally, but not contractually, gets first dibs to invest in their next gig.

Sometimes people get creative with their titles - Jason Calacanis was called an Entrepreneur In Action during his stay at Sequoia Capital in 2006-2007, but his job was essentially the same.

Bessemer Venture Partners is expanding the idea further, and are adding what they’re calling a Designer In Residence. Jason Putorti, former lead designer at Mint (now a subsidiary of Intuit), is the guy they hired for the job.

Earlier today we wrote about Square, the new payment service cofounded by Jim McKelvey and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. We also interviewed Dorsey and used Square to buy a coffee.

We knew Square had closed a hyper-competitive venture round. What we didn’t know until recently was the size and valuation of that round. Square is valued at a massive $40 million or more after raising $10 million in funding, and the service is yet to launch publicly for anyone to use.

Khosla Ventures is taking most of the $10 million venture round, we’ve heard from multiple sources. This is Gideon Yu’s (former Facebook CFO) first investment since joining Khosla Ventures in August. Other investors are joining the round as well, and we’re now trying to confirm those individuals and funds.

The feeding frenzy around Square isn’t just because of its celebrity founder, say our sources. This is a bold foray into a huge, and complicated, market: physical payments. “What PayPal was to eBay, Square is to the real world,” said one person close to the company.

San Francisco based Eventbrite went prime time earlier this month when they raised $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital, and added partner Roelof Botha to their board of directors. We had a chance to sit down with Botha as well as founders Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz and talk to them about their business and the fundraising.

We were supposed to talk for just ten minutes, but the interview went on for a solid 25 minutes before we were done. Julia and Kevin talked about Eventbrite’s growth to ten million registered users based only on word of mouth advertising. The company lets people sell (or give away) tickets to events – something only the big venues could do previously through companies like TicketMaster.

The service is free for people who give away tickets, and they charge a small percentage on non-free sales. The free tickets spread the word to new users, who often come back to sell tickets to their own events. This year, Eventbrite will rack up $100 million in gross ticket sales, says the company. The average ticket price, not factoring in the free tickets, is $60.

Sequoia Capital has led a second round of funding for Outright, provider of a free and drop-dead simple online bookkeeping service, investing $5 million in the fledgling company together with returning backers First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures and SoftTech VC.

Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap) launched its online bookkeeping app in public beta earlier this year after raising $2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors and the VC firms that have now joined this second financing round alongside Sequoia.

It’s a big night for Bump Technologies, the mobile software startup that recently landed a round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company makes mobile apps that let users share their contact information (and other data) simply by tapping their phones together. Up until now the app has been available for the iPhone only, where it’s developed quite a following, and tonight it’s launching on Android as well. The iPhone is getting some love too, as Bump’s 1.2 update was just approved by Apple (you can grab it here).

The updated iPhone app includes a ‘Friend Compare’ feature that looks at the address book and Facebook profiles of you and the person you’re bumping with to see if you have any mutual friends, which can be a good way to break the ice if you’re meeting someone for the first time.

There appears to be a good old bidding war going on for another VoIP startup, Jajah, following yesterday’s news about the acquisition of Gizmo5 by Google, a source in Silicon Valley with knowledge of the talks informs us.

Details are scarce at the moment, but Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Telefónica Europe (O2) are said to be looking to buy the venture capital-backed company for a price ranging from $200M to $400M. We’re digging for more information.

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned a few weeks ago that the M&A spigot is now back on at the search giant, he wasn’t talking about a trickle. Today’s announced deal to by mobile ad startup AdMob for $750 million is Google’s largest acquisition since its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in March, 2008, and its third-largest ever after the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition in 2006.

Why such a big bet? Because Google is gunning hard to dominate mobile Web advertising and AdMob has an early foothold in the display side. By focusing on the needs of mobile app developers, AdMob has “built what is approaching a $100 million business in three years,” says Jim Goetz, the partner at Sequoia Capital who sits on AdMob’s board, referring to the annualized revenue run-rate of the company. Since AdMob splits its revenues 60/40 with publishers, that implies AdMob is on course to see $40 million of that $100 million gross. The company is also cash-flow positive, with 140 employees.