Union Square Ventures
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2003 |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York, USA |
| Key people |
Fred Wilson, Managing Partner Brad Burnham, Managing Partner Albert Wenger, Partner John Buttrick, Partner Andy Weissman, Partner |
| Website | "http://www.usv.com/" |
Union Square Ventures (USV) is a New York-based venture capital firm that manages assets totaling $650 million as of January 2014[1] The firm is best known for its early investments in companies including Zynga, Twitter and Tumblr.[2] Additionally, the firm's founder, Fred Wilson, has acquired a celebrity status in the Tech world stemming in part to his blog AVC.com[3][4][5][6]
Firm
Union Square Ventures was originally founded in 2003 by Fred Wilson (a former partner of Flatiron Partners) and Brad Burnham (a former Executor in Residence with AT&T Ventures). The two men created USV with the intent of investing in and fostering the development of early stage companies.[7] Their investments are “mostly U.S.-based Internet and mobile companies considered to be ‘disruptive’”.[8]
In 2007, Albert Wenger, the former president of del.icio.us, joined the firm as a partner. The team was rounded out by the subsequent additions of John Buttrick and Betaworks founder Andy Weissman.
USV is one of a handful of firms that regularly included in Red Herring’s lists of top venture capital firms.[9]
In 2011, USV was deemed as being the best performing VC in the US based on investment return rate.[10]
Portfolio
Among USV’s notable early stage investments are:
- Behance[11]
- Boxee[12]
- Coinbase[13]
- CrowdRise[14]
- Del.icio.us[15]
- Disqus[16]
- DuckDuckGo
- Duolingo[17]
- Etsy[18]
- FeedBurner[19]
- Figure 1 [20]
- Flurry[21]
- Foursquare[22]
- Indeed[23]
- Kickstarter[24]
- Meetup[25]
- MongoDB[26]
- Tumblr[27]
- Twitter[28]
- Work Market[29]
- Yieldmo[30]
- Zynga[31]
References
- ↑ Union Square Ventures Site,"About Page" Jan 18, 2014
- ↑ Fortune Magazine,"Union Square Ventures Discloses New Fund Details and Maybe a New Partner" Dec 28, 2010
- ↑ Moz "Rise of the Celebrity Investor" Nov 07, 2010
- ↑ TechCrunch "The Top 20 VC Power Bloggers of 2010" Jan 19, 2011
- ↑ "TechStars""Fred Wilson Bio" Jan 18, 2014
- ↑ "Ad Age""NYC's Top VC Fred Wilson is Rich…and Grumpy" Apr 17, 2011
- ↑ "New York Times"A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms" Sept 22, 2008
- ↑ Wall Street Journal,"Union Square Ventures Rides Twitter and Tumblr Exits on Fundraising Trail" Nov 21, 2013
- ↑ Red Herring "Maximizing Venture Capital Investments" May 1, 2012
- ↑ Business Insider "It's Official: Union Square Ventures Is The Top VC in the World" April 9, 2011
- ↑ TechCrunch, "After 5 Years of Bootstrapping, Behance Nabs $6.5M From US, Jeff Bezos, Dave Morin & More" May 14, 2012.
- ↑ Variety, "Samsung Buys Internet Set-Top Startup Boxee" July 03, 2013.
- ↑ Business Insider, "Fred Wilson- Here’s Why I’m Investing in Bitcoin" May 09, 2013.
- ↑ Weiss, Geoff. "CrowdRise, Ed Norton's Charitable Social Network, Raises $23 Million". Entrepreneur Media, Inc. Retrieved 24 April 2014.
- ↑ Business Insider, "This Was The First Defining Investment We Ever Made" May 23, 2011.
- ↑ Shontell, Alyson (4 May 2011). "Disqus Raises A $10 Million Round And Closes In On 500 Million Monthly Uniques". Business Insider. Retrieved 1 October 2014.
- ↑ Forbes, "Duolingo Gets $15 Million To Translate The World’s Text Through Online Learning" Sept 17, 2012.
- ↑ PE Hub, "Etsy Raises $40M From Index, Union Square, Burda" May 09, 2012.
- ↑ Mark Evans Tech, "FeedBurner Taps Union Square" Feb 07 2006.
- ↑ The National Post, "How a Tweet Led to Toronto Medical Photo App Figure 1 Getting Backing from Union Square Ventures" Aug 26, 2014
- ↑ Gigaom, "Flurry Rides the Mobile Boom, Raises $25M with Eye Toward IPO" November 02, 2012.
- ↑ Business Insider, "Foursquare Raises $1.35 Million, Led By Union Square Ventures" Sept 04, 2009
- ↑ Business Insider, "Indeed, An Almost Entirely Bootstrapped Job Search Giant, Gets A Monster Exit" Sept 25, 2012.
- ↑ All Things D, "Kickstarter Fesses Up: The Crowdsourced Funding Startup Has Funding, Too" Mar 17, 2011.
- ↑ Venture Beat, "Meetup Raises Undislosed sum From Union Square Ventures" July 24, 2008.
- ↑ Bloomberg Business Week, "MongoDB Now King of NYC Startups With $1.2 Billion Valuation" Oct 04, 2013.
- ↑ CNN Money, ""How Much Did Tumblr’s VCs Really Make?" May 22, 2013.
- ↑ Bloomberg, "Union Square’s Early Twitter Bet Pays Off as IPO Nears" Oct 3, 2013
- ↑ Venture Beat, Square Ventures, Spark Capital Invest in Work Market," June 14, 2010.
- ↑ AllThingsD, "Google Ventures Bets on Mobile Ad Startup YieldMo"," December 5, 2013.
- ↑ Beta Beat, "Zynga’s IPO is a Fund Maker for Union Square Ventures" July 01, 2011.
External links
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