Imagekind raises $2.6 million
Well it’s finally official. Imagekind closes its $2.6 million Series A. As was reported in the Seattle PI, we took a rather unorthodox approach to this fundraising. Specifically, we started out thinking we weren’t going to raise any money at all. We managed to build the initial platform very quickly and without a large cash infusion. When people started calling and we could see that there was external interest we began to think very hard about our long term strategy and what we thought we needed in terms of partners and finances to really take the company to the next level. It was easy to see how venture funding could help us accelerate our growth plans.
On the other hand, I’d raised money before in a previous venture and I knew how time consuming and distracting fundraising can be. Just hitting our product milestones left little room for sleep and recreation. The usual program involves spending hundreds of hours toiling over an executive summary and a powerpoint deck and then scheduling meetings and giving pitches. Lots of pitches. Most of them don’t go anywhere. And while you’re out of the office your team is doing the best they can to move forward without your help and guidance.
This time, I decided to take an entirely different (and risky) approach. All those hours refining powerpoint decks, setting up meetings and re-explaining our business were to go into the product. The good news was that I knew something that wasn’t entirely clear to me five years ago. Venture capitalists are out there pro actively looking for good products and good teams to invest in! Imagine that. So we kept our heads down and kept developing. We kept refining. We kept perfecting. And our membership and revenue started to grow accordingly. People started writing nice things about us in their blogs. A little bit of buzz started to build.
And then one day the phone rang. An interested investor! Then the phone rang again. Since we weren’t interested in raising that much money it wasn’t long before there were more phone calls than there were dollars remaining to be raised. At this point it became an issue of choosing the right investors that could really add value to our organization. We wanted people who understood our business very well and the challenges we were to face. We wanted people who had global (international) experience because we believed from the beginning that we could find advantage in markets outside North America.
Focusing on the product wound up being the right decision for us. However, the investors made it very clear that while they loved how much adoration we receive from our membership base, the investment was still about the team. The investment is about YOU. They needed to know that myself and the team were the right strike force for this task. There is a lot of looking each other directly in the eye…trying to understand one another. There’s a lot of personal questions like “why are doing really doing this?” Or, “what is it that you want out of this?”
At the end of the day our decision came down to the people. We really liked the people. Holtzbrinck made a positive impression on us and vice versa.
Other investors included:
· Crosslink Capital, investors in TiVo, Omniture and Pandora
· Erik Blachford, former CEO of Expedia
· Tom Hughes, the co-founder of Photodisc (now Getty Images)
· Samwer-Brothers, the founders of eBay Germany, MyPhotobook
· Nick Hanuaer, Founder and Chairman of aQuantive, and Second Ave Partners
· Bill Trimarko, President of Larsen-Juhl, largest framing manufacturer
Imagekind gets to party with Flickr
Flickr is having their 3rd birthday party and Imagekind gets to play along!
Saturday March 3, 6-9 pm in San Francisco.
They’ll be announcing the venue shortly via our upcoming.org event listing. We hope you can join us.
As part of this year’s celebration, we’re hosting a benefit auction with proceeds going to charity (more to come). 20 photos selected by Team Flickr will be printed, matted and framed by ImageKind who are graciously donating the services. If you’d like to submit your photograph for consideration, you can do so via oFlickr 333 group. They are accepting submissions until 5pm PST February 16th.
Online photo editing
TechCrunch did a nice summary of online photo processing sites. I’ve met the Seattle based Picnik team once before and I have to say that this is a classic case of flawless execution. So much thought went into the detail here and that’s what separates this project from so many other attempts at online imaging.
No doubt there will be many questions about the business model but finding customers or potential suitors is always so much easier when you do a world-class job on the details.
This is an early release and there are no doubt many more features to come but already I can say that this is one of the best flash aps I’ve yet seen.
Want to see another amazing flash app? Check out http://www.imagevuex.com/
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Curious Office Companies
Inkd
Inkd is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We are developing the World's First Market for Original Print Design.
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CafePress
Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic. -
Imagekind
Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists. -
SEOmoz.org
Curious Office invested in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners in 2007. SEOmoz serves as one of the largest online hubs for search marketers worldwide by providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help make every SEO the best they can be. -
Shelfari
Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers -
Fanzter
Fanzter is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut and are the creators of the wildly popular celebrity style and entertainment platform Coolspotters.com, which launched in May 2008. Fanzter secured $2 Million In Series B Funding Led By Steamboat Ventures in March 2009. -
Wishpot
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netConcepts
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Rouxbe
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RocketVox
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FeedDigest
