Companies
Curious Office currently has 9 companies in its portfolio. You can read about each of them here:
- Inkd
- Imagekind
- Shelfari (acquired by Amazon)
- CoolSpotters
- netConcepts
- Rouxbe
- SEOmoz
- Wishpot
- FeedDigest
Conceived in 2005, Curious Office was established in recognition of a new trend emerging in web development. Increasingly, small teams using emerging development frameworks, better tools and web services could deploy game changing new applications on small budgets and within extremely short periods of time. Around the same time, the term “Web 2.0″ became synonymous for this evolution and for the ever increasingly popularity of user-generated content that drove all manner of new social networks built on these applications.
Having developed companies themselves, Curious Officer Partners (Kelly Smith and Adrian Hanauer) observed that the traditional venture capital model was often not well suited to make seed stage investments of just a few hundred thousand dollars – an amount often requested by developers for early proofs of concept.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has since written a great piece which attempts to summarize some of the paradigm shifts that have taken place in technology over the last few years. He writes:
“When Brad and I sat down in mid 2003 to write a business plan for Union Square Ventures, we listed the trends we saw developing in the technology business. These are some of the big ones:
1 – commodization of the core infrastructure of the technology business
2 – community powered development environments – ie open source
3 – software delivered as a service over the internet
4 – a movement toward lightweight web services – ie web 2.0
5 – the globalization of technology development and consumption”
Curious Office was formed to provide seed stage investment as well as assistance in the following areas:
- Software development
- Graphic design
- Marketing
- Business plan development
- Subsequent fund raising assistance
Curious Office also incubated Imagekind internally with its own investment and development staff which was acquired by CafePress in 2008 and started development on a new initiative called Pressplane which was funded with $1.7 million in September 2008. Besides these companies, the founders have developed other businesses, raised millions of dollars, delivered countless business plan presentations and have endured all the same challenges that other entrepreneurs face while building their own companies. Working with Curious Office, you’ll find we try to help in a very three dimensional way. We help refine the story, we help prioritize all aspects of execution and we help with financing and partnerships.
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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
