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Google Ventures appears to have made its third investment, participating with San Francisco-based First Round Capital and angel investor Niel Robertson in an $800,000 first round for stealthy local firm VigLink Inc., according to regulatory documents.
The company, which lists a Boston address with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, “helps users make money from casual link sharing by creating monetizable affiliate links out of regular URLs,” according to a brief description it provided as a semifinalist in the 2009 MIT 100K business plan competition.
Founder and CEO Oliver Roup, formerly an associate at Founders Fund and a Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) product director, said that description is now “out of date” but declined to say anything further about the company’s current plans.
VigLink’s website, viglink.com, bears only the tag line, “Affiliate every link on the web,” and lists three positions for which the company is hiring: “consumer web, commerce and scale guru,” “browser, client and design wizard,” and “data extraction, mining and normalization genius.”
Roup declined to say whether the company would base operations at its Boston address.
A company filing, posted yesterday by the SEC, lists Google Ventures managing partner Rich Miner as a director of the company. First Round managing partner Josh Kopelman is also named in the document. Colorado-based Niel Robertson is the co-founder and former CTO of Boulder’s Service Metrics, which sold to Exodus Communications for $280 million in 1999.
Google Ventures’ two other known investments to date are a late-stage investment in smart grid company Silver Spring Networks, and an early-stage funding for Pixazza, an online image commercialization software company.
The venture arm of Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) launched in March, is reported to have $100 million in capital to invest.
Google’s Miner could not be reached for comment this morning.
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