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Thursday, September 9, 2010
New investors Project 11, HackerAngels add seed funds to Locately
By Galen Moore
UMass President Jack Wilson on Entrepreneurship
How Massachusetts is landing stimulus funding
Two new seed investors on the Boston scene have made their first investment: Micro-VC Project 11 Ventures and angel group HackerAngels put $300,000 of seed money into Cadio Inc., a location-based marketing analytics venture that is also a finalist for a $100,000 prize in the MassChallenge startup competition.
Mass High Tech profiled HackerAngels in June. Project 11, launched by former Microsoft Corp. R&D leaders Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant in April, is still on its way to raising a planned $5 million first fund, but the two co-founders are already investing, Sturtevant said.
Cadio, which does business as Locately, provides location-based analytics to large retail customers interested in tracking users’ shopping habits. Users agree to share the information in return for special offers from Locately. The firm, which has written a white paper on mobile analytics, is one of several new startups skipping the check-in procedure preferred by games-based location plays like Foursquare and Gowalla. Some of them were profiled last week in Mass High Tech.
Sturtevant described Cadio as “three very technical guys that have managed to figure out also how to sell.” He said the company, which has revenue, will use the funds to make their product more packaged, and less custom. The company announced the funding today in a press release.
Originally conceived as an accelerator for startups, Project 11 will not offer shared space for startups in the coworking incubator approach favored by more well-known ventures, like TechStars and Y-Combinator, Sturtevant said. Instead, the new firm plans to host sessions for portfolio companies – from public events like speaker series, to more intimate workshops and one-on-one coaching – based on a set of startup tools Sturtevant and Rae developed at Microsoft and, in Sturtevant’s case, earlier on at the Idealab startup incubator.
“Katie and I have developed a certain set of techniques that are used when doing rapid product design, working with a business model or a go-to-market strategy,” Sturtevant said. “We’ve got a toolkit that makes it easy for us in an efficient way to help a team work through some of the issues you encounter over and over again.”
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