it looks like that $10 million offer from Martin Shkreli to exclusively acquire Kanye West’s new album wasn’t even in the ballpark. Today Kanye has taken to Twitter to publicly plead with tech execs for investments as the artist delays the release of his much anticipated album “The Life of Pablo” and cites $53 million in personal debt.
Reports surfaced last week suggesting that Google was in talks to invest in secure messaging startup Symphony, and a new report out Monday morning (via Re/code) suggests that the company is about to announce $100 million in funding raised in a recent round from several investors including — as was reported — the Mountain View company…
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According to recent reports from both Re/code and The Wall Street Journal, Google is in the later stages of talks to invest in Symphony, a startup building a secure messaging platform. While the exact terms of the investment, including its value, have not been determined, WSJ’s report said that the deal will value Symphony at $650 million…
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Google Capital has led a $100M investment in Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company with strong government ties, reports the WSJ. Supporting investors include Rackspace, Accel and Warburg Pincus.
Its head of investigations, Shawn Henry, is the former top computer-crimes official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crowdstrike’s D.C.-based chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, has a long history of calling out foreign hacker groups.
Crowdstrike offers a remote monitoring service for its clients’ networks, aiming to detect hacking attempts at an early stage. Where hackers have already penetrated, the company works to identify the group responsible.
Google Capital was formed last year to provide funding for successful companies looking for growth. It sits alongside Google Ventures, which provides early-stage funding for startups. Google Capital partner Gene Frantz said that they were “blown away” by the company tripling its billings year-on-year.
“We were blown away by CrowdStrike’s incredible growth and impressive customer adoption,” said Gene Frantz, partner at Google Capital. “They have a truly unique SaaS-based endpoint security model, a highly scalable subscription revenue model, and a visionary technical approach that has huge potential to transform the industry, which is why we’re thrilled to make this investment.”
The details are very scarce at this point, but a fresh press release this morning reveals that Cyanogen has received a “strategic investment” from Foxconn, closing out its series C round of funding. While an exact number isn’t mentioned (in fact no details are really mentioned), the release does say that Cyanogen has raised a total of $110 million in funding to date, assumably including the amount that Foxconn has invested.
Cyanogen received $70 million in an investment round in January, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Some amount of that was from Microsoft, another company that Cyanogen calls its partner. Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s CEO, was quoted as saying that the company plans to “take Android away from Google,” and apparently Foxconn—like Microsoft—will happily support this venture.
Leading Consumer Electronics Manufacturer Invests in Cyanogen’s Open OS Vision
PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwired – May 12, 2015) – Cyanogen Inc. announced the strategic investment from Foxconn and closed out its series C round of funding. With offices in Palo Alto and Seattle, Cyanogen is leveraging the investment to accelerate talent hiring and the development of its open OS platform. The platform will create a more open, level playing field for 3rd party developers, enabling seamlessly integrated experiences within the operating system.
Foxconn is the leader of contract manufacturing and FIH Mobile is the leading end-to-end provider for world’s best known handset brands. Along with Cyanogen’s other investors, the strategic investment from Foxconn will help advance Cyanogen’s commercial adoption and growth in major markets around the world.
“We’re evolving Android and creating an open computing platform that will change the way consumers interact with their mobile devices,” said Kirt McMaster, CEO of Cyanogen Inc. “Foxconn and our diverse group of strategic investors and partners reflect the mobile value chain, from device manufacturers and mobile network operators to chipset makers and 3rd party developers. They see the great potential of what we’re doing in creating the next major paradigm shift in mobile computing.”
To date, Cyanogen has raised a total $110 million in funding. As the third leading mobile operating system, Cyanogen is known for its commercial operating system, Cyanogen OS, and open source community distribution CyanogenMod that the company backs.
About Cyanogen Inc.
Cyanogen is reimagining mobile computing, giving power to the people to customize their mobile device and content experiences. The CYANOGEN® operating system is built on Android and known for its revolutionary personalization features, intuitive interface, speed, improved battery life, and enhanced security. With a rapidly growing global user base and a vibrant community of developers, we’re intelligently connecting smartphone and tablet consumers to people, apps, and things they love. For more information, visit Cyanogen’s website, Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.
About FIH Mobile Ltd.
FIH (http://www.fihmb.com) is a vertically integrated manufacturing service provider for the mobile device industry worldwide. It provides a wide range of manufacturing services to its customers in connection with the production of mobile devices. Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited is the ultimate controlling shareholder of FIH (Hon Hai), and Hon Hai and its subsidiaries (as a group commonly known as the Foxconn Technology Group) is the leading global manufacturing service provider in the 3C (computer, communication and consumer electronics) industries.
Update: When reached for comment, Google pointed us to its Twitter account’s response (below), which it said is accurate. While it doesn’t directly address the reports, it does seem to hint Google is working on a Lyft-style ride-sharing app and that it doesn’t view it as a direct competitor to Uber. Following the original reports, Uber made its announcement official on its website.
[tweet https://twitter.com/google/status/562392039459807232 align=’center’]
Update 2: Google has reportedly told the Wall Street Journal that the app in question is a carpooling app created by one of its engineers for Google employees. It is said to be unrelated to Google’s self-driving car.
Uber, the app-based car service in which Google is an investor, is about to announce a new investment into building its own fleet of driverless vehicles, according to a report from TechCrunch. Although the specific details are unclear at this point, the report comes just as news breaks that Google is developing its own ride-sharing app that could be a possible competitor to Uber.
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According to a new report from The Information, Google is currently considering investing in SpaceX, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s privately funded company working to make advancements in space travel. Rather than SpaceX projects looking to enable low-cost space travel, Google’s potential investment, according to the report, would be to help “support the development of SpaceX satellites that could beam low-cost Internet around the globe to billions who don’t have it.”
Digg founder Kevin Rose was first hired by Google as a partner at Google Ventures in early 2012, and today we learned Rose is shaking up his involvement at the search company’s investment arm. As Fortune notes, Kevin Rose decided several months back to move from general partner to venture partner at Google Ventures, and today Rose shared that his role will shift to an advisory one.
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Chardan Capital Markets analyst Jay Srivatsa believes that a combination of two Google investment decisions could signal that the company is planning to take “a different direction” with Google Glass, reports StreetInsider.
Srivatsa noted that Google had decided against further investment in Himax, a company specialising in controllers for conventional head-mounted micro-displays, at the same time as investing in virtual reality startup Magic Leap …
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YouTube announced this evening in a blog post that, once again, it plans to start funding original content. Two years ago, YouTube announced plans to spend more than $100 million to get content creators to create YouTube channels on which to share videos. With that plan, they focused on bringing in outside entertainers. With this new push, however, YouTube says it will focus on helping the self-funded and self-published stars on the site grow.
After first announcing its new equity fund for growth-stage companies, Google is officially launching its “Google Capital” today with an announcement on its blog. Google says the fund will “focus on emerging, long-term technology trends” and the companies it’s invested in so far range from companies in the education space to personal loans and a survey platform. Google took some time to explain how Google Capital will differ from its Google Ventures investment arm:
Like our colleagues at Google Ventures, our goal is to invest in the most promising companies of tomorrow, with one important difference. While Google Ventures focuses mainly on early-stage investments, we’ll be looking to invest in companies solely as they hit their growth phase. That means finding companies that have already built a solid foundation and are really ready to expand their business in big ways. We’ll look across a range of industries for companies with new technologies and proven track records in their fields.
Google notes that the fund has already invested in a few companies including SurveyMonkey and Lending Club, as well as Renaissance Learning, which Bloomberg reports Google is putting around $40 million into.
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According to a report from AllThingsD, Google’s investment arm, Google Ventures, just invested around $250 million into Uber, the private car delivery service that lets users order vehicles through mobile apps. The investment comes as Uber raises $360 million at a valuation of around $3.5B:
Though pricey, the latest scramble to be in the Uber funding round was apparently very competitive. Sources said Google won the investment because of direct intervention by CEO Larry Page, who met with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
While it would be a bit stretch to guess what plans Google might have for Uber down the road, there are a few Google services in development that could benefit. Some have speculated that Uber could help power a future driverless car service from Google, but perhaps more realistic for the short term would be deliveries. Since last year Google has been testing a same-day delivery service in and around San Francisco, and it reportedly planned to use driverless cars to do so.
Google isn’t slowing down investing in new data center operations around the world. Back in January we heard that it is expanding its Berkley County data center in South Carolina with an additional $600 million investment bringing the project up to $1.2 billion total. Today, Associated Press reports that Google is set to invest $390 million in a new expansion of its European data center in Belgium.
Internet search giant Google says it is investing 300 million euros ($390 million) to expand its continental European data center. Google Inc. said Wednesday it will upgrade the facility in Belgium to meet growing demand for its online services
Back in October of last year Google opened its data center doors to all with a new project dubbed “Where the internet lives” that gives anyone a unique behind the scenes look at its facilities responsible for handling 20 billion web pages indexed per day, 3 billion daily searches, and free mail to 425 million Gmail users.
