Tag Archives: VC deals

Looks like SpinVox is about to get a real run for the money, Nuance enters their niche

Everything leads us to the simple conclusion that Nuance is taking on SpinVox’s voice-to-text technology. It has always been interestingly enough to see how pouring big VC money into an idea, market niche, product or solution is always attracting some bigger player to try and exploit it. It seems the case with SpinVox today is pretty much the same. Nuance Communications, Inc., (the bigger player) announced today at CTIA Wireless 2008  the “Nuance Voicemail to Text” . Offered via wireless carriers, transcribed messages are sent to users as SMS or email messages. This news is hard not to connect to SpinVox’s massive round of funding that took place just a few weeks ago.

“Converting voicemail to text is a powerful and simple concept. But implementing a highly scalable semi-automated service is far more complex and requires highly accurate speech recognition – technology that takes decades to develop,” said Steve Chambers, president, mobile and consumer services division, Nuance. “The Nuance Voicemail to Text Service integrates speech technology with over 3,000 Nuance transcriptionists, hosted in a Nuance-owned facility, with proven security, scalability, and reliability.” 

Nuance’s telco-grade Voicemail to Text service delivers high-quality readable messages in minutes, giving you quick access to accurate transcriptions of your voicemail messages. Your entire voicemail message is transcribed and delivered directly to your mobile device. Users don’t have to worry about writing down or losing information while on-the-go. Messages can be saved, indexed in an archive and retrieved anytime, anywhere.

Nuance has revolutionized voicemail to text through high levels of automation. Nuance can deliver the world’s most accurate solution for turning speech into text with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the world’s leading proprietary speech recognition engine, backed by 400 patents worldwide and proven by millions of users over 10 years. Nuance’s own state-of-the-art speech technology is supported by 3,000 in-house transcriptionists, hosted in a Nuance-owned facility with “five nines” (99.999%) uptime and reliability.

While the early, direct to consumer model of voicemail to text services was needed for a proof-of-concept, Nuance is changing the model to bring speech-enabled services to the mobile consumer through carriers. Nuance hosts the Voicemail to Text for service providers, integrating it with any standard voicemail system. Callers simply leave a message on a voicemail system that’s Nuance-enabled, and the message is transcribed to text and sent back to the voicemail platform, which delivers it to users through different messaging mediums such as email or SMS.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NUAN) is a $3.8B market capitalization company that generates over $600M (2007) in revenues per year.

As just like some other technology blogs have already noticed and commented on, we also think all this looks like SpinVox is about to get a real run for the money to justify its huge valuation of $500M pre-money!

SpinVox, a London based voice-to-text technology has just recently raised $100M round of funding from a bunch of high-profile investors among which are Goldman Sachs, GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. Some of those venture capitalists have surely been seriously upset today.

The service can basically be described as a solution that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated. SpinVox’s software works simply by converting a voicemail message into text, which it then e-mails to a computer or sends via SMS to a phone. It removes the need to dial one’s voicemail, punch in a password and listen to messages.

More about Nuance

Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nuance) is a provider of speech-based solutions for businesses and consumers worldwide. The Company’s speech solutions are designed to transform the way people interact with information systems, mobile devices and services. Nuance offers businesses and consumers value-added speech, dictation and imaging solutions that facilitate the way people access, share, manage and use information in business and daily life. The Company provides speech solutions to enterprise speech, mobility, and healthcare dictation and transcription markets. Nuance markets and distributes its products indirectly through a global network of resellers, including system integrators, independent software vendors, value-added resellers, hardware vendors, telecommunications carriers and distributors, and directly through its sales force and through the Company’s e-commerce Website.

More about SpinVox

We launched in 2005 through The Carphone Warehouse, The Link and other retail channels. Pretty soon we had over 130,000 regular users, with an unprecedented customer retention rate of 80%. People who started speaking through SpinVox soon found they couldn’t live without it.

SpinVox has since won major industry awards from people like the GSM Association, Red Herring and Ernst & Young. No, we’re not boasting, we’re just pleased. In fact we’re amazed at how SpinVox is changing people’s lives.

At the heart of SpinVox is our patented Voice Message Conversion System™ (or VMCS to keep it simple). It underpins everything we do – our retail, enterprise, service provider and global carrier services. It’s maintained on an enterprise-class hardware infrastructure by an expert management team, to meet the rigorous demands of global carriers and their customers. Which means it just works, brilliantly.

From retail brands and direct customers, to global carriers and Web 2.0 brands, we are leading the way in converging voice and screens. SpinVox products are used on five continents, in five languages, with new carrier and technology partners joining us every month. SpinVox has 300 employees and offices in nine countries.

Some other competitors include Jott, Pinger, SimulScribe, among others.

More

http://www.nuance.com/
http://www.nuance.com/vm2text/
http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/
http://finance.google.com/finance?&q=NUAN
http://wirelessspeech.blogspot.com/2008/04/nuance-challenges-spinvox-in-voicemail.html
http://mashable.com/2008/04/01/nuance/
http://www.ctia.org/conventions_events/wireless/
https://web2innovations.com/money/2008/03/21/spinvox-raises-100m-at-a-whopping-500m-valuation/
http://www.spinvox.com/
http://blog.spinvox.com/
http://www.spinvox.com/spinvox-secures-over-100-million-in-new-funding-round..html
http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-voicemail-to-text-firm-spinvox-raises-100-million-500-million-valuation/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/20/spinvox-translates-voice-to-text-service-into-a-100-million-round/
http://mashable.com/2008/03/20/spinvox-funded/
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/03/19/it-looks-like-spinvox-has-raised-50m/
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUKN1932303420080319?rpc=44
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/13/your-phone-is-your-mic-spinvox-lets-users-talk-to-twitter-facebook-and-jaiku-europe-only/
http://www.spinvox.com/spinvox-targets-cambridge-for-speech-recognition-skills..html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Domecq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Domecq
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/spinvox

SpinVox raises $100M at a whopping $500M valuation

SpinVox, a London based voice-to-text technology is raising $100M round of funding from a bunch of high-profile investors among which are Goldman Sachs, GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. The service can basically be described as a solution that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated. SpinVox’s software works simply by converting a voicemail message into text, which it then e-mails to a computer or sends via SMS to a phone. It removes the need to dial one’s voicemail, punch in a password and listen to messages.

This brings the total money invested in the company so far to $200M and today’s round is said to have been done on $500M pre-money valuation. What is also interesting with the company is that the CEO, the 31-year-old Christina Domecq is from the famous liquor family Domecq from UK that was part of the international company Allied Domecq PLC that operated spirits, wine, and quick service restaurant businesses. Allied Domecq was the result of a 1994 merger between Allied Lyons and Pedro Domecq. Rumors go up to the point that SpinVox was planning on an IPO before, but today the company has said it has no immediate plans to go public or sell itself but is exploring all options.

SpinVox is said to have partnerships with 12 mobile carriers, mostly in Europe, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, and Virgin Mobile, but is barely presented on the US market.

The funds will be devoted to further building the global business of the UK-headquartered company that already operates on four continents.

“Closing this funding round is an exceptional achievement given the current state of the global financial markets,” says Christina Domecq, CEO and Co Founder of SpinVox. “We are delighted to have this group of institutional investors join the company. It clearly underlines the confidence these high-calibre investors have in SpinVox and the management team.”

The new round builds on previous investments made in the company by private equity investors such as Martin Hughes, Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse and Peter Wood, the founder of Direct Line, eSure and Sheila’s Wheels and institutional investors such as ABN Amro, Gartmore and Allen & Co.

“We built SpinVox to answer a real need in the marketplace and have now established a vast new market for voice-to-screen messaging which we continue to lead,” continues Christina. “One of the many reasons why people are getting so excited about SpinVox is that it is one of the few genuinely innovative companies to have emerged in the telecommunications arena in recent years. SpinVox is transforming core messaging for carriers world-wide and delivering new, recurring revenues from existing user behaviour.”

Goldman Sachs International acted as exclusive financial adviser to SpinVox on the transaction.

Most of the technology bloggers simply followed up on the PR materials being sent to them and have positively reviewed the service, but we think there is plenty of room for improvements and the reportedly $500M valuation for the company is hard to understand and justify.

However, the guys from Mashable have more critical look into the technology and have written that while the company is trying to make all the right moves, by opening up MySpace and Facebook applications, the core technology, “continues to fail hard.” We tend to agree with them.

Below are some transcripts from Mashable’s author when he attempted to get the service to accurately translate his voice to text:

What I said: “Ok, well, let’s see… What am I talking about? Oh! Actually I put a new article up on Mashable.com today. ”
What I said, SpinVoxed: “Ok well, see what I’m talking about oh actually put a new article of nashville.com(?) today.”

What I said: “It’s that YouTube or whatever may have helped them get there quicker, citing the new Apple UGC ad that came out as an example.”
What I Said, SpinVoxed: “It’s that a youtube or whatever may have helped them get their quick or setting the new apple UGC ad,…”

What I said: “It’s staying on and letting me talk and so I’m just gonna talk until this thing kicks me off.”
What I said, SpinVoxed: “It’s sticking on let me talk and so I’m just gonna talk into this thing puts me off.”

Mark Hopkins, an author at Mashable, has further said that he has spoken to folks far more familiar with the limitations of VTT (voice-to-text technology) technology that it just isn’t feasible with current standards of computing.

A guy that claims to work for the company has saidthe following. I work for SpinVox and have a window on the process. SpinVox employs a series of speech engines and the majority of our English conversions are automated. The Voice Message Conversion System is actually a “live learning” system that “knows what it doesn’t know”. When it encounters new language or ambient noise that confuses the automated process, it then asks a human to review that portion of the message in dispute. That person then converts the portion of the message in dispute and the complete conversion is then delivered. To date we’ve had about 4 million unique voices pass through the system which improves our ability to understand any voice.

Others, like Rob Abbott, are more favorable explaining that the value of indexable, searchable voice transcriptions is significant. Once integrated into an application like a mail client (Gmail, Mail, Outlook…etc.), the value is clear. The time spent transcribing important voice messages, interviews and conversations is cut by these services. While some services, like SimulScribe and SpinVox do send the audio to markets with cheap labor, the service isn’t always optimal or exact.

I am a current user, he says, of both services and it’s of enough value for me to become dependent on once my habits change. I get previews of my voice messages sent to my iPhone in SMS form, so I know who called and most importantly, why, without having to play the message (in a meeting).

Goldman Sachs is investing in the distributed service and in the technology, so SpinVox is widely integrated into applications which increase productivity, and so the quality of the transcription technology involves to an accurate service, whether it be by human or machine (or both).

Some competitors include Jott, Pinger, SimulScribe, among others.

More about SpinVox

We launched in 2005 through The Carphone Warehouse, The Link and other retail channels. Pretty soon we had over 130,000 regular users, with an unprecedented customer retention rate of 80%. People who started speaking through SpinVox soon found they couldn’t live without it.

SpinVox has since won major industry awards from people like the GSM Association, Red Herring and Ernst & Young. No, we’re not boasting, we’re just pleased. In fact we’re amazed at how SpinVox is changing people’s lives.

At the heart of SpinVox is our patented Voice Message Conversion System™ (or VMCS to keep it simple). It underpins everything we do – our retail, enterprise, service provider and global carrier services. It’s maintained on an enterprise-class hardware infrastructure by an expert management team, to meet the rigorous demands of global carriers and their customers. Which means it just works, brilliantly.

From retail brands and direct customers, to global carriers and Web 2.0 brands, we are leading the way in converging voice and screens. SpinVox products are used on five continents, in five languages, with new carrier and technology partners joining us every month.

SpinVox has 300 employees and offices in nine countries.

The management

  • Christina Domecq
    CEO and Co-founder
  • Daniel Doulton
    Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder
  • Andrew Cherry
    Chief Financial Officer
  • Tom Clear
    Chief Commercial Officer
  • Philip Marnick
    Chief Technology Officer
  • Rob Wheatley
    Chief Information Officer
  • James Scroggs
    VP Consumer Business

More

http://www.spinvox.com/
http://blog.spinvox.com/
http://www.spinvox.com/spinvox-secures-over-100-million-in-new-funding-round..html
http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-voicemail-to-text-firm-spinvox-raises-100-million-500-million-valuation/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/20/spinvox-translates-voice-to-text-service-into-a-100-million-round/
http://mashable.com/2008/03/20/spinvox-funded/
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/03/19/it-looks-like-spinvox-has-raised-50m/
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUKN1932303420080319?rpc=44
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/13/your-phone-is-your-mic-spinvox-lets-users-talk-to-twitter-facebook-and-jaiku-europe-only/
http://www.spinvox.com/spinvox-targets-cambridge-for-speech-recognition-skills..html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Domecq 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Domecq
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/spinvox

If your business is impacted by the weather WeatherBill might be a good solution for you

An interesting start-up that we have on our long list with funding deals here is under no doubt WeatherBill.

The San Francisco based WeatherBill started their service, which lets you cover your business from potential losses that might occur due to bad weather conditions, in early 2007 with a bunch of famous private and institutional investors among which are New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures, as well as a number of well known individuals: del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom (through his Atomico venture firm) and Howard Morgan (idealab and First Round Capital), Krishna Kolluri, Neil Rimer and Barney Schauble. The secretive investment firm Allen & Co., which has just helped Bebo sells for $850M to AOL, is among the investors in WeatherBill.

WeatherBill was founded by former Googlers David Friedberg and Siraj Khaliq.

In late 2007 WeatherBill took its series B round of funding in the $12.5M range, which brought the company’s total funding to date at $16.5M. By that time CEO David Friedberg said that Weatherbill has hundreds of customers and faces such high demand that it needs to bring more people aboard to increase capacity.

Essentially WeatherBill is a hybrid between ecommerce site and a complex weather forecasting algorithm to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses. WeatherBill offers custom weather contracts to protect businesses from financial loss caused by bad weather and provides tools to increase revenues through weather-related marketing promotions.

Users select a weather station via a Google Maps mash-up and choose the weather conditions they want to protect against. These options include temperature and precipitation level, and the specific parameters can be selected by the user.

WeatherBill hedges its own risk via its weather algorithm and partnership with a large hedge fund.

Aside US, WeatherBill offers its services to in the following countries too Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Norway.

WeatherBill contracts are legal financial instruments with eligibility requirements. It is meant for businesses and to be eligible you basically need to have 1) commodity pool – total assets exceeding $5,000,000; 2) corporation, partnership, proprietorship, organization, trust, or other entity that has total assets exceeding $10,000,000; or if it is an individual  – has a net worth exceeding $1,000,000.

Their financial risk partner, Nephila Capital Ltd., is one of the world’s largest and most respected weather risk and catastrophe reinsurance fund managers, with over $2 billion in capital.

More about WeatherBill

WeatherBill is the first service to provide affordable and easy-to-use weather coverage to protect revenue and control costs for the millions of businesses impacted by the weather.

WeatherBill coverage is safe and reliable. There is no unnecessary paperwork, no claims process, no proof-of-loss and no waiting for payment. WeatherBill is the only service that enables customers to customize, price and buy weather coverage online in just minutes, and pays automatically when bad weather occurs.

In addition to weather coverage, WeatherBill provides free services for businesses affected by the weather. Our free weather correlation tools help individual businesses understand how weather impacts their financial performance. Our research reports provide insight into the ways weather affects all industries. We believe every business should understand how the weather affects demand, yields, costs, schedules and the bottom line. WeatherBill can provide the earnings protection critical to every weather sensitive business.

Their Investors

WeatherBill’s investor group is a forward-thinking base of recongized and respected institutions and individuals from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
 
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is a leading venture capital firm. Practicing classic venture capital for 28 years, NEA focuses on investments at all stages of a company’s development, from seed-stage through IPO. With approximately $8.5 billion in committed capital, NEA’s experienced management team has invested in over 500 companies.

Index Ventures is a leading European venture capital firm active in technology venture investing since 1996. The firm is dedicated to helping top entrepreneurial teams both in the Life Science and Information Technology sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders.
 
Atomico was started by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, co-founders of Skype, Joost, and Kazaa. The firm is a risk capital group comprised of entrepreneurs with a global perspective who invest their own capital in passionate entrepreneurs with powerful ideas.

Nephila Capital Ltd. is a leading fund manager specializing in the reinsurance industry with multiple investment vehicles dedicated to investing in instruments such as insurance-linked securities, catastrophe bonds, insurance swaps, and weather derivatives. The company has been managing institutional assets in this space since it was founded in 1998, with over $2 billion under management at the start of 2007.

First Round Capital is an early stage venture capital firm managed by Joshua Kopelman, Chris Fralic, Rob Hayes and Howard Morgan. The firm looks to partner with entrepreneurs to build innovative technology companies.

Allen & Company
Allen & Company is a boutique investment bank based in New York. The firm has become a premier investment house in the media, entertainment, and technology industries.

Sean Park
Sean was most recently Head of Digital Markets and Credit Flow products at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW). He is also Director of Markit Group and International Index Company. Sean is a renowned thought-leader and speaker on the future of digital markets. He actively maintains his blog, Park Paradigm.

Salman Ullah
Salman is the Vice President of Corporate Development at Google. He joined Google in the fall of 2004 and manages the team that is responsible for all of Google’s acquisitions and minority investments. Prior to Google he spent over seven years at Microsoft in several roles including General Manager of Corporate Strategy and Managing Director of Corporate Development. Earlier in his career, Salman was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Co. in Chicago where he spent four years. He was also a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in physics at the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago. Salman has an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University.

Joshua Schachter
Joshua Schachter is the creator of del.icio.us, creator of geoURL and co-creator of Memepool. Joshua’s popular del.icio.us website helped to popularize the use of tags on the web. In 2005, del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo!, where Joshua currently remains. Prior to working full-time on del.icio.us, Joshua was a programmer in Morgan Stanley’s Equity Trading Lab.

Our other individual investors are notable leaders at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms.

More

http://www.weatherbill.com/
http://www.weatherbill.com/about/blog
https://www.weatherbill.com/tools
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/17/an-interesting-bet-weatherbill-takes-125-million-series-b/
http://atomicoinvestments.com/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/02/use-weatherbill-to-bet-on-the-weather/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/15/weatherbill-launches-announces-all-star-investors/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/weatherbill
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/david-friedberg
http://www.nephilacapital.com/
http://www.parkparadigm.com/
http://www.nea.com/
http://www.indexventures.com/

Peanut Labs closes its Series A round of funding

Yesterday we were tipped off that both LeapFrog Ventures and BV Capital have invested in San Francisco start-up called Peanut Labs. The funding is in the $3.2M range and is the company’s Series A round.

Peanut Labs helps social networks monetize, not through the traditional ad-based models, but via market researches and online surveys. The company also says that publishers — more than 70 found on social networks, applications and online communities like Facebook, MySpace, and members of Google’s OpenSocial — receive on average $20,000 per publisher a month.

CEO and Founder Murtaza Hussain isn’t new to the business. Peanut Labs developed their technology based on their own efforts to monetize Xuqa, the now-profitable social network in Turkey. By expanding this business model across several social networks, Peanut Labs proves that social networks and Facebook apps can create profitable revenue streams.

Peanut Labs is said to be profitable but no public information as to the revenues and profits is available, aside claiming profitability and seven figure revenues. The same is for the next year – Peanut Labs expects eight figure revenues in 2008. It can be anything between $1M and $9M and it could also mean anything between $10M and $99M respectively!?

The $3.2 million cash infusion will be used for continued product development towards Peanut Labs’ patent pending market research sampling technology, which is highly effective at reaching the sought after 13-25 year-old demographic known as Gen-Y.  The funding will also be used to actively service Peanut Labs’ burgeoning list of market research clients and enhance the survey-taking experience, a crucial part of Peanut Labs’ Sample3.0 technology.

“With surveys from the gaming, consumer products, entertainment, automotive and cellular industries, the demand for our uninhibited access to this taste-making demographic is exploding.  This round of funding will allow us to expand service to our active list of premier market research clients to give them the highest quality sample,” said Murtaza Hussain, chief executive officer and co-founder of Peanut Labs.  “We feel our business model proves that social networks have alternative ways to maintain profitability that yield revenue increases up to five times higher than with ineffective, ad-based models.”

Found across more than seventy social networks, Peanut Labs helps web publishers create revenue streams through market research surveys.  Each time a member of the social network completes a survey, the publisher earns a sum of money.

“Partnering with Peanut Labs has proven to be a most profitable way to monetize our Facebook applications,” said Josh Liptzin, CEO of Phase 2, Inc., a Peanut Labs publisher.  “There has been much talk surrounding the effectiveness of advertising as a means of revenue, but there is no question that Peanut Labs’ market research surveys are an excellent source of income and appealing to our users to enhance their overall experience.”

More about Peanut Labs

Peanut Labs is a rapidly growing provider of market research services backed by the investors of Skype, Yahoo eGroups and Del.icio.us. We provide access to hard-to-reach demographics for market researchers – and are the leading provider of Gen Y sample for market researchers today.
 
We have developed a research technology integrated across 70+ social networks and an online community that has demographically profiled, aggregated, and engages with millions of members each day. Our technology provides access to a recruitment audience of more than 27 million users.
 
Peanut Labs has partnered with many of the most popular MySpace, FaceBook and Google Open Social applications.

The company claims their network is able to reach more than 10 million users. Their platform enables publishers to better monetize their communities by allowing their users to participate in market research studies. On the other side their platform enables market researchers to gather high-quality data from Gen Y users by reaching them where they spend most of their time – on the Net. Because of their recruiting methods, their panel is free of professional survey takers. Peanut Labs enables access to hard-to-reach groups for the market research community.

Peanut Labs claims to have more than 70 sites participating in their network with total audience of 27M where the daily reach is said to be 4M. The site also claims to have 58 new sites applying to join the network monthly with only 10% of them being accepted.

The company also claims to be able to increase your revenues 3x – 5x more than what your are earning from advertising, which means 100,000 – $1 million in net profit for your organization in one year.

To be eligible, your site needs to have an Alexa ranking of 10,000 or better. At least 25% of your users must be from the US. You must have some way to communicate with individual, registered users (such as on-site messages or emails) on your site. And you need to have some type of incentive system (point, virtual items, community rankings, premium content, locked features etc).
 
Alexa ranking is seriously discredited so we do not understand why Peanut Labs is relying on Alexa to determine the real number of visitors a web site has.

The People

Murtaza Hussain, Chief Executive Officer Murtaza Hussain is the co-founder and CEO of Peanut Labs, provider of advanced market research services and developer of Sample3.0. In his role, Murtaza leads the company’s overall strategy and product direction. Murtaza has been instrumental in forming industry changing partnerships that bridge social media and online communities with the business application needs of the market research community.
 
In recent years, Murtaza has been heavily involved in the technologies supporting social media, and is has developed expertise in the practice of building online communities. Murtaza participates regularly as a speaker at industry events, including the Facebook Developer’s Conference, Widget Summit 2007, SNAP Summit, and Community Next.
 
He was most recently co-founder of XuQa.com, a leading online casual gaming community, which was built to 2M+ users and profitability. In 2001, Murtaza founded Gaming Ventura, an international entrepreneurship holding group which he has successfully been leading in his capacity as President for the previous 6 years.
 
Murtaza is a natural inventor and web developer, leading his team to three consecutive first-place finishes in the Intel International Schools Educational Olympiad from 1999-2001. He was the captain of Team Pakistan in the International Enterprise Olympics, where his team finished third globally. For two seasons, Murtaza also hosted a national youth TV show in Pakistan that boasted a viewership of more than 10 million.
 
He was pursuing a Bachelors of Arts in Anthropology at Williams College, MA prior to leaving academia to start the company.

Other members of the management include Ali Moiz, Prosper Nwankpa, Sean Case, M. Noman Ali and Lisa Duryea.  Board of Directors include Murtaza Hussain, Prosper Nwankpa, Thomas Gieselmann, Pete Sinclair and Simon Chadwick.

Investors

BV Capital
Silicon Valley and European based BV Capital invests in new opportunities and innovations in the internet space. BV Capital’s portfolio includes companies that are significantly changing the landscape of business and communication today including Angie’s List, Cranite, and shopping.com (eBay).
LeapFrog Ventures
Enablers of great ideas, LeapFrog Ventures has invested in companies that are well positioned for high growth. Known for their commitment to excellence, LeapFrog has had a selective portfolio companies including Octel, Symantec, Intrisa, Striva Software and Netli.

The company has also been named one of 50 “Companies to Watch in 2008” by the Dow Jones VentureOne Summit advisory board.

Similar companies include AdFish, PollDaddy.com, Constantcontact.com/survey, surveyclub.com and BoxTticker.com, among others. 

More

http://www.peanutlabs.com
http://www.peanutlabs.com/peanutlabs/files/documents/PeanutLabs_Sample3.pdf
http://ventureonesummit.dowjones.com/
http://en.oreilly.com/gspwest2008/public/schedule/speaker/2026
http://www.pehub.com/article/articledetail.php?articlepostid=10405
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/gen/company.html?gcode=74717C66139341F49A7F47D27A548B82
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2008/02/18/daily6.html
http://www.leapfrogventures.com
http://www.bvcapital.com/