Twilio is part of a broader trend towards services and APIs catering directly to developers. At Redpoint, we believe in the power of the developer in both early stage companies and large enterprises. More and more, developers are making critical decisions regarding the nature of the products they are building. Like Redpoint’s earlier investments in Heroku and Stripe, Twilio is at the forefront of this movement, and we can’t wait to watch what they will continue to do.

At Redpoint, we like marketplace models a lot. If done right, there are natural network effects to marketplaces which provide barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantage and, with a little luck, winner-take-most dynamics in terms of market share (and ultimately, company value). The growing organic demand and high customer satisfaction levels that Scripted is enjoying gives us encouragement that we will see it in the content creation market as well. We’re thrilled to be in business with the Scripted co-founders Sunil Rajaraman and Ryan Buckley, and look forward to working together to scale the Scripted platform for content creation.

We love a solid team that delivers a solid service, and we love it even more when that team delivers a game changing product. Long gone are the days of multiple remotes with too many buttons, technology overload, and lost or hard to find entertainment. With Fan TV, Fanhattan is reinventing the TV watching experience with its entertainment discovery service and new set-top box and simplified remote.  

Education is being transformed globally with new online models. From graduate school programs to language instruction and now skills-based learning like Curious offers, all forms of education are now re-imagined online. Curious empowers teachers with a platform that makes it easy to build/monetize lessons and a rich experience for students to learn and socially interact with other learners.

We believe the Infer team is building a category defining SaaS company  that leverages data science to help businesses identify their most valuable potential customers. Infer is a customer intelligence platform built by crawling your own historical selling patterns and matching it with the vast swaths of data on your potential customers available across the web.

Today, Tastemade formally launched and we are thrilled to be part of their vision. We believe Tastemade represents the best of the new breed of Internet video networks, and will deliver exceptional content and services to consumers worldwide.  In the short 6 months they have been in business, Tastemade has 100 channel partners, 9 million monthly viewers, and 1300 hours of compelling content. We are excited to see what the team accomplishes next.

Congrats to Redpoint portfolio companies BlueKai and Datameer - both listed in the Fast Company Most Innovative Big Data companies round up.

Today, our Redpoint portfolio company, Bluefin Labs, is announcing its merger with Twitter.  When we invested in Bluefin about two and a half years ago, we bought into the vision of matching and measuring social response to TV viewing; and deriving insights into engagement and reactions to ads and programs.  A spinout out of the MIT Media Lab, Bluefin uses heavy data science to gain never before available understandings to reactions to TV by matching millions of people’s social postings, such as tweets, to actual programs and ads.  By doing so, Bluefin is able to create the world’s largest and first ad hoc, real time focus group.

Redpoint V -  a $400M early stage fund, has closed. We are looking forward to supporting more bold entrepreneurs with the fund as they create industry defining businesses. With Redpoint V, we now manage over $3.3 billion across our multiple funds, and will focus investment in emerging and new markets.  

Adap.tv announced the appointment of Timothy R. Morse to the newly created position of Chief Financial Officer. Morse joins Adap.tv from Yahoo!, where he held the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer positions from June 2009 to October 2012.  To date, Adap.tv has experienced record growth. In 2012, it was named by Inc. Magazine as the nation’s fastest-growing video advertising company in “Inc 500,” its annual ranking of private companies. Adap.tv added more than 200 new customers in 2012, including some of the world’s most recognizable agencies and publishers, such as VEVO and Horizon Media.

Starting next fall, 10 prominent universities, including Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern, will form a consortium called Semester Online, offering about 30 online courses. Semester Online will be operated through the educational platform 2U.

Redpoint Ventures is proud to announce our investment in Big Switch Networks. We have been looking at data center architectures and how they are changing for a while now, being first exposed to that through our investment in cloud.com in 2009. While selling private clouds, we realized how dramatically cost efficient compute could become - but at the same time we were constantly reminded of the limitations of storage and the limitations of the old networking architecture.

Redpoint portfolio company Stripe was recently featured on CNBC regarding their online payments platform.

Microsoft has acquired portfolio company StorSimple - bolstering its Cloud-integrated Storage strategy. We are proud of the StorSimple team - which has defined the frontier on how cloud can empower enterprise IT.

In July, Redpoint e.ventures closed its first Brazil fund at USD $130 million. With this fund, Redpoint e.ventures becomes the largest early-stage VC fund in Brazil, and the first Silicon Valley-affiliated fund dedicated to the region.

Redpoint participates in the recent Series C round for thredUP (we also funded their Series B). The company is seeing 7,000 new customers join every month, with a 46 percent retention rate.

Zendesk is one of those companies that has re-defined the SaaS landscape. Not only did it dramatically simplify a complex and old software category with a beautifully simple UI, it also embraced the emerging social media channels for providing customer service.

BranchOut has a simple goal: to make professional networking a deeper and more personal experience. Recently the team unveiled a new version of BranchOut as a significant step on their path toward achieving this goal.

Working with your friends is not always easy, but Satish Dharmaraj and Scott Dietzen have found a way to do it for the past 15 years. Part of their secret, they say, is checking their egos at the door and taking a holistic approach to the business.

Launched in 2012 and backed by Redpoint, Electric Imp is making it possible to connect anything to the Internet. The founding team includes former iPhone engineering manager Hugo Fiennes and former Gmail designer Kevin Fox.