Skype Co-Founders Raise $165 Million For New Fund—Short Of Initial Goal

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Skype Co-Founders Raise $165 Million For New Fund—Short Of Initial Goal

Skype cofounders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis have raised $165 million for their second venture fund which will mainly back European high growth tech startups. Zennström and Friis—who also started Kazaa and Joost—had initially aimed to raise $266 million for the fund a year ago but downplay the shortfall telling the Financial Times, “when we started we had a flexible number” and “we think we have exactly the right amount of money.”

Zennström and Friis started their investment comapny—Atomico Ventures—four years ago. Over the last year, it has backed several startups, including mobile gaming firm Zattikka, music service Rdio, and social games site Playfire.

In its announcement, Atomico loosely lays out the criteria for how it will use the new cash. Zennström: “We will seek to invest in exceptional entrepreneurs who are building exceptional businesses. We will target companies that we believe have the potential to generate significant growth, transform their industries, and deliver strong returns.”

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Joseph Tartakoff

@josephtartakoff Mar 21, 2010 11:05 PM ET

Photo: Corbis

Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital

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I agree with Mocorocker, Having 10M/mo for Nytime is just pinuts for them.equal low lever company have 70% of traffic of nytime.
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mocorocker

Yes, again, I would love to have the $2-3M for myself, no question :)

But I will insist that 10M/mo is nothing to be proud about for a company like NYT.com - unless we are in 2005.

Many 1) 'no name' 2) smaller and 3) off deck publishers have several times that much traffic. Now, NYT.com has a brand, great content and acceptable carrier placement and still they can't outperform these other guys?

That was my only point.

Peace
MR

Staci D. Kramer

$3 million here, $3 million there and soon you're talking real money. Seriously, you're right about how the growth is easy to achieve in those circumstances and certainly unattainable on a regular basis, it's the kind of boost you can get at the beginning. But it does have potential for NYT.

mocorocker

Not to rain on anyone's parade but putting things in perspective:

a) 600% growth is easy to achieve if the previous year your WAP site was pretty much non existent (I think it was only on 'VZW Today').

b) 10M/mo page views is close to nothing. It means, best case scenario, some $0.5M in revenue. Taking average unsold inventory and declining WAP CPM's this can be easily cut into half if not more (oh, and subtract to that carriers' share and unusable pages).

So, basically what we are looking at here is a $2-3M/ per YEAR business.

Of course I would love to have $3M for myself, but is this 'great' news for a company such as NYT.com? What can smaller publishers expect?

MR

Isaac Babbs

This is great!! The mobile web or the WAP is truly happening. This site is great because it built and run with mobile users in mind. I wonder how many uniques they are getting a month or sessions? Also, it would be interesting to know what the usatoday and espn mobile numbers are too. Moconews please ask them for these numbers.