| Website | betaworks.com |
| Blog | blog.betaworks.com |
| @betaworks | |
| Category | Other |
| Phone | 646.839.8575 |
| info@betaworks.com | |
| Employees | 10 |
| Founded | 1/07 |
| Description | Business Accelerator |
| Total | $500k |
| Instapaper, 4/13 | |
| Digg, 7/12 | $500k |
| Vibe, 2/12 |
| TOTAL | $27.5M |
| FUNDING TOTAL | $27.5M |
| Series A, 1/08 RRE Ventures Ron Conway White Star Capital SV Angel | $7.5M |
| Series B, 3/10 RRE Ventures Intel Capital DFJ Growth AOL Ventures SoftBank Capital Lerer Ventures Founder Collective Joshua Stylman Peter Hershberg Howard Lindzon Pilot Group New York Times Gordon Crovitz | $20M |
Founded in 2008, betaworks is a company of builders. A tightly linked network of ideas, people, capital, products and data brought together in imaginative ways to build out a more connected world. At first glance we seem to do many things. But first and foremost, we’re builders, seeking to create a more sustainable innovation model. The more we build, the more we learn, the more we get ideas for peripheral things, all related, connected – in a loosely coupled network of products and companies.
betaworks is structured as a company– a single company that owns larger pieces of the things it has built and smaller pieces of the things it has invested in. It operates as a network: a tightly linked network of ideas, people, capital, and data united to build out a more inspired and useful connected world. betaworks makes seed-stage investments in this ecosystem. To us, seed investing means “first money in.” Our typical investment size is $150,000-200,000. We always invest as part of a syndicate of angels and early stage VCs. Our requirements from an investment perspective are simple, though narrow. Investments must be early stage, heavily tech focused, and have a working (public or private) prototype. We are a powerpoint-free zone.
We build and work closely with companies that we view as core to our vision, examples include: Summize/Twitter Search, bitly, TweetDeck, Chartbeat. And more recently, Digg, Dots, Giphy](www.Giphy.com) and Instapaper, which betaworks acquired in April of 2013. We attract the kind of people who could start their own company, but they don’t necessarily want to run a company. They’d rather be the co-founder of eight things than tied down for years as the sole founder of one. They’d rather build.
