New York investor/incubator Betaworks raises new fund
Betaworks is a small but well-connected New York investor/incubator firm that’s making a name for itself. It has put money into a number of well-hyped (and incidentally, also New York-based) startups including dating service turned social gaming site Iminlikewithyou, local news site Outside.in, joke e-greeting card company Someecards and music recommendation service Songkick.
Most prominently, it backed Summize, the search engine for Twitter — that Twitter bought this summer for $15 million. Betaworks, which uses the buzzword-laden phrase “business accelerator platform” to describe itself, has just raised another $10 million to $15 million from prominent angel investors, Silicon Alley Insider reports.
Well, I would say the things we have done, if they are “well-hyped” at all (dont think they are), are innovative and potentially large businesses.
And, we are not a fund, because not only do we invest, we also build things. And the structure, from a corporate perspective, is totally different. We probably haven’t done the best job of explaining it, really in short we build businesses, and attempt to do that in a scalable, focused and accelerated manner using our specific skills, a very product centric focus, and the network of companies we have. That’s the main strategy. How we do that - invest, build, acquire, etc. - is just a tactic, a detail.
