SEOMoz, the Saas startup focused on helping businesses get the most out of their online web presences announced last week that it had raised an $18 million Series B from existing investor Ignition Partners, as well as new investor, Foundry Group.

Funding announcements aren’t terribly interesting as most most press releases don’t provide any insight into the underlying health or traction of the business. You might see user numbers, but rarely active users or revenue figures.

For example, Path, the mobile social network also just raised a Series B, a whopping $40 million. However, there wasn’t even an official announcement on the story – just confirmation. No word on how user count is growing. Path is maintaining a low profile.

That’s what makes SEOMoz’s story so unique and interesting. While we’re still guessing Path’s number of active users, here’s what we know about SEOMoz – directly from SEOMoz.

Continue reading »

A few weeks ago, we achieved a small milestone here at PrivateEquityFirms.com – crossing the ‘magical’ (at least for us) 2,000 firm barrier.  2,000 certainly doesn’t make us ‘complete’, however it’s important to note that we’re constantly adding new firms and aren’t looking to let up anytime soon. Continue reading »

SecondMarket and SharesPost serve to facilitate the purchase and sale of illiquid assets and are the largest such exchanges in the rapidly emerging secondary marketplace field (other exchanges include DebtMarket, a specialist in loans and Liquidnet, a recent entrant into the trading of private company shares).  While both SecondMarket and SharesPost deal with the private sale of illiquid assets, there are important differences between the two marketplaces. Continue reading »

When private equity firms hunt for acquisitions, they look for business characteristics that minimize risk as they build value and position for a potential exit.  All investment firms break down the key traits that interest them the most.  The challenge of course is finding what they want at a reasonable multiple.   So what business characteristics do private equity firms covet the most? Continue reading »

By Mark Di Vincenzo

When you look at the biggest private equity buyouts in history, it’s easy to spot the glory years — 2006 and 2007, before a severe recession rocked the nation.

Economists say the recession is behind us, but we’re still limping along, and there are fears that the economy may double dip back into a recession. That has kept the deals of the past three or four years relatively small.

Here’s a list of the 10 biggest private equity buyouts, compiled by BusinessInsider, and a look at how they’ve worked out for the private equity firms involved: Continue reading »

The recent creation of a $24 million TechStars fund that promises to invest $100k into each accepted company (on top of the original $6k to $18k) is a big win for the program and the entrepreneurs vying for one of their coveted spots.  TechStars currently has programs in 4 cities (Boulder – HQ, Boston, Seattle, and New York) and altogether pumps 60 businesses through their 3 month, mentorship driven system each year. Continue reading »

Or is it the other way around? Rumors of a mega VC raise for popular file storage service Dropbox have been swirling in recent weeks and TechCrunch now confirms that Index Ventures is leading a round which values the 4 year-old startup at $4 billion. Continue reading »

Requiring 4 years of qualified professional experience and the passage of three, grueling 6-hour exams, the CFA Charterholder designation is not an easy qualification to obtain.  As such, there are only 90,000 charterholders around the world. Doing a quick search of ‘CFA’ amongst the 14,500+ junior to senior PE professionals in the PrivateEquityFirms.com database yields roughly 300 of them (2% of all database entries and 0.33% of all charterholders). Continue reading »

It’s been a couple of months since our recent makeover and one feature that’s proven quite popular with new and existing users is the ability to create simple project lists of private equity ‘Firms’, ‘Portfolio Companies’, and/or private equity ‘Professionals’, one record at a time. Currently, we provide four unique lists for each type of data (see below). Continue reading »