Confirmed: Pinterest Raises $27 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

Hot online pinboard site Pinterest has closed a $27 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, we’ve confirmed. As part of the financing, general partner Jeff Jordan will be joining Pinterest’s Board of Directors.

AllThingsD first reported that Andreessen Horowitz was leading a round of over $25 million that values the young startup at up to $200 million (the firm declined to confirm the valuation).

This new funding round comes just a few months after a $10 million round the company closed this past spring, led by Bessemer.

Pinterest is still invite-only, but it has garnered plenty of attention around Silicon Valley. And, notably, the site is getting a lot of traction outside of the tech bubble. The site’s popularity stems in part from its simplicity – at its core, it’s all about ‘pinning’ things you find interesting across the web, and saving them in whatever ‘Board’ you’d like (so, for example, you could make a ‘board’ of things you’d like to learn how to cook, showcasing tantalizing photos of steaks and ribs).

The site is very visually oriented, with photos everywhere — which is what makes it fun to browse through the pinboards of other users. When you spot something you like on someone else’s board, you can re-pin it onto yours (sort of like a Tumblr reblog). And it’s open-ended, so people wind up using their pinboards to showcase a variety of different things.

In an interview, Jordan said that Andreessen Horowitz is excited about Pinterest for three main reasons: first, the site is showing very strong growth metrics, despite the fact that it’s still in a semi-private beta. Second, the service has very strong user engagement — Jordan says the users who are registered often wind up using it “fairly voraciously”.

And finally, the site has a clear path to revenue —  a lot of the use-cases Pinterest users are coming up with have potential commercial intent (say, a list of things they want for their wedding). And there will certainly be business models that can be built around them.

Pinterest cofounder Ben Silbermann says that the company is setting out to “connect people all over the world through common interest”, and notes that people often use their pinboards to show off things that interest them offline (in other words, it’s sort of like an online bridge between the web and the real world).

Pinterest currently has a team of eight people, including Silbermann and fellow cofounders Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra. They intend to use the funding to grow the team (by a lot, presumably).

Pinterest is a social catalog service. Think of it as a virtual pinboard — a place where you can post collections of things you love, and “follow” collections created by people with great taste.

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Andreessen Horowitz Leads $5.7M Round In Analytics Platform For Hadoop Data Platfora

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Platfora, a startup focused on bringing businesses intelligence from big data, raised $5.7 million in Series A funding ??led by Andreessen Horowitz with intelligence technology company In-Q-Tel participating. Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Scott Weiss is joining the board as part of the investment.

Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora, explains that ??Hadoop one of the best options for businesses that manage huge amounts of data because it is low cost and provides a massively scalable data infrastructure. But, he explains that it lacks the interactivity, intelligence and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. Basically, there needs to be a layer that helps retrieve intelligence and analytics from this data.

For background, Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. For example, Facebook uses Hadoop.

Platfora works with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turns these huge amounts of data into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights. The company’s server architecture enables sub-second report delivery, analytics overlay, and drill down performance.

Platfora eliminates the need for traditional data warehouses, ETL tools and the legacy BI products of the past. The company, whose product will go to market in 2012, believes that it can serve a number of companies in industries including web, advertising, finance, telecommunications, logistics and federal intelligence.

Weiss says that Andreessen Horowitz has been sitting on sidelines of making a big investment in Hadoop for some time now. He says that it has been hard to find something valuable to help make Apache Hadoop useful and usable. “This is our big bet on Hadoop, ” says Weiss. Any company that is taking in large amount of data, whether that be from a network, email, or other infrastructure, gaining intelligence from this big data is key.

Weiss also cites the strength Werther as a key factor to the investment. He was a former product head of Greenplum, an analytical database company acquired by EMC.

The venture firm has been generally bullish on big data so the investment in a company that helps make sense of big data isn’t surprising. Andreessen Horowitz led a $25 million round in database company Factual last year.

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Glam Buys Ning For $150 Million, Andreessen Joins Board

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to... ? Learn More

After many twists and turns, DIY social network Ning has finally found a home. Glam Media is buying the network of social networks. A final price is not being disclosed. It is likely more than the $35 million News Corp fetched for MySpace from Specific Media and Justin Timberlake, but less than the $120M or so in capital that was poured into the company over the years. (Update: A source puts the deal price higher, at $150 million). Ning’s co-founder, chairman, and original investor Marc Andreessen will be joining Glam’s board as part of the deal. With Glam’s strong IPO prospects, a large part of the acquisition was probably in stock. Other serious bidders included Google, Yahoo, and even Groupon.

Ning started out as a platform where anyone could build their own niche social network. It turned out that most people just wanted to be on Facebook (Andreessen also sits on its board). About 18 months ago, Ning laid off 40 percent of its employees, switched CEOs, and started charging for its product. It went from an ad-supported model to a subscription model, and while it is no Facebook, CEO Jason Rosenthal managed to create a decent business with 100,000 Ning-powered sites and 60 million monthly unique visitors. If you just look at the subscription plans and apply a discount, the business is easily doing somewhere between $10 million and $20 million a year in subscription revenues alone.

Glam Media runs its own network of content sites, originally targeted at women, but now broader, with a combined reach of 200 million monthly unique visitors. After taking out duplication, the Ning acquisition should push Glam’s audience count up to about 240 million monthly uniques. Glam also has its own brand-friendly ad network to sell ads against that audience, and a content management platform. Now with Ning it has a social platform as well.

Glam will now be able to incorporate social features into its content platform. With Ning it gets the equivalent of a blogging platform, commenting platform, and social feeds platform all rolled into one. Glam should be able to do a better job selling ad inventory against the visitors to Ning-powered sites.

Ning is the world’s largest platform to create powerful, custom social websites. Top organizers, marketers, influencers, and activists use Ning to create a social destination where content intersects with conversations to inspire action. Every social website comes with out-of-the-box social integration, community features, point-and-click design tools, and turnkey monetization solutions that are easy to use. In October 2010, Ning announced the launch of Ning Everywhere. It offers unparalleled flexibility for Ning Creators and third party developers to create mobile apps,...

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Glam Media is a vertical media company, comprised of both Glam-owned-and-operated properties (Glam.com, Brash.com, and soon, Bliss.com) and a publisher network of 2000+ lifestyle websites and blogs. Glam Media’s vertical media model aims to enable premium brands to connect with audiences online. Glam Media is #1 in global reach for women online, with approximately 90 million unique monthly visitors in the US and more than 200 million uniques globally. Glam Media is a comScore Top 10 U.S. Web Property, is...

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