The MakerBot Team

New York's Makerbot, which creates DIY 3-D printers, has raised a $10 million round led by Foundry Group. The money will be used to scale the company, which is currently growing faster than it can afford.

Full text from Makerbot co-founder founder Bre Pettis:

Today, I’m excited to announce that MakerBot is taking $10 million in investment, with Foundry Group leading the round. Our investors are really invested–while Brad Feld and Foundry Group were getting to know us, they built their own MakerBot; you can visit Brad’s Thingiverse page to see what they’ve been printing! Foundry Group has worked with other startup companies that create hardware. We’re thrilled that they understand and support open source. This round will also include investment from Bezos Expeditions, True Ventures, RRE and many MakerBot angels (listed below). We are proud to be working with such great people and we are going to use this money do wonderful things.

To understand how we got to this point, let’s step into a MakerBotted time machine. In January of 2009, we started up the business and needed money to buy materials, make kits and then sell them. At that time, we were 3 guys, a lasercutter, and a dream. We went to our friend Jake Lodwick for $50k of seed investment. He let us take over a small corner of his office for inventory and shipping. Well, that little corner grew until we had taken over most of his office, at which point we had to move into our own space, the MakerBot Botcave.  In those early days we also got Adrian Bowyer, creator of the RepRap project, involved. He and his wife, Christine Bowyer, contributed $25k to bring us to $75k of seed money that helped start MakerBot.

With that initial $75k, we developed the first round of prototypes and put the first 20 MakerBot Cupcake CNCs into production. We sold them and bought more parts and made them into kits and sold those too. As of today, we’ve transformed that $75k into 5200 MakerBots in the wild.

In 2010, we invited some of our favorite people and teams to be MakerBot Angel investors. Shana Fisher led the angel round and the MakerBot Angels are Shana Fisher/High Line Venture Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Kal Vepuri, Steve Garfield, Jake Lodwick, Chuck and Claudia Pettis (my folks), Founder Collective, Antonio Rodriguez, True Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, Sam Lessin,  Joshua Schachter, Lerer Ventures, 500 Startups, and Thrive Capital.  This angel round investment gave us the confidence to grow!

Our seed investors, angel investors and now our venture investors are an all-star cast of awesome people and teams and we’re proud to have them involved as we explore the future of personal fabrication.

What’s going to change? Brad Feld of Foundry Group will be joining our board and we’re hiring to grow the MakerBot team to democratize manufacturing and make 3D printing more accessible to everyone!

Disclosure.

Kohort, the new startup from Mark Davis, just raised $3 million from folks like IA Ventures, RRE, FF Capital, David Tisch and David Cohen. It's going to be offering a suite of tools to help groups do things like organize events, collect dues and enlist new members.

But the secret sauce, says one investor, is the way in which Kohort will help groups to interact with one another. "Meetup is essentially providing a platform for anyone to create a group, but its not tapping the network effect that comes from tying those organizations together."

Kohort will have ways for groups to organize around a shared passion. So the 28 soccer clubs in New York could host a round robin tournament, pool their members and easily split the entry fees between all the participating groups.

When Meetup.com launched its redesign back in January, angry users took to the comment boards and forums to try and find an alternative. Some pointed at Facebook Groups and Groupspaces, but no one seemed satisfied with these choices. Kohort is planning to fill that vacuum, although it shouldn't count on Meetup to drop the ball and drive users its way.

Vyou relies less on scale and accuracy, like Quora or Stack Exchange. Instead it draws on personality and intimacy, giving fans a platform for connecting with figures as varied as Deepak Chopra and Courtney Love.

VYou announced today that it raised a $3 million series A round from some great New York names. The round was by RRE Ventures and Highland Capital Parnters, with participation from local angels like Rick Webb and David Tisch and Hollywood heavyweights like Kevin Wall and Jim Wiatt.

"We're going to be investing in the product and hiring a lot on the tech side," says Founder Steve Spurgat. "It would be great if you could put that in the title of your article," he joked.

While a lot of VYou is driven by individual personalities and the draw of interacting with a celebrity, the site also features channels with dedicated themes. The Fix, for example, collects medical professional who specialize in addiction and mixes them in with former strippers and recovery gurus.

"It's certainly up for debate whether this is a social network," says Spurgat. "Do you need bi-directional communication to be a social network? VYou allows fans to follow celebrities, but we also see people using the platform to keep in touch with friends and family."

A lot of the channels are platforms for brands, like Simon and Schuster and The Daily Beast. It's interesting to see that the structure for engaging with the audience seems to be more important the the brands presence on the web. Simon & Schuster uses VYou for Ask the Author, and has dozens of questions posted each day. The Daily Beast hasn't had a new question posted in almost two months.

Since launching in November VYou has served up 20 million video views and scored partnerships with some big names like MTV and Hearst. "The social web has revolutionized every form of media it has touched -- photos, news, location -- but not yet video," says Dan Nove, General Partner at Highland. "A massive opportunity awaits the first person to build an actual social network around video, which is the most engaging medium of all."

"It's a YouTube, Twitter, Formspring hybrid that acts kinda like a community site, where people ask questions, like Formspring, but you answer in a one shot video you can't edit," said A Guy Named Raf, who is VYou's most prolific poster. "I'm somewhat famous on an internet site that isn't really big right now and has no relevance in life, but I love it, ok, don't judge me," said Scott, aka Ask This Trucker, the site's biggest homegrown star.

VYou isn't big time yet, but its now got the funding and connections to jump to the next level.

Union Square Ventures and RRE are participating in an $8 million series A round for Kik, with Fred Wilson of USV and Adam Ludwin of RRE taking board seats.

"There are no lack of startups innovating in this sector. In fact, there are a ton of them. It is a very crowded space and we have had the benefit of meeting with and getting to know many of the teams working in this sector," Wilson wrote on his blog this morning.

The choice for Wilson came down to the product and the team. "The Kik product is simple, fast, and elegant. It gets the job done and doesn't getin the way... We believe that less is more and that message delivery speed is paramount," Wilson wrote.

Kik is based on mobile push. Until today it was just for one to one chat, but Kik is rolling out groups and photos along with the funding announcement. And of course they are prepping something special in order to stand out at SXSW: Kik will be providing a free concierge service down in Austin that answers users' questions about everything from tech panels to fresh tacos via real-time chat.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper