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Jun 28, 2018

Taunt esports startup raises $3M to build new platform for fan interaction

Taunt, a Seattle-based startup that allows esports fans to interact and predict game outcomes, announced Thursday that it has closed a $3 million seed financing round, led by Foundry Group. Taunt is a spinout of the startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, whose new venture fund PSL Ventures joined in the investment along with Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and CRCM Ventures, an esports industry investor. Foundry, which helped PSL get off the ground back in 2015, helped Taunt get started in September by leading a $1.7 million investment round. Taunt became the fifth startup to spin out of PSL, joining LumaTax, Jet Closing, AdLighting… Read More

Jan 15, 2017

How this reluctant Fitbit investor almost missed a $1.6 billion windfall

Tech investor Brad Feld remembers his first call with Fitbit CEO James Park. It was in 2010, during a major snowstorm at his home in the Colorado mountains, and he was too distracted by intermittent power outages to give serious attention to an investment pitch from a fitness tracking startup. “Pretty much my entire goal during that call was to get off the phone,” Feld recalls. “I wasn’t in any sort of headset or mindset about investing. I was interested in the idea of human-computer interaction, but I hadn’t really processed this notion of what a Fitbit was, or why I would want… Read More