Timehop, The Place To Reminisce Online, Raises $3M Led By Spark Capital

While present-focused social networks like Facebook and Instagram make plenty of room for the narcissists in us, there's not really a dedicated and focused place to reflect on the past.

Timehop, which started out as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, has evolved into a mobile-first startup that surfaces old memories from your social networks. The app will pull up status updates from a year or more ago, reminding you of friends you've lost contact with or thoughts you had a year ago on this day.

The New York-based startup says it just rounded up another $3 million in funding led by existing investor Spark Capital. O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures, which had also previously backed the company, participated as well. Andrew Parker, a principal at Spark, joins Timehop's board.

Timehop's CEO Jonathan Wegener says that the company will use the round to build out the team beyond seven people and focus on mobile apps. Timehop just shut down its e-mail service last week.

"The big, long-term vision is to be a place to reminisce online," Wegener said. "Basically in this world, all social networks are real-time. They're about what's happening right now, but there's no place online to discuss the past."

While the Series A crunch has made fundraising tough for all kinds of consumer-facing mobile and web products, Wegener said it was Timehop's stickiness that made a compelling case. He said one-third of Timehop's user base opens the product on any given day, which is a very respectable retention figure.

"Users who try to the product fall in love with it. This helped us make the argument that people are working Timehop into their everday lives," Wegener said. "At first, people don't understand why they would want this. But they get really addicted to it. They see it as a mirror of their own life, and a reflection of their past self."

He said he's used the app to remember which friends he's lost touch with over the years. The app will pull up old group photos, reminding Wegener to reach out and reconnect.

Timehop's earlier investors also included angels like Foursquare's Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and Alex Rainert, Groupme's Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin.

Second Screen TV Startup Wywy Raises $7M For International Growth

Wywy, a German company promising to help monetize TV activity on mobile devices, is announcing that it has raised $7 million in Series B funding.

According to the wywy website, the company's history goes back to 2001, with video and audio detection technology, but it only launched its second screen products last year. Those products include multi-screen ad synchronization, so that mobile and tablet users see online advertising that corresponds to the commercial they're seeing on TV; real-time TV campaign tracking; and content sync technology for second screen apps.

The company also offers an app of its own, but it sounds like that's just meant to showcase wywy's technology for potential customers.

The new funding follows a $3.1 million Series A last year and comes from existing investors Cipio Partners. Wywy says it currently supports 200 channels in five countries, and one of the big goals is to expand in Europe and the United States.

"Today, using a Second Screen device in parallel to watching TV has become the norm," said Cipio managing partner Werner Dreesbach in the funding release. "It is clear that TV advertisers require new approaches to ensure the effectiveness of their campaigns. wywy's huge success with media agencies and TV advertisers in Germany made the decision to internationalize easy."

Iterations: How Founders Can Fight Through The Great Fragmentation Of Talent

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

The #1 request I hear when talking to founders in San Francisco is: “We are hiring engineers. Know any?” We all know this is a big issue that’s only getting worse, and so do most of the investors. But, I’m now starting to hear this so often, I’m beginning to worry that all the conventional tactics simply won’t work. Early-stage startups that don’t start experimenting with new ideas to source, recruit, and close engineers and other technical hires may end up running out of money or never achieving the product traction they need to get to the next level. I don’t have data to support this, but my intuition is that technical talent is so fragmented right now, all options need to be reexamined and placed on the table.

In that spirit of investigating all available options, here are 10 tactics your startup may consider given today’s conditions. And, while we often read high-level posts about how to hire people, the on-the-ground reality is that so many early-stage companies are being funded every day that when the founders close that first round, they often turn into (near) full-time recruiters, and many of them don’t succeed at it because they either don’t understand the weight of the issue before them and/or because they aren’t willing to consider these kind of options below, some of which require a serious change in thinking:

1. Hire Remote Employees: Conventional wisdom says that your team should all be together, in person. Unfortunately, there are many great potential hires who are not located in NYC or SF and, for a host of reasons, cannot move.
2. Hire Contractors (onsite or remote): Conventional wisdom says that this can backfire and cause more work because of incongruous development, but some great people may not be in the mood to commit to something so early and may want to work on other side projects for a host of reasons.
3. Hire Qualified Candidates And Help Them Relocate: Early-stage companies don’t like to get into the game of relocation expenses, but if that’s the only thing stopping the close of a great potential hire who doesn’t live around here, it may be worth considering breaking that rule.
4. Referral Systems: I’m sure most startups do some form of this, whether through gifts or cash incentives. But, maybe they need to be more robust and creative.
5. Pay More Money and Share More Equity: If it’s that hard to land good technical talent, maybe a startup cannot afford the market price, or maybe the conventional wisdom around 15-20% option pools and current salary bands are not in line with this reality.
6. Acqui-hire Teams That Can’t Survive: The Series A Crunch is real and might be just beginning. For companies that have raised more growth capital and/or those who are making enough money to warrant reinvestment into their core business, there are lots of teams out there who can be slimmed down and gobbled up, usually for a salaried offer, some equity, and a modest bonus.
7. Open A Second Office: To get around the fear of remote and/or contract workers, there could be situations where a small group of qualified candidates reside close to each other but far away from your HQ. If this core group is open to setting up a new office and could hire more people through their own networks, it may not be a bad approach for a startup that has enough cash runway to handle it.
8. Publicize Your Infrastructure And Stack: Talented folks want to see what your company has under the hood, so one approach is to invest the time and resources into a real engineering blog and sharing what goes on behind the scenes. This kind of openness attracts others who may be like-minded and could send a strong signal about how differentiated your approach is.
9. Hire Less-Developed Candidates And Train Them: What if a founding team found raw talent and made the decision to hire these folks and train them? Without reducing the bar on quality, these teams may be able to hire folks like this and devote time and resources to developing them into full team players.
10. Everyday Improvements: It’s obvious, but any list like this would have to include options like making your office the best place to work, by spending more time on recruiting, or actually hiring an accomplished recruiter who can demonstrably earn the respect of good candidates, or organize more tech talks, or more hackathons, or more competitions. [And, continually learn from experts like Dan Portillo, who captures all of his knowledge and tricks in this great slide deck.]

Naval Ravikant tweeted a great line last year: “It’s never been easier to start a company, but it’s never been harder to build one.” This fragmentation of talent is the other side of the coin in this bubble we are in — and yes, it is a bubble, but the bubble isn’t where you may think it is. Today, the asset that is overvalued is the amount of funds and shares of equity that founders are in control of and chose to hold on to — to recruit the right people, founders now have to work extra harder or be even more creative and daring to fill in their open slots. Put another way, in order to win in today’s game, many founders are going to have to make uncomfortable decisions, especially with respect to money for salaries and equity as incentives.

I am not an expert on all of this. And, I know it’s not cool to suggest these tactics because everyone says it’s all about “team” and because you want to protect your culture and because you don’t want to manage people remotely or hire contractors or spend time training a diamond in the rough, but for many early-stage companies in a flooded market like San Francisco, the harsh truth of 2013 is that everyone and their mom has a tech startup now, and everyone and their dad has a new seed fund, and you, as a founder, are caught right in the middle, forced to make suboptimal tradeoffs between quality and speed. It’s not a pretty choice, but in order to survive or succeed in this environment, I simply don’t see another way.

NanoSatisfi Raises $1.2M To Disrupt The Aerospace Industry With Small, Affordable Satellites

For years, Peter Platzer was pretty close to a stereotypical rocket scientist on Wall Street - he was trained as a high-energy physicist, but he spent most of his professional career in finance. But he told me he’s always had an interest in space exploration, and now he’s working on an aerospace startup called NanoSatisfi, which just raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

Platzer said he avoided the industry in the past because it was slow and government-dominated, with little innovation. It took an enormous amount of time and money to launch satellites, which meant that the technology on those satellites lagged behind what was available on the ground.

“We don’t have Moore’s Law in space,” Platzer said.

That’s changing with the advent of nanosatellites, which are smaller and cheaper than satellites or microsatellites. For example, NanoSatisfi plans to launch two ArduSats this year, each one a cube with 10 centimeter sides and weighing about 1 kilogram, and they’re equipped with cameras, a Geiger counter, a spectrometer, a magnetometer, and more. ArduSats are designed to be active for about two years, at which point they’re replaced by new ones incorporating the latest technology. For example, even though the second ArduSat is launching only a few months after the first, its camera will actually be more powerful, thanks to rapidly dropping prices.

Ultimately, the company wants to create “a constellation of nanosatellites that get updated on a regular basis,” Platzer said. The first satellites will be used for science experiments and education. Access to the satellite costs $250 a week, and supporters signed up and contributed to the project on Kickstarter. Last summer’s campaign shot past its $35,000 goal and ended up raising $106,330. And the company plans to host an ArduSat Academy this summer, where students learn more about the technology and can compete to run their experiments on the second satellite.

NanoSatisfi isn’t just focused on science projects - once it gets more satellites in place, NanoSatisfi can start selling some “very attractive data services” to a number of different industries, Platzer said.

After the Kickstarter campaign, Platzer funded the company with his own money. The new funds were raised from individual investors using the new AngelList/SecondMarket partnership. Since it’s, y’know, building satellites (or rather assembling them, often using components built by other companies) I asked if NanoSatisfi will need a much bigger round to really grow the company. Platzer said it shouldn’t require much more capital than other startups - his target for the eventual Series A is $10 million.

“It is literally similar in capital efficiency of PCs versus mainframes,” he said.

As for that first launch, it’s scheduled for July 15, and Platzer said the satellite is being taken up on one of the resupply missions for the International Space Station. Even though there’s always some uncertainty, he said those flights tend to be “the most secure and safe and well-guarded.”

The startup is being incubated in San Francisco’s hardware-focused Lemnos Labs - it’s Lemnos’ first aerospace startup, but Lemnos co-founder Jeremy Conrad sounds pretty excited about the industry, so it probably won’t be the last.

SEC Watch: Swoop Raising $5M To Embellish Food Websites With Deals And Ads

Swoop, a company that works with food websites to automatically inject relevant deals, coupons, and ads, has raised $3 million of a $5 million Series B, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filing was first spotted by Mass High Tech.

When the service launched in February, CEO Ron Elwell pitched it as a way for publishers to create a “search discovery” experience on their sites. If you’re looking up recipes, a natural next step is to figure out a place where you can buy the ingredients at a low price - with Swoop, publishers can provide that information without directing visitors to another site.

Elwell also told me that the technology could be used in other areas, like baby and beauty products.

A visit to the Swoop website suggests that the model hasn’t changed too much. The company is also pitching itself as “a Native Advertising service that seamlessly integrates relevant information about products and services,” and it features case studies on how food brands ran Swoop campaigns and saw much higher engagement rates than standard display advertising. At the same time, Swoop still says most of its content consists of automatically aggregated deals and coupons, rather than advertising. (In the screenshot above, you can see regular Swoop links and a butter-related ad.)

In addition to Elwell, Swoop’s founding team includes CTO Simeon Simeonov. Both Elwell and Simeonov have VC experience - Elwell was a partner at Bessemer Ventures, while Simeonov was an executive in residence at General Catalyst Partners and a technology partner at Polaris Venture Partners.

I’ve emailed Swoop for confirmation, and will update if I hear back. The company previously raised $4.8 million from US Venture Partners, Valhalla Partners, and General Catalyst. The filing doesn’t say who’s investing in the new round.