News
Congratulations to Band of Angels member Ronald Weissman for joining the Angel Capital Association (ACA) Board this year, in addition to Juliana Garaizar, James Goulka, Lorine Pendleton, Esq., and Rick Timmins. The Band's Chairman Ian Sobieski was a founding member of ACA.
Read the ACA announcement here. Photo credit: Jill LeGrow.
We are very pleased to announce the Band of Angels 61st M&A exit: OtoSense (May 2016 Band Dinner), which developed the first platform leveraging a proprietary artificial intelligence and sound processing technology to perform a next-generation machine condition monitoring, has been acquired by Analog Devices, a global leader in the design and manufacturing of analog, mixed signal, and DSP integrated circuits to help solve the toughest engineering challenges.
Congratulations to the Band of Angels members that invested and the OtoSense team!
We enjoyed raising funds from Band of Angels members. The process was clear, the organization perfect, and we learned a lot from our discussions with this open-minded community.
— Sebastien Christian, CEO OtoSense
VoiceBase, an industry leading provider of AI-powered speech analytics for the cloud today announced a partnership with Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) recently acquired by XMedius, a global leader in the field of enterprise communications solutions, to power its cloud-based voicemail-to-text service for CX-E, its Unified Communications platform. Together, AVST and VoiceBase deliver secure voice messaging for highly regulated industries – from healthcare, education, and government to the largest global enterprises. CX-E is an interoperable UC platform that deploys applications across an evolving voice and data infrastructure – premise to cloud. It’s best-of-breed enterprise UC applications include: voice messaging, unified messaging, mobile client, personal assistant, automated attendant, IVR, call center, fax and notification.
Palma Ceia SemiDesign (PCS), a fabless semiconductor company offering wireless chips, modules, systems and IP supporting emerging Machine-to-Machine (M2M) WiFi and cellular standards for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced it has completed a Series B round of financing. Leading the round is Global Connective LP, a U.S. subsidiary fund of Inspiration China Ltd Pty, based in Adelaide, Australia. Inspiration China has extensive experience with China’s wireless and industrial sectors, key markets for Palma Ceia. Inspiration China’s business model is to assist international leading technology companies in accessing global markets, especially China’s booming market.
The Band has had another nice headline exit with the news that Apple Computer has bought our portfolio company Shazam (July 2001 Dinner) for approximately $400M. They were a small team out of Stanford when they presented in the same room at the Los Altos Golf and Country Club that we still meet to this day. We invested at a $2M pre-money valuation at a time that the dot.com bubble was bursting and a nuclear winter in venture investing was soon coming. There is pride in having seeded a company with as much impact on the world as Shazam. The little project we helped get off the ground became the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store with more that 100 million active daily users. With this acquisition, of the Band's 277+ investments, 60 have now been acquired for a profit to investors, and 11 have gone public.
Read the TechCrunch article, which was first to report the acquisition.
