Santa Monica, CA (PRWEB) March 24, 2014
The Los Angeles Venture Association (LAVA) held its Eleventh Annual Venture Awards Dinner on Thursday, March 13, 2014 to recognize Southern California’s best venture-backed companies, and to celebrate the induction of Robert Kibble into the LAVA Hall of Fame. The awards dinner was attended by over 200 leaders in the Venture Capital community, including CEOs and founders of successful emerging companies. It was held at Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica.
This year's LAVA Hall of Fame inductee was Robert Kibble. Robert Kibble is a co-Founder and Managing Partner of Mission Ventures, a Southern California venture capital firm investing regionally in early-stage information technology companies. He has over 30 years of venture capital investing experience.
Prior to Mission Ventures, Robert served for thirteen years as a founding General Partner of Paragon Venture Partners, a successful venture capital firm operating in Silicon Valley, focused on investing in information technology companies. His early career included investment banking on Wall Street as well as Vice President of Citicorp’s Merchant Banking Group in Malaysia and Brazil before becoming a Vice President of Citicorp Venture Capital.
Robert has a Bachelor's degree, with honors, in Natural Sciences from Oxford University, and an MBA from the Darden School, University of Virginia. He is a former Director of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and he currently sits on the Board of Eveo, Nexiant, and SodaHead. Robert represented Mission's leadership role in prior portfolio investments in Sandpiper Networks (subsequently becoming Digital Island) and Shopzilla.
“This is one of LAVA's signature events and it continues our tradition of showcasing Los Angeles' top emerging companies, entrepreneurs and investors,” says Matt Crowley, President of LAVA. “Earning recognition in trying economic times is especially challenging, and this year's nominees all deserve congratulations and admiration for their accomplishments.”
The five award winning companies were selected by the attendees at the evening’s dinner event from 17 nominees in the following categories:
Best M&A Exit - Docstoc
Docstoc is the premier online destination to start and grow small businesses. It hosts the best quality and widest selection of professional documents (over 30 million) and resources including expert courses, videos, articles and productivity tools to make every small business better. Docstoc is among the top 500 most visited websites (quantcast) and has over 45 million registered users. It offers a vast collection of free resources and provides a monthly membership which unlocks its widest selection of premium content. Docstoc also provides the technology to help facilitate the sharing and promotion of documents across the web and has popularized the use of embedding documents throughout the blogosphere and mainstream media. Docstoc Inc. was founded by Jason Nazar and Alon Shwartz and launched in October 2007. Docstoc was acquired by Intuit in December 2013. The company is located in Santa Monica, CA.
Best Seed/Early Stage Funding <$3mm - Cargomatic
Cargomatic is Uber for Local Trucking. Businesses moving freight can now find local trucks when and where they need them. Local trucking is an enormous yet highly fragmented market, with major carriers servicing only 15% of a $70B industry. Cargomatic is disrupting the marketplace by offering shippers easy access to under-utilized space on independent & owner-operated trucks.
Best A Round Funding - PaeDae
PaeDae is the world’s largest mobile ad engagement network. Based in Santa Monica, California with satellite offices in New York and San Francisco; PaeDae has to date raised more than $12M in funding to expand its unique user-centric advertising platform, which includes mobile video, rich media, and app discovery.
Best B Round plus Funding - Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club is a rocketing men’s lifestyle brand and e-commerce company on a mission to change the way men address their shaving and grooming needs. From our BS-free razor subscription, to our Shave Butter chemistry, to tomorrow’s cutting edge user experience – we’re dedicated to inventing smart products to make guys’ lives better and easier. We have an exploding member base to show for it and are backed by top tier VC funds.
Hottest New Company - Snapchat
Snapchat is a photo messaging application (“app”) developed by Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy, then Stanford University students. Using the application, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos are known as “Snaps”. Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps, after which they will be hidden from the recipient’s device and deleted from Snapchat’s servers.
About the Los Angeles Venture Association:
LAVA is Los Angeles’s premiere Venture Capital focused industry organization that provides a forum for Entrepreneurs, Investors and the community of businesses that assist companies in their formation and growth. LAVA celebrates 30 years of service to the community. It is led by a team of volunteers that provide program, sponsorship and leadership in the Venture funded community. For more information, visit http://www.lava.org.
CONTACTS:
Leonard Lanzi,
LAVA Executive Director
310-450-9544
len(at)lava(dot)org