One of Seattle’s quiet startup success stories just got a little louder: as TechCrunch and GeekWire reported last night, we joined Accel’s Rich Wong and Real Networks founder/CEO Rob Glaser in a $9.4MM Series A for HasOffers.
Founders’ Co-op is a seed-stage fund so this is an unusual deal for us — but then HasOffers is an unusual company. Founded by twin brothers Lee and Lucas Brown in 2009, the company won Bootstrapper of the Year at last year’s GeekWire Awards for building a profitable, 79-person business with no outside financing.
I’m a huge believer in the enterprise mobile marketing opportunity — with existing investments in companies like Urban Airship, Apptentive and MobileDevHQ — so when HasOffers rolled out its Mobile App Tracking business last year I immediately reached out to CEO Peter Hamilton to learn more about the business. It didn’t take long for me to figure out how excellent the team behind the business really was, and how big their ambitions were to play a central role in the huge and growing business of mobile customer acquisition.
Because the company was already well past the point at which we usually invest, my first impulse was to help connect them with the best Series A investors I knew who really understood mobile marketing. #1 on that list was Rich Wong of Accel, an early investor in both AdMob (acquired by Google for $750M) and leading mobile ad server MoPub (not to mention Rovio, creators of the Angry Birds franchise).
Peter, Lee and Lucas ran a very disciplined fundraising process which attracted participation from many strong firms and partners. But in the end, Rich and Accel emerged as the clear leader and best fit for the company. When Rich and Peter offered to include Founders’ Co-op in the round we jumped at the chance to work with such an incredible team of founders + investors.
I’m incredibly excited to have the opportunity to play a small supporting role in what I expect to be one of the Pacific Northwest’s next big success stories. I’m also delighted to see renowned Bay Area investors like Rich seeing the quality of our ecosystem and making significant new bets in the region.
Thanks to Peter, Lee, Lucas and the entire HasOffers team for welcoming Founders’ Co-op into your amazing startup family — I’m equally excited to welcome you to ours.