Capital Chaos

 Etsy (Brooklyn, NY) raised an astounding $27M in Series C led by Union Square Ventures and Hubert Burda Media with new investor Jim Breyer from Accel Partners participating as well.  According to TechCrunch, the company “previously raised a total of $4.6 million from Union Square Ventures and angels Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, and Albert Wenger. Union Square Ventures invested again in this round, as did new investoir Accel Partners. Accel partner Jim Breyer will take a seat on Etsy’s board (he is also a board member of Facebook). Fake, a founder of Flickr with her husband Butterfield, and Union Square’s Fred Wilson are existing board members. ”

Etsy now claims to have over 650,000 members in 127 different countries.  According to Etsy founder Rob Kalin, use of proceeds will go towards:

- Buy $5 million worth of hardware and hosting over the next two years.
- Support more currencies and languages other than the U.S. Dollar and English.
- Fix the checkout system (there is none now, every buyer has to pay every seller on an individual basis. There is no Etsy payment system that works across all sellers).
- Enahnce and improve search
- Provide a cushion in case of a recession
- Offer customer service and better shopping tools
- Provide competitive wages and take care of employees

_______________________________________________

Union Square Ventures  (New York, NY) is an early stage venture capital fund that focuses on IT-enabled services, media & marketing, financial services, healthcare and telecom.  The firm has made about 40 investments and a few in some pretty significant companies: Twitter, Clickable, del.icio.us and feedburner to name a few.

Both Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham have great reputations and are known to be quite candid and can move fast if they like your idea.  Make sure you are buttoned up as Brad is a former operator and Fred is a pure investor.

Contact:
915 Broadway
Suite 1408
New York, NY 10010
Telephone: (212) 994-7880