Betaworks has raised additional funds worth $10 million mostly from Japanese digital media incubator Digital Garage, TechCrunch reported. The round is an extension to the $20 million that the New York-based company obtained in December last year. A report from The Wall Street Journal said that of the $10 million, Digital Garage gave $7.5 million while the remainder came from angel investors.
Betaworks is a seed-stage investor even as it also dishes out new products. Founder John Borthwick told TechCrunch in an interview that his firm shares similarities to Digital Garage. He said, "They're a builder and an investor. They've been operating for a long time in the Japanese market as well as other Asian and U.S. markets."
According to Borthwick, they were able to get more investor interest after their $20 million fundraising round in December which actually marked the first time that they got external funding in four years. Other backers of Betaworks include David Karp of Tumblr, Salesforce chief Marc Benioff, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, Twitter's Ev Williams, Summize founder Abdur Chowdhury, Path's Dave Morin and Gerry Laybourne. Laybourne became part of the Betaworks board of directors recently, the report said.
Aside from making seed-stage investments in companies like Airbnb and Kickstarter, Betaworks has also rolled out its own products. These include crowdfunding-based equity platform Alphaworks, Chartbeat. Digg, Bitly, Dots, Poncho and Telecast, TechCrunch reported.
The WSJ reported that Digital Garage backed Twitter in 2008 and formed an alliance with the micro-blogging platform so they could localize Twitter in Japan. It also helped Twitter with business development and customer service.
The alliance formed between the two firms will help Japanese startups expand to the US market. Digital Garage Co-Founder and MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito told The WSJ, "Not only do I think this alliance will create a stronger flow of U.S. startups entering Asia, it will open up robust opportunities for Japanese startups to enter and compete in the U.S. market."
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