iPhone Live: Kleiner Perkins Commits $100 Million To iFund For iPhone Apps Development
By Tricia Duryee - Thu 06 Mar 2008 12:38 PM PST
Not a lot of of details yet but one of the announcements coming from the iPhone event now going on in Cupertino has some serious heft: John Doerr, partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, announced from the stage that the firm will commit $100 million to a fund exclusively for iPhone applications.
From the Kleiner Perkins release: “The iFund, managed by KPCB, will be invested in companies with market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) will provide KPCB with market insight and support.” Apple CEO Steve Jobs: “Developers are already bursting with ideas for the iPhone and iPod touch, and now they have the chance to turn those ideas into great companies with the help of world-class venture capitalists.”
-- iFund will be led by KPCB partner Matt Murphy in collaboration with partners John Doerr, Bill Joy, Randy Komisar, Ted Schlein, Chi-Hua Chien and Ellen Pao.
-- initiative will be “agnostic to stage and size of investment” with a focus on areas including location-based services, social networking, mCommerce, communication, entertainment
-- iFund is looking for entrepreneurs pursuing “transformative ideas with the potential to become standalone, public companies.”
-- As important as capital in many cases, KPCB will help on the company-building side.
More from the event: During his stage appearance, Doerr congratulated Jobs on the excellent job he is doing as Apple’s CEO, calling him the “supreme commander of the rebels” and asking the audience to salute “The world’s greatest entrepreneur Steve Jobs.”
“We are all here today because we love Apple products,” he said, adding that he “really loves Apple entrepreneurs—they do more than anyone thinks possible with less than what people think is possible.” The reason behind the iFund is because “new platforms are very rare, but they can be transformational.” He joked with the audience about how they pondered how much the iFund should be; he elaborated that EA took a few million to fund, Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN) received $8 million, and $24 million went to Google (NSDQ: GOOG). So, they made it $100 million enough to build “a dozen Amazons and four Googles.”
Posted in: Companies, Apple, Mobile, VC+M&A, Venture Capital
Tags: kleiner perkins caufield & byers, iphone live, iphone
