Ron Conway may have stepped back from funding Y Combinator startups, but FundersClub has stepped in. The online platform for seed investing said it raised a $1.1 million fund to invest in Y Combinator startups.

Call them the cream of the venture crop, the 472 high flying U.S.-based companies with valuations above $100 million and exciting businesses to justify them.

Y Combinator is paring back its 2013 winter class to less than 50 startups, saying it grew too fast earlier this year.

The billion-dollar Facebook-Instagram deal has venture capitalists and investment bankers alike licking their chops, in hopes of the next mega transaction (or, just the next Pinterest).

NBA champion Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban likes early-stage startups. He doesn’t like the Miami Heat, who his Mavs will square off against when the league kicks its season on Dec. 25. And, from the sound of it, he still doesn’t much care for Box.net’s prospects, either. I caught up with Cuban after his keynote [...]

Box.net is going public! Probably. Not soon, though, said Aaron Levie, the startup’s CEO. “It is part of the plan,” he acknowledged, when I had the opportunity to catch up with him in New York City during a visit (or, more like, whirlwind tour). He’ll be here a bit more often, for events, and later, [...]

So, how did Dropbox get itself valued at approximately $4 billion and rope in a quarter-bil from investors including Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs? For one, the company aims to grow its revenue almost ten-fold over the next couple of years, peHUB has learned. Projections provided to investors in its most recent round have Dropbox’s [...]

Decked out in black jeans, a purple shirt, black jacket and orange Puma tennis shoes, Box.net co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie lived up to his billing as a rising star in the tech world at today’s Venture Alpha conference in San Francisco. Interviewed by Alastair Goldfisher, acting editor of Thomson Reuters’ Venture Capital Journal, Levie [...]

Dropbox said Tuesday that it has completed a $250 million Series B financing led by Index Ventures. New investors includes Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners, and Valiant Capital Partners. Early investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated. San Francisco-based Dropbox, an online storage site, has received $257.2 million in total funding.

(Reuters) – Start-up companies using “freemium” business models, including Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, Animoto and Eventbrite, are thriving as the cost of computing power and storage falls. These are among a slew of venture-capital backed businesses that offer some products and services free, then try to lure customers into upgrading to premium versions that cost money. This [...]