Listed, California-based social network Facebook is acquiring Face.com, according to a blog post at the company’s site. Backers of Face.com include Yandex. Website Techcrunch earlier reported the news of the deal, rumored to be for $100 million. STATEMENT: Facebook has acquired Face.com! Our mission is and has always been to find new and exciting ways [...]

Here is confirmation of what most of you in the venture world already know. The market for venture-backed IPOs rebounded in the fourth quarter, but not enough to match the vigorous final three months of 2010. That helped lead all of 2011 down 31% in volume and 41% in dollar value from a year ago, [...]

A day after getting beaten down with the rest of the market, three-fourths of this year’s VC-backed IPOs posted gains in today’s market rebound.

Of the 38 VC-backed companies that have gone public on U.S. exchanges this year, 28 saw their share prices increase today, while nine experienced declines and one remained flat, according to data from Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). That stands in stark contrast to yesterday, when 36 of the stocks lost value and two remained flat.

The biggest gainers in terms of dollars were LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), which shot up

Traders showed no love for VC-backed IPOs in today’s bloodbath on Wall Street. Of the 38 venture-backed companies that have gone public this year, 36 saw their share prices drop today and two were flat, according to data from Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). All market indices were hammered, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average [...]

(Reuters) – Venture-backed IPOs saw their strongest quarter since 2000 with offerings valued at $5.5 billion coming to the market in the second quarter of 2011, according to an exit poll by Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). (See table below.)

The number of M&As also returned to 2009 levels, with the second quarter seeing 79 venture-backed M&As, 36 of which had an aggregate deal value of $5.4 billion.

For the first half of the year, VC-backed IPOs are up significantly from

Pandora is expected to price its IPO later today.

Oakland, Calif.-based Pandora, which provides a Web radio service, will likely begin trading Wednesday on the NYSE, and is expected to trade under the symbol “P,” an unexpected move because only market bellwethers tend to use single-letter ticker symbols.

John Fitzgibbon, publisher of IPO Scoop.com, says Pandora is generating huge demand, despite the fact that so many have condemned the company. The deal is 10 times oversubscribed, he says…

That was quick. Two-and-a-half years after closing its $90 million first fund, Russia-focused Almaz Capital Partners has returned all money to investors, and is looking to raise a second fund. Almaz, which has offices in San Francisco and Moscow, credits the fast return to a couple of recent exits. One was the aptly named Qik, [...]

(Reuters) – The frothy market for Internet IPOs is raising the specter of a bubble, underscoring how little has changed despite lawsuits and investigations in the wake of the 1990s dot-com craze. In the past five weeks, investors clamoring for newly public Internet companies have driven up shares of career networking site LinkedIn Corp and [...]

Catch up on what your colleagues found most interesting on peHUB this week. Posts that garnered the most pageviews from regular readers from May 23 to May 27 focused on an investigation into whether dozens of CalPERS employees improperly took gifts; the worst VC-backed Chinese IPOs; venture returns showing signs of a rebound; IPOs on [...]

(Reuters) – Take a helping of Russian genius, add a portion of risk appetite and stir in a lot of patience, and you have the recipe for the resounding success of search engine Yandex’s (Nasdaq: YNDX) U.S. stock market float.

The Nasdaq listing values Russia’s leading internet search engine at $8 billion, an eye-popping 500 times its worth when private equity investors bought into the company in 2000. (See details of IPO here.)

That year the business, founded in 1997 by mathematician Arkady Volozh and geophysicist Ilya Segalovich, had revenues of just $72,000 and lost $2 million.

Eyeing a long-term prospect, Yelena Ivashentseva of private equity fund Baring Vostok Capital Partners put together an investor group that bought a 36 percent stake in Yandex for just over