The Challenge

A new start-up Web 2.0 technology-focused venture capital fund was looking for a way to bring three groups together: Investors; Entrepreneurs looking for funding; and Tech Transfer Organizations interested in licensing intellectual property.

The client sought to create a Web solution to aggregate news and events, and become THE destination for local companies interested in financing and investing. The client also wanted to create an intranet for the fund's investors to use to evaluate and discuss deal flow.

The Solution

The client chose the iBN Engagement Platform because it had all the necessary tools to bring these constituents together, and organize them around distinct (but related) content communities, at a low price.

The iBN platform allowed for the aggregation and presentation of multiple data types, including external feeds from technology media sites, Amplifier-produced content and blogs, and user-contributed content. Positioning original content with automatically generated feeds gave context to information from disparate sources, and provided a jumping-off point for discussions that could be tagged, shared, searched, and distributed according to individual users’ needs.

Also, by developing communities around content, deals submitted by entrepreneurs could be easily shared with tailored investor groups for input and advice; DC-area investors and entrepreneurs could organize around local opportunities; and content experts in finance and technology could share knowledge across the network.

The Results

Expert bloggers are submitting their content from remote locations. The calendar is successfully aggregating events from the investor community. Amplifier has attracted participation from over 500+ prominent members of the investment community.

“Amplifier Ventures Partners was founded to help develop and grow early stage companies with significant promise. While we have a stellar group of individuals on our board making that happen, we were interested in finding a way for the investment community to support each other. The iBelong team was able to come develop a Web site architecture that manages large amounts of different types of investment information and presents it in a way that our users can search and organize while also having the ability to contribute to the information mix. The iBN platform helps us perform collaborative business management functions such as reviewing and discussing business plans that entrepreneurs submit, managing registrations for our Get Educated seminar series, and notifying users when content they are interested in is posted to the site. Additionally, the iBN platform provides a way for our users to connect with each other through searchable online profiles of hundreds of registered members of the investment community. The platform has also been extended to affiliated companies such as George Mason University who communicate with our users about their IP. We have truly created a business network and we know that as iBelong continues to evolve its platform, we will have access to all future developments. For all these reasons we decided to invest in the company!”

-- Jonathan Aberman, Managing Director, Amplifier Ventures