Ignition Partners certainly is busy these days. For the third time this week, the Bellevue venture capital firm has invested in a new technology company. Earlier today, we told you about Ignition joining with Menlo Ventures to co-lead a $7.5 million round in Redmond mobile startup Glympse.
Now, word comes that the venture capital firm has taken an equity stake in Bromium, a stealthy San Francisco startup that today announced a $9.2 million round. In addition to Ignition, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners joined the syndicate. (Andreessen Horowitz, led by former Netscape CEO Marc Andreessen, also worked with Ignition on the Zencoder deal).
The deals follow an investment earlier this week by Ignition in ScaleXtreme, a Palo Alto, California company that announced $11 million on Monday.
As a result of the investment, Ignition’s Frank Artale has joined Bromium’s board. (He also joined the board of ScaleXtreme). Bromium, led by former executives from Citrix, XenSource and Phoenix Technologies, said it is focused on the developing “trustworthy computing infrastructure” to address the issue of more employees taking gadgets and devices off the corporate network.
As I’ve noted in the past, Ignition continues to aggressively look for deals in the San Francisco Bay Area and continues to partner with leading Silicon Valley firms. It has also taken interests in Seattle area companies recently, including Swype, Glympse, iTegris and Tier 3.
By my count, Ignition has invested in a whopping 13 new companies so far this year. Of those, five are based in the Seattle area (Glympse, iTegris, Korrio, Swype and Tier 3).
The eight Bay Area bets include Bromium, BlueStacks, ScaleXtreme, Inporia, Zencoder, Topsy, Hipmunk and SocialEyes. (Note, these are just the “announced deals” that I’ve tracked so far this year, so there could very well be others in the pipeline).
As I mention in the headline, it is certainly a blistering pace of investment for the firm.
Marc Andreessen recently mentioned that he doesn’t think we’re experiencing another Internet bubble. Looks like Ignition tends to agree with its frequent co-investor.
