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VCs Dabble with Canadian Web 2.0 startup

Globe and Mail Update

You're a small Internet startup based in Canada, and you want access to U.S. venture capital, but you don't want to have to move to Silicon Valley or hand over 45 per cent of your stock to a big VC group. What do you do?

For Vancouver-based Dabble DB, you find a guy like Paul Kedrosky, a Canadian-born venture capitalist and former technology analyst who is based in Silicon Valley but has ties to Ventures West, a Vancouver investment group.

Dabble DB announced Tuesday morning that it had closed a financing round with Ventures West, and that Mr. Kedrosky would be joining the company's board of directors. Mr. Kedrosky's relationship with Ventures West is also changing, in part as a result of the financing deal.

The amount of the investment was not disclosed, but industry sources put the figure in the $2-million range (U.S.).

Dabble DB was founded by Andrew Catton and Avi Bryant, two veteran programmers in their late 20s who hope to ride the wave of enthusiasm about interactive Web-based applications known collectively as "Web 2.0."

Their product, which unlike many Web 2.0 offerings already has paying customers, is effectively an on-line database-creation application. Mr. Kedrosky describes it as a tool designed for people who are using Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet, "but for all the wrong things."

Spreadsheets can be imported into Dabble DB with a single click, and then become more interactive than existing spreadsheets, say the company's founders. Data can be reconfigured easily, new categories and fields can be created or deleted on the fly, and data can be shared as an HTML document, PDF document, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed or text file.

The Vancouver company is just the latest Canadian "Web 2.0" startup to attract the interest of venture capitalists and/or become a takeover target. One of the first was Flickr, a photo-sharing site and community that was acquired by Yahoo last year for what some insiders say was in excess of $30-million.

Several smaller Web-based companies have also received financing, including Vancouver's "participatory media" site NowPublic, Victoria-based Pixpo (another photo-sharing site), and Calgary-based StumbleUpon, a Web-browsing enhancement application.

StumbleUpon raised an estimated $1-million to $3-million from a group of angel investors - including Lotus founder Mitch Kapor - not long after moving from Calgary to San Francisco.

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