This morning Clustrix announced they have raised $16.5M in a Series C round from Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, ATA Ventures and Don Listwin. They are one of the earliest Y Combinator companies, founded in 2005 with nearly $47 million raised to date. Clustrix was ranked #5 on our Y Combinator Index for April.

The Benefits of MySQL Without the Scaling Limitations

Clustrix scales MySQL databases as engineering operations needs increase, simply by adding more nodes on Amazon Web Services. The company solves parallel processing challenges associated with applications that have a large quantity of data transactions, and is also used by dev ops to get realtime reporting on database performance an automatically scale up our down the number of nodes in use.

Before Clustrix an entirely different kind of datastore, such as MongoDB, would be used. This requires developers to split up their data across multiple servers and use a map reduce algorithm in order to query across all the data. However, developers using Clustrix save time because they can use their existing application code and MySQL connectors and don’t have to deal with sharding.

Possible IPO In Sight?

A PEHub article covering the announcement says:

CEO Robin Purohit told peHUB that the company will likely raise more funding in the next year to bring it to cash-flow positive. “And then we’ll see where the public markets are,” he said.

We’ll certainly keep an eye out for the next REG D to cross the SEC wire from Clustrix, and keep you posted on their monthly momentum and overall progress in the Startup Index.

Photo Credit: Clustrix Facebook page

These zombie stories just won’t die.

Last week Kirchner Group and Crestline Partners announced a joint effort to give limited partners (LPs) liquidity:

There is an estimated $100 billion in private equity assets managed by funds past their investment periods, according to industry estimates. Many of these so-called “zombie funds” have serious issues of alignment between the general partner and limited partners. As a result, an increasing number of institutional investors are looking for creative and effective ways to restructure these funds and rationalize their private equity portfolios.

Meet the Bobs of Private Equity

The announcement goes on to explain its areas of focus, which include supporting or replacing general partners, managing or even restructuring troubled funds, providing portfolio follow-on capital and even company level follow-on investment, and finding other opportunities for exits to give LPs liquidity and maximize value.

According to PEhub Kirchner Group has already has some success with this model:

Kirchner Group has made a name for itself as a specialist in zombie deals. It took over management of the Brantley Partners V LP from Brantley Partners and renamed it Emerald Partners V LP fund, which it continues to run.

What’s In Store for Venture Capital?

VC investing is a subcategory of private equity, accounting for $30B invested by venture capitalists in portfolio companies in 2012, according to the North American Venture Capital Association. This is roughly 10% of the private equity industry’s annual global investment, so I suspect the lowest hanging fruit for this kind of restructuring are among huge private equity firms but I certainly wouldn’t rule out some restructuring of larger zombie VC funds.

We are at the beginning of an industry transformation for traditional venture capital that has been a long time coming, and the chronicling of this shift began with the May 2012 report from the Kauffman Foundation, one of the largest investors in venture capital firms and an entrepreneurship think tank, on venture capital as an asset class. According to their findings:

Venture capital (VC) has delivered poor returns for more than a decade. VC returns haven’t significantly outperformed the public market since the late 1990s, and, since 1997, less cash has been returned to investors than has been invested in VC. Speculation among industry insiders is that the VC model is broken, despite occasional high-profile successes like Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Facebook in recent years.

You can read the full report here.

We will be watching to see which LPs take this route to liquidity for their venture capital portfolio, and looking to determine what those restructuring deals and partnership changes could mean for the entrepreneurs within their portfolio companies.

Through the startups indexes I’ve been creating in the past month I’ve developed a database of over 1,000 companies with dozens of signals each. This list includes ALL the startups in my database, across all the portfolios that have been indexed so far, ranked by momentum.

Why I’m Writing These Posts

Many commenters and friends have asked why I’m doing this and not working on my startup. In case it wasn’t obvious, this is our startup and these posts are our MVP. I’d like to publicly acknowledge the tremendous effort by my team that make this possible. Kevin Morrill, our CTO and cofounder, who has taken a process managed in dozens on unwieldly spreadsheets and a ridiculous number of browser tabs and automated it with code. Andy Sparks, our Technology Editor, has undertaken the incredible schlep work of hand building new indices and researching startups, cleaning, curating and organizing our data.

The Bigger They Come, the Harder They Fall

You will find companies in the top portion of the list that you’ve probably never heard of, and companies near the bottom who are big names you recognize right away. Because of this, you might be tempted to immediately discredit the entire index – but let’s walk through a few examples first so you can see what we are measuring. Since this measures momentum, the bigger the company the more it is impacted when it fails to grow.

#2 – Coinbase, a service for storing and selling Bitcoin e-currency, has been gaining a lot of momentum alongside the popularity of trading the online currency – averaging 11% growth week-over-week in web traffic by our estimates. This growth also shows in Coinbase’s social media following. They grew Facebook Likes 35% from 452 to 614 during April. On Twitter they grew from 1375 followers to 1876, a 36% growth rate. We’ll be watching to see if Coinbase can sustain this growth in May.

#1179 – StumbleUpon, the popular social content discovery service, appears just 6 positions from the bottom of the list and upon closer inspection we see this is because the mass of the company has declined as it dropped from 176 to 179 in Alexa rank during April. Based on our analysis this drop is representative of a loss of around 10,000 unique visitors per day, and a look at the companies Alexa graph reveals their traffic has been in steady decline for over a year.

Also of note in this list are some of the younger startups that have already shot to the top. YC Winter 13 companies such as Strikingly, Teespring and Thalmic Labs made an impressive showing.

Biggest Winners & Losers

Keep scrolling and you will find the entire list of startups, but for those of you who don’t like scrolling through 1000+ rows in a spreadsheet I’ve got the highlights for you.

The April 2013 Startup Index