DC Inno Beat 4/15: NEA Raises ~$3.1B Fund, IRS Woes and FiscalNote's Media Move

Happy Tax Day! Ignore the tax man and let’s get to some local tech and startup headlines

…On to The Beat

The Big One

Chris: NEA's new monster fund has been rumored for a while, and the firm has now officially raised two new funds totaling $3.15B. To date, NEA has now raised a staggering $17B in capital — woah. According to CB Insights' Q1 report, NEA topped the list of most active investment firms in the U.S. (followed by Andreessen Horowitz andFirst Round Capital). Founded in 1977, NEA has invested in more than 400 companies while participating in 48 IPOs and another 73 acquisitions.

Reid: Closing the largest VC fund in history, big time news. NEA broke this one down a little differently, setting aside $350M of the total in a separate fund for some flexibility in late stage investments.

Featured: IRS Woes

Chris: The dreaded 15th of April is here and this one may be worse than every one before it. The issue is: your tax return has to run a gauntlet of opportunistic identity thieves caught between cracks in the IRS’s old cyber wall. Internal and external reports have repeatedly found room for improvement when it comes to how the IRS handles information security. The most recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration in December found "weaknesses in the enterprise information technology security program.”

Eric: Cybersecurity is always a taxing proposition, and identity theft complicates things even more. Still, the IRS does seem on top of addressing its problems. If Congress would just listen to John Oliver and Michael Bolton and actually fund it properly, there would probably be even fewer problems.

Player Personnel

Chris: Legislative tracking startup FiscalNote has appointed former WaPo publisherKatharine Weymouth to its advisory board. Heading into a busy political campaign season, FiscalNote will more than likely use the appointment to leverage its data with media sources throughout the industry. Weymouth led WaPo for 17 years, and served as its publisher starting in 2008, before being replaced by Politico co-founder Frederick Ryan Jr in late 2014.

Eric: Weymouth knows publishing and she knows DC. Her rolodex alone will probably help FiscalNote expand its clientele base.

Community:

Reid: Our annual conference, State of Innovation is coming up on May 6 and this year we are looking at the major trends (national and local) impacting our business community and asking some of the area's top entrepreneurs what it takes to build a winner here. Early bird pricing ends tonight, get on it.

What We're Reading:

Reach out

Tips? Rumblings? Complaints? Something you want to see in the email? Reid@dcinno.com, Chris@dcinno.com