Physix Frontier
Google (Alphabet)
Funding History
- IPOUSD 1.7B — Issue price: $85.00 (Dutch auction pricing); Market cap at listing: Over $23B (some sources cite $27B); Shares issued: 19,605,052 shares (including 14,142,135 new shares issued by the company and 5,462,917 secondary shares offered by existing shareholders); Lock-up period: Standard 180-day lock-up | Source: Prospectus/Exchange disclosures
- Series A RoundUSD 25M — Amount: $25M; $25,000,000; Post-money valuation: Undisclosed (externally estimated at ~$100M); Led by: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) + Sequoia Capital | The uniqueness of this financing lies in KPCB and Sequoia, direct competitors, rarely co-leading the same round. This also laid the groundwork for subsequent governance arrangements—Sequoia strongly urged the two founders to hire a professional CEO after closing Series A, ultimately facilitating Eric Schmidt's joining in Aug 2001. Google announced this financing via its first official press release, simultaneously using the term 'Googlers' externally for the first time. | Source: Reuters / Investing.com
- Angel RoundUSD 1M — Amount: approx. USD 1M (including initial USD 100K); approx. USD 1,000,000; led by multiple angel investors jointly | These four angels shared the characteristic of being 'technical judges' rather than financial investors: Bechtolsheim worked on workstations, Cheriton on distributed systems, Shriram later joined the board, and Bezos was building Amazon into e-commerce infrastructure at the time. They bought the technical correctness of PageRank, not the business model—Google had no revenue in 1998. | Source: EverybodyWiki 'Google LLC'
- Angel RoundUSD 0M — Amount: $100,000; Led by Andy Bechtolsheim (Co-founder of Sun Microsystems) | After Page and Brin demonstrated their product at a Stanford professor's home, Bechtolsheim wrote a check on the spot. Key detail: The check was made out to 'Google Inc.'—a legal entity that did not yet exist. The founders had to register the company first to cash the check; the registration date was Sep 4, 1998. This is Silicon Valley's most famous case of 'check first, company later.' | Source: Wikipedia 'History of Google' + Official Google History