Manuel Rosso Raises $2M from AV

Manuel Rosso, formerly of Dell’s desktop group and IMVU Inc., a social media startup (co-founded by guru Eric Ries) has raised $2 million from Austin Ventures, the Statesman’s Lori Hawkins reports.

The new company was incubated at AV over the last year, where Rosso served as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence.

Austin Startup can additionally confirm that Rosso has hired ex-FiveRuns VP of Development and Technology Steve Sanderson as the VP of Product of the new company.

Sanderson has a reputation for guiding especially simple and elegant products, as well as the care and feeding of Ruby developers. At FiveRuns he recruited and managed and truly top-notch group, and it is reasonable to expect to see a few notable Rails hires for the new venture in the coming weeks and months.

The investment is one of a select few early stage, consumer-facing investments that AV has since announcing its new $900 million fund. Other recent portfolio company additions in this vein include Crimereports.com, Jigsaw, Slacker and Workstreamer.

Posted by Josh Jones-Dilworth Josh Jones-Dilworth is the founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc. -- a PR firm focused on bring early-stage technologies to market. He blogs at http://joshdilworth.com To read more posts click here.