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Earlybird Venture Capital, one of Europe’s most famous venture capital firms, today announces the expansion of its leadership team with the addition of Jason Whitmire who joins as Partner, focusing on early stage venture investing in mobile services, cloud computing, and digital media technologies.

Until June 2010 he served as General Manager & Vice President at Wind River Systems, where he founded and managed the company’s high growth mobile business (which according to the Wall Street Journal was the motivation behind Intel’s acquisition of Wind River for $884 million in July 2009). Previously Jason was shareholder and Managing Director of open source real-time Linux provider FSMLabs Inc. and played a key role in its acquisition by Wind River in 2007. Prior to that Mr. Whitmire co-founded the software business at Infineon Technologies, where he led the global licensing business for Infineon’s wireless software subsidiary, Comneon GmbH.

Yoom.de, an innovative online platform for tenant-to-tenant residential real estate transactions, has raised further growth capital from Earlybird Venture Capital. Currently, Earlybird manages over 430 million Euros of assets for an international investor base investing in innovative, fast growing companies with outstanding management teams and high growth potential in international markets. Earlybird’s portfolio currently includes more than 25 companies in seven countries, they invested in over 70 companies and scored several successful trade sales and IPOs.

The company received seed financing from angel investors in spring 2009 while the new round is rumored to be in the single-digit million Euro amount,  following its successful market entry.

Hopefully they will use the money to put up an english version and enter other european markets.

Malte Niebuhr, Managing Director at Yoom.de, is delighted: ”Earlybird Venture Capital is a high-class investor who has already very actively supported us during our start-up phase and continues to do so in the growth phase we are now entering and very much looking forward to.

Yoom.de enables current and new tenants, landlords and asset / facility managers to efficiently execute the tenant changing process without involving real estate agents, whilst at the same time providing an economic benefit for all parties by revolutionising the value chain.

Dr. Christian Nagel, Managing Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital, comments: “Yoom.de is an innovative business model with the potential to eliminate a market inefficiency – namely high real estate agent commissions without agents providing a noticeable service or value-ad in return. The first transactions on the platform have proven that the model offers significant advantages not only to previous and subsequent tenants, but also to landlords and asset / facility managers compared to the estate agent-model. We are very convinced of the business idea.”

Note: This is a post I wrote for Techcrunch Europe as soon as the news broke.

Scoreloop has just announced it closed its second financing round, with a $2.8 million / €2 million cash injection from new investors Earlybird and existing investor Target Partners, which was the seed funder for the Munich-based company. The funds will be used to fuel the growth of the company and to establish (or solidify) its position, especially in the realm of the iPhone. Since launching its technology in May 2009, Scoreloop has over 500 registered game developers that have published more than 40 Scoreloop enabled games in the iPhone App Store.

So one month after the release of its community application Scoreloop finds a great validation for its product, while Earlybird gets in on one of the most interesting new business areas around.

Scoreloop offers an SDK for mobile game developers that instantly adds social gaming to their applications with features such as challenges and a points system. The company offers its technology for free to developers and monetizes on the points system. To understand better how it works and I suggest you sign up on their community and challenge me (Plus: they have one of the most amazing facebook connect apps I’ve seen).

“We are continuously receiving excellent feedback from game developers and publishers, as Scoreloop offers a unique set of tools for social features and monetization strategies. We are thrilled to be working with two of Europe’s premier VCs with Earlybird as an additional partner beside our existing investor Target Partners.” said Marc Gumpinger, CEO of Scoreloop.

Marc Gumpinger, Scoreloop’s CEO is understandably pleased. Since launching its technology in May 2009, Scoreloop has over 500 registered game developers that have published more than 40 Scoreloop enabled games in the Apple App Store today.

Roland Manger says this is a new market for its fund and Scoreloop fills a gap in their portfolio. Earlybird was looking to get into the new mobile market, without a particular interest in gaming technologies until they found Scoreloop. He points at their significant growth potential: “Scoreloop’s technology and the community platform solve many problems both developers and users are facing in the mobile app-world. Scoreloop will help developers make their games more attractive while improving monetization and users will be able to find games relevant to them much quicker.”