It has become a common refrain among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: We didn’t need to raise money, but we did anyway.
The latest start-up to go this route is DoubleDutch, which makes an app for organizing events and gathering data from them. The company announced on Thursday that it had raised a $15 million financing round led by Mithril Capital, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
In addition, the company said it secured $4 million in credit from Silicon Valley Bank.
DoubleDutch previously raised a $10 million financing round in September. But as is often the case in such situations, the company says it raised additional money in part because it wanted the opportunity to work with new investors.
“We had kind of decided we weren’t going to raise at all; we were just going to go heads down until the fall,” Lawrence Coburn, the chief executive of DoubleDutch, said.
But then, after being introduced by an investor in his company, Mr. Coburn met with Mithril and was impressed.
“All the other growth funds we spoke to spent most of the time drilling into business model,” he said. “The Mithril guys only wanted to talk about product. And they wanted to talk about vision.”
With so much money in venture capital these days, the most successful start-ups have the luxury of raising money on their own terms as they field numerous requests from investors. That can contribute to higher valuations. DoubleDutch’s valuation in the financing round was not disclosed.
Ajay Royan, who started Mithril with Mr. Thiel, said he was attracted to DoubleDutch because it applies advanced technology to an area that lacks it. The app shows event organizers data about how guests responded to particular aspects of an event – such as an industry convention or a corporate conference – letting them fine-tune events in the future.
“DoubleDutch is not tech for tech,” Mr. Royan said. “It’s tech for real people. It’s tech for ubiquitous situations that everyone is dealing with on a daily basis.”
In addition to Mithril, the investors in the round included Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Bullpen Capital, three firms that had previously invested in the company.