As edtech startups continue to challenge the current state of higher education, and various niche startups focus on educating people through digital means, yet another company is getting a boost when it comes to helping people learn.
PopExpert, a learning marketplace that lets students connect with experts in one-on-one video chats, has just raised a $ 2 million seed round led by Learn Capital, with participation by Jeff Skoll, Ken Howery, Michael Chasen, and Expansion VC.
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Alteryx has raised $ 12 million for its business intelligence service designed for data analysts to build tools out of their own internal data and that from third parties.
The investment comes from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital, a new firm founded by former Quest Founder and CEO Vinny Smith.
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The march of the enterprise software IPOs continues, with not one but two companies debuting on New York stock exchanges today. Business intelligence provider Tableau Software, trading as “DATA”, is one of the more highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and so far it has not disappointed. It priced its IPO at $ 31 per share, and it has popped 58% to nearly $ 49/share in early trading on the NYSE. Marketo, a cloud-based marketing services company, priced its IPO at about half that, $ 13 per share. It will be trading as MKTO, but has yet to trade this morning.
CrowdOptic, a startup with technology for identifying where people are pointing their smartphone cameras, has raised another $ 1 million in funding.
When I’ve spoken to the team in the past, they’ve emphasized the ways this could be used to create new types of social interactions — if people are attending a live event and pointing their cameras at the same thing, they can start chatting and sharing content. However, the company’s website highlights a number of use cases, including “focus-aware” advertising, analytics, news reporting, social TV (live attendees can provide content to people watching at home), and security.
MessageMe — a messaging app that launched in March with a little Facebook controversy thrown in — has raised another $ 10 million, according to an SEC filing earlier today. The Series A round was led by Greylock Partners; and as part of it, John Lilly, the ex-ceo of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock, will be joining the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe.
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After a month of offering the iPhone 5 for $ 100 down, T-Mobile has quietly increased the upfront cost by $ 50. Even with the price hike, it’s still less expensive than on most other carriers, but some type of warning would’ve certainly been appreciated. As for the rest of T-Mobile’s new pricing scheme, its $ 20-a month, two-year amortization schedule remains intact. Consider us skeptical, but hopefully this is just a case of growing pains, and unannounced promotions won’t be part of the UnCarrier’s game plan going forward.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, T-Mobile
Via: TmoNews
Source: T-Mobile
New York City-based startup Cover seeks to simplify the process through the magic of mobile payments. It does that with a payments platform and mobile application that would reduce all the fuss and calculations that happen when the check comes.
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Mass Appeal, a joint venture that’s both reviving the Broolyn-based, graffiti-focused magazine of the same name and also moving into online content, is announcing that it has raised $ 1.2 million in funding.
It’s backed by a mix of traditional firms and figures from the hip hop world. The rapper, (and one-time TechCrunch contributor) Nas announced last month that he had invested a “six-figure sum” in the company, and he’s also serving as Mass Appeal’s associate publisher. Publisher Peter Bittenbender told me via email that the other investors include record label/”creative shop” DECON (where Bittenbender is co-founder and CEO), rapper Pusha T, and international firm White Owl Capital.
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CircleUp, a startup that connects investors with retail and consumer companies that wouldn’t attract traditional venture funding, has raised a $ 7.5 million Series A.
The round was led by Union Square Ventures. New backer Google Ventures also participated, as did previous investors Rose Park Advisors, Maveron, and David Topper. Union Square’s Andy Weissman is joining the CirlceUp board, while Google’s David Krane is becoming a board observer.
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Chute, a startup that offers tools for collecting and displaying photos, has raised $ 7 million in Series A Funding.
The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and US Venture Partners. Chute previously raised a $ 2.7 million seed round led by Freestyle.
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A little less than a year ago, a little company called LinkSmart launched to help publishers use text links to get their readers reading more. Now it has raised $ 5 million in Series B funding to take its technology for growing audiences and make it more widely available. The financing was led by Foundry Group and Costanoa Venture Partners.
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Peer-to-peer lending platform Lending Club is announcing a huge new investor today: Google. Google and existing investor Foundation Capital have put $ 125 million in Lending Club, which was valued at $ 1.55 billion in the round. As part of this investment Google will take an observer seat on the Lending Club Board alongside existing Board members including Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker, ex-chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley John Mack and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
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I’ve found that when people visit San Francisco, it’s not unusual to hear them ask something like: “No seriously, is there a coffee shop on every block in this city?” Yes, San Francisco likes coffee. So do a lot of cities. Busy people thrive on coffee, especially in the tech industry. In fact, some would even say that a substantial amount of coffee is an essential ingredient to success.
MindMixer, a startup that helps organizations like the City of San Francisco gather ideas from their communities, has raised $ 4 million in Series B funding.
When the company announced its $ 1.9 million Series A last year, CEO Nick Bowden recalled his work in urban planning, when local governments and agencies would hold public meetings that no one attended. So MindMixer created tools for soliciting ideas and feedback online.
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Search startup Leap2 is announcing that it has raised $ 1.6 million in new funding. It’s also releasing new versions of its iOS and Android apps.
Building a better search experience than the existing players is a pretty tall order. In Leap2′s case, it sounds like the focus really is on the experience, incorporating more images and social updates into a unified search result. Mixing different media into one list of links may not sound particularly new, but founder and CEO Mike Farmer told me via email that Leap2′s goal is to give you “the whole answer,” so there’s one result with all the content you’re looking for, and you don’t have to visit a number of different sites to piece things together.
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ClickTale, a company that helps businesses understand what visitors are actually doing on their websites, just announced that it has raised $ 17 million in Series B funding.
The company tries to go beyond the standard information revealed by most other analytics services, offering things like recordings of visitor sessions, heat maps that show where people moved their mouse and clicked, and a visualizer showing each step towards converting visitors into paying customers or registered users.
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Swifto, a startup that wants to be the Uber for dog walking, has raised $ 2.5 million from Benchmark Capital. We’re told that the funding round previously closed but the startup didn’t want to announce to the public for fear of attracting customers.
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Kickstart Seed Fund (not to be confused with crowdfunding giant Kickstarter), has raised $ 26 million for a second fund to invest in Utah-based startups, along with others in the “Mountain West” region of the U.S. Since its launch in 2008, with a $ 8 million fund raised by Managing Director Gavin Christensen, Kickstart has invested in 24 companies, including two exits with Panoptic Security in November of 2012 and GroSocial in January of 2013.
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Vidyo has raised yet another round of funding, this time $ 17 million. That brings total funding to $ 116 million, with the financing coming from inside and outside investors. Triangle Peak Partners was the lead new investor in the round, joining previous investors such as Juniper Networks, QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Capital Partners, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group.
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Kaazing, a provider of live Web and mobile communication and the developer of HTML5 WebSocket, has raised $ 15 million in funding, bringing the company’s total financing to $ 39 million. New investors this round include New Enterprise Associates and Columbus Nova Technology Partners, as well as existing investors. Kaazing says it will use the money to drive its plans for corporate growth. “This influx of new capital will fuel our global expansion and further validates our market momentum with an enterprise-grade web communication platform built using the HTML5 WebSocket standard,” said Kaazing CEO and co-founder Jonas Jacobi in a statement. “With iPads and other smart mobile devices rapidly displacing PCs and accelerating cloud adoption, enterprise application modernization is increasingly urgent. Today’s static web architectures are expensive and ineffective in supporting this huge market shift – Kaazing’s leading communication products are critical to the emerging cloud and mobile architectures. We are excited to be investors in the leader in this space,” added NEA partner Rohini Chakravarthy. The company’s last round of funding was in June, when it raised $ 17 million. At that time, Kaazing said it would use the funds to fund opportunities for using WebSocket technology to power real-time communications. Last year, Kaazing also brought on Cisco veteran John Donnelly to expand its sales and business development channels. Based in Mountain View with additional sales offices in New York City and London, Kaazing helps drive the real-time Web and mobile communications of Intel, Google, Bechtel, Oracle, and HSBC. The company was created in 2007 and its founding team helped design the HTML5 WebSocket protocol in order to enable a “full-duplex pipe” between participants, rather than the legacy infrastructure that required a request and response between two users.
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hypnosec writes “Anonymous knocked the doors of Indiegogo in a bid to raise some crowd-sourced dough to expand its news coverage by establishing a dedicated site instead of tweets and tumblr blog posts and managed to raise 27 time as much money as initially targeted. The initial target was to raise $ 2000 to fund the site development work as well as pay for initial hosting. Anonymous is planning to host news, reports and blogs from independent online reporters under its, already in use, Your Anon News brand.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Despite its potential, the jury is arguably still out on the best use-case for Augmented Reality. But one startup, Augment, thinks it has the answer: helping to sell products by letting customers see what they might look like in the real world.
A graduate of the Paris-based accelerator Le Camping, today the company is announcing a €220k (~$ 289k) funding round — capital it will use to take its offering to the U.S., where it has recently hired a biz dev and sales person, and incorporated a local subsidiary.
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Action.IO, a startup promising to make it easier to create, configure, and share development environments, just announced a new name — Nitrous.IO — and $ 1 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, TIBCO Software, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures, and Peanut Labs co-founder/CTO Prosper Nwankpa. (TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a partner at CrunchFund.)
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Dust off that cheque book. Teddle, the UK startup that lets you easily find and book a home cleaner, has closed a £255,000 (~$ 391k) funding round from a group of entrepreneurs-cum-angel investors, including Open Table founder David Pritchard.
In addition, the Springboard alumni has managed to persuade Hailo founder and chairman Ron Zeghibe to join as non-executive chairman, although I’m told he hasn’t invested, but (as we’d expect) is taking a small amount of equity.
The free music streaming and recommendation service, Songza, has just secured $ 3.82 million in funding. Its funding was revealed in a recent SEC filing. Songza offers playlists created by “music experts”. The playlists are configured based on the date, the time of day, your mood, and the type of activity that you’re currently doing. Like
Songza, a free streaming music service that has expert-made playlists and runs on the web and various touch screen platforms, has raised $ 3.8 million according to a SEC filing. We’ve reached out to both companies to get further detail and will update this post. A quick check on AngelList now names Amazon.com as an “unconfirmed” investors.
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Duedil has raised $ 5 million for its platform that uses open data to help companies conduct due diligence. The Series A round was led by Notion Capital. Also participating were Oak Investment Partners as well as Passion Capital and Spotify investor Shakil Khan. With the funding, Duedil is hiring data scientists and beefing up its resources for expansion. Duedil is a company that shows what innovation can come when governments open their data. That’s what has happened with Duedil, which directly benefits from open data policies in the United Kingdom and those emerging in the European Union. With open data, Duedil can link data from different sources, aggregate it and provide it free or soon to come, on a subscription basis. At its core, Duedil offers a data analytics and visualization engine. Using the service, for example, a corporate lawyer can research a company’s corporate structure. The lawyer can visualize in a mind-map the company’s shareholders and investments. Last fall, Mike Butcher wrote about Duedil opening its API. Developed with Mashery, Duedil offers up to 20 years of information on all companies registered in the UK and Ireland. With the EU opening its data, Duedil will extend its network across the continent. This is some pretty cool stuff. The data analysis is detailed and the visuals bring the information to life. Just take a look at this blog post about how it developed its new credit rating service. It draws from GitHub’s Histogram and the colored bands resistors to show data in a new dimension. This is not your old school credit score. This is something to marvel at both in terms of the analysis it provides and the elegance of the design.
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The company says that it nabbed the cash from the Silver Lake Waterman growth debt fund, and took out convertible debt from earlier investors. [Read more]
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Xeneta, which offers a crowdsourced price comparison service for sea freight, has raised a €1.2 million (~$ 1.6m) seed round led by the Stockholm VC Creandum, with participation from Norwegian private investment firm Alden. The new funding will be used to expand into new markets, specifically adding to the breadth of coverage for its comparisons in terms of the number of “trade lanes” in and out of Europe. Up until now, the 2012-founded company had been bootstrapped.
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The fairly new way for people to invest in projects and ideas is increasingly more popular. The crowdfunding market nearly doubled last year — funding more than 1 million campaigns. [Read more]
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GetNinjas, a local services marketplace startup based in São Paulo, Brazil has closed a $ 3 million Series A round backed by new investor Otto Ventures, with existing investors Monashees and KaszeK Ventures also participating. The latter both invested in GetNinjas’ 2011 seed round, which raised a total of $ 700,000.
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Singapore beauty e-tailer, Luxola, just raised its Series A round from GREE Ventures. The amount was undisclosed, but has been rumored to be in the region of $ 2 million. The company carries about 60 brands of cosmetics and beauty products on its website, and ships to countries in Southeast Asia like Singapore and Malaysia. Its site was launched in September 2012, and it had previously raised a seed round of about $ 596,820 (S$ 740,000) from Wavemaker Labs and Singapore government fund, the National Research Foundation. Its initial angel round was about $ 423,460 ($ 525,000), according to CEO and founder, Alexis Horowitz-Burdick. Besides its latest funding round, the company has also managed to pull over former PopSugar Director of Affiliates and Social, Christine Ng. Prior to that, she was product manager at Sephora, where she led the beauty store’s social media and interactive product efforts. She joins Luxola as its chief marketing officer. “We’re grateful for Christine. The sort of experience she has doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia yet because the community isn’t that old. She doesn’t just have online experience, but also directly with the beauty industry,” said Horowitz-Burdick. Before founding Luxola, she came to Singapore from Washington, DC about six years ago. She had started a group buying site called The Sweet Spot. “I wasn’t interested in the race to the bottom anymore,” she said, of the decision to sell higher-tier products. The average basket price for Luxola is about US$ 44 (S$ 55), she said. Luxola employs a staff of ten. Those are split into two on the engineering side, three handling creative and design tasks, and two marketing people. The new funding will allow Luxola to continue its expansion into the region and set up warehouses there, to complete fulfilment more easily. Currently, it has a warehouse space in Singapore and ships out of it.
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When it comes to streaming boxes, Simple.TV is a bit of an outlier, as it performs all the usual functions as a DVR, but it can then stream video that it captures to other devices. Anyway, what started out as a Kickstarter campaign has now become venture-backed, as the Simple.TV team has raised $ 5.7 million to make its funky little standalone DVR a mainstream device.
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Larky, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based startup focused on helping users take better advantage of discounts and benefits from various clubs or members-only organizations like AAA, AARP, as well as health insurance providers, credit card companies, and more, is today announcing a seed round of $ 650,000. The round, which officially closed in late 2012, was led by North Coast Technology Investors, and included participation from First Step Fund and the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, which gives the state of Michigan an equity stake in the new company.
The market for social marketing startups is getting some natural uplift as advertising money continues to shift online and marketers experiment with alternatives to traditional ad formats that don’t make enough of a mark in the digital space. One such startup, Collective Bias, has just closed a $ 10.5m Series A to expand its blogger-powered social marketing model internationally.
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Bespoke Post, a subscription-based e-commerce startup offering a hilariously titled “Box of Awesome” (no, not that one - Bespoke Post is for grown-ups), is today announcing having closed on $ 850,000 in seed funding, led by Warby Parker and Bonobos investor, Great Oaks VC. Also participating in the round, which actually closed last fall, were 500 Startups, Brad Harrison Ventures, 1-800 Flowers’ strategic investing arm, and several angel investors. And, as of Monday, the company is expanding into Canada.
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Fast growing enterprise network security company OpenDNS is announcing a new investment this morning, raising an undisclosed amount of Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures. New managing partner and former Juniper Network Systems executive Stefan Dyckerhoff is joining the company’s board. While OpenDNS is not releasing the exact amount of the funding, founder and CEO David Ulevitch tells us it’s a “meaningful round and a very large check,” that will enable the cash flow positive company to ramp up expansion in the next few years. Prior to this round, Open DNS had raised $ 7 million from Minor Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners.
Rev.com, a freelancer marketplace founded by early oDesk employees, is today announcing $ 4.5 million in Series A funding led by Venky Ganesan of Globespan Capital Partners. Also participating in the round were Craig Sherman (former COO of Ancestry.com) and Austin Ligon (founder of CarMax). All three are now members of Rev.com’s board of directors, following the round which closed back in August 2012.
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Sherpa, a personal assistant app that launched initially in the Spanish-speaking world, just announced that it has raised $ 1.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.
Sherpa users can speak or type their requests, and the app answers them by collecting information from around the web. The company has also partnered with PayPal and other services, so that users accomplish tasks like making travel reservations and transferring money.
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Louisville-based startup Red e App, a real-time private mobile messaging platform for enterprises with a high proportion of mobile workers that lets them send secure, trackable internal communications, has closed a $ 750,000 Series A round led by early-stage Louisville-based VC fund Yearling Fund II.
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Realty Mogul, a site where accredited investors can can pool their money to back real estate deals, is going live today.
Co-founder and Jilliene Helman argued that in the current financial landscape, real estate is “one of the ways that people can still get yields.” She also acknowledged that there’s a lot of excitement right now about equity crowdfunding for startups, but she noted that investments on Realty Mogul can start paying off in a few months (in the form of rent checks or loan payments), rather than five or ten years: “Our big focus for investors is cash flow.”
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Late last year, former Googler Gabor Cselle had a problem. He’d launched a fun app called DrawChat, and it was starting to see some real usage — which would be great, except Cselle told me that DrawChat was always meant to be “a palate cleanser” and that he wanted to pursue a “billion-dollar thing.” So he auctioned off DrawChat (it was purchased by OneLouder, a division of Handmark) and got to work on his big idea, which he’s announcing today.
Cselle said that the goal of his new startup Namo Media is to fix some of the big problems in mobile advertising. That’s a pretty common refrain among mobile ad startups, but Cselle has something specific in mind — creating native ads that are part of the stream of content in mobile apps. In other words, ads that are both less annoying and more lucrative. He isn’t ready to get specific about the product yet, only to talk about the general idea and the team (more on that in a second). He did compare his approach to Facebook’s, except for a wide range of “content heavy apps,” such as news apps or photo-sharing apps.
French real-time alerts startup mention, which describes its offering as ‘Google alerts on steroids’, has raised a “flash” seed round of $ 800,000 (€600,000) from Alven Capital and Point Nine Capital. Mention offers a real-time web alerts for brands, companies and individuals to track what’s being said about them on the web and social media sites.
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OpinionLab, a company that powers customer feedback technology for websites, has raised $ 15 million in growth capital financing from SSM Partners.
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Festicket, the UK site that aims to make booking and attending a music festival akin to the experience of purchasing a package holiday online, has raised $ 680k in a new round of funding.
Its new backers are the French early-stage fund Kima Ventures, Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of vente-privee.com), London’s #1 Seed and Playfair Capital, and the New York-based VC firm Windcrest Partners.
Festicket says the new capital will be used to further develop the platform and extend the range of products that it’s able to offer, as well as to bolster sales and marketing, including key hires, and to accelerate its plans for European expansion.
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Codenamed Daisy, the forthcoming “curated” music streaming service is expected to launch this summer. [Read more]
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Aktana has raised $ 5 million in angel funding for its suggestion-engine technology designed for sales people in the field.
Aktana provides data insights into sales activity that learns from interactions with a decision-based engine on the frontend and a backend that uses machine learning to determine better go-to market strategies. In all, it is meant as a virtual assistant for a sales rep.
Aktana started off as a project for NASA to optimize scarce resources, such as wind tunnels and computer resources, said Co-Founder Jack O’Holleran. The company changed direction when they realized there was a better application in a top line driven area.
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Firefox’s new Web-centric OS will let users run apps from the Web, raising concerns over how to stop malicious software.
Mozilla’s new Firefox OS for low-end smartphones—aimed initially at Eastern European and South American markets—will face challenges protecting users from the malicious mobile apps that are a growing problem around the world.
Predictive sports game startup PrePlay has closed a $ 4.7 million Series B round, led by Trilogy Equity Partners LLC. RSE Ventures, the VC fund founded by Miami Dolphins’ owner Stephen Ross and Matt Higgins, also participated in the round.
F-Commerce Startup Soldsie Raises $1 Million For Its Facebook Comments-Based Shopping Platform
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