Funding roundup - week ending 5/30/14

Steven Loeb · May 30, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3731

Message Bus, Spark Capital, BitFury, Sequoia, Newlans, ZPower, Askuity, Apixio, Thatgamecompany

Seed stage

Bindo, hyperlocal marketplace that facilitates and tracks all in-store, online and mobile transactions, raised a seed round of $1.8 million from Gary Vaynerchuk, East Ventures, and Metamorphic Venturess.

Mustbin, a personal data organization app, raised $1.5 million in funding from existing investors.

File sending app Infinit raised $1.8 million in funding from Alven Capital and 360 Capital Partners.

Need, an online magazine and retailer for men, raised $500,000 in seed funding led by Greg Abbott, Imran Sheikh and Mobelux.

Quick Key, a smartphone app for teachers that grades bubble answer sheets, raised a $250,000 seed round from ARC Capital.

MyNextRun, a platform for runners to discover and sign up for running events, raised €500,000 from Andy Phillipps, Moaffak Ahmed, Juha Lindfors and AJP Holding.

Wauwaa, a website that connects parents with relevant information and special offers, raised €500,000 from Vision+.

Askuity, a cross-retailer big data analytics platform, raised a $1.8 million seed round funding from dunnhumby Venture, MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund and a group of angel investors.

Online travel agency TourRadar raised $500,000 from SpeedInvest, AC & Friends and existing investors.

Brndstr, a crowd-marketing platform that gives people discounts and special offers when they post on social mediaraised $1.6 million in new funding from Funsho.

 

Early stage

Distil Networks, a provider of bot detection and mitigation solutions, raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Foundry Group and Techstars’ Bullet Time Ventures, with participation from ff Venture Capital, IDEA Fund Partners and Militello Capital.

HackerOne,  a volunteer security organization, raised $9 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital. 

Aver Informatics, a data management platform, raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led by Drive Capital and GE Ventures.

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart raised $210 million in a round led by DST Global, with Tiger Global, Naspers, and Iconiq Capital also participating. 

Aerial robotics platform Skycatch raised $13.2 million in a funding round from unnamed investors.

Qeexo, a developer of touch technology, raised $2.3 million in a  Series A funding round led by Sierra Ventures.

DemystData, a software provider that harnesses Big Data and predictive analytics, raised $5 million in Series A funding from Notion Capital, SingTel Innov8, Arbor Ventures, P2P Equity Partners, and Errol Damelin.

BitFury Group, a Bitcoin infrastructure provider, raised $20 million from Binary Financial, Crypto Currency Partners, Georgian Co-Investment Fund, Queensbridge Venture Partners and ZAD Investment Company. Angel investors Bill Tai and Jonathan Teo also participated, along with the company’s seed investors.

Venture-capital heavyweight Sequoia Capital raised $530 million for its fourth India-focused fund.

Nix Hydra, a software entertainment firm focused on developing products for young women, raised $5 million in Series A funding fromFoundry Group and Mike Lazerow.

Lucid Software, the company behind cloud-based apps Lucidchart and Lucidpress, raised $5 million in Series A funding from Kickstart Seed Fund, Grayhawk Capital, and others.

PatientPay, a cloud-base patient billing and payment service, raised a $2.5 million round led by Mosaik Partners.

 

Late stage

Message Bus, an e-mail hosting service, closed $4 million in a round led by True Ventures, along with North Bridge Venture Partners and Ignition Partners.

Korean e-commerce firm Coupang raised a $100 million funding round led by Sequoia.

Data platform Datalogix raised a $45 million round led by Wellington Management Company. Institutional Venture Partners also participated.

App Annie, a business intelligence solution, raised a $17 million round of funding from IDG Capital Partners, Greycroft Partners and Sequoia Capital.

E-commerce platform Ecwid raised $5 million in Series B funding led by iTech Capital. Runa Capital also participated.

Singapore Post, a provider of mail and retail solutions in Singapore, received a $249 million investment from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba for a 10.35% stake.

Open source software company Acquia closed a $50 million financing round led by New Enterprise Associates, along with Split Rock Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and Tenaya Capital.

Meta-search travel site Hipmunk raised a $20 million Series C round of funding led by Oak Investment Partners, along with Institutional Venture Partners, Ignition Partners and existing angel investors.

ExtraHop, a provider real-time wire data analytics for IT operational intelligence, raised $41 million in a round led byTechnology Crossover Ventures, along with Meritech Capital Partners and Madrona Venture Group, and private investors including Sujal Patel.

Trifacta, a developer of productivity platforms for data analysis, raised a $25 million Series C round led by Ignition Partners, along with Greylock Partners and Accel Partners.

Taxi booking app GrabTaxi raised a $15 million Series B led by GGV Capital with participation from Qunar and Vertex Venture Holdings.

Payments firm Swipely raised $20 million in a round led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital, along with First Round Capital, Index Ventures and Shasta Ventures.

Venture capital firm Spark Capital raised $375 million for its venture growth fund called Spark Growth.

Newlans, a developer of radio frequency solutions for mobile devices, raised $5 million from Verizon Ventures to complete its Series B round.

ZPower, which develops and manufactures rechargeable silver-zinc batteries, raised $10 million in funding from existing investors.

Apixio, a big data healthcare analytics firm, raised $13.5 million from Bain Capital Ventures and several “high-profile” unidentified Silicon Valley angel investors. 

Video game developer Thatgamecompany raised a $7 million round of funding from Capital Today.

Support VatorNews by Donating

Read more from our "Funding Roundup" series

More episodes

Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

Trifacta

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Trifacta, the pioneer in data transformation, significantly enhances the value of an enterprise’s Big Data by enabling users to easily transform raw, complex data into clean and structured formats for analysis. Leveraging decades of innovative work in human-computer interaction, scalable data management and machine learning, Trifacta’s unique technology creates a partnership between user and machine, with each side learning from the other and becoming smarter with experience. 

At Trifacta, our mission is to improve the way people work with data. Our platform significantly shortens the ‘time to insight’ by making data scientists and analysts 30x more productive, while also enabling dramatically better business decisions by giving business analysts direct access to Big Data.

Hipmunk

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Hipmunk is a meta-search travel site and app that helps save time and money by comparing top travel sites to show the perfect flight or hotel at the cheapest price. We’re eliminating the agony involved in travel planning. With Hipmunk, there’s no need to search through pages and pages of results, because we present the most convenient first. There’s also no need to toggle between several tabs to compare prices because we do that for you in one place where you know you’re getting the best deal.

Message Bus

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Message Bus provides a cloud-native application service for enabling and powering messaging across email and mobile channels, helping to ensure deliverability of critical communications, transactional messages, and marketing messages. The company removes the burden and cost of deploying multiple messaging servers with a service available via SMTP or through a programmatic API. Market leading companies rely on Message Bus to manage the trust relationship between senders and recipients, increasing their message deliverability rates and revenues. Key benefits include lower cost to market, compliance to industry regulations, and protecting brand reputation.

Sequoia Capital

Angel group/VC

Joined Vator on

Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital “one of the highest-caliber venture firms” and noted that it is “one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture-capital firms”. It invests between $100,000 and $1 million in seed stage, between $1 million and $10 million in early stage, and between $10 million and $100 million in growth stage.

 

Acquia, Inc

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Acquia is a ground-breaking open source software company providing value-added products and services for the wildly popular Drupal social publishing system. The people of Acquia believe that the open source development approach and social publishing technology have the power to connect people and unleash their collective creative potential in order to achieve great things.

Spark Capital

Angel group/VC

Joined Vator on


Spark Capital is a venture capital firm that partners with exceptional entrepreneurs seeking to build disruptive,
world-changing companies.

Founded in 2005 by Todd Dagres, Santo Politi and Paul Conway, Spark Capital is a tight-knit group of partners managing approximately $1,500,000,000 across four funds. We have offices in Boston, NY and San Francisco, but invest across the globe. Whether you need $250,000 in seed funding or $25,000,000 to establish category leadership, we can work with you.

Spark invests across a number of key market segments including: advertising & monetization, marketplaces, cloud & infrastructure, social, mobile and content. We don’t simply study these markets; we are active users of the products in which we invest. Spark’s portfolio includes companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, AdMeld, Adapt.tv, ThePlatform and 5Min. The Spark team has previously backed notable companies such as Akamai Technologies, Qtera, Aether Systems and Novatel Wireless.

Partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs is Spark’s first principle. From first time founders to seasoned entrepreneurs, we strive to work with individuals who aim to fundamentally transform important markets or create entirely new ones. We leverage our wide-ranging experiences, honed product & business instincts and extensive networks to help entrepreneurs build great companies.

Swipely

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Swipely is an online service that changes the way people shop, share and save by turning purchases into conversations. Swipely provides a secure platform for consumers to recommend purchase experiences, discover new places and products through trusted friends, save money, and have more fun shopping.