Funding roundup - week ending 1/9/15

Steven Loeb · January 9, 2015 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3b36

Glassdoor, Wanda E-Commerce, NetDragon, Fitmob, Tookitaki, Frankly, X.ai, MUBI, Lalamove, Dato, Stem

Seed stage

Data intelligence start up Tookitaki raised $1 million in a seed funding round led by Jungle Ventures, along with Rebright Partners and Blume Ventures.

 Frankly, a  video question and answer platform, raised a $600,000 seed round from Matrix Partners.

Samba Networks, a video ad network, raised a £250,000 ($377,000) angel round from Digicel, Mark Charkin and other existing angels.

AlayaCare, a cloud-based Home Healthcare platform, raised a $2.4 million round led by Klass Capital, along with angels with deep software and healthcare expertise.

Yozio, which help companies grow their mobile apps without advertising, raised $1.6 million in seed funding from Illuminate Ventures, Webb Investment Network, AME Cloud Ventures, Eric Reis and Sean Ellis. 

iSIGHT Partners, a provider of cyber threat intelligence for global enterprises, raised a $30 million Series C round from Bessemer Venture Partners.

 

Early stage

NetDragon, a mobile Internet platform developer and operator in China, raised  a $52.5 million Series A round from IDG Capital Partners, Vertex Venture and Alpha Animation.

X.aia personal assistant that schedules meetings, raised $9.2 million in a round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from IA Ventures, Softbank Capital and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. 

Lalamove, a mobile logistics booking platform, raised $10 million in a round led by Crystal Stream Capital, with participation from Geek Founders, Mindworks Ventures, Sirius Venture Capital and Aria Group.

WeLab, a Hong Kong based Internet finance tech firm, raised $6 million  from Yuri Milner, ICONIQ Capital, and Ule.

Mobile payments platform MatchMove Pay raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by Credit Saison, along with GMO Venture Partners.

Apervita, a health analytics marketplace, raised an $18 million Series A round led by GE Ventures and Baird Capital, with participation from Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Math Ventures and existing investors. 

Westwing, an online interior design platform, raised a €25 million round from existing investors. 

SiteSpect, a digital optimization platform provider, raised $13 million in funding from NewSpring Growth Capital.

CallRail, a call tracking and analytics platform, raised $1.9 million in a Series A funding round led by Wain Kellum, with participation from Reggie Bradford, Tycho Howle, Jim Armstrong, and Todd Belfer.

 

Late stage

Jobs and career community Glassdoor raised a $70 million round led by Google Capital and Tiger Global, with participation from Battery Ventures and Sutter Hill Venture.

Wanda E-Commerce, a joint venture between Wanda Group, Tencent and Baidu, raised $161 million in funding from Centec Networks and Xude Rendao.

Fitness startup Fitmob raised $5 million from Mayfield Fund, Kapoor, Sean Moriarty, John Troiano, Arjun Rao, Jonah Goodhart, Powder & Fitness to the People, Phil Kaplan, Narendra Rocherolle, Vast Ventures, Craig, Expansion VC, BAM Ventures, Queensbridge Capital, Rocketship.vc, Mark Britto, Structure Capital, Venture51, Pi Capital, and Rachel Aram. 

MUBI, a global curated film streaming service, raised a $15 million funding round, from Eric Fellner, Jon Winkelried, Martín Varsavsky, Pascal Cagni, Osama Al Ayoub, Simon Patterson, Jörg Mohaupt, Peter Dubens, Bertrand Demole, MMC Ventures, White Star Capital and Floreat Group.

Japanese venture capital firm Incubate Fund raised a 11 billion yen (or $91 million) seed stage fund.

Big data analytics company Dato, formely GraphLab, raised $18.5 million in a Series B round led by Vulcan Capital, with Opus Capital Ventures and NEA and Madrona Ventures participating.

Mister Spex, a European online optician, raised $40 million round led by Goldman Sachs. Scottish Equity Partners, XAnge and DN Capital also participated.

Seismic, a sales enablement solution, raised $20M in a Series B round was led by JMI Equity with Sigma West also participating. 

Robot-making startup Rethink Robotics raised $26.6 million in Series D financing, led by GE Ventures, with participation from Goldman Sachs, and all of Rethink Robotics’ earlier investors.

CommonFloor.com, an Indian online real estate platform, raised an undisclosed amount of new funding from Google Capital.

Red Ventures, a marketing technology and services company, raised $250 million from Silver Lake Partners.

Stem, an energy storage and data analytics company, raised $27 million from Constellation Technology Ventures and Total Energy Ventures.

Blue Box, a provider of on-demand private cloud as a service solutions, raised $4 million led by an unnamed telecommunications provider.

Ruby Receptionists, a provider of virtual receptionist services, raised $38.8 million from Updata Partners and StepStone Group.

Solexel, a manufacturer of thin-crystalline-silicon solar modules for photovoltaic electricity generation, received $25 million in debt financing from Opus Bank.

Chinese food delivery app Line0 raised a $30 million Series B round led by Tencent, along with Sequoia Capital and Gobi Partners.

GlySens, the developer of a glucose monitoring system, raised$12 million Series C round, from new and returning investors.

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Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

MUBI

Startup/Business

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Bluebox.net

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Tookitaki

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Tookitaki is a real time audience discovery platform, for brands and e-commerce companies. Tookitaki uses momentum advertising technology to detect trends in real time, based on data from twitter, google news,  rss feeds, youtube and facebook, and uses these trend keywords to serve ads automatically on facebook and google.

Momentum advertising is a new concept and has the potential to be a differentiating sector by itself in the growing digital ad industry. Detecting trends and mapping it to client's target audience segment in real time gives our platform an edge, as they can connect with the most engaged audience with relevant message at the right time

Our technology is built upon proprietary data mining and machine learning algorithms and knowledge graphs that are used to build complex relationships between seemingly disparate trend keywords, allowing us to connect the trends to customers product offerings.

SiteSpect

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

SiteSpect is a software services firm offering products that help optimize marketing effectiveness across web and digital channels. Its flagship products, SiteSpect ASP and SiteSpect Enterprise, provide web analytics and predicting modeling capabilities to marketers.

Key capabilities include:
* A/B testing
* Multivariate testing
* Behavioral targeting.

By testing variations of landing pages, product descriptions, search results and buy-flows, SiteSpect allows marketers to fine-tune every aspect of their Web site on a segment-by-segment basis.

SiteSpect’s patent-pending technology is used by Cabela’s, iProspect, Overstock.com, ShopNBC, and VEGAS.com, among others.

CommonFloor.com

Startup/Business

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CommonFloor creates online communities for residential properties like Apartments, Villas, Societies.

Yozio

Startup/Business

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Yozio is the perfect solution to amplify your mobile growth. Our Mobile Growth Platform brings you the same powerful mobile growth technologies that Twitter and Netflix built for themselves, so you can 

  • Understand what your best users looks like.
  • Find the best channel, messaging and context to acquire them.
  • Activate them before they churn away.

 

1) Who's the problem with current solutions?

 Acquiring mobile app user is very hard and expensive, turning the hard earned app installs into loyal users is even more harder. We are productizing even better technologies than what Twitter & Netflix have developed internally to grow their user base, and making it available to all of the mobile app creators.

 

2) Who's your target customer? SMBs? Mobile apps? Any particular vertical?

Anyone who has a mobile app, and trying to get more loyal users. 


3) Are you an analytics company? 

 Sort of, but much more than that. We work with apps and their current analytics vendors to provide much deeper user insights, and essential technologies to improve their chance of turning ordinary users into high value users. 

 

4) How do you help your customers acquire more mobile users? Can you provide a case study?

 We use the same scientific methods that Twitter/LinkedIn/Netflix are using to optimize their products.

Key Steps 
1) Understand what the best users look like. (ie. "7 friends in 10 days")
2) Find the best channel, messaging & context to get them.
3) Activate them before they churn away.

 

However, it's a very slow process and super expansive to do for most companies, so we made it much more automated, and much easier to use, and accessible to most of the companies who are trying to get more high value users for their mobile app.

 

Case studies:
Airbnb has mentioned us on their dev blog about how they hacked their word of mouth on mobile.
Screenshot


5) How much do your customers pay?


We have a tiered monthly subscription model that depends on which module and how much our customers uses our product. Ranging from $1,500 a month to $5,000 a month.


6) What kind of "actionable" data do you deliver? 

 

What your best (the most engaging users, high retaining, or high LTV users, etc) users / user profile look like?

 

+ Using twitter as an example, their best users (meaning come back to use their service after 30 days) follow 30+ friends, and have 1/3 of their friends follow them back.

 

How are they different from the ordinary users?

 

+ For example, our algorithm might find 
  + female customers are 2.7X more likely to make the purchase, but they are only 20% of overall user base - ouch, better figure out how to 
  + if your users have completed their netflix like 'taste profile', they are 3.8X more likely to retain for more than 6 months, but currently, only 3% of the total users have completed these. - ouch, better help them complete the taste profile

 

Which channels, messaging, context are the best to find my best users?

 

+ twitter? facebook? email? sms? viral? content? when? where? what kind of condition? what message made them convert?

 

Disclaimer: These are just examples. The numbers mentioned are not real reflections of the actual companies or customers data.