- Poncho, a precious orange “weathercat” bot developed by betaworks, raised a $2 million seed round of funding led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures with participation from Greycroft Partners, Comcast Ventures LP, Venture51 Capital Partners, and RRE Ventures. Poncho says it will use its new funding to continue developing its chatbot, particularly using data science and artificial intelligence to make the cat’s conversation more casual and personalized.
- Melbourne real estate agent review platform RateMyAgent secured $5 million in funding at a $20 million valuation, which will be used to consolidate the startup’s position in the market and expand internationally. The funding round was led by Catch of the Day’s Gabby Leibovich and the Smorgon family. It comes as the second round of funding for the startup, with RateMyAgent raising $1 million in 2014 from Kidder Williams to take the product off the ground.
- Prisyna, an oral care business unit of Synedgen, Inc., secured a $6 million growth equity investment. The financing was led by Andrew Miller through a private investment. Prisyna plans to use the funding for the advanced development, regulatory approval and marketing efforts for the expansion of its pipeline and in support of current products.
- Ionic, a company behind an open-source HTML5 framework and software development kit (SDK) for building native mobile apps and mobile web apps, raised a $8.5 million round of funding. General Catalyst led the round. To date, Ionic has raised $12.2 million. Ionic, which is based on the AngularJS JavaScript framework and supports CSS alongside HTML5, has taken off in open-source software land. As of this moment, it has 23,536 GitHub stars.
- Erecruit Holdings, LLC, a provider of enterprise staffing software, VMS and onboarding solutions for large staffing firms and employers, recieved $10 million investment led by North Bridge Growth Equity. The funding will enable erecruit to further accelerate product direction, continue to improve its customer experience and aggressively grow global sales and marketing efforts.
- Levyx Inc, an Irvine, California, producer of cost-efficient big-data infrastructure technology for all size enterprises, closed a $5.4 million Series A financing led by OCA Ventures of Chicago. In a statement, Levyx said that other participating investors included Amino Capital (aka zPark Capital) of Palo Alto, California, and Sumavision USA Corp. Sumavision Technologies Co is the Beijing provider of video-delivery solutions. Individual executives from tech companies including EMCand SAP also invested in the round. Levyx plans to use the funds to speed product development and boost sales and marketing.
- European startup Drivy raised €31 million ($35 million) to grow its car rental marketplace in new markets. The latest funding round, which was led by Cathay Innovation and Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), takes Drivy’s total outside investment past the $50 million mark, having raised $8 million back in 2014 and a further $9 million a year later.
If you are interested in being included in our funding roundup, submit your press release or blog post about your financing round to mitos@vator.tv.
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