When one of the biggest names starts offering college kids $100,000 grants to drop out of college, you know you work in an interesting industry. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook (a company founded by a Harvard dropout), realizes that some ideas are just too good to put on the backburner. The excitement of the potential is irresistible.
At Vator Splash on Thursday, we got to see a few proud founders and entrepreneurs show off their ideas getting put to work in a real way, and I doubt that many of the 400 tech enthusiasts in attendance could ignore the passion in the air.
But, as Thiel knows best, passion can only get you so far: a few million dollars of funding takes you the whole way.
Here are six soaring startups covered by VatorNews this past week:
Chegg.com, an online textbook rental service, secured $75 million in funding from Asia-based firm Ace Limited. A booming business catering to the needs of college students with shallow pockets, Chegg has easily raised a total of $219 million altogether. Though the company has not revealed sales details, rival site BookRenter said it experienced a 725% revenue spike in September versus the year before.
Face.com, developer of facial recognition technology, raised $4.3 million in a Series B funding round led by previous investor Rhodium and Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine. Face.com, founded in 2007 and launched publicly in 2009, is the first Israeli-based company to successfully court Yandex. The startup, which has developed two Facebook apps called Photo Finder and Photo Tagger, has scanned more than 7 billion images and identified 56 million faces. Face.com has raised $5.3 million to date.
Koofers, a social learning company, raised $5 million in Series A equity funding led by Revolution and QED Investors, along with previous investors New Atlantic Ventures and Altos Ventures. The Northern, VA-based startup, which has raised $7 million in total, takes to the Web every facet of schooling–course materials, professor ratings, grade histories, study tools, schedule planners, textbook sales, and more. Launched in 2008, Koofers boasts a network of 310,000 students accessing information from more than 400 universities.
Vertical media network NetShelter Technology Media raised $15 million in a Series B round of financing led by Rho Ventures, with participation from existing investors Rho Canada and JLA Ventures. The San Francisco-based company, which has raised a total of $27.6 million, focuses on technology-based sites, like MacRumors.com, Slashgear and CrackBerry.com. NetShelter will be using the new funding to expand internationally. 
Ongo, a media and news aggregator, raised a $12 million seed round from Gannett Co., Inc., the New York Times Company, and Washington Post Company. The Cupertino, CA-based company seeks to aggregate in one location news and information from multiple publishers in a reader-friendly format. Still in stealth mode, Ongo is expected to launch by the end of 2010.
Retail Solutions, provider of management software for retail, secured a $15.2 million Series C funding round led by Investor Growth Capital, the growth-stage venture capital arm of Sweden-based Investor AB, with participation from all previous investors: Venrock, Bessemer Venture Partners, Red Rock Ventures, and SAP Ventures. The Mountain View, CA-based company offers consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies a SaaS platform for monitoring point-of-sale and inventory data.
