- GitLab received $1.5 million in new financing. The financing comes from Khosla Ventures, 500 Startups, Crunchfund, Sound Ventures and Liquid 2 Ventures. The new funds will be used to partly expand the company’s sales team. GitLab essentially offers access to Git repositories, much like GitHub, but there is a difference. “It’s similar in a sense that both let you manage your code,” said Sytse “Sid” Sijbrandij, Founder and CEO of GitLab. “What makes us different is that this is an open-source software so anyone can contribute.” Since GitLab started in 2011 as Dmitriy Zaporozhets’ hobby, the company has grown to count 800 contributors adding features frequently. Zaporozhets, who is CTO, started working on GitLab full time in January 2013. Today, the company has more than 100,000 users. A portion of those users work for large companies that pay GitLab $49 per user per year.
- Anti e-commerce startup Shopsity has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sandeep Aggarwal, founder of ShopClues and Droom, and Teruhide Sato, founder of Netprice. Shopsity is an app that displays products available at nearby stores. The Delhi-based company will deploy funds for expansion, hiring bright talents and spruce-up technology capabilities. Led by Danish Ahmed, ex-CEO of Yebhi.com, Shopsity has already listed thousands of stores from Delhi/NCR, allowing customers to see products selling at Woodland, Redtape, W, Mufti, Nike, Levis and other stores.
- Primary maths teaching platform Third Space Learning has raised a £1.5m Series A round from the Munich-based Ananda Social Venture Fund and Nesta Impact Investments, along with the company’s existing angels. Third Space was founded in London in 2013 to address issues with maths attainment in UK schools by working with tutors from across the world to deliver tuition online, particularly professionals in India and Sri Lanka.
- Biotech startup Clara Foods closed a $1.7 million in seed funding from David Friedberg, Gary Hirshberg, Ali and Hadi Partovi, Scott Banister, and SOS Ventures today. The goal is to use the dough to create egg whites without the chickens. While startup Hampton Creek approaches the problem by favoring plant protein over eggs, Clara Foods concentrates its efforts on liquid alternatives in a lab, using genetically modified yeast.
- Octopus, a Tel Aviv startup that makes cloud-based physical security systems for large facilities, has raised $2.5 million from Singulariteam. The company will use the funds to expand in the U.S. and Asia. In China, its growth plans will be helped along by the fact that two of China’s biggest Internet companies, Tencent and Renren, are Singulariteam backers. Octopus’ products are already used in Israel by the government, 28 Coca-Cola factories, VISA, and three national banks.
- PandaDoc, a company that develops software to assemble important quotes, proposals, and contracts announced a $5 million investment led by Altos Ventures with additional participation from TMT Investments and other unnamed investors. The announcement actually encapsulates all of the money the company has raised so far including its previously unannounced seed funding rounds, company co-founder Mikita Mikado explained.
- Genymobile started in France with an ambitious mission — becoming the unifying Android platform for the enterprise. The company just raised $7.7 million (€7 million) from Alven Capital, with Bpifrance also participating. It is currently working on three different products that makes using Android much easier when you are an Android developer, an IT manager or even an OEM. Genymobile works across all Android devices and makes Android’s well-known fragmentation issue a thing of the past.
- French startup 1001Pharmacies just raised $8.9 million (€8 million) from Newfund, CM-CIC Capital Privé, and business angels, such as Xaviel Niel, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Olivier Mathiot. As the name suggests, 1001Pharmacies is an online pharmacy. The company first let you order your prescription goods from their website. In order to avoid legal issues, 1001Pharmacies partnered with hundreds of brick-and-mortar pharmacies and acted as the middleman, handling deliveries, payments and listings.
- Digital lending platform Lendingkart which is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and small businesses with working capital finance bagged $10 million in round of Series A round from Saama Capital and Mayfield Fund. Lendingkart will deploy the capital infusion to bolster its technology platform and artificially-intelligent Big Data Scoring System, and most importantly to expand its team.
- Tilt, formerly known as Crowdtilt secured around $30 million in its most-recent funding round as it pushes to expand internationally. The company had raised a round at a $400 million valuation. That brings Tilt’s total funding to around $67 million, with this funding round happening earlier this year. The last round Tilt raisedwas $23 million in December 2013. Andreessen-Horowitz participated in a lot of the company’s previous financing rounds, as well as investors like SV Angel, Alexis Ohanian and Matt Mullenweg.
- News In Shorts, a startup behind an India-focused mobile news app, nabbed a $20 million Series B round from existing investor Tiger Global. This Series B capital will be used to develop the product — and in particular the Android app, since the Google-owned platform accounts for around 80 percent of mobile devices in India.
- Healthcare startup Lybrate landed $10 million in a Series A round of funding from Tiger Global Management, Ratan Tata and its existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. Raised amount will be used for product development, recruit new talent and to scale company’s operations to other cities.
- Influitive, a Toronto-based company focused on advocate marketing, raised $30.5 million in Series B funding. The company has now raised more than $40 million in funding. The Series B was led by Georgian Partners, with participation from OurCrowd, DoCoMo Capital, BDC Capital IT Venture Fund, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Illuminate Ventures, Resolute Ventures, Relay Ventures, CommonAngels Ventures and First Round Capital.
- Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean secured $83 million in a Series B funding round, boosting its known overall financial backing to more than $170 million. The latest funding round was led by Access Industries, owned by entrepreneur and philanthropist Leonard Blavatnik — who amongst other ventures acquired Warner Music Group for $3.3 billion in 2011 — with participation from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which led the Series A funding round in March last year. The latest cash injection will go directly into growing its team and expanding product offerings.
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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