Daily funding roundup - July 29, 2015

Twilio closed $130M; Mereo BioPharma secured $119; AltspaceVR raised $10.3M

• AltspaceVR, a software company that uses virtual reality to provide a new communication platform, raised a $10.3 million round of funding. Investors in the round include Tencent, Dolby Family Ventures, Raine Ventures Lux Capital, Western Technology Investments, Maven Ventures, Promus Ventures, Streamlined Ventures and Rothenberg Ventures, along with new investor Comcast Ventures. The company will use the funding to grow its team, which currently consists of 20 full-time employees, adding roughly another 10 by the end of the year. 
  
  
• Promoter.io has raised $1 million in funding for its self-service customer loyalty platform. The platform automates the task of capturing feedback from customers under the standard for customer loyalty, the Net Promoter Score. Investors include Lew Moorman, Pat Condon and Pat Matthews of Rackspace, the Geekdom Fund, MaxCDN, and others. Strategic advisors include Rackspace chairman Graham Weston, Geekdom Fund Partner Don Douglas, and Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of AppFog.
  
  
• Eximo Medical has completed its Series A funding round of $1.6 Million. Accelmed, a leading medical device Investment Fund, led the round, with the participation of the Alfred Mann Institute at the Technion (AMIT), the Technion R&D Foundation Ltd. and a private investor. Eximo has developed a patented hybrid catheter, Cathi™, which is connected to a pulsed laser system that operates at 355nm UV. The catheter’s tip combines laser ablation capabilities with a mechanical blunt blade. This combination will potentially improve accuracy, and enable superior precision when passing through a vessel blockage, regardless of the type of lesion or size of the vessel.
  
  
• G2 Crowd, which provides reviews of other companies’ software products received $7 million in new investment. This Series A round was led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital, along with existing investors Chicago Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, ExactTarget cofounder and ex-CEO Scott Dorsey, company chairman Godard Abel, and the management team.
  
  
• Digital Global Systems Inc. (DGS), a provider of innovative broad spectrum management technology for public safety, enterprise, telecommunications and government customers, landed an additional $4 million of funding through the issuance of Series A-2 convertible preferred stock. The funding round included investments by LGS Innovations (LGS) and CoVant, as well as a broad representation of existing and new individual investors. The capital raised in its Series A-2 round is in addition to the $2 million of Series A and $2.25 million of Series A-1 convertible preferred stock previously issued. 
  
  
• 3D tech startup Occipital nabbed $13 million in Series B funding to take advantage of the growing interest in virtual and augmented reality. The round included new investors such as Intel Capital, Shea Ventures and Grishin Robotics, as well as existing investor Foundry Group. The company has raised $21.3 million to date, with $1.3 million of that amount crowdfunded through Kickstarter.
  
  
• Almirall, a pharmaceutical company based in Barcelona, closed a $15 million in Series C equity investment in Suneva Medical, Inc., an innovative aesthetics leader that markets Bellafill. The deal will give Almirall a position on the SunevaBoard of Directors as Suneva continues with its plans to be active in prescription, aesthetics and medicalised OTC Dermatology.
  
  
• Catchpoint Systems, Inc., a NYC-based provider of web and infrastructure performance monitoring solutions, completed a $16 million Series C funding. The funding included $6 million from Battery Ventures and a $10 million line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank. The company will use the funds to hire new people, invest in new products, and expand its global monitoring infrastructure.
  
  
• Radius, a predictive marketing company founded six years ago by early Facebook employee Darian Shirazi, raised another $50 million on the heels of four high-profile executive hires. Radius’ latest funding was led by Founders Fund. It also included Formation 8, Glynn Capital Management, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, and Yuan Capital.
  
  
• The founders of online retail platform Zovi, raised $50 million (roughly Rs. 319 crores) for their consumer lifestyle deals marketplace app, called Little. The investment round was led by Paytm, SAIF Partners, and Tiger Global, and a large new undisclosed investor.  The funding will be deployed to build the largest merchant ecosystem, build new technology and hire senior talent.
  
  
• Seattle-based legal advice startup Avvo, closed a $71.5 million financing round led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Vulcan Capital and existing investor Coatue also participated in the round, which pushes total funding for the 8-year-old company to $132 million. Avvo said it will use some of the fresh funds to hire engineers in Seattle, where it just inked a lease for seven floors in a 20-story downtown building at 720 Olive Way near South Lake Union.
  
  
• Mereo BioPharma Group Ltd, a recently-formed speciality biopharmaceutical company, secured $119 million (c. £76.5 million), gross, from blue chip institutional investors and simultaneously acquired a portfolio of three innovative clinical-stage development programmes from Novartis Pharmaceuticals. Novartis, through the shares issued in consideration for the acquisition of products, will also hold an equity stake in Mereo. 
  
  
• Online lending startups are filling niche after niche of the financial landscape. Short-term loans to small businesses is the one that Behalf Inc. is going after. The startup just received $119 million in commitments, including equity and a credit facility, to expand its business, the lender told VentureWire. Lending startups attracted $1 billion in venture capital in the first half of 2015, more than in all of 2014 and a record since Dow Jones VentureSource started collecting data in 1992. That’s also more than in all of last year, when venture capitalists put $968.7 million into the sector.
  
  
• Twilio, a developer platform for communications, closed a $130 million Series E round. Fidelity and T. Rowe Price led the round, together with new investors Altimeter Capital Management and Arrowpoint Partners, as well as strategic investors Amazon.com and Salesforce Ventures. Twilio will use the additional capital to accelerate its product roadmap, such as the recently announced Real-time Communications Suite, which includes Video and IP Messaging products.
  
  
• Healthcare-focused growth investor Foresite Capital is back in the market with a new fund targeting up to $450 million. Foresite’s third fundraise comes just over a year after it closed its second vehicle on $300 million, and about two-and-a-half years after it raised $100 million for its debut fund. Existing investor Longitude Capital and new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Aisling Capital, Adage Capital, RA Capital Management and Palo Alto Investors all participated in the round.

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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