Daily funding roundup - October 5, 2015

Precision Biopsy raised $33.6M; Voylla landed $15M; SportzVillage secured $10M

• Flixel Photos Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based visual storytelling company that enables content creators to produce cinemagraphs, raised $2.2 million in seed funding. The round was led by Extreme Venture Partners and Cranson Capital Securities, with participation from existing investors as well as angel investors in Australia and Canada. The company will use the funds to expand its suite of products.
  
  
• IndiaLends, an online marketplace that connects lenders and borrowers for unsecured loans, has raised $1 million in a bridge investment round led by existing investors DSG Consumer Partners, Siddharth Parekh and Gautham Radhakrishnan. The New Delhi-based startup, which last raised funds in August, said in a statement it will use the fresh money to grow its product suite, expand geographical reach and hire more staffers.
  
  
• Sentera, LLC, a Minneapolis-based drone, sensor, and software company, has launched its platform, after securing $5 million in funding. The funding came from an unnmed strategic investor. Led by Greg Emerick, EVP of business development, Sentera provides the OnTop™ Platform for desktop and mobile applications for the cellular and broadcast tower industry (tower owners, builders, climbers, and service providers) to manage big data associated with inspection imagery.
  
  
• Logz.io, a Predictive ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) log analytics cloud service company, launched today with an announcement of $8Million in financing led by 83North (formerly Greylock IL) and Giza Venture Capital. The company will use the funding to fuel additional product development and build sales, marketing, and support teams.  The company has already experienced pre-launch success with hundreds of companies worldwide onboarding the platform over the last few months.
  
  
• Neumob, a service that helps mobile app developers get their in-app content to users faster, today announced that it has raised an $8.5 million Series A round led by Accel Partners. Additional investors include Shasta Ventures, Eniac Ventures and Lightbank Ventures, as well as a number of private investors, including RealNetworks founder and CEO Rob Glaser. This Series A round follows Neumob’s $2.3 million seed round earlier this year.
  
  
• Online beauty and wellness retailer Nykaa.com has scored $9.5 million from multiple investors, including the family offices of Marico Industries chairman Harsh Mariwala and Hexaware Technologies Ltd chairman Atul Nishar. Falguni Nayar, founder of FSN E-Commerce Ventures Pvt. Ltd, that runs Nykaa.com, confirmed the transaction but did not reveal the amount of stake bought by the investors. The latest equity investment would be used to launch a private label, increase marketing activities and grow the team, Nayar, who is chief executive officer, Nykaa.com, said.
  
  
• Mumbai and Bengaluru based sports and fitness education venture SportzVillage has secured around $10 million in its second round of funding from mid-stage private equity firm Gaja Capital. The new funding will be used to extend its operations. In 2010, the company had secured about $2 million from Bharati Jacob and Mahesh Murthy-led early-stage fund, Seedfund, primarily for its EduSports business. SportzVillage operates three businesses – SportzConsult (sports management company), EduSports (provide physical education and sports programmes to schools) and MeraSport is a technology initiative to improve sports user experience by leveraging new media technologies of mobile, web and IPTV.
  
  
• TSheets, a cloud based time tracking software company, announced today that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding from global growth equity investor S​ummit Partners.​The funding will allow TSheets to scale more rapidly to meet growing demand, both domestic and international. This is the first major funding push from TSheets after raising a modest amount of initial startup capital from strategic angel investors in 2008. Since then, by partnering with other best­of­breed tech companies like Intuit and Square, and by using L​ean Startup​principles, TSheets achieved profitability without needing additional investment capital.
  
  
• YouNow, a four-year-old, New York-based social network that connects audiences and broadcasters in real time, has raised $15 million in new funding co-led by earlier backers Venrock and investor Oren Zeev, with participation from Comcast Ventures. The company has now collected $30 million altogether from investors, including Union Square Ventures, which led its Series A round in 2013.
  
  
• Jaipur-based fashion jewelry brand Voylla has landed $15 million in fresh funding led by private equity firm Peepul Capital. The funds will be used for brand building, expansion of the distribution network, investments in technology and enhancement of manufacturing capacity. Voylla claims to have 35,000 unique designs and add 300-500 new designs every week. It had raised two rounds of fund in 2012 and 2013 from Snow Leopard Technology venture and others.
  
  
• Allied Minds, an innovative U.S. science and technology development and commercialization company, today announced that its subsidiary company, Precision Biopsy, has raised $33.6 million in new equity investments as the company embarks on a global commercialization strategy for its ClariCore Biopsy System, a device platform designed to provide accurate, real-time classification of prostate tissue during biopsy procedures. Of the $33.6 million raised in this financing, Woodford contributed approximately $15 million for the purchase of 2,837,899 preferred shares. Woodford is a substantial shareholder of Allied Minds pursuant to the Listing Rules, and thus this transaction is a smaller related party transaction falling within the scope of Listing Rule 11.1.10R.
  
  
• London-based Octopus Ventures, which last year revealed it had a $91.3 million early stage fund, is today launching a new, separate, $140 million fund designed to providing growth capital to “successful fast-growing later-stage companies across Europe”. The Octopus Zenith Opportunities II LP (“Octopus Opportunities fund”), will also provide much-needed follow-on investments into existing companies within the Octopus portfolio and invest between £250,000 and £25 million. The first investment has been made, with Octopus leading the recent $60 million round with Google Ventures into Secret Escapes, the London-based members-only luxury travel site.
  

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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