Daily funding roundup - March 14, 2016
LendInvest raised $25M; GV led $21M investment in Epigenetix; Arterys closed a $12M funding
- LendInvest, a platform for peer-to-peer real estate investing, closed a £17 million (approximately $25 million) Series B funding round from Atomico, a London-based investment firm founded by Skype and Kazaa co-creator Niklas Zennström. Added to its previous rounds, including a £22 million (approximately $34 million) Series A invested by Chinese firm Beijing Kunlun last year, LendInvest has now received over £200 million (approximately $285 million) in total institutional funding.
- Tokyo-based healthcare startup iCARE has released Carely, a newly developed healthcare platform for corporates. In addition, the company recently announced that it has secured 100 million yen (about $880,000) from Japanese VC firm Incubate Fund. iCare was founded by three students at the Keio University Graduate School of Business Administration.
- Fukuoka-based Sefuri, a Japanese startup that provides the Yamap app for mountain climbers and hikers, fundraised 170 million yen (about $1.5 million) in series A funding round. This round was led by Japanese mobile gaming publisher Colopl, with participation from Daiwa Corporate Investment and Fukuoka-based VC firm Dogan. Sefuri claims that they will continue being focused on improving their services rather than pursuing profitability for over an year from now at least, so the funds will be used for operation during the period.
- ChartIQ, a Charlottesville, VA-based provider of HTML5 financial charting software for capital markets, raised $4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Illuminate Financial, with participation from existing investors ValueStream, Tribeca Angels and additional angel investors.
In conjunction with the funding, Mark Whitcroft, Partner at IFM, joined ChartIQ’s board. The company intends to use the funds to expand its existing sales, marketing, and engineering teams in Virginia and New York, along with a new office in London. - Israeli big data startup Alooma closed a $11.2 million Series A financing round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital, which also invested in the company's seed round. Alooma, which provides a modern ETL platform for data engineers and scientists, has raised a total of $15 million to date. Based in Tel Aviv, Alooma will use the funding to expand its sales and marketing team in the San Francisco Bay Area and to continue to strengthen its product.
- Arterys Inc., a privately-held company dedicated to deep learning in medical imaging, closed its Series A financing, bringing the total Series A funding to over $12 million. GE Ventures, the Stanford-StartX Fund (which was co-founded by the StartX accelerator, Stanford University and Stanford Health Care) and Norwich Ventures join Emergent Medical Partners who led the round, with additional participation by existing investors Asset Management Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures and Morado Ventures. Arterys plans to use the proceeds to expand the commercial operations of the company's visualization and quantification algorithm for medical imaging.
- GV, formerly Google Ventures led a $21 million Series B funding round for a Cambridge UK epigenome pioneer, Cambridge Epigenetix. CEGX has simultaneously unveiled former Illumina luminary Dr Geoff Smith as CEO. While GV led the Series B round there was significant participation from Sequoia Capital. Current investors New Science Ventures, Syncona Partners and Cambridge University also joined the round. Hulme will join CEGX’s board of directors and co-founder Dr Bobby Yerramilli-Rao will assume the role of chairman.
- UrWork, a co-working office space start-up founded a year ago by a former executive at China Vanke Co., Ltd., completed RMB200 million (US$31 million) series A+ round of financing from undisclosed investors, according to Chinese media reports. The new financing round took place six months after the start-up raised RMB200 million from Gopher Asset Management Co., Ltd. and an obscure Chinese investment firm.
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.
Image source: entrepreneur.com
Mitos Suson
I produce Vator Events and enjoy the challenge. I am learning and growing a lot, being involved with Vator and loving every moment of it!
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Lightspeed Venture Partners
Service provider
Joined Vator on
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a technology-focused venture capital firm that manages $1.3 billion of capital commitments. We closed Lightspeed VII, a $480 million fund, at the end of 2005. Over the past two decades, our partners have invested in more than 120 companies, many of which have gone on to become leaders in their respective industries. Our team invests in the U.S. and internationally from offices in Menlo Park, China, India, and Israel.
We are proud to have partnered with many exceptional management teams. Our investment professionals have contributed domain expertise and operational experience to help build high-growth, market-leading companies such as Blue Nile (NILE), Brocade (BRCD), Ciena (CIEN), DoubleClick (DCLK), Informatica (INFA), Kiva Software (acquired by AOL), Openwave (OPWV), Quantum Effect Devices (acquired by PMCS), Sirocco (acquired by SCMR), and Waveset (acquired by SUNW). Some of our recent exits include the top-performing tech IPO of 2006, Riverbed Technology (RVBD), and the top enterprise software acquisition of 2006, Virsa Systems (acquired by SAP).
Visit our website at www.lightspeedvp.com
Sequoia Capital
Angel group/VC
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Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital “one of the highest-caliber venture firms” and noted that it is “one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture-capital firms”. It invests between $100,000 and $1 million in seed stage, between $1 million and $10 million in early stage, and between $10 million and $100 million in growth stage.