Funding roundup - week ending 11/26/10

Badgeville, Bizness Apps, Gather, MyThings, Qype, SmartDate, Svpply, Welocalize, Yardsellr ZipList

Seed 

Bizness Apps, a company that develops apps for small businesses, raised an undisclosed round of seed funding from Build.com CEO Chris Friedland and founder and CEO of Collegescheduler.com Robert Strazzarino. For $39 a month, Bizness Apps enables small businesses to create and customize their very own iPhone app, complete with the client's own design choices and content.

Social retail site Svpply raised a $550,000 seed investment led by Spark Capital and Founder Collective with participation from angel investors Ron Conway, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and former Myspace co-President Jason Hirschhorn, Spark Capital principal Mo Koyfman has confirmed. Svpply (pronounced “supply”), is a site for discovering rare and unique things to buy by following other users with similar interests as well as individual retailers.

Early-stage

Badgeville, a loyalty and rewards service platform, closed a $2.5 million Series A round of financing led by eBay COO Maynard Webb, Panatir founder Joe Lonsdale, and several senior executives from PayPal, Chegg, Shopping.com, DrugStore.com and Warner Music. The company previously raised $250,000 in seed funding. Just launched in September, Badgeville helps publishers drive user engagement and promote loyalty, with a customizable rewards program.

Qype, the Yelp of Europe, raised 3.5 million euros (about $4.72 million) from Vodafone Ventures and a further 3.0 million euros (about $4.05 million) from its existing three investors, Advent Venture Partners, Partech International and Wellington Partners, for a total of 6.5 million euros ($8.77 million). This is Qype’s second major funding round. Launched in 2006, Qype allows users to browse and add reviews for restaurants, hotels, bars and other establishments.

SmartDate, which makes online dating easy through Facebook Connect, raised a $5 million (€3.5 million) Series A round that brings the company’s total funds raised this year to $7.5 million. The Paris-based company announced over the summer that SmartDate had garnered some 300,000 members. Now it's on track to reach the 650,000-member mark by the end of the month.

Yardsellr, a place to buy and sell items within a friend network, raised a $5 million Series A round of funding led by Accel Partners, with participation from former backer Harrison Metal Capital. On Yardsellr, which users can only access via Facebook Connect, sellers present their wares in terms of “blocks,” in the physical, neighborhood yard sale sense of the word.

ZipList, a service for managing your grocery list online, raised over $2 million in funding from SoftBank Capital and Martha Stewart Living Omnipedia, with Steven Murray (general partner at SoftBank) and Janet Balis (EVP of sales and marketing at Omnimedia). The company has raised $4.5 million to date. ZipList makes grocery list creation incredibly simple and lets users share their lists with family members so that anyone can update the list from any Web-connected device in real-time.

Late-stage

Gather, a site where freelance writers create and share content for shared revenue, raised a $2.4 million Series E round of funding from Lotus founder Jim Manzi, investment firm Allen & Co. and new contributor Progress Partners, represented by Nick McShane. The company has raised just over $24 million so far. Gather originally launched in 2005 as a content-focused social network, but has since shifted gears to focus explicitly on advertising-generating content. The site has attracted seven million monthly unique visitors to the site in the last year.

MyThings, a personalized retargeting platform, raised a $6 million third round of funding led by T-Venture, with participation from Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, Dot Corp, and GP Bullhound. This brings the company’s total funds raised to $19 million. Founded in 2005, the company has developed a unique personalized display advertising solution that it claims can increase return conversion rates by more than 500 percent.

Welocalize, an on-demand provider of translation, localization and internationalization services, raised a $34 million round from Boston-based private equity firm Riverside Partners. Founded in 1997 and based in Frederick, Md., Welocalize provides almost every kind of translation service, from machine to crowdsource to professional translators. Today, Welocalize serves a number of high-profile clients, including Canon, IBM, Microsoft, and more.