Funding roundup - week ending 12/03/10

10gen, Awarepoint, Betterment, ClickFox, CloudBees, LivingSocial, Payvment, Standing Cloud, and more

Early-stage

Online investing service Betterment has raised a $3 million Series A financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Anthemis Group, as well as several individual investors, including Thomas Lehrman of Alta Investors, Fabrice Grinda (a musing entrepreneur) and Dave Abner. The new funding will be used to expand the company team and develop new products set to be released next year. One of the new products is reported to be an individual retirement account (IRA).

CloudBees, a provider of cloud services for Java developers, closed a $4 million Series A round led by Matrix Partners, with participation from JBoss founder Marc Fluery and former JBoss VP of strategy, Bob Bickel. The company was founded in January 2010 by former JBoss CTO, Sacha Labourey. The company emerged from stealth mode in August with its development infrastructure, DEV@cloud, and went on to acquire InfraDNA, creator of the Hudson continuous integration server, an open-source project that life-cycle testing to catch bugs before they happen.  The acquisition resulted in Nectar 1.0, an update of InfraDNA’s Hudson continuous integration server and rebranded under CloudBees.

Payvment, a platform that enables retailers to open e-commerce storefronts on Facebook, raised a $6 million Series B round of funding led by Sierra Ventures with participation from previous investor BlueRun Ventures. Sierra partner Vispi Daver will be joining Payvment’s board. The San Francisco startup raised a $1.15 million Series A from BlueRun in March of this year and a $250,000 seed round last year. Payvment helps over 40,000 small/medium-sized businesses, major brands and global retailers launch Facebook page storefronts.

Cloud application management platform Standing Cloud closed a $3 million Series B round of funding led by Avalon Ventures with participation from previous backer Foundry Group. Rich Levandov, Avalon’s managing member and also an early investor in Zynga, has invested in four other notable cloud companies: Backupify, Cloudkick, Cloudant and TwinStrata. He will be joining Standing Cloud’s board of directors. The company hosts cloud computing applications like Drupal and WordPress for small and medium-sized businesses.

VoIP and video chat application Veribu has closed a $440,000 round of venture funding from unnamed investors. The round is just part of what Cook hopes to be a $2 to $5 million Series A. The company first received a $100,000 angel investment last January. The Web-based communications platform lets users video chat, make calls, and text, all without a software download. Some see the service as morphing into a social platform, but Cook says his priority is on the communications side right now. Veribu is already available for iPhone, with an Android version coming soon.

Late-stage

10gen, the maker of open-source database MongoDB, closed a $6.5 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures.  This round brings the company’s total financing to $11.4 million.  MongoDB, a high-performance, open-source database, is used by Bit.ly, Foursquare, IGN, Shutterfly, Craigslist, and SourceForge.  With over 90,000 downloads per month, MongoDB offers such features as content management, event logging, web data storage, and real time analytics.

Awarepoint, a real-time location systems (RTLS) provider for hospitals, has raised $9 million in a combination of equity and debt. All existing Awarepoint investors returned to participate in the round. Nine months ago, Awarepoint raised a $10 million round led by Jafco Ventures with the help of previous investors Cardinal Partners and Venrock. The company has raised $28 million to date. The company just appointed healthcare IT veteran Jay Deady as President and CEO this week.

Analytics company ClickFox raised a $18 million Series C financing round led by Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners (AIP). Though other investors were not named, it would be safe to bet that at least a few if not all of existing investors--Ascent Venture Partners, Cedar Fund, Delta Ventures and Veritas Venture Partners--participated in the round as well. Those four former investors last contributed $12.5 million to ClickFox. The already profitable company provides customer service analytics at all interaction points--interactive voice response (IVR), Web agent, chat, and retail/point-of-sale (POS).

Group deals site LivingSocial received a $175 million investment from Amazon, along with an additional $8 million from LightSpeed Venture Partners, for a total of $183 million. Founded in 2007, the daily deals company previously raised $49 million from LightSpeed Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures, and Revolution, bringing the company’s total funds raised to $232 million. Serving 10 million throughout the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia, LivingSocial claims to be booking over $1 million per day in revenues and plans to see over $500 million in revenues in 2011.

Vostu, one of the leading social gaming companies in Brazil, has raised a $30 million Series C round of funding from Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners. Accel partner Jim Breyer will join the Vostu board, adding the seat to his others at private-held companies Booyah, Etsy and, of course, Facebook. Vostu has raised $46 million to date. Like Zynga here in the U.S., Vostu already boasts profitability, with 20 million monthly active players, ten times more than a year ago.

Enterprise social networking site Yammer closed a $25 million Series C round, bringing its total financing to $40 million since launching in 2008.  The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners, with help from Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures, and Founders Fund. Yammer only allows individuals with a valid business email account to join, at which point they can communicate and collaborate via any number of the site’s features, including enterprise microblogging, direct messaging, groups, communities, company directories, and uploads.