Funding roundup - week ending 12/31/10

Three early-stage, three late-stage: 3VR, Centro, Dashwire, Groupon, Image Space Media, Wild Needle

Early-stage

Centro, a digital media services company, closed a $22.5 million Series A round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The form lists Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker and Eric Byunn, partner at FTV Capital, as directors. Headquartered in Chicago, Centro works with ad agencies and media companies to simplify the media buying process. The company’s proprietary technology, Transis, takes care of the mundane details, including research, strategic planning, negotiating, buying, optimizing, trafficking, and billing to speed up the buying process and get media campaigns implemented faster.

Image Space Media (ISM), an ad network for in-image advertising, has raised $1 million in funding, according to an SEC filing and confirmed by the company. The round is a prelude to the company’s Series B round, slated for 2011. No new names are listed on the filing, meaning that the entire round was raised by previous investors. The startup previously raised a $2.9 million first round led by New Atlantic Ventures. Like competitor GumGum, ISM helps pubilshers monetize their site by embedding relevant advertising into images.

Stealth social mobile gaming startup Wild Needle has raised $2.5 million of a $3 million Series A round, according to an SEC Form D filing. Persons involved in the deal, according to the form, are Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson (listed as an executive); Heidi Carson, VP of Platform Solutions for Adify (also listed as an executive; and Shasta Ventures co-founder Robert T. Coneybeer.

Late-stage

3VR Security, Inc., a video surveillance and search software provider, announced Monday that it has closed a $17 million late-stage round in new financing led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Focus Ventures and previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DAG Ventures. In addition to providing digital video recorders and RAID storage hardware to organizations and businesses, 3VR boasts technology that can extract faces, license plates and other kinds of useful visual data from recorded video

Dashwire, a mobile services platform, has raised nearly $1 million in a recent round of funding, according to an SEC filing.  The Seattle, Wash.-based company previously raised $2.86 million over three rounds of funding in the last two years, and this latest round brings the company’s total financing to nearly $3.86 million. Founded in 2006, the company provides mobile-web connected services to enable device makers, carriers, and retailers to provide device management software services on mobile phones.

Groupon has already raised $500 million in equity financing of a planned $950 million round, according to an SEC filing.  Investors have not been disclosed, but Digital Sky Technologies, Morgan Stanley, and Fidelity are rumored to be the primary backers. The fresh capital brings Groupon’s valuation to just under $4.8 billion, but if Groupon raises the remaining $450 million in the round, it will raise the company’s total valuation to just under $8 billion, dwarfing Google’s $6 billion offer earlier this month.