Funding roundup - week ending 05/06/11

Ronny Kerr · May 6, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1a21

Slim week: nearly $130 million for 17 startups (two seed, nine early-stage, six late-stage)

Seed-stage

AppDirect, a new way for businesses to find, buy and use Web-based software, raised a $3.25 million seed round led by iNovia Capital.

Mobile developer NoiseToys raised $1.2 million in seed funding from several investors, including DCM, former Playdom Chairman Rick Thompson, and Guitar Hero co-creator Charles Huang.

 

Early-stage

COLOURlovers raised $1 million from a long list of investors.

 

Personalized video advertising company EyeView raised a $1 million round of funding led Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.

 

Firespotter Labs, an idea and product accelerator, announced Thursday that it has launched with $3 million in Series A funding from Google Ventures.

Y Combinator graduate Grubwithus, a Web service for finding people to dine with, raised a $1.6 million round from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, NEA, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Vivi Nevo, Maynard Webb, Matt Cutts, Elad Gil, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Start Fund, and Y Combinator.

 

Peel closed a $16.7 million Series B round of financing led by Ravi Mhatre from Lightspeed Venture Partners, with help from Redpoint Ventures and several existing angels.

The Resumator, simplifying applicant tracking and social recruiting, raised $700,000 in funding led by Rincon Venture Partners.

Send the Trend, an e-commerce company site for women’s fashion accessories, raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures.

TaskRabbit, a networking platform that helps busy people get things done, secured $5 million in Series A financing led by Shasta Ventures.

Social marketing platform Tigerlily raised €900,000 ($1.3 million).

 

Late-stage

Helium, a self-publishing site that bills itself as a “citizen journalism” hub, has raised $10 million in debt financing according to a recently filed SEC form, bringing the company’s total raised to $27 million.

 

 

Location-based mobile media company JiWire raised $20 million in Series C funding.

 

 

Jumptap, provider of targeted mobile advertising, completed a $25 million financing round. Existing investors including AllianceBernstein, General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, Summerhill Ventures, Valhalla Partners and WPP, as well as several new investors, participated in the round.

Kaminario, provider of high performance SSD storage, closed a $15 million Series C from Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Pitango Venture Capital.

Mashery, provider of API management tools and services, raised $11 million in funding led by OpenView Venture Partners. Existing investors Cisco, Formative Ventures, First Round Capital and .406 Ventures also participated in this funding round.

 

 

PowerReviews, a social commerce SaaS solutions provider, secured a $10 million round led by Four Rivers Group.

Image Description

Ronny Kerr

All author posts

Support VatorNews by Donating

Read more from our "Trends and news" series

More episodes

Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

PowerReviews/ Buzzillions.com

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com) is the Internet's most comprehensive developer of customer-review solutions for retailers and their shoppers. We  provide customer reviews and social merchandising solutions to multi-channel retailers and their shoppers.

Our technology platform for collecting, organizing, structuring and moderating relevance-based reviews helps online retailers significantly boost their sales. PowerReviews' user-generated content and community drives the highest sales uplift in the industry, and in addition to working with more than 350 online retailers, including Staples, Toys "R" Us, REI, Ritz Camera, Walgreen's, Diapers.com and The Sports Authority.

We have also launched our own shopping research portal, Buzzillions (www.buzzillions.com). The company is based in San Francisco and is backed by Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards.

AppDirect

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Where business can find, buy and manage web-based applications.

Our Business Application Network allows businesses to easily find the perfect software solution for their needs through our application marketplaces. Businesses can now benefit from one bill for all their applications and one portal to manage and use them. This allows greater integration, ease of use and security for application management.

The Story

We founded AppDirect in the summer of 2009 with a simple mission: improve the web-based enterprise experience. Our mission and enthusiasm attracted a leading team with over 55 years of collective on-demand e-commerce and software experience from HP, Oracle, Google, VMware, and Salesforce. In our first year, AppDirect grew into one of the largest independent software distribution channels through channel partners that share our vision and passion for web-based products.

Web-based software is better.

Web-based technology overcomes the barriers to entry that software companies face in the traditional packaged software market. This makes the software industry more competitive and businesses can now benefit from a greater range of products and services. It liberalizes software by allowing small businesses to access and afford enterprise grade solutions.

We make web-based software even better.

AppDirect promotes the ease of use, security and reach of web-based applications. Despite the growth in web-based applications over the past few years it remains difficult to find solutions and integrate them for unified management and use. We address this problem with our Application Marketplace, which makes it much easier for businesses to find and compare solutions. We also allow businesses to manage and use web-based software applications in a unified environment through our Business Application Manager.

 

Mashery

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Mashery is the leading provider of web services and API management solutions enabling software-driven companies to unlock and accelerate their web services channel. With its on-demand, fully hosted solution, Mashery takes away the cumbersome process and plumbing around managing web services. Mashery provides all the ingredients required to get web services up-and-running quickly, easily and successfully while ensuring that they will scale: usage/access management, tracking, metrics, commerce, performance optimization and developer/community tools all come pre-packaged. Mashery enables web services providers to focus their time, resources and capital on building their core software, not on creating web services management infrastructure.

Related News