Daily funding roundup - September 29, 2015

Trive Capital Management bagged $500M; Thumbtack raised $125M; Wheels Up raised $115M

• The local services marketplace is filled with players, including companies like TaskRabbit, Angie's List and Yelp. Even companies like eBay, Amazon and GoDaddy are getting into the space. Frankly, though, its a space that has not seen much innovation or change. Most services operate the same way, with the same search and browsing features. Thumbtack, though, is attempting to do just that, by upending how people and professionals connect. And it raising huge amounts of money to put that plan into action. The company has that it has raised a $125 million round of funding, it was announced in a blog post from Marco Zappacosta, founder and CEO of Thumbtack. The round was led by Scottish money management firm Baillie Gifford with previous investors including Tiger Global, Google Capital and Sequoia Capital also participating. The round, which comes a little over a year after Thumbtack raised a $100 million round in August of 2014, nearly doubles the amount of money Thumbtack has raised. That last round valued it at $750 million, and now this latest funding pushed it over the top, giving it unicorn status with a $1.3 billion valuation.
  
  
• Wheels Up, a membership-based private aviation company, announced on Monday that it has completed its first closing on a capital raise of up to $115 million. The new funding came from funds and trusts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Fidelity Management and Research Company, and NEA. The Company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2013, and with this latest round its valuation is now greater than $500 million. Founded in 2013 by by Kenny Dichter, the Founder of Marquis Jet, Wheels Up's mission it to reduce the upfront cost of fly privately. The company offers aircraft with guaranteed availability on its private fleet of Beechcraft King Air 350i and Citation Excel/XLS aircraft.
  
  
• MagicEvent.com, a Paris, France – based startup dedicated to business travel accommodation and services, raised €1.5 million ($1.7 million) in funding. Backers included: Benoît Bassi, Partner and President of Bridgepoint Business in France, and member of the Bridgepoint Group’s board, Michael Benabou, co-founder of Vente-Privée.com, the Banque Publique d’Investissement (BPI), and some unnamed investment companies. The company, which has raised €3 million in total, intends to use the funds to develop its portfolio of accommodation in Europe, and to offer new services to professionals.
  
  
• BeneStream today announced additional investment from BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners and Sandbox Advantage Fund, closing out its Series A Round of financing. BeneStream is a health technology company that connects qualified employees to government health benefits through its signature product, Medicaid Migration. The process helps workers access affordable, quality health coverage and other benefits. The company raised a total of $2 million from BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners and Sandbox Advantage Fund, bringing the total Series A round to $6.26 million.
  
  
• Infoworks, a pioneering company in automated big data management, announced today that it has secured $5 million in Series A financing in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation by Knoll Ventures and others. With the new funding, Infoworks has expanded its management team to prepare for the next stage of growth. In a separate announcement at the 2015 Strata conference, Infoworks also announced availability of a complete solution for data warehouse augmentation, which is built on the company’s dynamic data warehousing (DDW) platform.
  
  
• McLean-based Urgent.ly just raised $7 million in venture funding, money the company says it plans to use to rapidly expand its nationwide on-demand roadside assistance service. Allianz Digital Corporate Ventures, Verizon Ventures and Forte Ventures were behind the Series A funding round. Earlier this year, Urgent.ly landed a partnership with AT&T that will plug its services directly into the dashboards of a few million cars. Urgent.ly also announced it was partnering with a San Francisco-based analytics company to add accident detection and accident alerts to its Urgent.ly mobile platform.
  
  
• Swarm64 AS, an Oslo- and Berlin-based data acceleration startup, has raised a total of €7.1 million ($8 million) from lead investors Alliance Venture, Target Partners and Investinor. The funds will be used for market entry and team building in regards to the US market. Swarm64 has been developing a hardware and software solution that scales databases in size and speed to exceed their current limitations. There is significant business value in combining the speed and real-time aspects of transaction processing with the ability to answer complex analytic queries in seconds. 
  
  
• Apitope, a Cardiff, Wales-based drug discovery and development company focused on treating the underlying cause of autoimmune diseases, raised €12 million ($13.5 million) in Series B financing. The round was led by new investor Wales Life Sciences Fund with participation from current investors Vesalius Biocapital, LRM, PMV and Wyvern and existing shareholders the Wellcome Trust. In conjunction with the funding, Brenig Preest, Wales Life Sciences Fund, will join the Apitope board.
  
  
• UNIFi Software, the only comprehensive data integration solution for the enterprise, today announced it has landed $10 million in Series A funding, led by Pelion Venture Partners with additional funding from Canaan Partners, which had previously led the seed round. The company will use the new round of funding to scale customer acquisition by ramping up its sales and marketing team; to execute on UNIFi's product vision by growing the engineering team; and to accelerate market capture through the introduction of a cloud-based free trial version of the product. 
  
  
• PinpointCare, a Chicago, IL-based bundled payment and care coordination technology company, secured $11M in funding. The backers remained undisclosed. The company will use the funds to continue to accelerate growth. Led by Chief Executive Officer Joel Splan and Chief Technology Officer Adam Hoffman, PinpointCare provides a Software-as-a-Service application that streamlines care coordination for hospitals, physician groups, post-acute care providers, and patients.
  
  
• Origami Logic, a marketing analytics firm, has nabbed another $25 million to make sense of those signals in context. The new round led by Next World Capital essentially doubles the amount of money backing the three-year-old company to $49.3 million. Existing investors Accel Partners, Icon Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners are return investors. The new round will fund hires across sales, marketing, and customer success functions. The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., hopes to double headcount over the next year to 100 employees.
  
  
• Base, a leading next-generation sales platform, today announced $30 million in round C funding. This comes in the wake of Base’s remarkable market expansion over the last year. The new funding will allow Base to both keep pace with growing demand and also invest aggressively in expanding the platform’s sales intelligence capabilities. Tenaya Capital led the round with participation from Index Ventures and previous investors. Base provides integrated sales productivity tools that visualize the sales experience. Base also boasts the #1 ranked mobile CRM app available on the market. 
  
  
• PulsePoint, a global programmatic platform for brand engagement, announced its recent $30 million debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. The funds will be used for business expansion and future acquisitions of technology companies. This announcement comes on the heels of PulsePoint being named an Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Company, with 106% year-over-year revenue growth, strong profitability and solid cash flow and more than 800 billion biddable impressions across PulsePoint’s industry-leading programmatic platform in 2014
  
  
• PepperTap, a nine-month-old grocery delivery service in India, has closed its third round of investment this year after announcing a $36 million raise. The funding is lead by Snapdeal, the India-based Amazon rival that is backed by Alibaba, with participation from existing investors Sequoia India and SAIF Partners, as well as new backers Ru-net, JAFCO, and BeeNext. And as if that isn’t enough, PepperTap, which landed $1.2 million in March and then $10 million more in April, is in discussions in expand this round by an additional $20 million.
  
  
• LLamasoft, a supply chain software innovator, announced that it has closed a $50 million Series B financing round with affiliates of Goldman, Sachs & Co. The minority investment will be used to fund numerous technology development and growth initiatives. Goldman Sachs will have one seat on LLamasoft’s Board as part of the investment. LLamasoft, a supply chain software innovator, announced that it has closed a $50 million Series B financing round with affiliates of Goldman, Sachs & Co. The minority investment will be used to fund numerous technology development and growth initiatives. Goldman Sachs will have one seat on LLamasoft’s Board as part of the investment.
  
  
• US-based Trive Capital Management has closed its oversubscribed second fund on $500 million, reaching its hard cap in three months and smashing its initial $400 million target. Fund II comes just two years since the mid-market firm closed its debut vehicle on $300 million, after just five months on the road. Trive’s first fund received commitments from investors globally, including public and private pension funds, endowments, foundations, fund of funds and family offices. The new fund is likely to follow a similar make up. Just last week, AltAssets reported that the firm had registered $468 million for the fund, having reeled in commitments from 55 LPs.

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