Daily funding roundup - November 19, 2015

PresenceLearning raised $25M; UrbanClap scored $25M; Cinematique closed $3.5M funding

• Touchable video platform Cinematique, announced on Thursday that it has closed $3.5 million in a funding round led by Pumori Capital, an investment advisory firm founded by former Credit Suisse Asset Management executives. Cinematique previously raised $1.1 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $4.6 million. Previous investors and advisors include Alex Song (Pinterest, Dropbox), Karl Alomar (Digital Ocean), Sir John Hegarty (BBH Worldwide), Charles Ortner (Lady Gaga, U2), Nick Hedges (Velocify), and Rena Ronson (United Talent Agency), among others. The company makes touchable, shoppable video that allows viewers to touch, tap or click on any item they like in a video as it moves across screen. Viewers can continue watching a video but dive deeper into additional content and product information at their own convenience.
  
  
• PHHHOTO, a social app for sharing moving pictures, has announced the surprise release of an entirely new, truly transformative social feature named PARTY, along with the close of $1.5 million in seed funding. In its most ambitious product release to date, PARTY is the new way to hang out with groups of friends, family and strangers — instantly, in public or private, all day and night. The Series Seed financing is led by Eniac Ventures, the first seed stage venture fund focused exclusively on mobile technology, with support from WME, Maveron, and other strategic partners.
  
  
• Social news aggregator Nuzzel has raised $1.7 million in new funding from a bunch of individual investors including Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, Google’s Matt Cutts, SoftBank’s vice chairman Nikesh Arora, and others. This announcement comes as the company evolves its social aggregator product — it’s now available to everyone, meaning that you don’t need to have a Twitter account to actually use the service. The new funding will be used to further scale the product, including bringing on more engineers and improving product development of such features as its newsletter platform. Money will also be put into resources exploring integrations with publishers, something that hasn’t been a major focus yet.
  
  
• twoXAR, Inc., a company pioneering digital approaches to drug discovery, announced today that it has raised $3.4 million in seed financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Joining Andreessen Horowitz in this financing round are existing twoXAR investors CLI Ventures and the Stanford-StartX Fund, which was co-founded by the StartX accelerator, Stanford University, and Stanford Health Care. twoXAR will use these funds to expand its engineering and commercial teams and advance the progress of new and existing partnerships focused on drug candidates for metabolic and neurological diseases.
  
  
• Toronto's Deep Genomics announced the closing of a $3.7 million seed financing round led by True Ventures of the Bay Area with participation from Bloomberg Beta and other global angel investors. Deep Genomics is startup that has developed a unique deep learning-based technology that can sift through hundreds of millions of previously unknown genetic mutations and find ones that lead to disease. The company will use the funding to grow its team of machine learning and genome biology experts and to further develop and validate its proprietary deep learning technology.
  
  
• Zenedge announced today that it took in a $4 million series B round led by Canadian telecommunications company Telus. The San Jose-based startup said that will use capital to expand its services in Canada and Europe by adding new DDoS mitigation services in Toronto and Amsterdam. Telus will now offer Zenedge’s services to its customers, the startup added. Zenedge has raised at lest $7.5 million to date.
  
  
• A London-based fintech startup called SalaryFinance has raised $6.1 million in financing from Brightbridge Ventures. The company allows employees to consolidate debts and reduce interest costs by making repayments via salary deduction in the UK. Notably, the startup was founded by Dan Cobley, who used to run Google in the UK, alongside former banking consultant Asesh Sarkar and entrepreneur Daniel Shakhani.
  
  
• Santa Monica-based CARD.com, the online financial services provider led by Ben Katz, raised $9 million in a growth capital facility, from Columbia Pacific Advisors' Growth Capital Strategy and Fenway Summer Ventures. The company offers up a prepaid MasterCard which can be customized with a user's favorite brands and characters, from the Walking Dead and Family Guy, to Sesame Street, Star Trek and the Care Bears.
  
  
• OpenHouse Realty Inc., a real-estate agent recommendation service, is tapping into social data that it mingles with demographic information in an effort to serve up more insights into neighborhoods for people searching for homes. OpenHouse has picked up $13.5 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Triangle Peak Partners and March Capital Partners and had participation from undisclosed investors. The startup is competing in a crowded category of real-estate search incumbents including Zillow, Trulia and Redfin.
  
  
• Fractyl Laboratories Inc., a Waltham company working on a medical procedure to help diabetics, has raised $17 million after a small study of its procedure showed promise. Deerfield Management Co.  LP and other investors chipped in more to the company’s series C round, boosting the total raised to $57 million, the company said Wednesday. That comes on top of the $40 million the company raised last year from investors including Mithril Capital Management, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Domain Associates.
  
  
• Umbel, a Customer Data Platform, announced a Series B financing of $20 million led by Cielo Private Equity with participation from other new and existing investors. Umbel has completed its first closing of the Series B round. This financing will be used to expand the company's sales and marketing efforts in order to capitalize on the untapped market opportunity in data analytics, to accelerate technical innovation and for potential acquisitions.
  
  
• Services marketplace startup UrbanClap today announced that it had raised $25 million Series B round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from existing investors SAIF and Accel Partners. Earlier this year, UrbanClap had raised $12 million across two rounds from SAIF and Accel Partners.
  
  
• PresenceLearning Inc., a San Francisco, CA-based provider of live online speech therapy, occupational therapy, and behavior and mental health services for K-12 students, raised $25 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Catalyst Investors with participation from existing investors Birchmere Ventures, Blue Heron Capital, Catamount Ventures and New Markets Venture Partners. In conjunction with the funding, Catalyst Partner & Co-Founder Ryan McNally, joined PresenceLearning’s board of directors.

If you are interested in being included in our funding roundup, submit your press release or blog post about your financing round to mitos@vator.tv. 

Image source: business-standard.com