Daily funding roundup - December 16, 2015

Slack revealed $80M fund; Digital Guardian bagged $66M; Springboard raised $1.7M

• Education technology company Springboard (formerly known as SlideRule) today announced that it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding from a long list of investors, including Allen Blue (co-founder of LinkedIn), John Katzman (founder of The Princeton Review), 2U and The Noodle Companies, Naveen Tewari (founder and CEO of InMobi), Kartik Hosanagar (the Wharton School professor), 500 Startups, Blue Fog Capital and others.One wave among a rising tide of edtech companies, Springboard aims to help millennials get ahead in their careers through self-paced, mentor-led workshops.
  
  
• Digital Guardian, provider of data security solutions, today announced that it has raised a $66 million round of funding from previous investors GE Pension Trust (advised by GE Asset Management), Fairhaven Capital Partners, Loring Wolcott & Coolidge, Special Situation Funds, and Brookline Venture Partners. Also contributing to the round are several new investors, including LLR Partners, Mass Mutual Ventures LLC (the corporate venture capital arm of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company), and the Venture Capital Unit of Siemens Financial Services.
  
  
• Workplace collaboration service Slack has a new plan to build out its platform. It goes beyond just integrating apps onto the platform, but by being a hub for their creation and development. The company announced on Tuesday two new initiatives to make this happen. First it revealed a new $80 fund that it has started, to give support to developers who want to build their app for the Slack platform, as well as other apps it can integrate in the future. That $80 million isn't coming only from Slack, but also from its partners, which include some of the top venture capital firms in the Valley: Accel, Andreessen-Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark, and Social+Capital.
  
  
• Vroom, an online retailer of pre-owned cars, raised $95 million in Series C funding. The company is using the funds to acquire Texas Direct Auto (TDA), a Houston, Texas-based platform for retailing cars online. Founded in 2002 by Mike Welch and Rick Williams, Texas Direct Auto leverages proprietary RFID tracking and prioritization software to sell vehicles to consumers, dealers and dealer networks around the globe.
  
  
• Allovue has raised a $5.1 million Series A round led by Rethink Education. Red House Education, Serious Change II, Kapor Capital and Baltimore Angels also participated. This round brings Allovue's total funding up to $6.9 million, and with it the Baltimore, MD-based company plans to expand its customer success and leadership teams by hiring 35 new people in 2016, which would more than triple the size of the company. Allovue makes “Balance,” an accounting platform for school districts, which the company launched this year.
  
  
• Textio, founded last year by Microsoft veterans Kieran Snyder and Jensen Harris, develops a machine-learning program that can automatically read through job postings and recruiting emails and tell a business how effective the writing will be for attracting candidates. The company announced an $8 million round of funding Wednesday, bringing its total to $9.5 million. The latest round was led by San Mateo, Calif.-based Emergence Capital, with participation from Cowboy Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Upside Partnership.
  
  
• Profusa, Inc., today announced it secured $13.2 million in Series B financing to support the development and com­mercialization of its internal biosensor technology for long-term, continuous monitoring of body chemistry for improving personal health and managing disease. 3E Bioventures, a Beijing-based venture capital firm, led the round with Asset Management Ventures, Qihoo 360, and other Series A investors participating in the funding. All told, including non-dilutive grants, the new financing brings to the privately held company more than $30 million in funding since its founding in 2009. Other financial details were not disclosed.
  
  
• Trustlook Inc., a mobile security provider for the Android platform, today announced that it has closed a $17 million Series A round of funding. The financing was led by Trustbridge Partners, a leading venture capital and private equity firm, specializing in growth capital and expansion stage investment. New investors Sparkland Ventures and Linear Capital Partners, as well as existing investor Danhua Capital are also participating in the funding.
  
  
• Blue River Technology, a company that uses computer vision, machine learning and robotics for agriculture, today announced it has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund (Pontifax AgTech). Syngenta Ventures and Monsanto Growth Ventures joined the round as new investors, and existing investors Data Collective Venture Capital, Khosla Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors also participated. The company plans to use the funds to further expand its world-class engineering team and to accelerate the development of its field-proven agricultural robots.
  
  
• Amazon has pin down a deal with Bangalore based service provider Housejoy. Amazon has invested $ 22.5 million in Housejoy in Series B round of funding. In its previous round, Housejoy has managed to pull in $4 million funding from Matrix Partners in Series A round. Series B round of funding was witnessed by the existing investor Matrix Partners and new investors including Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and Ru-Net Technology Partners. The raised amount will be utalised in resolving its operational issues, strategic acquisitions, partnerships and building the team.
  
  
• More than 10 years after launching and three years after its most recent investment round, Janrain is raising a substantial amount of cash. The Portland-based startup, which develops technology that lets companies enable and track social sign-ins via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other services, today announced a $27 million Series D round led by HighBar Partners, with participation from existing investors Millennium Technology Value Partners, Split Rock Partners, Epic Ventures, Emergence Capital, RPM Ventures and DFJ Frontier.
  
  
• Sequoia Capital, an early backer of companies like Google and Amazon, said Wednesday that it is putting $35 million into a upstart health insurance company, Clover Health. Clover is trying to use data analysis and preventative care to improve healthcare for seniors and to give customers who use private versions of Medicare a cheaper option. Clover says it will be using the new funding to expand beyond New Jersey. The company previously raised $100 million in debt and equity funding from early Uber backer-First Round Capital and Athyrium Capital Management, both of which contributed to the most recent round of Series B funding.
  
  
• Datavail, a company that offers database administration for enterprises, took in a $47 million investment led by Catalyst Investors, the VC firm announced today. Tahosa Capital,  Lumerity Capital Partners, and Boulder Ventures also contributed to the funding round that gives Datavail a total of $60 million in venture funds. Catalyst’s Tyler Newton and Susan Bihler, alongside Tahosa’s Derek Pilling, joined Datavail’s board.

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