Funding roundup - week ending 08/13/10

Empire Avenue, Marginize, Medialets, ngmoco, TransFS, and WePay: six awesome startups raise funds

This week we've got a social network for buying and selling shares in people and brands, yet another browser sidebar for commenting on Web pages with other users, a mobile analytics platform, and more.

Here are a few of the most notable fundraisers from the past week:

Empire Avenue, a social site where users buy and sell shares in each other, secured $200,000 in seed funding from a group of angel investors headed by Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures. Since beta launching in February, the Edmonton, Canada-based startup has accumulated 15,000 registered users and businesses, including Sears, OREO, WestJet, Motorola, and others. Proof that users actively engage with the site is Empire Avenue's own statistic: over 750,000 virtual share trades have occurred on the site in the past three months.

Marginize, another service that lets users comment on, share, and check-into pages across the Web via a sidebar plugin, raised $650,000 from Atlas Ventures, Longworth Venture Partners, eonBusiness, SOS Ventures, and angels. Graduate of Boston TechStars class of June 2010, Marginize believes it has a different approach to a traditionally unsuccessful space, as the startup automatically populates Web page sidebars with commentary drawn from Twitter. Additionally, Marginize uses an HTML rendering of the sidebar so that not all users necessarily need to install a plugin to use the service.

Medialets, a rich media advertising and analytics platform for mobile, closed a $6 million Series B round of financing with support from previous investors The Foundry Group and DFJ Gotham and new investors 500 Startups, Dave McClure’s new venture fund, and Chris Saridakis’ Great Barn Ventures. Since its June 2008 founding, the New York startup has raised a total of $10 million in funding. One of the most used ad platforms for mobile, Medialets boasts publisher clients as prominent as NPR, CNN, and Fox.

ngmoco, a game developer for iPhone and iPod Touch, received an estimated $3-5 million investment from Google Ventures, Google's venture capital arm. Following a $25 million Series C round closed in February, this latest investment puts the San Francisco-based startup's valuation at over $100 million. ngmoco is one of the most popular iOS game developers, with 'We Farm' currently the second most popular iPad game on the App Store.

TransFS, a comparison shopping website for credit card processing, raised $510,000 in new funding from Hyde Park Angels and angel Dave McClure’s recently launched fund500Startups. The Chicago-based startup, which aims to save businesses money on credit card processing fees, supposedly helps clients save 40% on average. TransFS has bigger plans, however, to also add comparison services for payroll processing, employee health insurance plans, and more.

WePay, a payments platform that helps groups collect, manage, and spend money, secured a $7.5 million Series B round led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from existing investor August Capital. After raising a $1.65 million Series A round in December 2009 with backing by August Capital, PayPal founder Max Levchin, angel investor Ron Conway, YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chenand, and former Intuit CTO and CFO Eric Dunn, the Silicon Valley-based startup publicly launched in April 2010. Adding over 1000 groups in July, WePay saw payment volume grow by 80%.