Funding roundup - week ending 11/19/10

ConnectEDU, Fabricly, Fashism, GameGround, Gnip, PayNearMe, Plastic Jungle, Teambox, TokBox, Zemanta

Seed

Fabricly raised a $400,000 seed round from Atomico Ventures for a site that crowdsource styles. The funds will be used to add more collections and to attract more designers. The New York-based startup, which was incubated in Y Combinator, holds contests where designers submit sketches and users vote on their favorite. Popular items advance to a pre-order stage.

Collaboration software creator Teambox closed a $250,000 seed funding round, the organization’s second angel investment. The company has now raised a little over $350,000. Founded a little over a year ago, the startup is funded by Albert Feliu, co-founder of Infojobs (a career site for Spain, Italy, and Brazil), Diego Mariño (founder of Abiquo, cloud computing software), and the Priu family in Barcelona, where Teambox is based. Teambox develops Facebook experience-influenced collaboration software designed specifically with the small business in mind.

Zemanta, a browser add-on that help bloggers add supplemental content to their posts, raised $3 million--its biggest financing round to date--from previous backers Union Square Ventures and Eden Ventures. The Seedcamp 2007 winner has raised $6 million to date. The new funding will be used to expand sales and increase blogging innovation, and is expected to help the company reach profitability.

Early-stage

Social shopping site Fashism raised a $1 million Series A round led by Ashton Kutcher’s fund A-Grade Investments. Fashism was previously self-funded, but now it’s added a long list of new investors. The social site lets users upload photos of their outfits or other clothing items for other users to vote on. Since its founding in 2009, the site has registered 40,000 users and has seen 50,000 downloads of its iPhone app.

Social gaming company GameGround raised a $5.3 million Series B round, bringing the total amount of funds raised since opening up shop in 2008 to $11.1 million. Investors participating in this round include Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Capital, Vodafone Ventures, and Novel TMT Ventures. The New York-based startup lets PC, Web, Xbox and Facebook gamers connect and share each other's achievements in one place. The beta currently has about 10,000 people playing on the site.

Late-stage

ConnectEDU raised a $7 million Series D round from Allen & Company.  Founded in 2002, the Web-based education solutions provider has raised a total of $18.7 million, and the new funds will be used to support the company’s growth as it develops tools to help students make major educational and career-planning decisions. Like a LinkedIn for students, ConnectEDU's Connect! platform includes five million high school and college aged students, 2,500 high schools, 450 colleges, and nearly 50 employers.

Gnip, a social media data provider for businesses, has raised a $2 million funding round led by previous investor Foundry Group with participation from First Round Capital, another existing investor. Additionally, Gnip announced a partnership with Twitter that will allow it to sell access to the data fountain of tweets known as the “firehose," giving marketers and other companies interested in analytics and trends a new way to study what users are talking about.

PayNearMe closed a $16 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from August Capital, True Ventures, and Maveron. The company also announced a new mobile platform that will allow anyone with a mobile phone to make e-commerce payments, loan repayments, or even purchase e-wallet funds without a card or bank account. PayNearMe (formerly known as Kwedit) only launched two months ago.

Gift card marketplace Plastic Jungle announced Thursday that it has closed a $10 million Series C round led by Jafco Ventures with participation from previous backers Shasta Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Bay Partners and First Round Capital. The round, which is Plastic Jungle’s biggest, comes exactly eight months after the company raised a $7.4 million second round led by Redpoint and about a year and a half after raising a $4.8 million first round led by Shasta.

TokBox, a San Francisco-based Web video communications provider, closed a $12 million Series C round led by DAG Ventures, with participation from existing investors Bain Capital and Sequoia Capital.  Since launching in October 2007, the company has raised a total of $26.4 million. With Tokbox, developers can build their own app using TokBox’s Javascript APIs to embed video chat conversations in any Web page