Funding roundup - week ending 12/24/10

Elevance, Lookout, LS9, Major League Gaming, Mass Relevance, Nasuni, PixelFish

Early-stage

Mass Relevance, a social marketing company that just launched, secured nearly $2 million from the Floodgate Fund (formerly Maples Investments) and Austin Ventures in a Series A round. Apparently social marketing is such a hot space, the startup is leaving the “highly competitive round” open for any other angel investors that want to get a piece of the pie. CEO Sam Decker, a former Dell executive and founding CMO of Bazaarvoice, co-founded  the company to be a platform for brands like Best Buy, Macy’s and Dell to manage the content they share on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Cloud gateway company Nasuni closed $15 million in Series B funding led by Flybridge Capital Partners with participation from existing investors, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners, who led the company’s Series A funding in March 2009. Investment in Nasuni now totals $23 million for the two rounds. Nasuni offers virtual network-attached storage (NAS) software called Nasuni Filer, which allows companies to manage their volume and performance directly from their own servers. Company data is stored in the cloud by third-party or private storage providers, like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Windows Azure.

Video production company PixelFish raised a $2.1 million second round of funding. Though investors have not yet been confirmed for the round, one can safely assume that many who contributed to PixelFish’s $1.4 million Series A in October also contributed to this round. Series A investors included founder John McIntyre, co-founder John Zdanowski (partner and CFO at River Forest Financial, LLC), and angels Mike Maples (Floodgate) and Darin Brannan. Reports say AT&T and Microsoft executives also took part in the latest round.

Late-stage

Elevance Renewable Sciences closed a $100 million Series C round led by Naxos Capital Partners, with participation from Total Energy Ventures International, TPG Biotech, TPG Growth. Founded in 2007, Elevance produces speciality ingredients in personal care products, detergents, lubricants, and fuel from renewable feedstocks and natural oils. The company uses olefin metathesis to synthesize natural oils while using less energy than fossil-based oils. Using metathesis, products can be manufactured using low temperatures and pressure. The result includes products like wax, alpha olefins, acids and esters, epoxides, and alcohols.

Smartphone security company Lookout raised a $19.5 million third round of funding, led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures. Lookout builds free mobile applications for Android, BlackBerry and Windows that offer security features like a virus/spyware scanner and a stolen phone locator. Automatic backup of the phone’s data to the cloud is also included.

Industrial biotechnology company LS9 closed a $30 million round of funding led by BlackRock, a firm with over $3 trillion in assets.  All of LS9’s previous investors also participated in this round, including Khosla Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Chevron's CTTV Investments. LS9 produces renewable petroleum fuels and sustainable chemicals. The company’s technology allows for greater genetic control over the design of the fuels to make them chemically identical to petroleum.

Major League Gaming (MLG), a professional video game league and provider of cross-platform competitions, announced the initial closing of a $10 million financing commitment to be completed in Q1 2011. The investment was led by Legion Enterprises with participation from Oak Investment Partners, which previously contributed $32.5 million to MLG. Targeting the approximately 40 million video game consumers in North America, MLG attracts about 4.5 million people monthly to its Web properties, where over 600,000 unique viewers tune in to each live broadcast of Pro Circuit competitions.