Seed-stage
Tapiture, a social discovery website, raised $825,000 in seed funding through private angel investors.
Enterprise SaaS innovation software platform Batterii closed a $2.5 million seed-stage funding round led by CincyTech, along with Batterii CEO Kevin C. Cummins, Los Angeles-based investor Ken Salkin, and undisclosed individuals.
Think Big Analytics, a Big Data service provider, announced a $3 million dollar seed round lead by Angel Investor Daniel Scheinman with participation from WI Harper Group.
Ribbon, which allows users to sell digital and physical goods on any platform, raised $1.6M seed round of funding led by Tim Draper, with participation from Siemer Ventures, Emil Michael, Naguib Sawiris,Winston Ibrahim, MicroVentures, and others.
Lulu, a private network dedicated to women and relationships, raised $2.5 million in seed funding from super angels, including Yuri Milner, Hosain Rahman, Alexander Asseily, Bill Tai, Vivi Nevo, Dave Morin , and existing investors, Passion Capital and PROfounders Capital.
Newsreader app Guide raised $1 million in seed funding from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Sapient Corp., Bob Pitman, Omar Epps, and Steve Schimmel.
Early-stage
Upstream Commerce, provider of solutions for product intelligence, raised $3 million from YL Ventures, Bright Capital, and new private investors.
Cloud Application Hypervisor provider Ravello Systems raised $26 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Wireless Internet provider Freedom Pop raised $4.3 million in Series A1 funding from existing investors, DCM and Mangrove Capital.
Late-stage
Whitehat Security, a provider of website risk management solution, raised $31 million in a strategic growth round led by new investor JMI Equity, with participation from existing investor Investor Growth Capital.
Mobile app back-end developer Urban Airship raised $25 million in a round of funding led by August Capital, with participation from existing investors Foundry Group, Intel Capital, True Ventures, and Verizon.
Enterprise middleware provider WSO2 raised $10 million in a round of funding led by Toba Capital, with help from Cisco and Intel Capital.
Real-time media management platform DataXu closed $27 million in funding led by Thomvest Ventures, Current investors Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures also participated.
Livefyre, provider of real-time social media software, announced the closing of a $15 million Series C round of funding led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and included existing investors Greycroft Partners, Cue Ball, HillsVen Group, and ff Venture Capital.
Movile, a Latin American mobile publishing company, announced that it invested $2.6 million in Brazilian food ordering and delivery company iFood. The investment is iFood’s Series B round of funding.
JIBE, a referral-based hiring platform, closed a $10 million Series B round. New investor Longworth Venture Partners led the round. Polaris Partners, DFJ Gotham, DFJ, Zelkova, Lerer Ventures and Thrive Capital also participated.
Intel invested $6.5 million into software-defined networking company Big Switch's B round, bringing the round to $31.5 million.
New Relic, the cloud-based performance software tool, raised $80 million in mezzanine financing led by Insight Venture Partners. Other participants included Dragoneer Investment Group LLC, Passport Ventures LLC, and the company's existing investors Allen & Company, Benchmark Capital, Trinity Ventures and Tenaya Capital. It also included a major investment from accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates.
O
n demand taxi service Hailo announced that it raised a $30 million Series B from Union Square Ventures.
Rover, an Airbnb-like service for dogs, raised $7 million in Series B funding led by The Foundry Group. Existing investor Madrona Venture Group also participated.
Doctor On Demand, Softbank, Namely, Mezaaj, Are You A Human, Framebridge, Spacious, MentAd, GoFundMe
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Steven Loeb
Duolingo, Vinli, Jimdo, Dalia Research, Procore Technologies, Colabo, Menlo Security, Enervee, Tile
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Steven Loeb
DocuSig, Flywheel, Enervee, Notion, VitalFields, jobandtalent, EverCompliant, Tegile Systems, Ubimo
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
JIBE is a referral-based hiring platform that enables jobseekers to tap into their existing social networks to gain access to the jobs they want through the people they already know. JIBE provides jobseekers with a wide range of career opportunities, insight into how many connections they have at a given company and the ability to contact their connections, ask for referrals, and then attach those referrals to their job application. JIBE works directly with enterprises, many of which are Fortune 1,000 companies.
Founded in 2008 by Joe Essenfeld, JIBE is based in New York City and backed by Polaris Venture Partners, Lerer Ventures, Zelkova Ventures and Thrive Capital.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Upstream Commerce is the leading solution for pricing intelligence and product intelligence for online retailers. It helps you proactively adjust your pricing to the most appropriate levels for market conditions. By running 24-7, collecting, normalizing, analyzing, and reporting on product pricing and related factors you receive information when you want it, where you want it, and in the formats you need, eliminating all the tedious work normally required to arrive at useful market intelligence.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Hailo is a network that matches passengers and licensed taxi drivers, using a tool which helps to make cabbies’ days more sociable – and profitable. Hailo makes sure people are never more than two taps away from a licensed taxi, and that cabbies get more passengers when they want them.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Lulu is a digital marketplace guided by a vision of empowerment and accessibility, and built on a business model that has proven wildly successful. The rapid growth of Lulu, which is being driven by over 15,000 new registrations a week and more than 100, 000 unique visitors everyday, is built on its proven ability to grab hold of the long tail of user-generated content and provide an empowering outlet for creators of all types.
Lulu eliminates traditional entry barriers to publishing, and enables content creators and owners – authors and educators, videographers and musicians, businesses and nonprofits, professionals and amateurs – to bring their work directly to their audience. First, they use Lulu’s tools to format their digital content. Then they take advantage of Lulu’s dedicated marketplace, custom storefronts and advanced listing and distribution services to make their books, videos, CDs, DVDs, calendars, reports and more available to as many, or as few, people around the world as they like, earning 80% of all creator revenue, of which millions of dollars has already been paid out.
As the creation of user-generated content has grown exponentially, Lulu has been at the forefront of this still rapidly growing curve. Traditional book publishers in the United States published roughly 120,000 books a year. Lulu alone published 98,000 new titles globally, created by some of our almost 1.2 million registered users. In addition, Lulu has empowered creators to post, sell, and share hundreds of thousands of videos, music downloads, artistic creations and great photography.
In just five years Lulu.com has, in essence, become home to a new economy. With users in more than 80 countries and corporate offices in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, Lulu is a top 2500 website world wide (Alexa.com); a winner of the 2007 Web 2.0 Award for best websites (SEOMoz.com), and is the top ranked self publishing site on Alexa, boasting one of the largest online worldwide creative communities and a premiere global marketplace for new digital content on the Internet.
Lulu is guided by founder and CEO Bob Young – a true technology entrepreneur and open-source visionary with four successful multi-million dollar start-up companies on his resume. In 1993, Young co-founded Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the open-source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology. Red Hat is a Fortune 500 company and chief rival to Microsoft. His success at Red Hat won him industry accolades, including nomination as one of Business Week’s “Top Entrepreneurs” in 1999. In 2000, Young co-founded the Center for Public Domain, a non-profit foundation created to bolster healthy conversation of intellectual property, patent and copyright law, and the management of the public domain for the common good. Grant recipients included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Future of Music Coalition. In 2003, Young purchased the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League and currently serves as the league’s vice chairman.
