Daily funding roundup - March 31, 2016

Garena bagged $170 Series D funding; Turner led $15M investment in Mashable; SkySquirrel raised $1M

• SkySquirrel Technologies, a Halifax, Canada-based provider of drone-based technology for monitoring and improving crop health, closed a $1 million investment round. The round includes a $500k investment from Innovacorp, Nova Scotia’s early stage venture capital organization, and $500k from an undisclosed Ontario-based private investor. The company intends to use the funds to to launch the next-generation of its product before the current year’s growing season and enter new markets.
  
  
• HealthJoy, a healthcare technology startup, closed $3 million in funding led by GoHealth and a group of industry angel investors. With this funding, HealthJoy plans to accelerate development of its healthcare decision platform and continue expansion into consumer, broker and employer channels. This includes the development of JOY, a human-supported machine intelligence that will cost-effectively scale the delivery model to millions of users.
  
  
• Expway, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based wireless multicast technology provider, raised €3 million (approximately $3.42 million) in funding. The round was led by NTT DOCOMO Ventures, the corporate venture arm of NTT Group, with participation from current investors Innovation Capital, I-Source, TechFund and Isatis Capital. The company intends to use the funds to further the adoption of FastLane.
  
  
• eRelevance Corporation, closed its Series A round of funding totaling $4.5 million.  Prior to this funding eRelevance raised $4.1 million in seed capital, bringing its total capital raised to $8.6 million since inception in July 2013. The funding will be used to drive top line growth with increases in sales and marketing along with the additional resources necessary to support company growth. The Series A round was led by Silicon Valley based Rally Ventures. Other institutional participants include Chicago Ventures,Miramar Venture Partners and Rothenberg Ventures. In addition to the institutional investors, existing angel investors also participated in this round of funding.
  
  
• TOK.tv, a San Francisco, CA-based mobile app for soccer fans, closed a $5 million Series A financing. Backers included Angel Lab, Techstars, Social Starts, XG Ventures, U-Start Club (Opea and Anya Capital), IAG, JetVentures, TEEC Angel Fund and Heyi Capital. The company intends to use the funds to expand the social network partner base to the USA (which is already the second most popular country for TOK.tv users), bringing the voice platform to US teams and leagues.
  
  
• Gauss Surgical, Inc., maker of Triton, platform for real-time monitoring of surgical blood loss, closed its $12.6 million in Series B financing, bringing its total funding to $24.6 million. Providence Ventures, the investment arm of Providence Health & Services, the third largest not-for-profit health system in the United States, led the round, with participation from Jump Capital, a Chicago-based firm specializing in expansion stage and growth capital investments.
  
  
• Playbuzz, a platform for online content engagement and social distribution, raised $15 million in new funding, led by Saban Ventures with participation from The Walt Disney Company. Existing investors 83North, Carmel Ventures and FirstTime Ventures also participated in the investment round. Playbuzz will use the investment to further enhance its proprietary content-engagement platform and expand its sponsored content business, which already works with many of the world's leading brands to create and distribute native advertising campaigns at scale.
  
  
• Turner led a new $15 million investment round in the digital publisher Mashable. As part of the new partnership, the two companies will develop content together for both digital and linear distribution. Plus, Turner will gain access to Mashable’s Velocity technology—an analytics tool that Mashable uses to help identify which content is likely to resonate in social media.
  
  
• Airware, a San Francisco-based startup developing an operating system for drones, raised $30 million in venture capital in a round led by Next World Capital. That investment also included previous investors like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz as well as Cisco Systems Executive Chairman and former CEO John Chambers, who joined Airware’s board.
  
  
• Task management software startup Asana secured $50 million round of funding. Several known entities in the technology industry are participating in the new round, which is led by Y Combinator president Sam Altman. Other investors in the round include Joe Lonsdale’s 8 VC, Tony Hsieh’s VTF Capital, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Andrew Mason, Roger McNamee, Adam D’Angelo, Founders Fund, Eric Ries, Divesh Makan, Ruchi Sanghvi, and Aditya Agrawal. Asana founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein also participated.
  
  
• Juicero.com, a food tech startup that makes Internet-connected kitchen appliances, raised $70 million in Series B funding in a round led by Artis Ventures. Alongside Artis Ventures, Juicero’s Series A and B investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Thrive Capital, Campbell Soup Company, Two Sigma Ventures, DBL Partners, First Beverage Group, Acre Venture Partners and others.
  
  
• Garena, a Singapore-based company engaged in the gaming, internet, and mobile industries, closed a $170 million series D funding round, led by Khazanah Nasional Berhad. Khazanah is the strategic investment fund of the Malaysian government. It joins Garena’s existing list of investors, including General Atlantic LLC, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and Keytone Ventures.

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Image source: techinasia.com