Investment News

Crowdtilt launches to group fund anything (and it means anything)

Crowdtilt, a new group-funding site backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, has launched today to help you fund anything. The site lets you group fund any project or goal you can come up with, from trips across the country to buying a wedding gift.

“Essentially, we’ve taken our favorite elements of crowdfunding platforms and provided them for groups of friends instead” Crowdtilt chief executive and co-founder James Beshara told VentureBeat in an email.

Crowdtilt’s focus … Continue Reading

Shopping site Sneakpeeq raises $2.67M

Social daily deals and shopping website Sneakpeeq announced Friday is has raised $2.67 million in funding.

Sneakpeeq is attempting to replicate the shopping experience you’d have in a physical store. What type of experience? Well, think about walking into a fancy shop, picking an item off the shelf, turning it over, and checking the price tag. Sneakpeeq recreates that by, for example, making you click a “peeq” button to see a price rather than blatantly … Continue Reading

Silver Lake buys stake in Conduit, giving Israeli investors 200x return

Yozma Venture Capital is in talks to sell its share of Conduit, an Israel-based company that creates user engagement tools, for more than $200 million, Globes reported Thursday.

A source tells VentureBeat the buyer is Silver Lake, a U.S. private equity firm, which is paying between $200 and $250 million for the stake of the company. Globes describes the firm as a “large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars in assets … Continue Reading

Stripe attracts $18M in funding at $100M valuation

Stripe, an online-payment system company going after PayPal, is said to have raised $18 million at a $100 million valuation from Sequoia Capital and other investors, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

The deal has not been finalized but a few unnamed sources revealed that Sequoia was responsible for $17 million of the funding. Lawyer Michael J. Patrick from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West LLP was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “There must be something red hot … Continue Reading

Stealth-mode app TimeRazor helps you find time for your favorite events, raises $3.4M

TimeRazor is a mobile application launching in March that will help you find events and offers near you. The company announced today it has raised $3.4 million from private investors.

TimeRazor is tackling the “fear of missing out” or FOMO as the company calls it. It proposes people are often so busy with errands and tasks they need to do, that they miss out on the fun events they want to do. TimeRazor is set … Continue Reading

Alibaba suspends public trading to buy back its stock from Yahoo

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has suspended public trading of its shares in Hong Kong as it prepares to buy back its 40 percent stake held by Yahoo.

The transaction is said to be worth between $10 billion and $11.5 billion.

In a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, Alibaba representatives said the company would be releasing a statement today that would be “potentially price sensitive.”

Late last year, Alibaba began rounding up the financing … Continue Reading

Google’s Motorola bid set for approval, but it won’t be the end of patent wars

Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility will likely be approved by the U.S. Department of Justice next week, sources tell Bloomberg, but don’t expect Google to backtrack on Motorola’s contentious patent litigation tactics.

Purchasing Motorola will grant Google over 17,000 mobile patents in addition to the phone maker’s handset assets. Many had expected Google, which has historically argued against the trend of patent litigation from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, to use its … Continue Reading

Oracle agrees to buy SuccessFactors rival Taleo for $1.9B

Software titan and now cloud services provider Oracle has agreed to acquire talent management cloud company Taleo for $1.9 billion, the companies announced today.

The deal greatly mirrors the $3.4 billion acquisition of employee performance management software provider SuccessFactors by enterprise software giant SAP. Oracle and SAP are involved in an intensifying battle for large enterprise customers, as their software and cloud offerings begin to overlap. With SAP buying SuccessFactors, the only proper thing for … Continue Reading

Fueled by mobile madness, Appcelerator acquires Cocoafish

As long as consumers are crazy about mobile apps, developers will build them — and as long as developers are cranking out mobile apps, companies like Appcelerator will continue to flourish and snap up companies like Cocoafish.

In a nutshell, both Cocoafish and Appcelerator are in the business of making mobile development a lot easier, and the latter has just announced its acquisition of the former. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Appcelerator … Continue Reading

Nivio pulls in $21M to make cloud computing cheaper and more student-friendly

Cloud computing and desktop virtualization are rapidly growing trends in the tech world, and one company has spent a considerable amount of time developing this technology. Nivio, which started as an idea in 2004, announced today it has received $21 million in its first round of venture capital funding.

Nivio lets you store up to 10GB of your documents, music, and movies in the cloud for free with nDrive. Your files sync across all of … Continue Reading

Blip chops off its “.tv” branding with a $12M investment sword

Indie streaming video startup Blip.tv announced today that it will ditch the “.tv” from its name in the first of many steps to refresh and improve the company. Blip has also secured a $12 million round of funding to help see those improvement efforts through.

“Our research actually showed that people didn’t really identify web series as associated with television, so dropping the ‘.tv’ from the brand just made sense,” said Blip COO Steve Brookstein … Continue Reading

Yammer possibly seeking a new $50M investment

Rumors are circulating that enterprise-focused social network Yammer is raising a new mega funding round of more than $50 million, which would push the startup’s valuation near $1 billion.

Yammer provides companies with their own private social network that employees use to quickly communicate and update their activity throughout the day. A company’s Yammer network is closed off from public view and is only accessible to people who have a company-branded email address. Over 200,000 … Continue Reading

Extole turns regular customers into brand ambassadors, raises $10M

Nearly every company has a social presence these days, but personal recommendations are often a more powerful way to boost sales. If you’ve never heard about a company before, but your friend has, you’ll likely trust her opinion over that of a complete stranger. But keeping track of how much customer referrals really help your business can be hard, so Extole has created a way to track word-of-mouth marketing.

The service seeks to find and … Continue Reading

Mystery music app TastemakerX nails down a $1.8M funding round pre-launch

It hasn’t even launched yet, but TastemakerX has already sealed a reasonable deal to lock in funding from Silicon Valley investors.

Now that’s what we call rock n’ roll.

The social-mobile-music app raised a $1.8 million chunk of change for its first round of institutional funding. Investors include Baseline Ventures, AOL Ventures, True Ventures, and a slew of others, including a handful of angels.

The app is still shrouded in mystery; we haven’t seen screenshots … Continue Reading

LinkedIn reportedly buying contact manager Rapportive

Business social-media giant LinkedIn is acquiring Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that enhances contact information.

Sources close to the negotiation disclosed the news and said that LinkedIn is paying over $10 million to buy the company, All Things D reported. The final purchase price is undisclosed, no deal has been finalized, and both companies are keeping quiet about the details. VentureBeat reached out to Rapportive’s chief executive Rahul Vohra for comment and didn’t get a response.… Continue Reading

TerraEchos fights security threats with data, attracts $1.55M seed funding

Hacking into government systems just got a bit harder. TerraEchos, a security company using big data to identify and thwart security threats, announced today that it’s raised $1.55 million in seed funding to be an internet security vigilante.

“For the past three years we’ve been working on problems funded by the US Navy and the Department of Energy, on how to process and analyze huge amounts of information and find the most meaningful security alerts,” … Continue Reading

LA-based Viddy steals $6M from Silicon Valley VCs for social video

Social video startup Viddy has raised its first round of institutional funding — a healthy $6 million from Silicon Valley venture firms.

Battery Ventures led the round, which also saw participation from Qualcomm. Outside the Valley, New York’s Greycroft Ventures also joined in the financing.

Viddy, which lets users share 15-second video clips, will use the funding to bring its app to Android tablets and smartphones as well as to the iPad. BlackBerry and Windows … Continue Reading

Klout buys community app Blockboard, confirms intent to score offline influence

Money can’t buy you friends, but in the case of influence tracking startup Klout, money can buy you neighbors and possibly an understanding of the social dynamic linking people in communities.

Klout, a San Francisco-based company that attempts to quantify a social media user’s reach, has used a chunk of its estimated $30 million in new funding to purchase the community-centric company Blockboard for an undisclosed sum.

Blockboard makes an iPhone application designed to connect … Continue Reading

HBO drops $10M on Australian rental service Quickflix

Premium U.S. television network HBO has agreed to invest $10 million into DVD and streaming video rental service Quickflix, the companies announced today.

Quickflix is one of the largest streaming and physical (DVD and Blu-ray) video rental services in Australia. The company’s streaming video-on-demand subscription service is integrated into a variety of devices, such as Smart TVs, Playstation 3, Blu-ray players, and select Android-based mobile devices. Quickflix customers have access movie and television content from … Continue Reading