Funding daily: show me the money, say news, health, real estate, and yes, funeral companies

It's been a slowish day for funding news, but with big dollar signs on many of the deals that did happen. Here's a rundown on the days' deals.

The 20 biggest private exits of 2012 (for the top 20 VC firms of the year)

Private company research firm Privco has ranked the top 20 merger and acquisitions of the top 20 technology VC firms of 2012, including Ancestry.com's $1.6 billion sale to private equity firm Permira and other top tech acquisitions such as Yammer, Meebo, Instagram, and NextG networks.

Wendr, an app for planning a night out, wins Thrillist and Samsung’s ‘Speed Dating for Startups’ competition

Wendr wins a slew of sexy laptops and launch help from Thrillist and Samsung.

Entrepreneurs and investors meet in New York to organize for profit and for revolution

There were two pretty incredible tech events in New York this Tuesday. I only managed to score an invite to one of them, the Lerer Ventures CEO summit at Citi Field. The other was Union Square Ventures more exclusive Hacking …

Pulse grows from 1M to 11M users in 2011, works on monetization

Pulse, which makes a news reading app for Apple and Android tablets and smartphones, threw a party in the penthouse of the Kimberly Hotel last night to celebrate it big growth. “These guys offered to pay me for using our …

Memory grand master Ed Cooke gets $1M to teach his tricks at new startup, Memrise

There is nothing extraordinary about Ed Cooke’s brain. Sure he can memorize a 1000 digit number in less than an hour, but so can you, he believes.

“It’s not like I was born with special cognitive abilities. I trained myself …

BestVendor is the utility belt for small business apps

Being successful in business is about knowing what your competitors know and being able to act on it. If you could find out what kinds of work tools are helping your competitors stay lean and mean, it could be a …

Pulse raises $9M for its slick news reader

Pulse, which created the popular Pulse news reading app, has raised $9 million in its first round of institutional venture funding.

The app aggregates news stories from RSS feeds and social networks and presents them in a design that was …