In a rare twist, the majority of startups closing funding rounds today are targeted to consumers. We’ve recently seen business-focused tech dominate the deals channel.

Bitcoin, crowdfunding, foodie, usability testing, mobile events, and community sports startups landed a round of venture capital and/or angel investment. Apologies for the torrent of buzz words!

Without further ado…

Foodpanda suited up with $20M to conquer online food delivery

Foodpanda, based in Berlin, has raised $20 million to continue expanding its delivery service around the globe. In the past few months, Foodpanda and its affiliated brand hellofood entered 15 new countries, and it’s now active in 27 different markets. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

CircleUp raised $7.5M to feed hungry consumer-products startups with capital

CircleUp is using crowdfunding to get your favorite snacks onto store shelves. This startup, which connects up-and-coming consumer product businesses with accredited investors, has raised $7.5 million to build out the platform. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Chute raised $7M and gets its first dose of user-generated advertising

San Francisco startup Chute has raised a second round of institutional funding: $7 million led by Foundry Group with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and U.S. Venture Partners. It also announced today the advent of Chute Ads, which use “real-time,” user-generated content as commercial fodder for big brands. Read the full story on VentureBeat. 

FTBpro got $5.8M to bring its fan generated sports platform to new markets

FTBpro, a UK-based fan generated platform for online football (soccer in the U.S.) has secured $5.8 million financing from Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Ventures, as the startup continues to expand into key geographical markets. The platform is driven by 1,000 regular contributors, generating over 200 daily articles in English, Spanish, German and Italian.

Coinbase got $5 million in the biggest funding for a Bitcoin startup

The online platform that lets people buy a virtual currency called Bitcoin nabbed $5 million from Union Square Ventures. In April, the founders told the Wall Street Journal that it has grown to 116,000 members who converted $15 million of real money into Bitcoin.

Canada’s mobile event app QuickMobile pulled in $3.2M

QuickMobile, a provider of mobile event app solutions, announced that it has closed a $3.2 million round of funding led by existing investors, BDC IT Venture Fund and Vancity. The startup will use the funding to expand internationally.

YouEye nabbed $3M for its new approach to usability testing

Customers like Airbnb and Eventbrite are using the technology to watch testers browsing their websites through webcam, and they can listen in to any feedback. Today it closed a $3 million angel round for its “UX in the cloud.” Read the full story on VentureBeat.

A startup called Madison Color aims to reinvent the home hair care experience, starting with color. The company raised a $4 million funding round today led by True Ventures, a firm that sees a massive market opportunity for high-quality, home-delivered hair products.

Madison won’t publicly launch until the fall, but the founders say they plan to develop an online service for customers select, buy and apply hair products. Madison Color will begin by offering ammonia-free products, which can be ordered online or via a mobile app, and delivered straight to your doorstep. Think of it as a Warby Parker for hair products.

Cofounder Amy Errett [left] secured a smaller investment from her former firm, Maveron LLC, where she had worked as a Bay Area-based venture partner. Errett is a big name in startup circles; she sits on the board for companies like SAY Media and General Assembly, and previously worked as the chief executive officer for Olivia.com, a lifestyle and travel brand for lesbians.

In a statement, Errett said she’s excited by the opportunity to bring new technology to a “market with high existing consumer demand that hasn’t changed in decades.”

Investors are making a bet on the Madison Color founding team, which also includes Home Value Protection cofounder Eric Hutchinson, Zynga cofounder Andrew Trader, and former Threadsy CRO Sabrina Riddle. As part of the terms of the funding, True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan will join the company’s board.

Top image via Shutterstock

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This is a guest post by investor Joseph Floyd

Consumer-to-consumer (“C2C”) marketplace startups are enjoying a Renaissance, as exemplified by Airbnb and others. Sites like these that facilitate transactions between people have disrupted older offline business-to-business marketplaces by taking advantage of ubiquitous mobile access, and delivering a better experience.

For example, Scripted connects businesses to freelance journalists through its online marketplace. Since Scripted sells access as a SaaS subscription, businesses sign annual contracts (which lowers churn) with Scripted supplying a minimum quantity of written content. If the customer does not utilize the full quantity of service, subscription breakage occurs – Scripted still earns the full revenue but does not incur the cost of providing the unused service (which expands margins). In combination, these two forces increase customer lifetime value, allowing Scripted to increase sales and marketing spend to scale growth more aggressively.

For example, MetalSite, one of a few vertical specific marketplaces in the early 2000s, connected commodities buyers and sellers via auctions. But, MetalSite and many other vertical B2B marketplaces failed because they were taken out of the loop after the first transaction as suppliers began bidding lower prices directly to buyers, without paying commissions to MetalSite.

On the other hand, OpenTable, a restaurant reservation marketplace, has become the de facto system of record for many customers. As a result, customers are locked in to using the platform, which ensures OpenTable captures each transaction and receives its commission. Additionally, restaurants are much less likely to replace OpenTable with a competitor because it keeps the system of record as opposed to simply being a source of reservations.

Over the holidays, friends and family with a bit of extra cash might choose to invest their money in risky, albiet exciting, startups.

Given the meteoric success of Instagram, why not give in and fund that crazy brother-in-law with an idea for an iPhone app that just might work. All he’s asking for is $25,000 from a handful of investors to outsource the cost of a developer in India or Russia to build a prototype.

The barriers to entry when starting a tech company these days are low. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to get an idea off the ground, and you need little or no programming expertise. As a result, the number of startup ideas that receive seed funding from angel investors has exploded.

It’s all rosy until the entrepreneur decides it’s time to raise a first round in institutional funding, say $1.5 million or above. With increasing competition for a steady amount of available dollars, we’re hearing plenty of resounding “no’s” from Sand Hill Road. The press have labelled it a “Series A Crunch,” which sounds looming and suggests it’s only going to get worse.

To shed light on the reality of this trend, investment firm CBInsights produced a report analyzing 4,056 seed investments. The research indicates that 1,000 recently-funded seed companies will be orphaned, meaning they are unable to raise follow-on financing. The author refers to this as the “process of natural selection.” They also make the case that the eventual death of these startups is a good thing for the tech ecosystem — it will mean there is more available talent for startups that have raised venture capital rounds.

The explosion in seed funding will result in over $1 billion of investment into these companies being incinerated. However, this is to be expected, as seed investments are the riskiest bets an investor can make.

“With at least twice as many companies getting seed funding this year, it’s not surprising to me that there’s a crunch,” said Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture firm that views Series A as its sweet spot. In a phone interview, Coneybeer said he’s not taking more meetings than usual and inferred that many of these companies funded with dumb money aren’t solving particularly unique and challenging technology problems. “It hasn’t changed things for us because there are four times as many photo-sharing companies,” he said.

In a recent story about the big, dumb angel bubble, VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell argued that institutional investors are not to blame, and it’s not an indication that entrepreneurs are producing less deserving or less fundable startups. The problem is that easy “dumb” money from inexperienced investors, like friends, family, or former colleagues, often does more harm than good.

“Finding the right investor at the seed stage is critical,” said Jenn Wei of Blumberg Capital, a firm that specializes in early-stage startups. Untrained investors often lack connections and influence and haven’t done their homework. “We have seen an increase in the number of angel investors who do not do proper diligence, and oftentimes, those companies are under-funded,” said Wei.

Wei explained that most seed-funded startups receive about $200,000 or $500,000 from angels, which is not sufficient to carry the company to a complete functional product and obtain customers, the “milestones” that she typically looks for.

To avoid hitting a wall, entrepreneurs need to get smarter about fundraising. Entrepreneur Sameh Elamawy is currently in the process of fundraising for his Series A. He advises raising a larger seed round than expected. To get to a stage where you’re ready for a Series A investment, you may need to fund your developers and ramen-habit for well over a year. He also advises raising tiny consecutive seed rounds — $25,000 here and $50,000 there — rather than betting on a huge chunk of first-round financing.

As the power shifts to investors, CBInsights’ analysts predict that it will take longer for entrepreneurs to raise follow-on financing. Currently, it’s about 13 months, according to the report.

Above all, avoid taking “dumb” money; ideally, your angel investor is a prominent figure in Silicon Valley and is connected to a venture capital firm. “You want your seed investors working for you to make the next round happen,” said Elamawy. The report also found that seed deals in which VCs participate have a historically higher rate of getting follow-on financing compared to seed deals in which VCs are not participating.

The Series A Crunch is very real, but there’s nothing and no one to blame but simple economics. “The category is doing well, and this is the natural course of capitalism,” said Coneybeer.

That’s despite the release of the Cisco Umi, a web-connected camera that sits on top of televisions that’s designed for home video conferencing. It was an attempt to bring the company’s popular enterprise-class telecommunications hardware to everyday consumers, but the price tag was a bit absurd — $600 for the actual device, plus an extra $25 each month to use the service.

Cisco’s price for Umi was telling in and of itself — there’s a pretty big disconnect between Cisco and the consumer marketplace. Cisco doesn’t have that much reach in the consumer space, outside of wireless router sales. The company’s orders from enterprise customers were up 10 percent last quarter when compared to the same quarter a year earlier, and orders from the public sector were up 7 percent.

The company’s overall sales were up 6 percent in the second quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, from $9.8 billion in its 2010 fiscal year to $10.4 billion. But its net income fell by around 18 percent to $1.5 billion (or 37 cents per share) in the second quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, from $1.9 billion in its 2010 fiscal year. That decline was in line with the consensus estimate of 35 cents per share by Wall Street analysts.

The Cisco Umi experiment seems like it didn’t go as well as planned. The rest of Cisco’s product orders grew while consumer orders shrank by 15 percent. Overall, Cisco’s product orders were up 8 percent, according to a presentation given during the company’s conference call. Cisco is also traditionally seen as an enterprise technology bellwether because it has a massive reach in both the commercial and governmental space.

Cisco did warn that governmental sales were slipping, and lowered its profit outlook for the next quarter as a result to between 35 and 38 cents per share. The consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts was an outlook that had Cisco earning around 40 cents per share in the next quarter. Investors didn’t really like the new guidance and sent Cisco’s shares down about 9 percent in extended trading to $20.12.