July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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After closing an undisclosed amount of funding over dinner from the ex-chief executive of Network 18 this March, Indian housing marketplace Housing.co.in has announced a new round of $2.5 million.

This comes from Nexus Venture Partners’ $270 million fund that closed last September to fuel the tech scene in India.

“The housing team is disrupting online search for home buying and renting in India like never before,” Nexus Venture Partners cofounder Suvir Sujan said of the investment. “We were very impressed with the vision, passion and speed of execution of the founding team and we are very excited to partner with them.”

Much like Zillow, Housing.co.in is a real estate search portal that helps you find housing based on the number of rooms you want and geography. It’s a map-based website that sorts housing by two categories: rent and sale. It works on a subscription-based model that enables partners and property dealers to upload listings for a fee.

The Mumbai-based company recently added Bangalore to its service and operates in five cities. It’s the brainchild of a group of students from IIT-Bombay, the top technology institute of India.

With the new cash injection, Housing.co.in cofounder Advitiya Sharma hopes to expand his technology and data sciences teams.

According to Housing.co.in, its real strength lies in its data. Since its inception, the company has been obsessed with its data approach. It plans to add new features like area-based pricing and ratings in the near future.

Sharma, an aerospace engineer who hails from a small town in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, founded the company with an aim to make “home search hassle-free.”

Image credit: 401(K) 2013/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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New York City-based mobile ad startup Dobleas has emerged out of stealth with a $5.4 million investment from FreakOut, a Japanese digital marketing company.

Dobleas offers a “real-time mobile demand-side platform (DSP) provider with real-time data.” Ideally, its service will offer better data sources and more transparency to ad buyers and sellers who want to do business on mobile platforms.

FreakOut recently got a similar amount of cash from YJ Capital, the venture capital arm of Yahoo Japan. So FreakOut in turn decided to take YJ’s money and invest it in Dobleas, which was started and spun off by FreakOut President Yuzuru Honda, a serial entrepreneur.

“YJ Capital’s investment in FreakOut, in turn allowing our further investment in Dobleas, is validation of the company’s mobile technology and business model,” Honda said in a statement. “I have the utmost confidence in Dobleas’ executive team to bring value to the mobile advertising market and real-time mobile DSP solution.”

Photo via Dobleas

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AppDynamics nets $50M from IVP, Greylock, & others to dominate app performance management

App performance management startup AppDynamics has raised $50 million from top-tier investors in its fourth round of funding. AppDynamics offers cloud-based app performance management solutions to more than 100,000 customers, including 500 large enterprise businesses. It competes with other application performance management companies like Flexera Software, Compuware, and Appnomic. But with these funds, it might be able to edge out its rivals.The new batch of funding was led by Institutional Venture Partners, with participation by current investors Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Including the new funds, AppDynamics has raised $86.5 million to date. Read more on VentureBeat.

Facebook’s first intern leads small-business revolution

Radius has raised $12.4 million led by American Express to measure these ripples and turn them into actionable sales insights. Radius crawls the Internet for information about small businesses. The engine collects data in real time from over 22 million businesses and indexes it into a goldmine for sales teams. The information is highly searchable and, when combined with lead generation tools and CRM integrations, makes it much easier for companies to identify potential customers and partners. Existing investor Blue Run Ventures also participated, after throwing in for Radius’ first $6 million round along with Comcast. Read more on VentureBeat.

Spanish banking group ventures into venture capital with $100M fund

BBVA has pooled together a $100 million fund to invest in startups that are developing technology for the financial services industry. BBVA Ventures is an initiative to help this international banking conglomerate tap into the innovation happening in Silicon Valley. The team is establishing ties with entrepreneurs, startups, incubator and accelerator programs, and investors, and will make strategic investments in both startups and other funds. The goal is to improve internal awareness of new technologies and the opportunities therein. Investments so far include incubator program 500 Startups, Ribbit Capital, and SaveUp. Read more on VentureBeat.

VMware pulls up Puppet Labs with $30M and a strategic partnership

Virtualization giant VMware has invested $30 million into Puppet Labs, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of software for system administrators. As part of the funding, the companies formed a strategic partnership to deliver a more robust set of IT tools to customers. Puppet Labs hopes to accelerate market adoption and secure high-profile customers in new geographies. Puppet Labs has already integrated its flagship product, Puppet Enterprise, with VMware. Puppet Enterprise lets automatically manage virtual machines, and take advantage of VMware’s vSphere API. Going forward, the companies plan to collaborate on new products. Read more on VentureBeat.

Apperian pumps up with strategic investment from Intel Capital

Apperian is an mobile app management platform that today announced receiving a strategic investment from Intel Capital. Apperian’s cloud-based Enterprise App Service Environment  (EASE) platform helps enterprise customers deploy and manage their mobile business applications. The software connects mobile applications to backend servers and keeps all the information unified. There are also security features to keep data safe outside of protected networks, analytical tools, and features that brands can use to create customized app catalogs. This investment was around $4.6 million and brings Apperian’s total funding to $28 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

Relationship app Between gets $3M, will spend it on more than just V-Day chocolates

Korean relationships app Between just received $3 million in its first round of funding. The app connects you with your significant other and gives you a place to chronicle your relationship. You can add pictures, events, and little status updates onto a timeline of your love. If you break up, the company keeps all of the data alive in its servers for one month (just in case you get back together) and then fully deletes, assuming you guys are really through. The funding was led by Stonebridge Capital and KTB Network, with participation from Capstone Partners and Softbank Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat. 

FlixMaster drags-and-drops $1.125 million into its bank account

One of the most memorable Christmas presents I ever received was the entire collection of Disney Princess video tapes. All I had to do was pluck my desired video off the shelf and pop it into our VCR. Boulder-based FlixMaster has raised over a million dollars to make enterprise video creation that easy. Its drag-and-drop interactive editing platform has options for entertainment, educational, e-commerce, non-profits, brand marketing, and customer support purposes. Users can upload video content, build a project, share it, and then monitor and optimize the project when its done. This financing was led by Golden Seeds. It wil be used to expand further into corporate enterprise markets. Read the press release.

Bloodhound fetches more funding for event planners on the go 

Bloodhound has sniffed out $3 million to feed its mobile events platform. The platform helps organizers manage all aspects of their events from their smart phones. They add event details into the system and can manage, track, update, and communicate all the necessary information from the dashboard. On the other end, its Retrieve app targets event exhibitors and attendees. It enables them to find networking opportunities and pursue sales leads to get the most out of events like conferences, trade shows, and conventions. The investment was led by Peter Thiel’s FF Angel, as well as Jason Portnoy of Subtraction Capital, 500 Startups Dave McClure, and COO of Badoo Benjamin Ling who participated in the earlier seed round.

Dutch startup takes software delivery from pushes to taps 

Sometimes I like to wreck stuff. White tee-shirts, Jenga towers, elegantly presented desserts. Wercker, a “cloud-based continuous delivery platform for cloud software development” likes to wreck stuff. And take investment dollars. Wercker’s solution enables developers to push software updates incrementally as they are ready, rather than in bundled dumps. There are also social features to enable collaboration between team members. Wercker is still in private beta. It was part of the 2012 Rockstart Accelerator startup incbuator program in Amsterdam, where Wercker is based. This round of undisclosed seed funding was led by Shamrock Ventures, with additional funding from Greylock Partners and the Amsterdam micro-VC fund Vitulum Ventures.

Leyden Energy powers up with $10M from big name VCs

Manufacturer of advanced batteries Leyden Energy has raised $10 million in its third round of funding from existing investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Ventures, Sigma Partners, and Walden Interantional. The funding will help commercialize the technology, which uses a lithium-imide chemistry platform to improve battery performance. These advancements can be used to improve the energy capabilities of thin mobile consumer electronics. Read the press release.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud management software startup OnApp said today that it has raised $20 million in funding, cash it hopes will help expand its product offerings into more countries.

OnApp claims to power public cloud services for more than 500 providers in 39 countries. OnApp says 40 percent of its revenue currently comes from the U.S. companies, but it is also seeing strong growth in Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

The company’s most popular product is OnApp Cloud, which provides “everything you need to build a fully featured cloud hosting service” and can be deployed in a matter of days. It has also launched OnApp CDN, OnApp Marketplace, and OnApp Storage to diversify its offerings.

“In 2010, we set out to build a turnkey platform to make it easy for service providers to create profitable cloud services,” OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl said in a statement. “Our customers now run some of the fastest growing cloud services out there, with an average annual growth rate of over 80 percent. We’ve also seen a new breed of Virtual Service Providers emerge, who are creating a wide range of cloud-based businesses on top of the OnApp Marketplace. This round of funding gives us a solid financial base from which we will continue creating products that make OnApp-powered service providers the most successful in their markets.”

London-based OnApp was launched in July 2010 and has more than 115 employees across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. The new funding was led by U.K.-based private equity firm LDC.

Cloud image via OnApp

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Hadoop-based startup Cloudera nabs a massive $65M funding round

Cloudera has pulled in $65 million in its fifth round of venture capital funding, bringing the company’s total funds to $140 million. The Silicon Valley company was among the first to commercialize Hadoop, the open source computing framework that makes it easier for large corporations to manage large volumes of data that cannot be stored in a traditional database.

Accel Partners, the venture capital firm with a $100 million fund dedicated to big data startups, led this series E round. The round was announced at a closed meeting of Cloudera execs at its Palo Alto headquarters led by CEO Mike Olson. According to AllThingsD, this deal values Cloudera at about $700 million, which puts it in strong position as the company edges toward an initial public offering. Cloudera has not yet made a formal announcement about the funding. Read more on VentureBeat.

Naya Ventures gives birth to “naya” $50M fund

Naya Ventures has pooled a $50 million fund dedicated to early-stage companies in the mobile and cloud markets. The firm was founded in 2011 by serial entrepreneurs who wanted to apply their industry experience to building an investment portfolio, creating a network of resources, and providing guidance to startups. The current portfolio consists of eight companies: GlobalOutlook, Glympse, Zoomingo, Motivity Labs, SinglePoint, M2 Junction, nfluence, and Boxfish. Naya is headquartered in Dallas with offices in Silicon Valley, Seattle and Hyperabad, India. It focuses its investments on US and India-based companies. Read more on VentureBeat.

London calling: Developer hub rings up $5M to foster software innovation in Europe

European developer community Skills Matter is adding $5 million into its fold. The mission behind the organization is to promote continuous learning and innovation in software. Comprised of 35,000 members, Skills Matter holds training and events where developers can improve their programming skills, collaborate, and make connections. The investment was led by Beringea, an international growth capital firm with offices in London. Read more on VentureBeat.

Rangespan gets $5M to help itself and brands spread their wings

Rangespan, a London startup that operates data infrastructure to help retailers expand the online range of their products, is nailing down a $5 million round of funding. Rangespan’s “customer demand predicting algorithm” RangeRank predicts the sales potential for products, and helps brands figure out their optimal product range (the who, what, where, when, why, and how much of distrbution).

Rangespan also offers a vendor platform to help retailers launch new products, with tools for supplier integration, item data formatting, order progress visibility and more. Clients like Tesco, Argos, and Asda use the services, and this round will be used to develop RangeRank and grow its retailer and supplier networks. It was led by the ventures team at Octopus Investments, which typically puts between £250,000 to £5 million into early stage companies based in the UK.

Zettaset closes $4.75M to make Hadoop understandable to common folk

Big data company Zettaset filed with the SEC for $4.75 million in new funding. The platform makes the administration of data analysis software Hadoop easier for regular employees who don’t have an extensive technical backgrounds. Zettaset handles many of the common issues with Hadoop deployment and offers tools that make massive amounts of data manageable, understandable, and secure.

In 2011, Zettaset changed its name from GOTO Metrics and raised $3 million from Draper Fisher Jurveston and EPIC Ventures in its first round of funding. Investors from EPIC Ventures, as well as Highbar Ventures and H.I.G. Ventures were listed on the filing.

Much-hyped ClearStory Data bags $12M to replace the traditional dashboard 

ClearStory Data, the much-hyped data analytics startup, has pulled in $9 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. Its still early days, but the company is positioning itself as the next evolution from the typical analytics-heavy dashboard, which provides only a “rear-view mirror” look into your data. Silicon Valley-based ClearStory is one of a dozen technology startups that would support data services teams employed by large corporations, or replace data scientists altogether.The product is still being baked by the company’s 20-person team, and will not be generally available until 2013. Read more on VentureBeat.

AppFirst nets $8.7M for its birds-eye view of computing stacks 

WIth flying, as with DevOps, visibility is key. Pilots need to have all relevant information at-the-ready to make informed decisions and get the plane where it needs to go. Data startup AppFirst provides a platform that IT teams use to monitor all their applications. It launched its dashboard in September that gives a unified view of data from every layer of a business’ computing stack.

Three months later, AppFirst has closed its second round of funding with Safeguard Scientifics. With this $8.7 million investment, AppFirst has secured $15 million in venture capital and will apply it to scaling marketing and sales efforts. FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, and Javein Partners invested in the first round.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Busuu, a startup with a free tool for you to master a new language, has pulled in about $5 million in its first round funding.

The company describes itself as a “social network for language learning” — it offers free and paid-for audio-visual courses in 12 languages, including Spanish and French. There is a free web version, as well as a well-designed mobile and tablet application.

What’s unique about this technology is that every user is a both tutor and a tutee. Using the video tool, anyone can converse with a native speaker, and practice their budding language skills. The company competes with a variety of online language learning tools that help users circumvent the textbook — popular choices are Mango Languages, TellMeMore (which caters to business users) and Living Language.

It makes money through its business English and Spanish courses that helps employees learn typical phrases used in professional situations. The startup plans to release more of these business language courses in the coming months.

The company is showing signs of impressive growth — it has more than 25 million users in over 200 countries and is gaining 40,000 new members per day. It is relocating from Madrid to London as it scales up its operations.

It will use the funding to invest in building out its core product, and to hire more people.

Brent Hoberman, Lastminute.com’s cofounder, will join the board of advisors. “We are looking forward to supporting the company in its future growth plans and shaking up the global language learning market,” said the travel entrepreneur in a statement.

The series A round was led by PROfounders Capital with participation from angel investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Just a few weeks after tooting its horn about being a profitable bootstrapped company, DNS and enterprise email delivery service Dyn has raised its first-ever funding round: $38 million from North Bridge.

That’s a surprisingly huge series A round these days, when companies can get started and reach millions of users on just a few million.

Dyn provides managed DNS and email delivery services for companies including Twitter, Zappos, and Jive. Its services cover more than 450,000 e-commerce clients and 2,000 enterprise clients, which total up to more than four million active users worldwide.

“We are doubling down on our commitment to being the world leader in Infrastructure as a Service and are delighted to partner with North Bridge, one of the leading technology and infrastructure investors in the country,” said Dyn CEO and co-founder Jeremy Hitchcock in a statement. “This investment better positions us to cement our leadership position within a rapidly growing multibillion dollar IaaS opportunity.”

Along with its funding, Dyn has also established a board of directors that includes Dyn’s co-founders, two general partners at North Bridge, and angel investor Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo and former CEO of Weblogs Inc.

Manchester, N.H.-based Dyn was founded in 2001 and has about 160 employees.

Businessman using email photo FrameAngel/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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The Silicon Valley makers of iPhone application Ness have received a five-star review from investors. The company closed a $15 million round led by SingTel Innov8, the venture arm of Singapore Telecommunications.

Founded in 2009, Ness Computing intends to help people discover places. The startup released Ness for iPhone one year ago, and the application pivots around a “likeness” score that predicts how much a customer will like a restaurant, using a 0 to 100 percent scoring system. Users leave bite-sized reviews in the form of one to five-star ratings, and Ness combines those ratings with social data from Foursquare and Facebook to perfect its score.

Ness ultimately wants to tell you more than where to just grab a bite or pick up a cup of coffee; it wants to show you what to do, see, and buy. American Express, existing investors Khosla Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners, and an affiliate of the LeFrak Organization participated in the startup’s latest round, which Ness will use to develop into more of a personal shopping tool for mobile.

The three-year-old company, which competes with Yelp and Foursquare, has the multimillion-dollar confidence of investors because the algorithms used in Ness’s search and recommendations engines can be applied to areas such as bars, nightlife, travel, movies, music, shopping, and beyond, Ness cofounder Corey Reese said.

“The risk area that we’ve mitigated … was that core technology development,” Reese said, comparing the sophistication of his company’s search technologies to those employed by Google, Amazon, and Apple.

But a startup that’s hesitant to share the size of its active user base, as is this case with Ness, is not one that typically instills confidence in its health (at least for this reporter). Reese insisted, however, that Ness intentionally chose not to focus on user growth and opted instead to improve the technology powering the application.

“We’re using this next round of financing to focus on growing the user base and getting out into these additional categories,” he said. “We spent a lot of time improving our recommendation technology, developing our own new algorithms … and we’ve been generating a tremendous amount of data from our users.”

On the data front, Ness users have contributed more than 3 million ratings to the system since the iPhone application’s release last August. On average, people generate 17 ratings the first time they start using Ness, Reese said.

In addition to going after users, Ness will apply its fresh $15 million in financing to move into the new verticals mentioned above, piece together even more signals from channels such as Twitter and credit card transactions to perfect the scoring algorithm, and continue to focus on product craftsmanship, Reese said. The startup also hopes to release an application for Android by early next year.

Ness Computing has raised $20 million in total funding to date.

Photo credit: christian.senger/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Just call it “Money Magnet.”

Business application platform Magnet Systems was thrust into the spotlight yesterday when we learned that HTC, burned by its stake in OnLive, was doling out $35.4 million for a 17.1 percent stake in the nearly four-year-old startup. Lost in the news, however, was that Magnet actually raised $12 million more with the help of esteemed Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Magnet confirmed to VentureBeat that it closed a Series B round of more than $47 million at a valuation exceeding $200 million. Andreessen Horowitz, the lead investor in the startup’s first round in 2011, reupped with an additional $10 million investment. Warburg Pincus managing director Bill Janeway participated again as well.

Founded in late 2008, Magnet would like to make work-centric mobile applications worthy of sitting next to your favorite gaming and social applications. That’s a problem and an opportunity sizable enough to warrant a whopping $47 million more in funding, cofounder and CEO Alfred Chuang told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

“To get there to be some level of balance [between consumer and enterprise apps] where you see the smartphone have literally great applications that people are dependent on for work — that’s the goal we’re trying to achieve,” Chuang said.

People, he added, live on their smartphones, and yet most currently turn to just two or three applications, such as email and IM, to manage their work needs.

Magnet’s platform will give its enterprise clients social, mobile, cloud, and big data services specially tailored for e-commerce and IT application development. “We plan to sell a complete solution for people to build a new generation of enterprise software applications,” he said.

The platform has yet to officially launch, but it’s currently operating in limited beta and should go live in the first quarter of 2013.

Magnet Systems is based in Palo Alto, Calif. The startup has raised more than $65 million in funding to date.

Magnet dollar photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Mobile payment service LevelUp, a part of Boston-based startup SCVNGR, has collected $9 million more in financial padding, courtesy of T-Ventures, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. The funding is the second tranche of a two-part round that brings LevelUp’s total raise to $21 million.

LevelUp, considered to be a top mobile payment network second only to Starbucks, provides a QR code pay-by-phone application for consumers and a terminal system for merchants. The mobile apps are used by roughly 200,000 consumers, with LevelUp payments accepted at more than 3,000 locations in 20 U.S. markets.

In June, LevelUp announced that it had secured $12 million from Highland Capital, Google Ventures, Balderton Capital, Continental Investors, and Transmedia Capital in part one of the large raise. VentureBeat has heard from a person familiar with the matter that the full $21 million round now values the company at $172 million.

SCVNGR founder and CEO Seth Priebatsch told VentureBeat that the funds will be used for growing the company, hiring, and advertising. “We now have some budget to take a model that we know is working and really scale it,” he said.

More interesting, perhaps, is that LevelUp’s growth with be on the dime of the parent companies of its two largest competitors. Google Ventures is indirectly tied to Google’s NFC Wallet endeavor, while Deutsche Telekom is the parent company of T-Mobile, which has a major stake in Isis.

“The biggest guys are placing side bets,” Priebatsch said. “We’re really trying to build something that is different than the mobile payment players out there, and I think the larger players are starting to take a look at that.”

In July, LevelUp eliminated credit card processing fees for merchants. As a result, the service is now signing up twice as many merchants per month, Priebatsch said. The company added 625 new merchants in July, up from 300 in June, he said.

With all the doom and gloom about the European debt crisis, it’s easy to underestimate the impact of early-stage tech companies, sprouting up in hubs like London and Berlin. These startups have fueled a 14 percent increase in venture capital investment in Europe, compared to the same period last year.

Figures released today by Dow Jones VentureSource reveal some surprising insights about the startup economy in Europe, and provide some cause for optimism.

One recent phenomena is the trend for investment in consumer internet. A few years ago, young enterprise companies like Autonomy, later acquired by HP, dominated the market. Now, according to the data, consumer services experienced the greatest gains of any industry, raising a mammoth €463 million (equivalent to $567 million) through 72 deals. Almost two-thirds of the capital went to consumer information services, which include social media, video and online entertainment, and search companies.

But it’s not all good news and celebration this quarter. Deal activity fell 20 percent due to the disappointing exit environment. Only three companies went public this quarter, half the number of IPOs recorded in the first quarter of 2011. According to Dow Jones, venture capital investment totaled €2.2 billion for 550 deals, a 10 percent decline in deals compared to this time last year.

Read about how Facebook’s long IPO casts a shadow over U.S. venture capital

In part due to tariff cuts in Britain, there were also deep declines in investment in the renewable energy and healthcare sectors.

The UK remains the top destination for startup activity and investment, followed closely by Germany and France.

Top Image via Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Raised on the Internet and versed in social media, today’s youngsters view the world in a different light than generations past. Here to serve and inspire these influential minds is #waywire, a New York-based startup that’s landed $1.75 million in funding, which includes celebrity support from Oprah, for its mission.

#waywire, which launches in beta later this summer, is a video news network targeted at Generation Y that will feature original, syndicated, and member-created content. The vision of Newark, New Jersey mayor and tech figurehead Cory Booker, #waywire’s goal is to provide today’s youth with a social platform that informs and encourages participation in positive debates with peers.

First Round Capital and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors led the startup’s first round of funding. Oprah Winfrey, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, and Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter have also ponied up to participate in the round as well.

“The idea behind #waywire came from Mayor Booker and grew from his desire to shift America’s public conversation away from divisiveness toward a debate focused on achieving solutions. The Mayor plans to contribute original content to the #waywire network where he will discuss America’s most significant challenges with a variety of thought leaders from diverse backgrounds,” according to a press release.

Booker, a co-founder and part owner in #waywire, will only play advisor to the company while he remains in office.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Swipp, a stealthy Silicon Valley startup is betting that the social network in all its current glory is still just scratching the surface. It has raised $3.5 million in funding from Old Willow Partners.

Swipp — the name rhymes with sip and has no real meaning — is still in the hush-hush stages of its launch cycle. After a year in stealth mode, it’s now readying products for summer release that will offer consumers and businesses a fresh twist on social and some new ways to monetize social data.

“We look at social as it is today as version 1.0. It’s really just the first instance,” Swipp CEO and co-founder Don Thorson told VentureBeat. “What kind of applications would the world come up with if you had everyone persistently connected on the globe?”

Swipp will blend social media, personal data, and commerce, although Thorson won’t say exactly what it does or what it looks like yet.

“You will use Swipp in addition to, and in some cases instead of, other social media applications,” Thorson said, adding that the platform has Twitter-, Yelp-, and Foursquare-like characteristics.

After some prying — and boy did we pry — Thorson boiled Swipp down to “a social data play” that will “extract a lot more knowledge and intelligence from the communities than Facebook and Twitter do.” The 10-person startup also believes it has hit upon a never-seen-before business model that will appeal to brands.

You’re skeptical? We are too. But have a little faith. Thorson’s been around the block — the Valley, rather — and may know a thing or two about how to take social to its next level. The sixteenth employee at Atari, Thorson was also a creative director at Apple, the vice president of marketing at telephony startup Jajah (later sold to Telefonica), and the chief marking officer at Ribbit. Ribbit sold to BT for $105 million in 2008 during Thorson’s tenure.

So maybe we should reserve judgment until we see it. After all, the company did land a respectable $3.5 million in its first round of funding.

“The business model for social is unproven, and the company has a solution that’s as novel as it is elegant,” said Rich Heise of Old Willow Partners, now a board member at Swipp thanks to his firm’s investment. “We see Swipp as not just the next thing to watch in social media, but the next generation in commerce, where consumers will be empowered to interact more openly and effectively with brands on the open web.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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It was a bit quiet on the funding front today, but several companies managed to raise capital. China’s largest wiki and a data monitoring company were among those raking in the cash. Check them out below.

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

China’s Wikipedia clone Hudong.com raises $50 million

Created in 2005, Hudong.com calls itself the world’s largest Chinese-language wiki with 6.4 million entries. The company is reportedly raising a $50 million third round of funding. Part of Hudong.com’s funding is being raised by online private investment platform Xpert Financial. Read more on VentureBeat: China’s online encyclopedia Hudong.com raising $50M round.

Department of Energy gives $2 million to Solar Mosaic

Solar crowdfunding site Solar Mosaic grabbed $2 million from the U.S. Department of Energy Wednesday. Solar Mosaic is still in a quiet pre-launch period, but its projects have so far collected more than $350,000 in interest-free investments from 400 individuals, and the first five projects have together generated 73kW of clean solar energy. Read more on VentureBeat: Dept. of Energy throws millions at a startup trying to make solar energy mainstream.

Openet raises $21 million to keep its eyes on your mobile data use

Openet, a mobile network transaction software company, announced its fourth round of funding for $21 million Wednesday. Openet manages network engagement, insights, and control of a mobile network. AT&T, Verizon, and Vodafone use its software to keep tabs on their networks. Japanese investor NS Solutions led the round of funding, with participation from existing investors Balderton Capital, Cross Atlantic, and Kreos Capital. Read more on VentureBeat: With Openet, your wireless carrier knows exactly what you’re downloading.

Cloud Cruiser announces $6 million

Cloud Cruiser helps companies understand what they’re spending for cloud services and how they could make cost-saving changes. The company raised a $6 million funding round from ONSET Ventures. Read the press release.

Wrike raises $1M

Project management and collaboration software provider Wrike has raised $1 million. Wrike provides collaborative spaces for company projects, with real-time updates. TMT Investments led the round. Read the press release.

Thismoment Raises $22 million

Social media content management company Thismoment grabbed $22 million in a new investment. The company provides a single space for businesses to update Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networks simultaneously. Trident Capital led the third round of funding. Read the press release.

Solar array image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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POS. It’s the universally understood acronym that can stand for “piece of sh*t” or “point of sale” — and that’s no coincidence. LightSpeed, which seeks to change retailers’ perception of point-of-sale systems, has today announced $30 million in its first institutional round of funding.

The Series A investment, raised entirely from Accel Partners, comes seven years after LightSpeed was born and validates the company’s mission to bridge the gap between online and offline shopping, and transform the in-store experience.

Founded in 2005, LightSpeed makes a Mac-, iPhone-, and iPad-friendly point-of-sale and retail management system that is now used by roughly 10,000 retailers, athletic apparel manufacturer Adidas being one of them.

Think of LightSpeed’s system as giving retailers a way to replicate Apple’s stellar in-store experience, where every sales person with a mobile device can show off products and make a sale. The system is multi-user, integrates with a retailer’s e-commerce business, supports a variety of payment options (including gift cards), works for companies with multiple locations, and tracks and manages store inventory.

LightSpeed, a bootstrapped company until today, has grown revenue 2,000 percent over the past five years, the company said in a press release.

“With our new capital resources and partners at Accel, we will further enhance our products and solutions that help virtually any store chain, anywhere in the world, to move ahead of the curve in the digital retail revolution and embrace the needs of today’s shoppers,” founder and CEO Dax Dasilva said in a statement.

Based in Montreal and Ottawa, LightSpeed has 50 employees and will use its funding, in part, to staff-up operations.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Finding an identity all its own, Gigya, a six-year-old startup powering the social functionality behind brand name applications and reaching more than a billion people each month, has raised $15.3 million in its fifth round of funding.

Condé Nast owner Advance Publications and Adobe joined existing investors Mayfield Fund, Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures in piling in on the new round. Gigya has raised a total of roughly $45 million in funding to date.

Founded in 2006, Gigya refers to itself as the “leading provider of social infrastructure for business.” But, my goodness, there are some fuzzy buzzwords in that clause, so we asked CEO Patrick Salyer for a breakdown, in English, of what the company actually does.

“We have a series of social plug-ins … envision them as little widgets or applications, that sit on our clients’ sites that do different functionality,” he said. “The functionality can vary from social log-ins … to sharing, to commenting tools, to communication tools.”

So, when Nike, Pepsi, ABC, or Verizon need access to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and other social APIs to create richer application experiences, they turn to Gigya. Nike, for instance, uses Gigya in its Nike+ iPhone and Android applications to allow users to log in or register through Facebook or Twitter, and to automate activity sharing to other apps, Salyer said.

Why can’t Nike or Gigya’s other 500 enterprise clients access Facebook’s or Twitter’s APIs independently and just build their own connections?

“We provide a single access point for many APIs,” Salyer said, adding that the company supports roughly 26 different APIs. “Beyond that, we actually maintain those APIs … what we do as a middle layer is manage changes. Finally … even if [clients] just want Facebook, we have a number of value added features that you could never get out of the box.”

Gigya’s social gamificiation implemention with Pepsi

The company’s social gamification tool, which tracks user activity to award points or badges and manage rewards (and is used by Pepsi), is one example of those features, Salyer said.

As for the part about being a leader, Salyer said that, through its client base, Gigya’s social applications reach more than 1 billion people every month.

Though Salyer wouldn’t provide specifics on revenue or comment on whether the company is profitable (safe guess: not yet), he did say that Gigya’s 2011 sales tripled year-over-year, and added that the company is adding 75 to 100 customers every quarter. Gigya’s services start at tens of thousands dollars, he said, which means that most clients are top, enterprise-level businesses in publishing and retail arenas.

Gigya, which employees 130 people spread across four offices, will be using its fresh cash hoard to expand internationally (it just opened a UK office in London), grow the sales team, and push out new products.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Six-year-old, storytelling and reading community Wattpad has raised the eyebrows of investors anxious to see how the startup’s plot unfolds. The cost for penning Wattpad’s next chapter? Just $17.3 million in cash.

Khosla Ventures led the $17.3 million Series B round in Wattpad, the companies announced today. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Union Square Ventures, and Golden Venture Partners also participated in the round.

“We’re democratizing the written word and seeing incredible new types of collaboration come to life,” Wattpad founder and CEO Allen Lau wrote in a blog post on the funding round. “We take the best characteristics of how people interact through storytelling and make this work on the web and across all mobile devices without any legacy issues.”

Wattpad, for those who missed its introductory chapters, is the long-running online reading community that offers amateur novelists a way to publish and share their manuscripts, chapter by chapter if they choose, and build up an audience of ravenous readers who help participate in the creative writing process.

The service currently hosts more than 5 million user-generated stories that can be read across all devices, and attracts 8 million unique visitors who spend a total of 1.7 billion minutes using the site each month.

While Wattpad’s unique self-publishing model and its social following system are certainly the foundational elements of its success, the Toronto-based startup most likely owes its sizable raise — just its second institutional round — to its dominance on mobile. As an e-reader accessible via Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Kindle, Wattpad now sees more than 70 percent of usage stemming from its mobile applications.

“I believe we are creating a product and a community that will come to define how people share and connect over stories for the digital age,” Lau said.

Lau told VentureBeat that originally the company was planning to wait until next year to raise the round, but increased traffic and infrastructure demands forced the issue. With the funding, Wattpad will ramp up hiring efforts and get back to focusing on improving the product.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Shopping for the next e-commerce hit, investors have spent $2 million on budding startup Wanelo, an online shopping community where regular people share their uncommon finds.

Wanelo, a blend of the words “want, need, love,” is a combination of product-inspiration and social shopping sites such as Pinterest, Fancy, and Polyvore, and is meant to be a store curated by users.

“Wanelo is a movement of regular people who help each other find things they like, and most of these things are affordable,” Wanelo CEO and founder Deena Varshavskaya told VentureBeat. “Wanelo is about unique things you can actually buy.”

The comparisons to Pinterest is practically unavoidable — members find and save products to personal collections — but Wanelo moves beyond the aspirational and encourages members to swap affordable treasures for their shopping wish-lists.

“Users go to Pinterest to find or collection inspiration; they go to Wanelo to shop,” said Varshavskaya.

Founded in October 2010, the San Francisco-based company has attracted a highly engaged community of shoppers who save, on average, 100,000 products each day and who have collectively posted 1.3 million products from 24,000 stores.

“Even though we have an addictive and growing community, we’re just scratching the surface of what we need to build,” Varshavskaya said. “As we get deeper into solving various problems around shopping, the experience will become more obviously differentiated [from Pinterest].”

This $2 million round of funding was Wanelo’s first. Floodgate, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant, Forerunner Ventures, Roger Dickey, Aayush Phumbhra, Andy Dunn, and other angels all participated. The money will be used to help the company expand operations, hire engineers and designers, and push out new products.

Wanelo has a team of 11 employees and recently brought on former ModCloth senior engineer Konstantin Gredeskoul as CTO, and Etsy alum Sean Flannagan as vice president of product. The startup doesn’t have a revenue model in place yet but believes the product-centered experience is inherently monetizable.

Photo credit: andrewarchy/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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SMS messages sent for practical, group communication rather than just LOLs is serious enough business that investors have handed SendHub a $2 million check.

Recent Y Combinator graduate SendHub, which bills itself as SMS for organizations, is in the business of replacing the email blast with an SMS message and aims to solve a myriad of real-world consumer, business, and enterprise one-to-many communication challenges.

SendHub has just closed a $2 million seed round led by Kapor Capital, the company exclusively told VentureBeat. Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage fund, 500 Startups, Bronze Investments, Menlo Ventures, and angels including Eric Ries, Paul Buchheit, and Jawed Karim all participated in the round.

Why such a sizable seed raise for an SMS service? The young company and its new investors believe that SendHub is tackling a massive problem.

“How do you send a message and make sure you get a response?” said SendHub co-founder Ash Rust. “Email is not really that medium anymore, it’s just such an overburdened channel. Social media is even worse. It’s often impractical to call people. So that leaves SMS. And nobody has really made SMS serious — and that’s what we do.”

Teachers, group leaders, soccer coaches, business owners, company managers, and so forth can sign up for the service to get a number and access to a simple-to-use dashboard for sending messages (from the web or a cell phone) to a group of contacts. A teacher, for instance, could use SendHub to send a message to kids’ parents about a looming test or homework assignment, or a CrossFit box (a.k.a. gym) owner could have his members text the SendHub number to receive an auto-responder with the WOD (workout of the day in CrossFit speak).

If the idea sounds familiar, that’s because it’s very much a hybrid of consumer group messaging services such as GroupMe or Beluga and SMS marketing services. But the group messaging apps can’t realistically replace email, Rust said, and SendHub wasn’t really intended for marketing purposes. “We’re basically making SMS a BCC email,” he said.

The young company got its start specifically hoping to solve a pain point for teachers. This time last year, co-founder and CEO Garrett Johnson observed that teachers at his nephew’s charter school in Tampa had a really hard time getting in touch with parents and connecting with their students. So Johnson and Rust, then a director at Klout, set about creating a cost-effective and simple solution to facilitate this type of communication, but they quickly found that their serious SMS product had more universal appeal.

With the new funding, SendHub will hire more aggressively and round out the product with more enterprise-friendly features. “Our goal is to create a sustainable business around the fact that enterprises need to communicate in real time,” Rust said. “You should be able to use efficient communication systems like SMS from anywhere. We want to invest the money in making sure we can be everywhere our customers are.”

SendHub, which runs its service off of telecommunications startup Twilio’s voice and text platform, offers customers both free and paid plans and will work with enterprises on custom arrangements.

Founded in 2011, SendHub previously raised $300,000 from Howard Lindzon, Tom McInerney, and Y Combinator. The company currently employs a team of five and operates out of Mountain View, Calif. but is in the midst of relocating to Palo Alto. SendHub has thousands of users and sends hundreds of thousands SMS messages each month, Rust said.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Betting that new mommies will want to supply baby with the best toys, outfits, snacks, and goodies vetted by other mommies, investors have handed startup Citrus Lane a bundle of a joy in the form of $5.1 million in fresh funding.

One year-old Citrus Lane is in the monthly care package business, specifically targeting moms-to-be and parents with children under three years of age. The startup takes a pay-per-month subscription approach, so parents are charged $25 a month for a themed package that includes four to five age-appropriate products for their child. Products are curated from partner brands such as Weleda and Green Toys, and are only boxed up after receiving the seal of approval from real moms.

“When I was pregnant with my first child, I knew nothing. I had to do all my own research … and I started by asking my mom friends what products they suggested. And then I realized there is a market for that kind of real-life wisdom,” Citrus Lane founder and CEO Mauria Finley told VentureBeat. “Parents need help cutting through the noise and figuring out what products are really best for their child.”

Citrus Lane’s first institutional round of funding, from GGV Capital and Greylock Partners, will be used to grow the business and hire more aggressively.

“We’re using the money to make our customers’ experience even better in every way we can think of — from expanding our social media presence to offering our loyal customers more opportunities to purchase from the company,” Finley said. “We need to staff up in engineering, design, marketing and operations to continue to deliver a great experience to our customers as we grow.”

The tried-and-true monthly subscription model seems especially appropriate for the new moms market, and the company hopes to reach this highly influential group by supplementing its boxed product offerings with tips and advice on its Facebook Page.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Citrus Lane has 14 employees. The startup previously raised a $1.5 million seed round of funding.

Photo credit: Citrus Lane/Facebook

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Dan Serfaty, CEO Viadeo

Proving that second place doesn’t always equate to being the first loser, the world’s number two social network for professionals, Viadeo, (LinkedIn is number one), is getting $32 million in fresh financing.

The $32 million round, Viadeo’s fourth institutional round, was pooled from the French Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement, existing shareholders, and a crop of new investors. The Paris-based company will use this stockpile to push deeper into China as well expand its presence in Russia, India, and Africa.

“We are a really local player with huge momentum and traction,” chief strategy and development officer Olivier Fecherolle told VentureBeat. “We think now is the moment to invest in China.”

Founded in 2004, Viadeo targets non-English-speaking businesspeople and has swelled to 45 million members across the globe, with an especially dominant presence in Europe, Latin America, and China. Viadeo is profitable and currently adds about 1 million new members to its service each month, the company said.

In China, Viadeo operates Tianji, the top professional network of that country (fun fact: CEO Dan Serfaty moved to Beijing in September). The localized Viadeo offshoot has 10 million members and is adding 500,000 new members each month, said Fecherolle. “In China, it’s our market to lose.”

LinkedIn, for comparison, has more than 150 million members, albeit with a small presence in China. The company went public nearly a year ago in a successful initial offering and is now valued at $10 billion.

Just as LinkedIn was making its public debut, Viadeo shelved its own plans for an offering. At the time, Serfaty told Reuters that, despite frothy levels of interest from investors and bankers, the company wanted to focus on growing the business.

Nearly 12 months later, Viadeo’s plans to go public remain on the distant horizon. Fecherolle referred to the $32 million round as pre-IPO financing and said that a public offering is still a target, just likely one that is several months out. Profitable since September 2009, the company makes or 50 percent of its revenue from premium accounts, earns 30 percent from hiring and recruiting tools, and brings in 20 percent from targeted advertising.

Viadeo, which employees 400 people across offices in Europe, China, India, Africa, Mexico, China, and Russia, has raised more than $52 million in funding to date.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Skout CTO Niklas Lindstrom and CEO Christian Wiklund

The makers of web and mobile applications for location-based flirting have landed a local conquest of their own.

Five year-old Skout has raised $22 million in funding from esteemed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

“[Skout] is really helping people to meet new people … which is a part of human nature,” Skout CEO and founder Christian Wiklund told VentureBeat. “We have cracked the nut on providing a safe, fun, and healthy experience.”

San Francisco-based Skout, quite the Valley veteran, has been around since early 2007. It first started off as a Loopt-like location-based app but later pivoted to focus specifically on real-time, local connections. Skout launched its location-centric iPhone dating application in 2009 — a novel idea at the time. The application took more than a year to hit one million registered users, but today it adds one million new users each month, Wiklund said.

Skout is especially popular with 25- to 35-year-old busy, urban professionals in large metro areas and has impressively high engagement figures. The social application for iPhone and Android, which Wiklund likens to a mobile bar, rock concert, or salsa class, processes 300 million messages per month, and the average user signs in eight to nine times per day for a total of 45 minutes of application usage.

The five-year ride hasn’t always been so rosy. Eighteen months ago, Skout was down to three employees and its future looked rather bleak. But thanks to a combination of organic growth, paid user acquisition, and success on Android and Apple app stores, the company now has 50 staffers and pulls in enough money through virtual goods and ads to break even.

With the infusion of $22 million, however, Skout will go in the red as it spends to take over the world. The company will be investing heavily in global expansion and hiring more than 80 people to work in its San Francisco office.

“We want to really anchor Skout globally … and for that we need a big war chest,” Wiklund said. “With this money, we can deploy [Skout] very efficiently and aggressively and fork lift the whole business.”

This is San Francisco-based Skout’s first institutional round of funding. The company previously raised $4.6 million in Angel funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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A startup aiming to help people avoid giving bad gifts is itself the recipient of the one gift we all tend to appreciate: cash.

Wantful, an alternative gift-giving service that gives gift recipients the power of choice, has raised $5.5 million in a funding round led by Polaris Venture Partners.

The young San Francisco-based startup, launched in October of last year, encourages gift buyers to select 16 items from an assortment of options tailored for the recipient. Those choices are assembled in a printed gift book that is delivered to the gift recipient who can then pick a single item for delivery. The service also connects with Facebook to add social intelligence to the mix.

The new round of funding will be used to improve the product, expand the product catalog, bring in new talent, and finance marketing initiatives.

Polaris Venture Partners principal and Dogpatch Labs head Ryan Spoon is joining Wantful’s board of directors. Previous investors Harrison Metal, Greylock Partners, and Forerunner Ventures all participated in the round.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Clearspring Technologies, the creator of the AddThis social content sharing platform, can now add this to its list of accomplishments: $20 million in series D funding in a round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).Clearspring’s existing investors also participated in the round.

McLean, Va.-based Clearspring said in a press release that the funds will be used for acquisitions, as well as for growing the company’s publisher and advertising offerings.

The round is good news for Clearspring, who suffered last year after it was alleged that it gathered private data from users via their AddThis widgets. It now appears that the lawsuits stemming from the charges could be dismissed.