And startup Piggybackr is making the job even easier for kids with the launch today of a kid-friendly approach to crowdfunding.

“[Kids] are super tech savvy and everyone and their mom is fundraising online,” founder Andrea Lo told VentureBeat. ”While entrepreneurs, artists, and nonprofits fundraise online with great success, I wondered why this hasn’t spread to youth and their communities.”

Lo was first inspired by her 11-year-old sister, who was trying to earn money by selling bracelets. Lo wanted to help her sister be more savvy and business-minded and ultimately achieve a higher financial goal. She began investigating why kids are largely not involved with crowdfunding and found that there were a specific set of challenges that could be addressed.

On Piggybackr, kids learn how to set up a fundraiser and wage successful campaigns. There is a strong educational component, with suggested ideas, instructional videos, and tools so they can reach out to and engage their audience. The gamified task list helps keep kids motivated. Kids can also earn “effort points” to reflect their hard work in ways other than dollars, and they can earn skill badges for specific achievements. Since kids often fundraise socially, Piggybackr also offers features for organizing team members, communicating, and working together to achieve goals. The site is armed with safety features, and kids under 13 need their parents’ permission to use the service.

“The reality is, most kids are raising smaller amounts from friends, family, and local businesses,” Lo said. “Teaching them how to maximize their potential with that audience is key, and then they can start to think about getting larger. We are really focused on teaching kids tactically what they can do.”

During the private beta, kids raised an average of $75 per individual supporter. For anyone who has ever peddled Girl Scout cookies door-to-door or swum 100 laps for Cystic Fibrosis, you know this is a significant amount. Piggybackr has helped youth raise over $250,000 while still in beta. It launched today with 1,500 participants, which Lo expects will grow quickly now that the product is public. Piggybackr is also working with 10 partner organizations to expand its distribution. The United Way Youth Venture is one of the partners and looks at Piggybackr as a way to build problem solving skills and entrepreneurship, as well as to fundraise.

Projects range from a wheelchair basketball team in need of new equipment to an individual kid raising money for a turtle protection project in Costa Rica. Piggybackr takes 5 percent and 30 cents per transaction that comes in. The company is based in San Francisco and currently has three full-time employees.

WeFunder is a online investment platform. The ultimate vision is that anyone, regardless of wealth, can invest in startups. The platform is currently only available to accredited investors, until the SEC publishes the final regulations for the JOBS Act which changes the rules for crowdfunding.

“We are not just giving startups dumb, quick, and easy money,” said founder Nick Tommarello on stage at Y Combinator’s demo day. “With the power of the crowd, we are giving them an army of evangelists that feel a sense of ownership and are driven to help their startup succeed.

WeFunder finds and features promising startups on the site to a community of almost 14,000 investors. Those people have the opportunity to put as little as $1000 into companies that catch their eye. All of the money raised on WeFunder is put into a trust account managed by the startup’s law firm and then transferred into their corporate account once the campaign is completed.

This strategy opens up investment opportunities to a larger community and gives startups more flexible fundraising options. Tommarello said this is like pressing a “green button” to raise money, instead of going through the traditional, labor-intensive channels. Some voices in the Valley say crowd funding for startups is a bad idea because it can lead to a cluttered cap table and prevent fundraising opportunities down the road. However, Tommarello said that a large number of small investors can be a strength.

WeFunder is comparable to The Funders Club, which launched as part of the last Y Combinator class and has since raised $6 million and attracted international attention from the media, investors, and entrepreneurs. The JOBS Act may not be in action yet, but when it is, it will democratize the early-stage investment process for startups and investors.

Raising venture capital has more in common with computer gaming than you might think – and Sitar Teli, a partner at Connect Ventures, early investor in SoundCloud and an avid gamer, did a brilliant job joining the dots during the weekend’s Startup Camp Berlin.

Addressing a packed-out crowd, and following a keynote from German Technology Minister Philipp Rösler earlier that day, she shared a humorous and frank take on fundraising dubbed by the MC as a top talk of the day.

Caveat: Raising VC funds isn’t for everyone – and giving up equity for cash is probably the most expensive way to get it. For the small subset of companies who should be raising venture capital, though, here are nine cheats and tips to keep in mind:

1. Fundraising is social

First and foremost: “In a social game, the larger a network you have the better you do in the game,” Teli said. Fundraising works in a similar way. “There’s a good reason for this. VCs see lots and lots of deals. Last year, we were a completely new VC fund. No-one knew we existed and we still saw about 800 deals.”

Enter the network: While some of Teli’s contacts are more likely to refer good companies than others, she’s likely to take any referral more seriously than a blind email. “A blind email, to me, says the entrepreneur isn’t trying very hard.”

2. Viral loops are highly effective

Creating buzz around you and your product is another way to cut through the noise. Say a VC spots a mention in a tech blog – then, even better, somebody gives your company a referral. “Now you have what might be a buzz around you – it’s a viral loop.”

Getting the good word out works with nightclubs and restaurants, and it works with startups. This doesn’t necessarily mean constantly pitching TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher or VentureVillage, she added. “Using your network is again a very good way of trying to create that buzz.”

3. Check your heads-up display 

If you’ve launched your product, you should know your numbers cold – that includes numbers of active users, how fast the company is growing per day and what specific acts convert people to active users. “If you don’t have those numbers, you should be talking to a specific type of VC, probably a seed VC, or someone who looks at companies pre-launch rather than growing companies with traction.”

4. Know your gamer 

“My background is in consumer and social – I now also work with some SME B2B companies and freemium models,” Teli explained. “If you’re an infrastructure company, I could sit down for three hours and I wouldn’t know anything about your company at the end of it – I’d know what you told me, but I wouldn’t understand it.”

She’d be unlikely to put money in – and, even if she did, she’d probably be less helpful to the company than a partner who is an established expert in the field.

Warning – a VC who knows he or she isn’t a good fit might still take the meeting. “Don’t assume that you will talk to the right person and everyone’s gong to be good and say ‘I’m not the right one, you should talk to this partner’,” she said. Instead, get the right meeting from the start.

5. Practice builds skills 

You should be able to explain their company in 30 seconds, three minutes and 30 minutes: “If you can’t take a 30 minute pitch and condense it to a few sentences of why it’s interesting, you’re going to need to get a first meeting just to get people interested.”

Practise various time lengths and various pitch angles: product angle, business angle, marketing strategy – all the core functions and areas you’ll need to succeed.

6. Get ready for the boss level

With most VC funds, after a partner has spoken to a company a few times, he or she will bring the company up with the partership, Teli said. “If they’re interested, the entrepreneur or the founding team will then meet with all of the partners.”

This is the equivalent of a boss level. Both have a pretty high death rate but there are ways to get through it more easily. First: “If you made it to this level, it means at least one of the partners in the fund really likes you.”

Talk to the person championing you in advance and get to know who’ll be in the room – and especially who will be the key decision-makers. “What kinds of questions are they likely to ask? Who asks the toughest questions? Who can you ignore?”

Ask your champion to review your pitch before you give it. And, old advice but something not many people actually follow, ask entrepreneurs who’ve already raised money from the fund for advice on how to play it.

7. Don’t play the game – play the player

You could play the game and talk to every VC on the planet. The catch: “If everyone says no, you’ve basically got 40 ‘no’s – and the more you get, the less likely you are to get money.” There are exceptions: when Teli invested in SoundCloud, while an associate at Doughty Hanson, “they’d been raising money for months and everyone said no,” she said. “We still said yes just because we really liked the team and we really liked what they were doing.”

In general, though, it’s better to play the player: figure out and target exactly who you want to have on your board.

Another tip: look for partners on their way up within a firm, the ones who’ve done a few deals but haven’t had a big hit yet. “They’re still hungry,” Teli pointed out – and therefore more likely to invest than someone who’s seen it all.”

8. Know the cheat codes 

In other words, do as much as you can to educate and prepare yourself. Teli recommended Venture Hacks – a “fantastic resource” though not updated much and based in the U.S. “Read some of Brad Feld’s books on how to raise money and be smarter than your lawyer,” she added.

9. Failure is normal

Only a very few companies manage to raise venture capital money every year. Even those that do will still probably fail – and all of this is OK: “Failure is part of entrepreneurship, part of being a startup. The worst thing you can do is not try again…”

Check out the original slide set from Startup Camp Berlin over at Slideshare. 

Image credits: Sitar Teli: provided by Sitar Teli; FarmVille: via Zynga; World of Tanks: via World of Tanks; SuperTux boss level: via Wikipedia; Pacman: flickr user rogerimp 

This post originally appeared on VentureVillage, VentureBeat’s content partner in Germany.

Imagine using data to pinpoint the most high-performing employees and keep them satisfied?

A startup called Evolv is building technology to make that possible, and it has raised $15 million in a fourth funding round led by Vantage Point Capital.

“We prevent the wrong person ending up in the wrong job,” said Max Simkoff, the company’s founder and CEO, in an interview.

Evolv’s team of data scientists have developed software they claim can increase workforce tenure by an average of 15 percent and workforce performance by 5 percent. The product compiles data from disparate sources and makes recommendations.

“It’s hard to understand why it’s radically predictive, but it’s radically predictive,” said Jim Meyerle, Evolv’s cofounder.

More specifically, the in-house data science team will extract information like termination history and performance data, then combine it with relevant econometrics, like gas prices and nationwide unemployment rates. To bolster the data sets, Evolv pushes out surveys to its customers’ employees about social media usage, work history, and other core traits and competencies.

Evolv showcases how “big data can be leveraged to improve stagnant business processes,” said Bill Harding, Managing Director, VantagePoint Capital Partners, and a newly-appointed member of the company’s board of directors.

Since forming in 2007, the company has scored some high-profle contracts with household-name customers, such as Xerox, that pay a six figure sum for an annual subscription.

Evolv’s San Francisco-based team will use the cash at its disposal to build out its sales and marketing team, and expand internationally. Previoius investors, GGV, Khosla and Lightspeed Ventures, also participated in this latest funding round.

In November, we reported on Evolv’s partnership with The Wharton School of business. The effort was not just about helping Fortune 500 companies recruit talent and boost productivity — there are tools like SAP’s SuccessFactors and Oracle-owned Taleo for that. Instead, the partners were looking to better understand (and potentially combat) high attrition rates in US workplaces.

Top image via Shutterstock

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Real estate listings site Trulia announced this morning that it is looking to raise $150 million so it can move quickly on potential acquisitions.

The newly public company filed an amendment to its Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which will partially release some shares that were locked up. Trulia and some of its stockholders are proposing to sell an aggregate of 5.25 million shares in a primary and secondary offering.

Trulia revealed that it will offer 3.5 million in shares, and stockholders are offering 1.75 million. The last reported sale price of Trulia stock as of Friday was $30.44 per share price on the New York Stock Exchange. The company notes that the follow-on offering altogether could raise as much as $164 million.

“The capital is to really to strengthen the cash reserves for new product lines and acquisitions,” said Ken Shuman, the company’s vice president of communications in an interview. He confirmed that Trulia is not looking into any mergers opportunities.

The company has not made an acquisition since the buy-up of Movity in December 2010, which Shuman claims is a deliberate choice as “most acquisitions fail and tend to be a distraction for senior management.”

Last year, Trulia’s corporate development team evaluated dozens of startups but didn’t move forward. “There has to be a really compelling reason to acquire as we’re often better off building,” he explained.

But with the company filing for its IPO last year, it maybe reevaluating its “build first” mentality. Shuman said the company is considering tools and services for real estate agents, online rentals (“a huge, emerging business”), mortgages-focused startups, and small companies that would support “international expansion.”

Currently, Trulia has almost 5 million homes listed on its site. Potential buyers can easily search, visualize, and track properties, as well as access information about nearby schools and crime.

With chief competitor Zillow making several buy-ups in 2012 (the company spent close to $60 million to acquire Hotpads and RentJuice), expect to see some activity in the real estate sector.

Trulia is hiring in its marketing and engineering teams to support the expansion. Last week, the company’s data science team rolled out a “suggests” feature to introduce Netflix-style recommendations to its website and mobile apps.

The company admits in the filing that it has a “history of losses” and may not reach profitability anytime soon. Major risks for investors include a limited operating history, the possibility that real estate professionals won’t continue to subscribe, that it won’t be able to maintain accurate real estate information.

Top image // Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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I tweeted to female entrepreneurs and developers to ask whether they enjoy the “women in tech” conversation or avoid it, and why. I hit a nerve and received dozens of responses, which we compiled using Storify. Check it out at the bottom.  

Silicon Valley’s tech industry still has a gender problem.

The woman-in-tech topic has been debated ad nauseam for years. You might be bored sick of it, but the numbers refuse to budge.

“We don’t want to be seen as crazy bitches moaning about the same issue,” explained Jenn Wei, a twentysomething investor at Blumberg Capital, when asked about the lack of women in venture capital.

Women represent less than 10 percent of venture capitalists, and they have been leaving the industry at twice the rate of men, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Wei is well aware of the gender imbalance and has written about it, but said she is fearful about “overplaying the victim card.”

For this reason, women in the male-dominated tech industry have historically shunned the topic, particularly in conversations with the press.

Former Epiphany chief executive Karen Richardson was one of the few women executives in tech in the 1990s and 2000s, and she spent most of her career deflecting questions about gender. It was considered “whiny and snively” to draw attention to it, she said.

But the tide is changing. With the emergence of all-female workshops, meetups, and social groups like Women 2.0 and Women Who Code, many female entrepreneurs that were shy are now forcing the issue. And better yet, they are banding together with men — and each other — to actively make improvements.

“For the first time in over 30 years, the gender conversation can be a productive dialogue,” Richardson said.

We can all stand to benefit from a more balanced workforce. A recent report from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology observed that gender and ethnic diversity in a workplace strengthens decision-making, and diverse teams tend to be more innovative. Women-led startups are proving to be more capital-efficient, and venture-backed 
companies run by a woman have 12 percent higher revenues than others, according to research by Illuminate Ventures.

Many women say it’s a great time to be in tech, although they believe there is a long journey ahead and much progress still needs to be made. The primary problems they currently face, and their suggested solutions are the following:

‘It was harder for me to gain the same level of respect…’

Knotch’s team (L-R): CEO Anda Gansca, Designer Rebecca Chaika, CTO Stephanie Volftsun.

Stephanie Volftsun is the technical lead at all-female tech startup, which is a surprise to most people that she meets.

Female chief technical officers and senior engineers are a rare breed in Silicon Valley. Why? Women’s share of bachelor’s degrees in computer science at colleges and universities is decreasing, according to the National Science Foundation.

Volfstun is the daughter of Russian immigrants — both engineers — and has been coding for most of her life. At 23, she is a “full stack” engineer, meaning that she can build mobile stack, web stack, or native applications for her startup, Knotch.

Volftsun would earn a six-figure salary at any tech company, but she is reluctant to work at a male-dominated tech startup again.

“At college, I didn’t feel the pressure of being the only girl in my computer science classes because everyone starts out on a blank slate and you have your grades to build you up,” Volftsun said.

As a professional (she landed her first job as a back-end engineer at financial technology startup Addepar), she found it more difficult to prove herself to her fellow developers. “It was harder for me to gain the same level of respect my male peers had,” she said.

This perspective is shared by hundreds of women in the tech industry, according to a report by the Level Playing Field Institute. Its 2011 study found that IT workplaces, including tech startups, can create hostile or unpleasant environments for women and people of color, prompting those employees to seek out other industries.

The problem isn’t just too few female engineering grads — it’s that junior-level programmers are leaving the industry in their droves.

The NSF conducted deeper research that revealed that workplace culture is a big problem. In a survey of almost 4,000 female engineers, a third of respondents said they left the industry due to a bad boss or negative working environment.

One quote from the NSF report is particularly troubling, especially as it reflects the experience of many women: “At my last engineering job, women were fed up with the culture: arrogant, inflexible, completely money-driven, sometimes unethical, intolerant of differences in values and priorities. I felt alienated in spite of spending my whole career trying to act like a man.”

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Causes announced today that it is acquiring Votizen, site where people can campaign for candidates and causes they believe.

According to a post on Votizen’s Facebook page, this acquisition will help “improve democracy” by combining Causes’ powerful user base of 153 million people with Votizen’s technology.

Votizen leverages social networks and voting data to create a more connected electorate. Its technology combined a database of public voting records from around the country and connected them to the social graph, creating a visual depiction of each voter’s network. This makes it easier for individuals to band together to affect change.

“By joining with Causes and its nearly 200 million members, Votizen now has the capability effectively reach every voter in America and will greatly increase our ability to surface the latent political influence that exists in our personal relationships,” the founders wrote.  ”We have made one great jump toward achieving our goal of a more vibrant, effective democracy, and we couldn’t be more excited for the future.”

Since its founding in 2009, Votizens raised a total of $2.25 million from well-known investors like Founders Fund, 500 Startups, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, and Troy Carter. It will shut down its site as part of this deal, as well as destroy all personal data records, including open letters, endorsements, and vote pledges. The founders wrote that while this may seem abrupt, the timing is just right between the end of the election cycle and the start of the legislative cycle.

Causes appeared thanks to founders Sean Parker and Joe Green in 2007 to provide free and simple online tools to raise awareness, find supporters, raise money, and build momentum. Those that want to start a campaign choose from nine templates and customize them for their own needs. In addition to its massive, active user base, Causes has received $16.4 million in venture funding. Read the Facebook post.

More than 1.2 million donors contributed to this campaign, which ran in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. The foundation said that its most successful 24-hour period for donations brought in nearly $2.4 million. Last year, it took 46 days to complete.

This was the foundation’s ninth annual drive. The fundraiser takes place each year to keep Wikipedia and its sister projects alive and free. These funds pay for software upgrades, hiring editors, maintaining the infrastructure, and the ad-free user experience. The money also supports the foundation’s efforts to deliver information to people in the developing world, who often access Wikipedia articles from feature phones on less-than-strong mobile networks.

This financial support is, of course, vital to sustaining Wikimedia’s work. In a statement, the foundation not only thanked the donors but also the volunteer contributors that “are the heart of the world’s largest encyclopedia.” To highlight their efforts, the Wikimedia Foundation is now conducting a “thank you campaign” to showcase some of their stories. This campaign starts today and includes a Malaysian botanist, an electric engineer from South Africa, and a U.S. Air Force veteran-turned-fly fisherman. You can watch their videos here.

It’s all too rare that we hear about San Francisco’s cash-flush startups using their technology for good.

Rally.org, the startup that provides donation-enabling software to Mitt Romney and Bon Jovi, has a plan to inspire charitable giving this Christmas. The founders came to the conclusion that the best way to inspire people to raise money for charity is to offer a meeting with a storied Silicon Valley investor.

Rally.org has partnered up with Glide, a San Francisco non-profit that aims to alleviate poverty and homelessness. Those who raise the most money for Glide will win a flight to San Francisco, and a sit-down meeting to pitch a startup idea to the likes of Mike Maples, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, or Eric Ries.

The cheerily-titled campaign, Silicon Valley: Powered By Love, has succeeded in pulling in $1,840 of its $15,000 goal.

“This feels like a win for everybody, and is a nice way to give back while drawing attention to Glide,” said Mike Maples, an investor and founding partner at early-stage investment fund, Floodgate Capital. Maples is one of the Valley’s original “super angels” specializing in seed-stage startups, and is perhaps best-known for being one of the first investors in Twitter.

If you’re not entrepreneurially-minded, there is also the option to donate directly to Glide and potentially win a spot at Rally.org’s famed pitch nights, where the city’s founders gather to present their ideas.

“We hope this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to brands and influencers leveraging their celebrity to benefit causes,” said Nick Warshaw, Rally.org’s business development lead.

The company’s software is designed to help anyone with a cause make money. Most recently, it powered donations for the Romney campaign, and it featured on the websites of Democratic National Convention speakers Julian Castro and Elizabeth Warren.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital, and a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. This post originally appeared on his blog.

A question I often get asked by entrepreneurs is what is Flybridge’s investment philosophy – do we make our investment decisions based on people or on themes?  The glib answer is both, but as I’ve thought more about this question I wanted to expand the answer a bit to help entrepreneurs understand how investors approach this issue in more detail.

I think this question has become more acute as the much-discussed shortage of Series A capital (the so-called “Series A Crunch”) means that, going forward, too many entrepreneurs are going to be chasing too little capital.

People-based investing is an age-old investment strategy.  Bet on the jockey, not the horse, as the saying goes.  Exceptional entrepreneurs will always find a way to make money, so the job of the investor is to spot the exceptional entrepreneur and convince them to take your money as opposed to worrying about strategic trends and dynamics.

People-based investors focus their due diligence process on spending both structured and unstructured time with the entrepreneur, as opposed to analyzing the product, business model or interviewing customers.  People-based investors can be quite analytical, although often times it is more instinctual.  When they are analytical, people-based investors conduct deep management team due diligence, psychological profiles and a broad set of team interviews.  When they are not, they simply listen to their intuition as to whether the entrepreneur is a “money maker” and trustworthy.

Personally, I think this is a flawed investment strategy.  Building a successful startup requires more than exceptional people, because even exceptional people can find themselves the victims of market forces, competitive pressures and faulty business models.  I have seen many exceptional people execute beautifully, hire well, achieve operational excellence, but still fail to build a massive business.  These entrepreneurs are like the well-trained surfers who sit, frustrated, on their surfboards on a calm day because they can’t catch the right wave to propel them to shore.

A theme-based investment strategy requires the investor to have market knowledge and a strategic point of view.  Theme-based investors go deep in a particular sector, develop a hypothesis, and then meet entrepreneurs to test this hypothesis.  They build market maps, attend conferences, hire EIRs (entrepreneurs in residence) and cluster their investments and networking around a particular sector.  By building expertise in a sector, theme-based investors develop insights about where the markets are moving and where the opportunities are for disruption.  They like to “see everything” in a space before investing in something so that they are assured that they have picked the absolute best way to play the theme they have identified.

And here’s where the magic happens – referring back to my glib answer regarding Flybridge’s “both” investment strategy – when a theme-based investor collides with an exceptional entrepreneur who shares the investor’s vision for a particular disruptive opportunity.  I have heard many entrepreneurs gush when describing these meetings.  “It was like he was giving my pitch for me!” effused one entrepreneur after a VC she was pitching took over the meeting with their own passionate observations about the market opportunity.

We experienced just such an opportunity as part of a new deal we are leading in New York City that my partner, David Aronoff, recently alluded to.  We have a thematic focus on cloud computing and the consumerization of the enterprise.  It is an extension of our developer-driven investment theme, that led to portfolio companies such as 10gen and Crashlytics.  When we intersected with an entrepreneur who had a similar theme and had developed an emerging leader in a space we liked, we jumped at the chance to lead the Series A, following on with some great angel investors.

As an entrepreneur, those are the situations you want to find.  Seek out “Investor-Entrepreneur” Fit.  Find that investor who believes in you as well as the market opportunity and has already been thinking proactively about it.  Watch what they blog about, what their investment history looks like, and what conferences they are attending.  If you can find this intersection of compelling themes and people, you won’t sweat the coming Series A crunch.

Sequoia Capital is fixin’ to raise a chunk of change for a new seed fund, according to an SEC filing this morning.

UPDATED 12:14 p.m. PT: Sequoia writes us to say they are not, in fact, raising funds. The Form D we’re seeing is due to some paperwork shuffling rather than new fundraising activity.

“Nothing new here, just some admin changes related to programs like Scouts,” a rep told VentureBeat via email. Scouts is the firm’s mini-army of entrepreneurs-turned-investors who use Sequoia money to make small deals with early-stage founders in their own networks. That would explain the “seed fund” nomenclature on the form.

Original story amended below.

In a Form D disclosing its fundraising plans, we read that the new fund is described as a seed fund. The exact amount the firm hopes to raise is as yet indefinite, and so far, no capital for the new fund has been confirmed.

Here’s the document in its entirety:

Sequoia Fundraise

Sequoia’s last big, confirmed raise was a huge $1.3 billion fund about one year ago. That fund was primarily focused on early and growth stage companies located in the U.S. and China. And six month ago, we heard Sequoia was raising yet again — another billion-dollar fund for similar investments in similar areas.

But not all the firm’s investments are the big, splashy, headline-making rounds that throw companies into the limelight. Sequoia also does seed-stage investments as low-dollar as $100,000.

A few months ago, the firm also closed a $200 million fund for Israel-focused investments to capture at least part of the booming Tel Aviv tech scene.

Top image courtesy of vovan, Shutterstock

Movember first began in Australia and is now a global movement to support prostate cancer and testicular cancer initiatives. “Via the moustache, Movember aims to fulfill its vision of having an everlasting impact on the face of men’s health by continuing to spark conversation and spread awareness of men’s health issues each year,” says the organization’s mission statement. Over the past decade, almost 2 million “Mo Bros and Mo Sistas” have participated and raised $126.3 million for the cause in 2011 alone. 

Last year, a few of the guys at SurveyMonkey decided to form an informal team. Their efforts were so popular that this year, the company formed an official partnership with Movember. SurveyMonkey employees not only sprouted ‘staches and fundraised, but they also offered the organization the resources at their disposal.

SurveyMonkey is a provider of web-based survey solutions. Customers easily create custom surveys online and distribute them to respondents. These surveys help them collect data of any kind that can be used for anything from business insights, to in this case, “who has the most iconic mo?” Apparently, men associate mustaches with manliness and distinction, while women generally find them creepy.

“It was interesting to watch the monkeys grow mustaches, and as we watched them do it, we wanted to do research,” said VP of Marketing Bennett Porter. “This is very important stuff, we wanted to get feedback on how America feels about mustaches so we could give our monkeys pointers.”

The surveys found that the top style is the ‘classic English,’ followed by the ‘Handlebar’, ‘Fu Manchu’, ‘Painter’s Brush’, ‘Pencil’, ‘Chevron’, and the ‘Walrus’. Apparently, the number one reason men don’t grow mustaches is because they think they look funny, while 36% of significant others are fine if their loved ones ‘bro a Mo.’

That said, one of the team captains was forced to shave his mustache for a wedding at the bequest of his girlfriend. Not one to be derailed, he grew a second ‘stache and had something to present at the Great Shave after all.

As part of the Great Shave, SurveyMoney brought a professional barber into the headquarters to bring all participants back to clean-shaven. However, a few men abstained from the proceedings to keep their mustaches for one more wild weekend and a few even contemplated maintaining the mustachioed look. 

“Over the past 30 days, some people looked exactly the same as they did on day 1, and others looked like they were headed straight for a biker bar,” Porter said.  “We took an internal survey to crown the King of Movember and the winner was one of our guys in Portland, but it was kind of unfair because mustaches seem to grow better in Portland. Regardless, we are going to miss those furry little guys.”

Hipster points aside, SurveyMonkey raised around $2000 for men’s health. Porter said this endeavor was about more than fundraising; it  was also about promoting company culture and staying competitive in the battle to recruit talent. SurveyMonkey is hardly a scrappy startup anymore. It was purchased in 2009 by Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital, and today has 150 employees and a billion dollar valuation.

That said, SurveyMonkey, like the mustaches on of its employees faces, is continuing to grow, spreading the doctrine of accessible data, as well as mustaches, around the world. Check out the Flickr gallery the “Month of Mustaches” and this Movember infographic:

Startup Spotlight is a new weekly series that features a company with a unique idea or story to tell. If your company would like to be considered, please submit an application at http://venturebeat.com/news-tips/.

This is a guest post by Flybridge Capital Partners’ investor Jeff Bussgang.

We have a number of portfolio companies that are raising money. When I talk to my CEOs that in the midst of this process, almost all of them complain about the same thing. They dislike the fundraising process and can’t wait until it’s over. They view it as a distraction from their day job and a non value-added chore.

I love the CEOs I work with. But when I hear these complaints, which echo those of other entrpereneurs I know, I can’t help but think how dead wrong they are.

Raising capital is a core part of building a valuable business. Whether you are raising a $250K seed round or navigating a $100 million IPO, the capital markets — in all of its various forms — are a fundamental constituent in the business-building journey.

Developing expertise in raising capital is more than a necessary evil, it’s a competitive weapon. If you have a stronger balance sheet than your competition, you can push off monetization decisions and focus on product-market fit. You can take more risks on partner deals, focusing on long-term value creation, not short-term gain.

If you have a larger cash horde than your competition, you can make aggressive hires, attract better talent, perhaps even make acquisitions. Adding some debt onto your balance sheet will lower your cost of capital and your dilution, which is better for existing investors and the management team. In other words, being able to efficiently access the capital markets is as core to business-building as product management, go to market and your profit formula.

I admit that fundraising can be painful — and certainly I felt the pain when I was an entrepreneur and had to explain the same story over and over again to prospective investors of varying intelligence and sophistication — so, all joking aside, I am sympathetic to the complaints.

But in the process of fundraising, I always gathered valuable feedback from savvy investors who understood the market and had a broad perspective. Seeing my firm through their eyes gave me valuable insight and often caused me to make adjustments along the way — in many cases, critical adjustments to our business model or approach based on the feedback.

A cynic might suggest that I’m supposed to have this perspective because, as a venture capitalist, I’m bound to think that my role in the start-up ecosystem is an important one. But that’s not entirely true.  For example, I have huge respect and passion for product development and the role of the product manager. I spend alot of time with my portfolio companies on their go-to-market strategy, partnerships and scaling sales.

But I do think the cultural pendulum in the startup world has swung too far away from requiring entrepreneurs to be financially savvy. The best entrepreneurs develop acumen across a range of business-building disciplines, including general management and finance.

They view fundraising as one of the multiple dimensions that are a core part of their job, not an ancillary distraction or necessary nuisance.

Being an entrepreneur is a really hard and lonely journey. Entrepreneurs need to “major” in some disciplines and “minor” in others. They can’t be so focused on, say, product development that they can ignore a major discipline like fundraising. Whining about fundraising, particularly to investors in the midst of the financing process, isn’t a winning approach.

This post originally appeared on Jeff Bussgang’s personal blog.

Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. Jeff currently represents the firm on the boards of Cartera Commerce,ClickSquared, DataXu, i4cp, Plastiq,  SavingStar, SimpleTuition, tracx, and is a board observer ZestFinance. 

 Jeff was previously a director at Brontes Technologies (acquired by 3M),BzzAgent (acquired by Tesco), Convoke Systems, go2Media, and oneforty (acquired by HubSpot), among others. 

He serves as a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and teaches a class on entrepreneurship and lean start-ups.

On the heels of last night’s news about 500 Startups opening a $5 million fund in India, today we read in an SEC filing that startup Yoda Dave McClure is taking the franchise into Mexico.

Get ready to say hola to 500 Luchadores, another $5 million fund from McClure, this time focused solidly on Latin American entrepreneurship.

A luchador is a professional wrestler. These surprisingly agile masked wrestlers work in Spanish-speaking countries and form hierarchies of three-man teams and wrestling families. The lucha libre form of wrestling is most prominent in Mexico; most luchadores are men.

What exact parallels can be drawn between luchadores and tech entrepreneurs? We’ll have to wait for McClure to enlighten us; for now, the impressario has declined to comment, citing a bad case of lawyers.

But the expansion of the 500 family makes sense, given McClure’s increasingly international incubator portfolio (57 percent of the founders from the most recent batch hailed from outsied the United States).

In addition to the branching out into India, earlier this year, McClure joined a super-angel, pan-Asian project called Jungle Ventures.

He also bought a Mexican VC fund back in August, which may or may not relate directly to today’s news. We’ll relate more details as soon as the McClure camp is ready to talk.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Grant.

Happy November everyone! Or should I say, “Movember“? During this month, participating gentlemen (known as Mo Bros),”groom, trim and wax their way into the annals of fine moustachery,” and to raise money for prostrate and testicular cancer initiatives. They are not the only ones fundraising this month. Read more to see what technology companies raised money for their own causes.

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.

MindBody, a Salesforce for health and beauty, nabs $35M

Bessemer Venture Partners,  Institutional Venture Partners and Catalyst Ventures today invested $35 million into MindBody, a Salesforce-like technology for businesses like yoga studios and hair salons. MindBody provides a suite of marketing tools, scheduling, analytics, networking and point of sale services for health, beauty and wellness providers. With this sixth-round of capital, the San Luis Obispo-based startup is plotting its international expansion — it already has satellite offices in New York and the UK, with a third opening soon in Australia. Read more on VentureBeat.

Dollar Shave Club’s ‘f**king great blades’ help it raise $9.8 million

Dollar Shave Club has netted $9.8 million in a Series A funding round led by Venrock. Each month Dollar Shave Club sends customers the option of three razors, which are priced depending on the number of blades they have (the most expensive one, dubbed the Executive, comes with six blades, and runs for $9 a month).Probably not, but the company has leveraged technology  to such an extent that its worth paying attention to for that reason alone. Read more on VentureBeat.

Come on baby, do the Local Motion

Local Motion has raised $1 million and is the first startup to graduate from Lemnos Labs hardware incubator program. Local Motion manufactures a module that can be installed in any vehicle to make it more shareable. The technology not only replaces keys, but also transmit and collects data. It can be used by corporations, universities, and municipalities that have fleets of vehicles to make their vehicle sharing programs more efficient. The investment came from Tim Draper of Draper Associates, Jerry Yang of Ame Cloud Ventures, Ash Patel of Morado Ventures, and Tony Hsieh from the The Vegas Tech Fund. Read more on VentureBeat.

Reflektion raises $1.57 million for top secret, classified, billions dollar idea

Stealth startup Reflektion filed a Form D with the SEC for $1.57 million. For a company whose name implies transparency, this company is extremely veiled about their product. No-one responded to a request for comment, and all the website reveals is that it may be the next billion dollar company, and it is hiring a an iPhone developer, an Android developer, a web front end developer, and a web back-end developer. Very mysterious indeed. Check out the filing. 

Invested.in gets invested in

Crowdfunding startup Invested.in has netted an $830K seed round. Billing itself as “a white label social fundraising platform”, Invested.in offers fundraising solutions for individuals, business and charities, and enterprises. The company participated in the AmplifyLA accelerator program and is already revenue positive. Kamran Pourzanjani led the investment. Other investors include  Siemer Ventures, Canyon Creek Capital, Karlin Ventures, Gordon Crawford, David Carter, Mark Schwartz, Michael Liou, Chairul Irawan, Chris Grey, Steven Roussey, Alan Stern, Irv Weintraub, Steve Reich, Mark Kolokotrones, Brad Schwartz, and Terry Kay. Invested.in is based in Los Angeles, CA.

adeptCloud better at cloud storage, fundraising than ineptCloud (not a real company)

AdeptCloud released a pilot version of its enterprise private collaboration tool today that allows businesses to securely maintain their own file storage behind corporate firewalls, rather than transferring or storing documents in a third party data center. Employees can collaborate internally and externally, without compromising security. adeptCloud also announced that it has raised $700K in its first found of funding, led by The Entrepreneurs’ Fund III. Read the press release.

Darwin Engine converts browsers to buyers, weaklings to survivors

Conversion marketing startup Runa has closed a $1 million round of funding, according to an SEC filing. The operating system called Darwin Engine captures the site history of every site visitor and customers, and analyzes their behavior to create a unique profile. It uses this data to compute the right ad to show that shopper in real time. The technology can help e-commerce companies drive sales. Runa previously raised $9.2 million in 2010. Read more on VentureBeat.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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To accomodate the onslaught of funding news, I published the first edition of Funding Daily earlier today in the form of a “morning cocktail.” Now, at its usual hour, here is the updated edition with the full scope of investment news. 11 doses of venture capital fun. Don’t go too crazy, it is important to save energy for Halloween.

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.

Investment rains down on South African e-commerce site Zando

South African company Zando is soaking up an investment of €20 million for its fashion e-commerce site. Zando launched in January of 2012 as a footwear merchant, much along the lines of Zappos. It offers free shipping and free returns, and has now expanded the inventory to include clothing, accessories, beauty projects, and sporting goods. This round was led by Summit Partners, with participation from J.P. Morgan. Read more on VentureBeat. 

ItsOn gets $15.5M from Andreessen Horowitz to empower mobile data customers

Super stealthy mobile services startup ItsOn says it’s going to change the way mobile subscribers use data. The company plans to offer wireless customers real-time visibility and control over their voice, text, and data services. This is a big deal for any major carrier, because giving consumers more control could mean getting more of them to sign up for more extensive data plans. The company is getting a $15.5 million funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and an investor group led by Jim Davidson. Read more on VentureBeat. 

QuantiaMD lands $12M for its doctors-only social network

QuantiaMD, the website and mobile app for doctors to brainstorm and collaborate on tricky cases, has raised $12 million in venture capital funding. The Waltham, MA. based health IT startup will use its funding to engage more physicians, and add them to the growing network. The funding round was led by existing investor, Fuse Capital. Read more on VentureBeat. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Pentaho shifts focus from business intelligence to “big data”, nabs $23M   

For Pentaho, the  startup that claims to be the first business intelligence (BI) provider to shift its focus to  ”big data”, the bet is paying off. The Orlando, Fl. based startup has secured $23 million in third-round funding, bringing its total funds to $55 million. The round was led by New Enterprise Investors with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Conductor lights up with $20M to drive natural search

Conductor has raised $20 million in its third found of funding for its enterprise-level SEO platform, Conductor Searchlight. The technology helps organizations optimize their natural search programs. Marketing teams can use it to manage data points like keywords, competitive analysis, social signals, universal search and workflow, and develop more effective marketing strategies.

Conductor Searchlight is built with open-source technology which allows the company to scale and iterate quickly. More than 100 of the Fortune 500 companies use Conductor Searchlight, including GE, BestBuy, AT&T, Amtrak, Capital One, FedEx, and Siemens, and revenue is growing fast. The investment was led by Investor Growth Capital, with participation from existing investors FirstMark Capital and Matrix Partners. This brings Conductor’s total investment to $33.5 million.

Yotpo brings user-generated reviews to any website that wants them

Product review platform Yotpo has raised $1.5 million in funding. The Israeli startup powers social review capabilities (like on Yelp or Amazon) for e-commerce sites. Over 2,000 sites use the technology, which gives shoppers the ability to read and write reviews. Yotpo also provides data analytics and reporting services for online merchants. The investment was led by Rhodium and Gandyr Group, with participation from Zohar Gilon, Tron Capital, and current investors Plus Ventures and 2bAngels.

Danger!! High Voltage! Heat.ma knows what happens when we touch…iPhones 

Touch is one of my top five favorite senses. Without it, we wouldn’t understand the furry softness of a poodle, the luxuriousness or silk sheets, or the interaction users have with the screens on their iPhones. Heat.ma offers a touch-based data analytics service that tells developers how users are interacting with the app, beyond actions and clicks. The software can reveal where people touch first, what functions are never used, and give designers a deeper glimpse into the quality of the user interface. Heat.ma emerged out of stealth mode today and announced $400K in seed funding to move the service beyond beta testing. So far, 100 apps are using the framework. The company is based in Warsaw, Poland.

MobiPlex swings away with $3.1M in funding

Countless deals have been struck on the golf course and it can be important for business to have a strong swing. Mobiplex, a startup that specializes in sports performance technology, has putted $3.1 million into its tin cup to accelerate sales and product development of the SwingTIP product suite. The SwingTIP Golf Swing Analyzer is a Bluetooth-enabled motion sensor that clips onto a golf club. It captures, analyzes, and reproduces a golf swing in three dimensions, and sends the data to the golfers’ phones so they can improve their swing. This first round of funding came from a group of private investors, Mobiplex is based in Santa Clara, California.

SmartAsset takes money to help others manage theirs

Financial decision-making platform SmartAsset closed $1.5 million in new funding, following the startups presentation at Y Combinator’s demo day in August. When they arrive on the site, users answer a series of questions about their goals, income, deductions etc… and the technology generates a personalized report on what is financially feasible. The lead investors are Javelin Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners and brings SmartAsset’s total raise to $2.4 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

Mobile customer service “desk” Helpshift ramps up with $3.2M

A strong mobile presence is necessary for many businesses today to stay in touch with customers, but presence alone is not enough. Helpshift offers software-as-a-service that companies can use to manage their customer service needs on mobile. The solution sends in-app customer service inquiries directly to a representative who can address them from the Helpshift dashboard. True Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners invested in a seed round of $3.2 million.

fanatix carves safe digital space for sports fans to feed their obsessions

Sports fans can be, well, fanatics. Now, they have a dedicated social network where they can unleash their excitement through their iPhones. fanatix launched in the US today, after surpassing the 250,000 download mark in overseas markets. The free iOS app provides sports fans with a personalize feed of sports content, including news update, tweets, videos, live scores, and statistics, as well as sharing abilities and group chats. It has also netted $1 million in finding from angel investors, bringing its total to $2 million.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The San Francisco Giants won the pennant last night and there was celebrating in the streets on San Francisco. Of course I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give a shout out to their victory, even though I am not quite what one would call a “sports fan”, and make some far flung analogy between first, second, and third base, and first, second, and third rounds of financing. Let’s play Funding Daily ball!

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.

InfoArmy wants YOU to create business intelligence reports  

InfoArmy is a marketplace where researchers, analysts, or anyone with the requisite skill set can make extra money by writing competitive intelligence reports. The startup has raised $17.3 million in its second round of funding to “recruit a global army of researchers to build the largest and most comprehensive database of business intelligence reports in existence.” The $17.3 million Series B funding round came from Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, and adds to Fowler’s initial $2 million Series A. Read more on VentureBeat.

Skytree pulls in $1M to bring machine learning to the mainstream  

Skytree, a “big data” company that came out of stealth mode in February, has filed for additional funding from existing investors, Javelin Venture Partners.The startup has a tool to bring machine learning techniques to a mainstream market and has raised $1 million of a $2 million round, according to the security and exchange commission (SEC). The San Jose-based company raised its series A round from Javelin Venture Partners in February, 2012. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Spartoo’s boots are made for funding

Online shoe store Spartoo is stepping into €25 million. Known as the “Zappos of Europe,” Spartoo is a straightforward e-commerce site that sells affordable footwear. It sold 2 million pairs of shoes last year and is growing fast. This investment will go towards sustaining the rapid growth and entering new markets. Sofina, A Plus Finance, CM-CIC Capital Privé, Highland Partners, and Endeavour Vision contributed to this round, which brings Spartoo’ total financing to €45 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

Onetwotrip takes off into Russian startup space

Russian travel site Onetwotrip is stowing away another $16 million in investment. OneTwoTrip is an online airline ticket booking site where users can search for flights, see offers, look at ratings, and select the flight that is right for them. According to the tip from Russian tech blog Quintura, this round of funding came from Atomico, a venture capital firm started by a founder of Skype. Read more on VentureBeat.

PEX Card simplifies business expenses

Expense reports can be a hassle, and the unambiguously titled Prepaid Expense Card Solutions, Inc. has raised $3.2 million in its second round of funding. The company provides Visa expense cards to small and medium businesses, in conjunction with management tools for distributing cash to employees and monitoring their spending. The investment was led by existing investor iNovia Capital, with participation from Bluff Point Associates and Augury Capital. This brings the company’s total to almost $5 million. Read the press release.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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With high rates of unemployment, an emphasis on entrepreneurship as the rope to pull America out of its economic slump, and the impending Presidential election, jobs are a hot button topic. Entrepreneurs not only create jobs for themselves, they create jobs for other people. This could take the form of direct employment, or as we are seeing in today’s funding news, by creating platforms that leverage the power of a workforce looking for work. Whether it be a marketplace for skilled labor, a language learning service to boost a resume, or a tool to simplify opening an online store, startups and their investors are putting in their part to jumpstart American business.

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.

Gigwalk raises a fresh $6M, expands Bing Maps partnership

Temp work marketplace Gigwalk has raised another $6 million. Gigwalk pairs businesses with short term workers for a wide range of jobs, including mystery shopping, photography, and flier distribution. Launched last year, the company has raised $7.7 million to date, underscoring investor interest in the approach.Also increasing is interest in the company from Microsoft, which has enlisted Gigwalk workers to expand its Bing Maps data. Read more on VentureBeat.  

Crowdsource nabs $12.5M to bring scalable labor to the enterprise 

Crowdsource, a company that crowdfunds labor-intensive tasks like content creation and data-crunching, has raised $12.5 million in a round led by Highland Capital Partners. The St Louis-based startup’s typical workers are students, housewives, and people with flexible hours. They receive a decent hourly wage (usually between $15 and $30), cash bonuses, and opportunities for higher-paid tasks. Since it launched in June 2011, the startup has signed on 500,000 workers, who have completed over 25 million tasks. Read more on VentureBeat.

Clever makes teaching with technology as easy as 1,2,3

While new developments in education technology may enhance the learning process for students, it can be challenging for instructors to implement. To address this issue, Y Combinator startup Clever has raised $3 million to make this process easier. Clever’s technology integrates data held in Student Information Systems (SIS) into educational software. This means teachers can focus on teaching, instead of data integration.

A number of Y Combinator partners personally invested in this  round, as well as SV Angel, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitch Kapor, Ashton Kutcher, and a slew of high profile ed tech executives. Read more on VentureBeat.

Tictail makes Do-It-Yourself e-commerce easier than arts and crafts

Do-It-Yourself yourself is all the rage these days, as I unpleasantly experienced when I smothered my hands in hot glue in an attempt to craft Japanese style lateens for my patio. However certain types of DIY endeavors are far more practical, like those run on Tictail. Tictail offers an e-commerce platform where retailers can set up their own online stores.

Balderton Capital has given the Sewdish company €1.2 million in seed funding to continue expanding its roster of features, tools, and services. Since launching in about six months ago, Tictail powers more than 5000 stores. Its primary markets are in Europe, and this investment will help fuel UK expansion. Read the press release. 

Lithium Technologies gets $5.6 power shot to buy Social Dynamx
Lithium Technologies has raised an additional $5.6 million to power a “business combination transaction,” such as a merger, acquisition or exchange. Although unconfirmed, this money is likely connected to the October 9th announcement that Lithium acquired Social Dynamx.

Lithium helps brands build social networks that can be used to drive sales and marketing, inform product development, and improve customer service. It closed $53.4 million in its fourth round of financing in January. This recent offering lists investors from Shasta Ventures, Emergence, Benchmark and New Enterprise Associates. These firms all participated in the Series D, as did SAP Ventures, DAG Ventures, Greenspring Associates, and Tenaya Capital. Read more on VentureBeat.

Language-learning tool Busuu gains $5M and a boardmember from LastMinute.com

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. The series A round was led by PROfounders Capital with participation from angel investors. Read more on VentureBeat. 

$20 million is quite a hill of beans, and it’s an especially large hill for a coffee chain with 11 locations. But that’s just what Blue Bottle Coffee is sitting on top of right now.

Blue Bottle is a high-quality purveyor of coffee that roasts its beans in small batches using vintage roasting machines, packs them in compostable bags, and sells them within 48 hours of roasting. Like other quality, “slow coffee” shops that have sprung up in the past few years, such as Ritual Roasters and Philz, Blue Bottle’s usual method of preparation is the pour-over: What your dad probably called “drip” coffee, except this is done with great care, one cup at a time, by a specially-trained barista.

The coffee is delicious, and while pricey, it doesn’t seem too expensive for those already softened up by several decades of buying brews at national chains: $2.50 per cup or so.

Perhaps thanks to that high sticker price, Blue Bottle is a surprisingly big business for a coffee chain with seven San Francisco Locations and four in New York. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that the company pulled in $15 to $20 million in revenue last year. Even more attractive to the venture capitalists who are investing in the coffee business is the fact that its revenues have grown by 50 percent every year since the company was founded.

Still, it’s hard to imagine what a coffee chain with seven San Francisco locations, four in New York, and a dedication to craft-roasting beans needs with $20 million. Expansion? A Blue Bottle in every mall? Its own 3-D iPad app?

The fund raise is disclosed in an SEC filing that appeared today. True Ventures led the round, according to Tony Conrad, a venture partner at the VC firm.

Blue Bottle is based in Oakland, Calif. and employs about 200 people in San Francisco and New York.

Corrected 10/17: True Ventures led the funding round, not Index Ventures.

Many of us loves boobs. There is certainly no shortage of boobs online, but they are often used for a good cause. Fortunately, the Avon Foundation is using the Internet to save them.

The Avon Foundation for Women is a major supporter of breast cancer and has distributed more than $860 million to programs around the world that support both research and access to care. A major component of its fundraising efforts are the Avon Walks, two-day, 39-mile walkathons that take place around the country.

These events bring together thousands of women and their supporters and raise millions of dollars. This past weekend at the walk in Santa Barbara, 1,700 participants collectively brought in $4.7 million. The only pre-requisite for signing up, aside from a dedication to the cause, is walkers must raise a minimum of $1,800.

For many, the financial challenge is more daunting than the walk itself.

“One of the barriers for people to participate is the worry that they can’t raise the money, especially for people who have never fundraised before,” said program director Eloise Caggiano. “By making it super-easy for them to do the fundraising using our website, apps, and social media, we can alleviate some of their fears. We do anything we can do break down these obstacles.”

The foundation has come a long way in the past couple years with regard to social media. Based on demand from consumers and participants, the organization began using technology to engage more with their community. Walkers can easily register online or from their smart phone. The Avon Walk application for the iPhone enables fundraising on the go. People can also use these tools track their fundraising progress, reach out to donors, and send “thank you” messages.

Avon has also partnered with Runtastic to create a pedometer app that monitors steps, distance, and speed during preparatory walks. People in training can post progress updates on their social networks, conveniently next to a “Donate Now” button. 

A huge number of participants use their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts as part of their individual fundraising efforts. The Avon Walk Facebook page itself has 50,000 fans and is full of shared stories, photos, and videos to digitally communicate the experience of the walk. Caggiano said the capability to see in advance what the walk is like is comforting to women who are nervous and is also encouraging for those on the fence about signing up.

“The more we can get the word out there, the better,” she said. “Keeping up with the times is an important element in that. If we keep printing out brochures and putting them in snail mail when everyone else is online, then we aren’t being very smart. We want as many people to know about the good work as possible, and for people to feel comfortable with who we are and what we do.”

The Avon Foundation also uses their enhanced online and mobile presence to keep supporters in the loop about there their money is actually going. Avon provides donations to a variety of causes, and a feature on the site shares the real-world impact of the dollars.

Michael Spatz turned his social media power into $11,000. Spatz lost his mother to breast cancer and knew multiple friends who also struggled with the disease. He felt helpless and wanted to take action, so he signed up for the Avon Walk.

“As a guy, I don’t know what is going on inside a woman’s body,” he said. “As you get older, things start to happen to the people you love and care about. It is a harsh reality. This is what I was able to do, and I did it all to social media, emailing and Twitter.”

Spatz began his fundraising efforts online. He created T-shirts with cute slogans on them like “Viva La Boobies” and posted to his Facebook that anyone who contributed $20 would get a free shirt. His efforts spiraled. Soon, he had hundreds of requests for T-shirts coming in and people sending thousands of dollars in checks. He completed his fundraising within a month.

The walks are examples of events where the journey is just as significant as the destination. People spend months fundraising, training, and raising awareness their efforts and this pervasive disease. While technology is useful for fundraising, one of its most powerful effects has been the capability to connect women all over the country, before, during, and after the events.

Participants are able to reach out to a wider audience, including people from around the world or those they have lost touch with. On platforms like MyBreastCancerTeam, women facing the disease can find a protected, nurturing, safe support network. The internet offers opportunities, not only to raise money but to also meaningfully rally around a cause in an online environment.

In this case, the cause is to Save the Ta-Tas!

1) The Investor Deck

Put together a concise investor deck that is no longer than 15 slides. Don’t overstuff slides with small details. Just make sure to get the high-level point across and support it with a few pieces of data. Get a LOT of feedback on your investor deck from friends, advisors, and investors. Make sure it’s perfectly formatted and that you know backup details for every single number in your presentation. If you are pre-launch, make sure you conduct experiments so you have some data to back up your hypothesis. Investors will be impressed that you found cheap, clever ways to test the concept.

2) Terms and Structure of the Deal

Decide how much money you need to raise. Put together a detailed monthly model in Excel and project your cash burn as best you can. Raise enough money to hit meaningful milestones. For my company, the seed round milestones were to take the technology risk off the table by moving from a virtual fitting prototype to a web-based product and to sell 1,000 pairs of glasses. We are behind my initial timeline but, luckily, I heeded the good advice to raise more than you think you need. We are on track to hit our milestones with our existing capital, which sets us up nicely to do a Series A.

I have a few friends who tried to reduce the amount they needed to raise by paying themselves and/or employees only with equity. Of course, equity is a major motivator in a startup, but not having a paycheck can add undue stress to an already stressful situation. Obviously, you’ll be making much less than you would have had you joined a large corporation, but at least make sure you can support your basic life needs. It will help prevent burnout.

When you present your “Ask” slide, tell them how much you are raising, but don’t tell them the valuation. That’s a highly negotiated term that is usually set by an investor. As a rule of thumb, venture capital firms typically want between 25% and 35% of your equity for a multimillion-dollar investment. And although it’s illogical and many investors will deny it, the valuation is oftentimes just 3x the money you are asking to raise. Another reason to raise a little more than you thought! Not surprisingly, valuations higher than this generality are usually directly correlated with the competitiveness of the process. Try to get several investors interested to improve your economics. Also, many investors will tell you they are interested but will sit back for someone else to set the price. It can be a tricky dance to get the first investor to set the valuation.

3) Finding the Right Investor

Once your pitch deck is ready and you know how much you need to raise, do your homework to find the right angel investor or venture capital firm for you. Make sure your investment stage and business model are a good fit for them. For example, most firms invest in “consumer Internet,” but dig a little deeper and see if that firm likes two-sided marketplaces, gaming, private label ecommerce, aggregator ecommerce, etc. Doing your homework on the firms will help you narrow the list and save you (and the investors) lots of precious time.

Don’t ignore the local investors. Many people are mistaken that you need to be in Silicon Valley to raise money. There are great angels and VCs in nearly every major city across the country. Looking locally can be a good way to get your foot in the door.

4) How to Meet the Right Investor and Partner

Work your network to get a warm introduction. Admittedly, attending Stanford Business School opened a lot of doors for fundraising because there are a number of VC firms with ties to Stanford. My current VC investor was a judge at a Stanford business plan competition, and one of my professors is an angel investor. Many of my classmates made introductions or recommendations to firms. Reaching out cold to VCs through their websites often doesn’t get you a response. That said, getting introductions is possible through incubators, business plan competitions, and advisors. Find the people you would want on your advisory board and reach out to them for mentorship. Work your LinkedIn network to find and connect with great people.

Once you find the right firm, make sure you find the right partner within that firm. Just like hiring, make sure the partner is a good fit and can add tangible value to your business. It doesn’t need to be the partner you first got introduced to at the firm, so don’t be shy about asking to meet other partners within the firm. Make sure you pick someone who is both valuable to you and an enthusiastic supporter so you have a champion within the venture firm.

5) The Process

If you are raising venture money, your first meeting will likely be with one representative. If that goes well, you can expect to get called back to meet with 2-3 partners. If that goes well, you will be called back in to do a partner-wide meeting, where they will make the final investment decision. It can be a few weeks between meetings, which is why fundraising requires patience. You’ll need to spend time answering due diligence questions between meetings too, so be ready for that.

Fundraising can definitely be a challenge, but do your homework, trust your gut, and use the feedback and connections you make along the way to improve your business.

Good luck!

Kate Endress is a private equity investor turned entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer. After graduating from Stanford Business School in 2011, Kate cofounded Ditto.com, an ecommerce site selling designer prescription glasses that features new “try-on” technology.

[Top image credit: Robert Kneschke/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Say hello to the future of political fundraising.

Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and U.S. Cellular have all agreed to allow their subscribers to make campaign donations by text, signaling the beginning of a whole new way for political candidates to raise money from their supporters.

Absent from the agreement was AT&T, though Reuters reports that campaign officials for President Barack Obama expect to reach an agreement with the carrier soon.

The deal, which was supposed to launch in June, was held up when carriers said they wanted legal protections in the event of fraudulent donations. A court case last week gave them that protection with the assurance that it would be campaigns, not carriers, who will be responsible for the donations they receive.

We speculated that carrier hesitation to adopt campaign donations by text would mean that the measures would come too late for use in this fall’s election. Fortunately for the presidential candidates, that didn’t end up being the case.

But the carriers aren’t supporting the texting plan out of kindness: They get a cut out of every donation made via their services, which could turn out to be a pretty lucrative arrangement if things go right.

Obama’s campaign has been the biggest supporter of donation texting, which will allow it to receive donations from his young, tech-savvy cadre of supporters.

Photo: Flickr/Nick Knupffer

The crowdfunding platform brings together accredited investors with promising startups looking to raise money. Investors can look at profiles of the featured companies and if interested, make small equity investments directly on the site.

All of the smaller checks are aggregated into one entity and given to the startup. By pooling together smaller investments, Funders Club essentially sets up a micro fund for each startup. This eliminates concerns that crowdfunding for startups could lead to an over-crowded cap table.

This model makes it easier for aspiring investors to find and invest in startups. They can make multiple small investments to diversify their portfolios. Smaller investors can also save time and money because Funders Club provides due diligence and contracts for them. It also gives investors who do not have access to startups the ability to form relationships. People from all over the world have signed up.

Since launching about a month ago, Funders Club has raised over $1.3 million on the site, including fully funding itself.

Read more on VentureBeat. 

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Funders Club is a platform where accredited investors can access an inventory of vetted, early-stage companies. The startups publish comprehensive profiles on the site, along with a fundraising goal. Members have the opportunity to make small, equity investments in companies that appeal to them.

The Funders Club website resembles other fundraising platforms, like crowdfunding site Kickstarter or microloan portal Kiva. However, Funders Club has an important difference. While on Kickstarter, you’re making a donation, and on Kiva, the transactions are loans. On Funders Club, you’re making an investment in exchange for a share of the company.

Essentially, Funders Club sets up an individual venture capital fund for each startup. Once the goal is reached, the money is bundled together and given to the company with Funders Club listed as the shareholder. If and when a liquidation event occurs, Funders Club will take the returns and distribute them to the investors in the fund.

By aggregating smaller checks into one and representing all the contributors as one entity, Funders Club eliminates one of the concerns with equity-based crowdfunding: an over-crowded capitalization table.

Generally, angel investors and venture firms do not make large numbers of small investments. The process of finding and meeting with startups is time-consuming, as is dealing with the paperwork. Furthermore, smaller investments do not generally offer desirable terms, so while investors may want to diversify their portfolios, the reality of doing so may not seem worthwhile.

Entrepreneur Sheel Mohnot made his first ever angel investment on Funders Club. After his startup was acquired by Groupon, Mohnot found himself in a financial position to give money to early-stage companies but without the bandwidth to do so.

“I’ve been wanting to do angel investing in the past, but there is a lot of pain involved,” he said.  “Sourcing deals is frustrating as an individual and the paperwork can be daunting. I don’t have the time or money to do a ton of due diligence. Funders Club enables me to do something I have always wanted to do. Literally in 10 minutes, I can make an investment. It is democratizing angel rounds.”

By assuming the responsibility of bringing companies onto the platform and building a full infrastructure, complete with legal documents, payment processing, and communication tools, Funders Club makes this process simpler.

On the other side, participating entrepreneurs are connected to a wide network of investors. They can find venture capital money without having to make pitch after pitch, take meeting after meeting, and anxiously await commitments.

Right now, five startups are on the platform, all currently participating in Y Combinator. Funders Club itself was the first company to achieve its goal, with almost $520,000 committed through the site. Video advertising site Virool has also surpassed its goal, with $287, 301 in the bank and climbing.

Three other companies are still open for investment. With Y Combinator’s Demo Day happening in under a week, traditionally followed by a barrage of investor interest, Funder’s Club provides an advance opportunity for those who won’t be present at the exclusive event to put in their 2 cents (or 2,000. or 200,000).

In the few weeks since the site went live, investors from 25 different countries have signed up. It seems people from around the world are fighting for a piece of the tech startup pie.

Already more than 1,000 members are on the site with a combined net worth of over a billion dollars. In order to become a member, investors must confirm that their income surpasses $200,000 a year or that they have a net worth over $1 million. Investments can be as small as $1,000.

The day after Demo Day is the day the SEC will pass a ruling on the JOBS Act. Although the JOBS Act was signed into law on April 5, the SEC still needs to rule on some of the regulatory implications. The SEC’s approval, if it comes, will remove some of the restrictions placed on companies who are fundraising, making it easier for them to solicit investment.

I spoke with Steve Graham, a mergers and acquisitions and IPO lawyer at Fenwick & West LLP about the prohibition against general solicitation.

“Right now private companies cannot solicit investment publicly,” he said. “They have to show a prior connection to their investors. When the SEC implements the new rules, small entrepreneurs will be able to go ahead and solicit publicly.”

While it is against the law for a company to publicly announce that it is fundraising, exactly what constitutes “public” is vague, and it seems every lawyer, entrepreneur, policymaker, and venture capitalist has their own opinion.

Funders Club is a private network with an accreditation wall, and the names of the companies raising on the site are not public information. According to the site, the JOBS Act legislation does not actually impact its activities at all, since it only targets accredited investors and uses the same structure as angels groups or VC funds.

In essence, it is putting an offline process that has been legal for decades online.

There is clearly a great deal of excitement on both the investor and the entrepreneur sides for the floodgates of equity-based crowdfunding and general solicitation to open. Even though Funders Club does not engage in either of these activities, it will be ahead of the curve as the possibilities continue to unfold.

For now, the team is content to be “changing the way the world fundraises and invests,” one accredited investor at a time.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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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.

GoodData racks up $25 million in a third round of funding for its big data analytics service

GoodData offers operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools in a single platform. Since the company was founded, over 6,000 customers  have adopted GoodData, and the company has seen dramatic revenue growth of 500% year over year.

The round was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners. The company received $15 million in 2011 and has raised $53.5 million in total investment. Read more on VentureBeat. 

I just wanna’ TicketFly (put your arms around me, VCs)

Online ticketing website Ticketfly today announced raising $22 million in the startup’s third round of institutional funding. Ticketfly offers its customers (promoters and event venues) ticket-selling microsites and online marketing tools. It has around 300 affiliate partners and has experienced dramatic growth during 2012.

The new money comes from SAP Ventures, which led the round. Northgate Capital, Cross Creek Capital, and second-round lead investor Mohr Davidow Ventures also participated. With $15 million in previous rounds, this brings Ticketfly’s total VC bill to $37 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

Meteor shoots across the Silicon Valley sky with $11.2M

Meteor Development Group has pulled in $11.2 million in funding to make building client-side web apps super easy and super fast. This is the group’s first institutional funding round. Meteor is open-sourced (under the MIT license) and JavaScript-centric. Meteor apps run in the browser rather than on a web server, and they grab data from cloud services as they run. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Matrix Partners and a few others. Read more on VentureBeat.

NEA hoards the world’s money, raises fund larger than 2x the population of China

New Enterprise Associates has raised one of the largest venture capital funds ever with the closing of its $2.6 billion fund. The raise of the firm’s 14th fund brings NEA’s total committed capital to more than $13 billion. This is the third consecutive time NEA has raised more than $2.5 billion for a single fund. Read more in VentureBeat.

Backblaze at long last accepts $5M in venture capital fuel

Storage startup wild child Backblaze rebelled against itself today and announced it has raised $5 million in funding. Backblaze is an extremely easy-to-use, cheap storage service that keeps data safe by continuously and automatically backing it up to the cloud.

The company notoriously bootstrapped for years in an effort to fuel innovation and efficiency. Despite being profitable, Backblaze has pivoted its no-venture-capital policy to pursue its goal of making unlimited backup available to all PCs and Macs. The investment came from British firm TMT Investments and will be given in two equal distributions. Read more on VentureBeat.

Revinate takes $14.5M to empower the hospitality industry against angry social media attacks

Revinate is doing something interesting for the hospitality industry: it’s gathering up reviews from all over the web — Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, places where we might not even know we’re writing a “review” — and letting hoteliers and retaurateurs sort and analyze the information in really useful ways.

The startup just took a great big Series A of $14.5 million from Benchmark Capital, which led the round, and relatively new VC firm Formation 8. The funding will be used to bring Revinate to more chains, corporate groups, hotels, and restaurants around the world. The company previously reported a $500,000 seed or angel round to the SEC; this brings the startup’s total venture capital fundraising to $15 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

GiveForward raises $2M to pay for kidneys, chemo, and Klonopin

Medical fundraising platform GiveForward closed $2 million in investment for its unique application of the crowdfunding craze. It’s like Kickstarter for medical expenses. People can use the site to seek money for friends or loved ones who have to pay out of pocket for expensive procedures or treatments. The company has 3,000+ active fundraisers on the site and is currently working with 200 health organizations and hospitals across the country to help families in times of need. The round was led by Founder Collective and First Round Capital.

GiveForward graduated from Chicago’s Excelerate Labs in 2010 and has been striving ever since to help the 72 million Americans who take on medical debt every year. Read the press release.

EcoScraps makes millions by selling stores their own garbage

Scrappy startup EcoScraps is doing its part to save the earth. The company announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in its first round of funding, which will enable the team to expand operations into more stores and regions across the United States. The concept behind EcoScraps is simple: The company takes leftover food from retail stores, turns it into compost, and sells it. The money came from KickStart Seed Fund, DBL Investors, and Peterson Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat.

Peter Thiel puts $1.2M ‘on the barbie’ for ScriptRock 

Australian enterprise software provider ScriptRock today announced that Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technology investor Peter Thiel has lead the startup’s seed investment round of $1.2M. This is Thiel’s first investment in an Australian company.

ScriptRock’s technology allows companies to test complicated system configurations, (basically test how the applications are working) in an easier way. The investment will be used to grow the team and establish a US presence. It represents yet another example of venture capitalists looking beyond US borders for investment opportunities and the potential of technology markets emerging abroad. Read the press release.

Backblaze is an extremely easy-to-use, cheap storage service that keeps data safe by continuously and automatically backing it up to the cloud. Founder Gleb Budman shook up Silicon Valley by sharing the secrets behind the company’s technology in 2009 and again in 2011. The company stores nearly 40,000,000 GB of data and backs up 100,000,000 files per day. It makes money by charging users a small monthly or annual fee for the service.

The revenue is apparently not enough to quickly achieve Budman’s ultimate goals and thus he set out to fundraising. He received the $5 million from British firm TMT Investments. The money will be given in two equal distributions. Read the full story (including a trip to Panama) on the Backblaze blog.

Backblaze was founded in 2007 and is based in San Mateo, Calif.

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.

Tintri raises $25M for trippy-sounding infrastructure: virtualized flash storage

Tintri, a startup that produces flash storage appliances for virtual machines, announced today that it’s closed an oversubscribed $25 million round of funding. Tintri compresses information using solid state disks, rather than bulky hard drives, and makes use of flash technology so data storage is more compact and cost-effective.

This is the company’s fourth funding round. It was led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investors NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated, bringing the company’s total capital raised to over $60 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

Apigee raises another $20M to expand its powerful API platform

API management startup Apigee has raised $20 million in its fifth round of funding to help it expand into new markets, the company announced today. More than 100 billion API calls per month run through Apigee’s platform. Notable Apigee clients include Walgreens, Netflix, eBay, Pearson, Gilt Groupe, Bechtel, and Getty Images. The new round of funding was led by Focus Ventures, with participation by prior investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, and Third Point Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat.

StackSocial grabs $800K to bring stores to tech publications

Startup StackSocial has raised $800,000 to help take its tech deals platform public, the company announced today. StackSocial basically provides a white-label daily deals-like store for news publications to place within their website.

StackSocial is part of the first batch of companies from the LA-based startup accelerator Amplify. The new seed fund includes investments from 500 Startups, Tim Draper, Paige Craig, Siemer Ventures, EchoVC Partners, and others. Along with the funding news, StackSocial also announced partnerships to bring its platform to a number of other tech sites, such as TechRadar, MacLife, Maximum PC, and GamesRadar. Read more on VentureBeat.

Xamarin takes $12M to solve the mobile developer shortage

In order to address the mobile developer shortage of 2012, investors threw $12 million at Xamarin, the company that houses Mono, a project that allows for cross-platform development between multiple operating systems and code bases. Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Floodgate all contributed to the effort to solve this crisis. This is Xamarin’s first institutional round of funding. Read more on VentureBeat.

Nextdoor takes $18.6M to strengthen communities across America

Nextdoor, a private social network for the neighborhood, announced today that it has raised $18.6 million in funding. The site provides a trusted and protected online space for neighbors to engage with each other, with the overarching goal of making communities across America safer and stronger.

This recent round of funding is the first explicitly invested for Nextdoor and was led by Benchmark Capital as well as DAG Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Shasta Ventures.

The money will be used to scale the network, which Nextdoor founder Nirav Tolia believes should (and will) be present in every one of the 20,000 communities across the US. Read more on VentureBeat.

Angel investor floats down from above (Canada) to bestow $15M on entrepreneurs  

Version One Ventures, the micro-VC fund spearheaded by angel investor Boris Wertz, established a new $15 million pool to provide seed and first round financing for startups. Wertz will use the capital to make $250K and $500K investments in consumer Internet, e-commerce, software-as-a-service, and mobile companies across America.

Version One began after Wertz met with notable success as an angel investor, making over 35 investments, including six exits and acquisitions by big players like Google, Twitter, Salesforce, and Groupon. This recent fundraising was led by former President and COO of Yahoo Jeff Mallett and has already gone to support five companies:  Top Hat Monocle (interactive learning platform), Julep (multi-channel beauty brand), Jobber (business management software for contractors), Instacanv.as (Instagram artist marketplace) and Sunnytrail (social intelligence platform). Read the press release.

Mitre Media packs $8.6M in heat, shows off significant assets

Mitre Media, a provider of financial content and tools for well-endowed investors (I am referring to net worth — get your mind out of the gutter) raised $8.6 million led by iNovia Capital. This financial media startup was founded by Tom Hendrickson, a former partner at Investopedia.com, and targets financial advisors and decision makers. As this segment of the population tends to have money under its belt (there you go again), Mitre Media has thousands of paying users who help bring in millions of dollars in revenue. In addition to raising capital, Mitre Media also announced its first two acquisitions: Dividend.com and ETFdb.com.

Chute reaches $2.7M rung on investment ladder

Chute, a startup that helps developers quickly and easily bring multimedia content into their apps, today sealed a $2.7 million funding deal led by Freestyle Capital with participation from Battery Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and a handful of corporations and individuals, including Salesforce.com, Klout co-founder Joe Fernandez.

The startup makes it simple for developers to get images into their apps with “a cloud-based backend for image uploading, processing, moderation, third-party API integrations, and user authentication,” all with a few lines of code. So far, the young company’s client base includes a wide range of big-name brands, from NBCNews.com and Lucky Magazine to Havaianas flip flops and House of Blues. Read more on VentureBeat.

Spent some time feelin’ inferior
standing in front of my mirror.
Combed my hair in a thousand ways
but I came out looking just the same.

For some of you, that feeling Sir Rod sang about is the same one that venture capitalists can cause you to feel. The name “venture capitalist” alone can send shivers down one’s spine, conjuring images of well-dressed men poring over company statistics and shooting holes in your vision.

Our company, EquipRent.com, has pitched to these guys many times this past year to raise capital. As we became more comfortable with pitching, what used to be an intimidating interview scenario slowly turned into a conversation, and we have learned a lot more about the scary men behind the table in the process.

The first thing we noticed was how short of an attention span these guys had. After five minutes of talking, three of them were already looking at their phones. They really didn’t care much for the story of how our company was founded, who a typical customer was, or even the pages of statistics that clearly showed why we were a great investment opportunity. Over time, we learned to keep our pitch concise, relevant, and full of engaging imagery … and pictures.

After much fine-tuning, it dawned on us that Rod was on to something: the best way to tell your story is through a picture. We creatively put together a colorful investment infographic, or “InvestFoGraphic,” on a handout. This completely complied with our goal of keeping our pitch concise, relevant, and exciting. Check out our capital-raising infographic.

Source: EquipRent

Detail of EquipRent’s capital-raising one-page infographic (click for full version)

The previous handout that we had given them (a typical 1-page executive summary) was heavy on words explaining in great detail what our company did and how successful we had been. Our new handout was riddled with bold and exciting claims about our company and our industry. The underlying theory behind using the infographic was to hook them first, and then be ready to talk business once they were paying attention.

One of the most necessary considerations when pitching a venture capitalist firm is to view the pitch from their point of view. What makes a great investment? What specific qualities do investors look for in a presentation?

We found that investors love disruptions and hate distractions. They love getting first dibs at untapped potential in huge markets. So, we focused our pitch from this angle. Instead of our old tagline “leading market service for equipment rentals,” which was an accurate description of our company, we decided to go with “disrupting the $28B market for construction equipment rental.”

The infographic we handed out contained VC-friendly buzzwords like “scalable model” and “fast, profitable growth.” Each of these claims was accompanied by a picture, since pictures are much more likely to stick in someone’s head than a paragraph of big words. Long, wordy paragraphs are distractions. There is a time and place to get down to the nitty-gritty and go over the numbers, but that is is not in your first encounter with a potential investor.

The reaction to our new infographic one-pager was very positive. “I liked it…I can quickly see what is different about this company than reading a typical one-page executive summary,” one investor said.

“I have never seen anyone use an infographic for investor purposes before,  other than to distinguish market trends,” another one said.

“It sets you apart…it’s like a cool and different resume,” said another one.

The exciting news is that we are now in final discussions with several investor groups to close our first round (series A) funding. We know the infographic wasn’t the main reason for getting to this final phase, but we do know that differentiating yourself makes you more memorable and shows investors you and your company plan on being different.

Remember the advice that the great Mr. Stewart gave years ago:

Every picture tells a story, don’t it!

Roberto Guerrieri is the chief executive of  EquipRent.com. This is his fourth startup. Previously he was the founder and chief marketing officer of Incentive Logic, a loyalty platform for online market research panels. He has also worked for early-stage companies in mobile marketing, lead generation, and in consumer marketing for Apple  and Hewlett-Packard.

Image: Album cover for Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”

First Round Capital has just finished raising its fourth fund, a $135 million chunk of change that will keep the firm running just as it’s been running for the past few years.

In a blog post confirming the fundraising, First Round managing director Josh Kopelman writes that the fund, the investors, the firm’s team, and its strategy will all stay exactly the same.

“We are thrilled that our investor base remains the same,” the VC wrote. “Every single one of our existing institutional Limited Partners has recommitted to our new fund — and we are honored and thankful for their continued support.”

While all these things remain the same, there will be a couple small changes at First Round: Kent Goldman and Phin Barnes will become the firm’s newest partners. Saying that both investors have done First Round proud so far, Kopelman explains, “They’ve helped us expand our footprint in New York and San Francisco, introducing First Round to many talented entrepreneurs and supporting our portfolio CEOs as board members and trusted advisors.”

First Round’s portfolio includes the ever-growing Fab.com, the uber-popular Uber, the trendy ModCloth, and a host of other revenue monsters, especially online marketplaces (think One Kings Lane and Birchbox, also First Round companies).

First Round Capital was founded in 2004. Its managing partners include Kopelman, Chris Fralic, Rob Hayes, and Howard Morgan (all pictured above). The company is based in Philadelphia with a strong presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a total portfolio consisting of more than 70 companies, First Round is ranked the third-largest U.S. investment firm by number of deals, and enjoys a particularly good reputation among entrepreneurs in VentureBeat’s own sphere of acquaintance.

First Round Capital, an early stage firm with a ton of Silicon Valley clout, has just revealed to the SEC it’s raising a new $135 million fund.

In its most recent SEC filing, submitted with Monday’s date, First Round noted this would be the firm’s fourth fund.

Previously, First Round Capital gathered $126 million for its third fund in late 2010.

Companies currently in the First Round portfolio are Fab.com, a revenue/growth monster, cab-service-alternative Uber, successful vintage-ish retail outlet ModCloth, L.A.-based Dog Vacay, and a host of other up-and-comers, particularly in the world of online marketplaces (think One Kings Lane and Birchbox, also First Round companies).

To get an even better idea of what a “First Round company” looks like, check out the firm’s annual spoof-tastic holiday video, which shows off the creme-de-la-creme of First Round’s investments.

First Round Capital was founded in 2004. Its managing partners include Josh Kopelman, Chris Fralic, Rob Hayes, and Howard Morgan (all pictured). The company is based in Philadelphia with a strong presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a total portfolio consisting of more than 70 companies, First Round is ranked the third-largest U.S. investment firm by number of deals.