VentureBeat

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Even though a recession is looming (and venture investment has slowed) not everyone is doing badly. In fact, the tough times may benefit some companies, such as electronic procurement startup Coupa Software, which just raised $6 million in a second round of funding.

Foster City, Calif.-based Coupa may be one of the few companies that actually does better in the tough economic times ahead — as businesses tighten their belts, Coupa’s services will become even more useful. The startup’s software-as-a-service creates a “one stop shop” where employees can search for and purchase supplies. By centralizing and managing the procurement process, Coupa helps companies root out waste.

Battery Ventures led the round, and senior associate Brian O’Malley told VentureWire that his firm likes Coupa because its services would still be in demand during a possible recession. BlueRun Ventures also participated.

Coupa previously raised $1.5 million, which we covered here. (The amount was undisclosed at the time.)

Update: I just finished an interview with O’Malley, who elaborated on why he thinks Coupa is a good investment. And yes, the fact that it’s “almost counter-cyclical” — i.e., that it might do even better during a downturn — is a big factor. That’s something Battery’s investors have to think about when considering any new funding, or when they’re evaluating companies in the firm’s portfolio, O’Malley says. (With that same logic, Battery has been taking a close look at startups in the mortgage market, particularly those that can help homeowners refinance. The firm has yet to make any investments in this area, however.)

And Coupa really does save companies money, he says. For example, it serves biotech firms that have to make several expensive overnight shipments each day. With Coupa those companies can better manage the ordering process, and therefore consolidate each of those shipments into a single daily order.

There are some big players in this field, but that’s exactly what creates an opening for Coupa. Companies like Ariba only serve large customers, because installing their systems is expensive and difficult. Coupa, on the other hand, is much cheaper and easier to set-up — in part because it’s built on Ruby on Rails and Amazon web services — so it can serve companies with between 100 and 5,000 employees.

“There’s been so much built on the consumer shopping side, but there’s a big void on the business side,” O’Malley says.

Zivity, the start-up featuring semi and fully nude women in different poses, has a simple model: Make a social network similar to Facebook or MySpace, but with two separate user bases — one being subscription-paying members, and the other being models and photographers who post (artistically) nude photo-sets on the site.

Zivity has proven itself something of an anomaly by raising $8 million to date from some well known venture firms. The first million came last year, and $7 million was just added on by Bluerun Ventures and Founders Fund.

Investors normally shy away from anything that might be labeled porn, mainly because everyone else in the world also shies away from it. Advertisers, especially, tend to avoid even slightly controversial sites. Hence the subscription model, which is pretty much standard for the industry. With this investment, San Francisco’s Founders Fund continues to assert its maverick status among firms.

However, it was John Malloy (left), of the Menlo Park, Calif. office of global venture firm BlueRun venturesFusionOne, who took the risk of being quoted in the funding announcement press release. Malloy, who previously backed more IT-focused companies like Riya, Slide and Varoli, was quoted as saying: “Zivity, much like Slide and PayPal before it, has a driven and talented team focused on challenging the status quo and creating a large new market opportunity.” Founders Fund Luke Nosek also joins the company’s board.

Aside from the nudity, Zivity is keen on selling itself as a social network, not as a porn site. When I talked to him, co-founder Scott Banister — who previously co-founded the decidedly non-sexy Ironport Systems and helped sell it for $830 million last year — repeatedly referred to MySpace’s policy of removing any sort of nudity from its site.

“If the MySpace anti-nudity team took a month off, they’d come back and there would be nudity everywhere. In the world we live in now, people want to be famous, they want to be creative,” he said. He’s hoping they want money, too — Zivity will share 40 percent of all its revenue with the models and photographers who post up sets, based on votes given out by members.

The site will also feature blogging and videos. There’s no requirement for nudity, but it’s obviously going to be the big selling point for members to shell out $10 a month.

I agree with Banister that there’s no point in being a prude. If nudity makes for a good business model, then go for it. On the other hand, the Internet is filled with porn. It’s not hard to be skeptical about Zivity. Why would attractive women spread around nude (or even half-clothed) photos of themselves on a social network with several hundred thousand or even over a million members — and where will all those paying members come from in the first place?

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Unlike a site like SuicideGirls (which Banister says is just a niche site), that pays both models and photographers up-front, models will have to wait for money to accumulate from paying members. On the other hand, members won’t start paying unless there’s plenty of content.

And there is still social stigma attached to being a member of a site like Zivity, even if it looks more like Web 2.0 than Penthouse. It’s worth noting that PlayBoy has dealt with some of the same respectability issues. For more on that, read a recent interview on Freakonomics with its editorial director, Chris Napolitano.

Zivity will begin charging its 1,000+ beta members within the next three months, so we’ll soon see whether it can work. Banister says there are about 75 models with sets up on the site so far (and from a quick glance, some of them are pretty good-looking). The company, which is based in San Francisco, will remain in an invitation-only beta until early 2009.

Updated

Widget-maker Slide has raised nearly $50 million at a $550 million valuation from two private equity funds, Fidelity and T-Rowe Price, according to the New York Times, with the two firms buying a total of around a nine percent stake in the company.

San Francisco-based Slide has more than 144 million users of its widgets on Myspace and other social networks, and another more than 50 million total (not necessarily active) users of its Facebook applications, according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who first reported that a large round was in the works earlier today.

However, Slide hasn’t, as far as I know, publicly stated significant revenue streams — as is the case with many other Myspace widget and Facebook application companies. A large funding round could mean that the company has proven to investors that it can monetize.

On the other hand, investors may just be impressed with the number of eyeballs Slide has attracted. The company’s Top Friends Facebook application, which lets you designate and display your favorite Facebook friends on your profile page, has 2,483,760 daily active users. Its FunWall application, which replaces Facebook’s “Wall” of messages from your friends on your profile with its own features, such as video-sharing, has 2,762,039 daily active users.

Note: Facebook applications give third-party developers direct access to user data, such as your list of Facebook friends, which companies like Slide can use to make more compelling applications, like Top Friends.

Slide sees itself as a “distributed media company,” relying on its widgets and applications to create new forms of entertainment for social network users. For more, see my interview with chief executive Max Levchin from last June. Its latest efforts include involvement in Open Social (our coverage), a Google-led effort that’s in development, that intends to create a standard means of implementing social networking applications on Facebook rival sites, including Myspace.

Main competitors to Slide include RockYou, which also has popular Facebook applications as well as widgets on other social networks. RockYou claims to have passed Slide as the most popular Facebook app company, as I wrote last month, although it’s not clear if that’s still the case. In late August, Slide claimed the number one spot.

Slide would use the money to expand as well as buy other companies, Swisher says, and has hired investment bank Allen & Co. to help raise the round (the bank, among other things, is also helping Digg shop itself around).

Slide’s previous valuation is based on the approximately $20 million that it raised in 2006 from Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund (our coverage).

Slide, the San Francisco start-up that lets you create slide shows from your photos or other content, has raised a large third round of funding from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund.

The amount remains undisclosed, but we’ve heard it is more than the company got for its second round, which was $8 million. That gives the company near or north of $20 million in total funding, putting it comfortably on the list of best-funded Web 2.0 companies in Silicon Valley — and apparently making it the biggest of any of the latest generations of photo-related sites.

The site lets you push slideshows, onto your blog for example, or to share your favorite photos with friends and family. But it also lets you pull them, accepting a slideshow of images fed from your friends or from your favorite Web sites. It is the latter feature, where people might pull slideshows of products from their favorite retailers, for example, where Slide sees a business model. Slide also lets eBay sellers feature their wares in slideshows. It’s unclear whether Slide has made progress in making money.

Here is our previous story about Slide.

Levchin (pictured above) said he hit it off with Vinod Khosla, the well-known venture capitalist who runs Khosla Ventures. Khosla grasped Levchin’s vision for slides more quickly than others, Levchin said.

The funding also included previous investors, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.