VentureBeat

Update: Imagekind has confirmed the purchase.

Imagekind, an online marketplace for original and reprinted artwork, has been bought by online t-shirt and gift seller CafePress, a reliable source tells us, with rival Zazzle losing out on the deal. We hear the acquisition price may have been between $15 million and $20 million, although we’re still looking for confirmation on the amount.

While these days there are seemingly countless sites that let you design and sell your own t-shirts online, CafePress and Zazzle both raised venture rounds years ago and seem to have gained market leadership. Both have also gone beyond t-shirts, looking to get their respective users doing things like buying and selling gifts. Meanwhile, other companies, specifically handmade-goods site Etsy, have also been growing and raising venture funding.

So, the purchase of art-focused Imagekind (sample photo, above) is a classy way for San Mateo, Calif.-based CafePress to further distance itself from just being a t-shirts site (sample t-shirt, below) — and put itself more directly in competition for artists who want to sell their works and buyers who like nice stuff.

The purchase also suggests that it may be too late in the game for new startups to try to create their own t-shirt, art, and gift-selling online marketplaces.

Seattle-based Imagekind, which raised $2.6 million in February of 2007 from German publisher Holtzbrinck, venture firm Crosslink Capital, the Samwer brothers (who now invest via their own firm, European Founders Fund), and a number of angel investors, has in the past rejected a purchase offer from Amazon.com. It competes directly with Art.com, another art marketplace that has also been rumored to be trying to buy the company. During Imagekind’s last funding round, its rumored valuation was up to $7 million — so maybe the company is seeing solid growth and revenue, and maybe also the bidding war got particularly fierce.

[Photo by Imagekind artist James Howe, T-shirt by Flippin' Sweet]

Luxim, a Sunnyvale, Calif. company that boats it produces one of the most efficient light sources on the globe — 144 lumens per watt — or almost twice as efficient as other sources, has raised $21 million more in financing, we’ve learned.

The money comes from leading Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital, as well as Crosslink Capital and DAG Ventures.

Lighting currently consumes almost a quarter of the world’s generated power, generating over 700 million tons of carbon dioxide. More efficient lighting is needed to fight global warming, and Luxim is the latest Silicon Valley company to help do that. Its powerful light sources target things like theatrical, architectural, street, retail and wider area lighting. It’s also used for medical and analytical instrument lighting, and also projection display.

Sequoia’s Pierre Lamond is on the board.

It’s LIFI technology combines solid-state electronics and full spectrum plasma emitters (see how it works here.) The company previously raised $40 million. We haven’t reported on this company before. It is four years old. Peter Rip, of Crosslink, confirmed the investment.

LucidEra offers a web-based service that helps companies collect and analyze data across their internal software systems to make them more efficient, and has just raised $15.6 million.

LucidEra is another company in the somewhat crowded “business intelligence” industry.

These companies try to help a company’s management get a more granular, immediate view of factors affecting their business. For example, they show a sales manager how quickly potential clients are being converted into paying customers, and which sales staffers are being the most successful.

LucidEra is notable because it is one of the early leaders among startups trying to offer web-based or “on demand” business intelligence services (previous coverage) — it is also competing with other startups including Seatab Software, Host Analytics, and Oco. It collects data from a company’s systems, automatically checking for errors like duplicate customer accounts, then runs its own analysis of the data and produces live, online reports about what is happening in the company.

Cognos, Business Objects SA, Microsoft and others currently provide on-site hardware, software and consultants to help companies analyze data generated by their software systems used in their various departments. These companies already work with most Fortune 1000 firms.

LucidEra is targeting firms with annual revenue of $20 million to $500 million and 100 to 1,000 employees, says chief executive Ken Rudin. These smaller companies face multiple problems. Not only do they have to pay a lot to get the on-site software installed, they also need to pay extra IT costs to keep the software running once it’s installed, as well as pay consultants to keep analyzing the data for them, he SAYS [tells us].

Rudin says he saw the problem first-hand, while running his own business intelligence consultancy. His staff would go to a company, install hardware and software, then discover six months later that the system had fallen apart. One client at the time told him it was like “trying to manage a nuclear reactor when I just want electricity,” he says.

LucidEra began offering a “forecast-to-billing” service last quarter, aimed at improving a company’s sale cycle. The company didn’t divulge further details on growth and revenue.

The company says it isn’t concerned about the dominant business intelligence companies moving down-market. Its larger competitors have a difficult time turning their on-site technology into a web-based service, according to Rudin. The chief executive of Business Objects appears to agree, suggesting on this blog that his company is looking to make acquisitions.

Besides competitors, the biggest risk for LucidEra is that people still won’t use it: The rap on business intelligence is that it costs precious resources while sometimes delivering “reports almost no one reads.”

The market for web-based business intelligence services is roughly equal to that of web-based CRM software, estimates Crosslink Capital investor Peter Rip, or around $600 million, and growing 30 percent compounded for the next five years, he says.

The round was led by Crosslink Capital, joined by existing investors Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners.

Rip will join LucidEra’s board of directors with this investment. Last month, he wrote a poignant blog post about deciding to invest in the company, calling the deal “love at first sight.”

Sometimes, if you keep plugging away, you can pull something off — even if its daunting during the low points along the way.

Two years ago, we wrote about San Francisco’s Yipes, which provides “managed ethernet services” for corporate customers. At the time, it was raising yet another $24 million more in venture capital. The funding cycles seemed endless. Launched in 1998, it had gone through bankruptcy had raised a whopping $385 million — a seeming impossible amount to generate a profit from. One more symbol of the excess of the Bubble.

We called the company “Yikes.”

Today we learn the company has just been acquired for $300 million by Reliance Communications. Groups like NEA, Focus and Sprout kept investing in the company through the years and probably didn’t make much, if anything. But newcomer Crosslink Capital, which led the turnaround beginning 2005, has apparently done very well — because it’s stake wasn’t watered down by the restructuring, and it held a major chunk of the company. At least someone is a winner in the saga.

Here’s a roundup of the latest green technology developments.

SoloPower announces investors — The Milpitas, Calif. make of photovoltaic solar cells and modules ,said it has $30 million more in a second round of capital. That adds to its previous $10 million. It’s well-funded, but not near nearly as well as some other players using the similar material, copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS), to make newer, low-cost solar cells. Nanosolar, Heliovolt, Solyndra and Miasole have all raised significantly more cash. We reported SolorPower’s funding yesterday, but the company hadn’t disclosed investor names. Today it released those names: Convexa Capital, which led the investment, Scatec, Spencer Energy and existing investors Crosslink Capital, Firsthand Capital Management and Musea Ventures.

MWOE Solar, yet another “thin-film” solar panel maker, raises $7M — The company, based in Ohio, received the funding from Emerald Technology Ventures and NGP Energy Technology Partners. Like all the companies mentioned above, it uses a thin-film technology. Thin-film refers to the thin layer of CIGS or other material deposited onto a substrate, which makes solar panels more flexible than traditional silicon-based solar technology (see image above, which comes from MWOE’s site).

SNTech, low-power motor maker, raises $1.2M — The company, of Seoul, Korea, makes low-power brushless DC motors for household appliances. SAIL Venture Partners won a quarter ownership of the company, in return for the investment (VentureWire; subscription required).