VentureBeat

Corrected

Mimosa Systems, a startup that helps companies archive emails and other files, has raised a $17 million fourth round of funding. Mimosa calls the latest financing a “mezzanine round,” meaning it should be the last round before an IPO.

The kind of comprehensive archiving that Mimosa offers is necessary for the “eDiscovery” process — namely, the process of searching through a company’s electronic records. With the growing number of legal requirements for corporate record-keeping, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, there’s been a lot of money entering this field. Last June, for example, Automatic acquired market leader Zantaz for $375 million (although the startup’s founder and early investors didn’t see much of a payoff). Correction: The company that acquired Zantaz was Autonomy.

When we wrote about Mimosa a year ago, we portrayed the company as playing second fiddle to Zantaz, but the Santa Clara, Calif. startup seems to be doing pretty well for itself. It has raised a total of $51 million and has offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, China, Australia and India. Mimosa recently moved beyond emails, attachments, instant messages and backup tapes and now says it can archive any file. Even more interesting, chief executive T.M. Ravi says Mimosa will make its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to third-party applications later this year.

The recent funding was led by Focus Ventures, with participation from existing backers August Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners, JAFCO Ventures and the Mayfield Fund.

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Oodle, the San Mateo, Calif. online classifieds company has oodles of competition, but venture capitalists have invested $11 million more to help it stand out.

On its face, Oodle is not that different from Craigslist, and other classifieds startups, such as Edgeio, LiveDeal and Vflyer, to name a few.

But Oodle, which announces its new financing tomorrow, is using the money to offer tools to help you make better buying decisions. Take its car classifieds, for example. If you’re searching for a Honda Accord, Oodle gives you market price data, and availability — data that you can’t get at the other sites. If you’re looking for a 2003 Honda Accord with 40,000-50,000 miles, Oodle will show you that the market price for this car is between $12,000 and $17,000 (see screenshot below). The bar chart tells you (apologies, the font size is small) a few of these cars are going for $12,000, you’ve still got a great deal at $14,000. It gives you other features, such as an alert that tells you when Oodel gets a listing for this car priced at $12,000.

Oodle can do this because it has good insights into the overall market. Oodle’s model is not to take listings itself, but to aggregate listings from other sites, such as newspapers — giving it a greater reach than many sites. It has 20 million listings culled from over 75,000 sources. As in cars, Oodle uses its reach to offer tools in other categories, including dating, pets and concert tickets. If you’re looking for a Sting ticket in Oakland, for example, Oodle will also show other bands in Oakland that evening — assuming you may be looking for something to do. In fact, it tracks 75,000 bands (Ticketmaster only tracks 10,000) and will give you a two-week calendar of bands playing in the entire Bay Area.

The investment comes from JAFCO Ventures, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Chief executive Craig Donato said the company is still not profitable. It makes money by taking a cut from advertisers who pay a premium to get their ads featured at the top of returned results. Oodle is on track to make at least a million dollars in revenue by the end of this year, he said.

Devicescape releases a software today that connects any of your WiFi devices automatically to a WiFi hotspot or muni network.

This is significant, because more cellphones are being equipped with WiFi, as the cost of WiFI chips hit bottom rates of $2. And by accessing WiFi with a Skype or other Internet (VoIP) phone, you can make cheap calls.

The service, a software download, automatically detects when there’s a Wifi network nearby; you can set the phone to vibrate, for example, to alert you when you’re near one. Phones, music players, or any other WiFi device can use the service. The device can also download subscribed information from Wifi hotspots, without you having to do anything.

The company has just raised an undisclosed amount of “millions” in a third round of capital, it told VentureBeat. This follows $12.2 millon it raised in January 2005 from firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, JAFCO Ventures, August Capital and Applied Materials.

Glenn Flinchbaugh, the company’s VP of products, said 300 cities across the U.S. are at some stage of deploying WiFi systems, and there are thousands of other hotspot providers, both free and paid. Devicescape lets your device communicate with even paid hotspots, but you have to pay to access it. Both the downloadable and pre-installed versions of the software interact with the Devicescape server to enable things like automatic hotspot login.

Devicescape’s chief competitor is Boingo, which aggregates WiFi networks for subscribers. Like Devicescape, Boingo has realized the promise of increasingly popular dual-mode phones, which work on GSM or WiFi (and thus make free Internet calls). However, Devicescape’s software is smaller, at 35KB, because it updates via communication with the Devicescape server. This gives it an advantage over Boingo’s MB-sized software, which has to store all of Boingo’s network information on the phone, which makes it not merely bulky, but costlier.

Devicescape hopes to make money by licensing its software to device manufaucturers. It will also strike partnerships with hotspot providers, getting a cut if it brings them more customers, said Flinchbaugh.

There will be more than 1 billion WiFi devices by 2010, according to Merrill Lynch.