SolarEdge raises funds for self-adjusting photovoltaic panels
SolarEdge, maker of intelligent photovoltaic installations that can adjust to varying sunlight conditions, just brought in an undisclosed sum in a second round of funding led by Vertex Venture Capital and including Opus Capital, Genesis Partners, ORR Partners and Walden International.
The solar panels in the San Francisco company’s installations contain converters that allow them to turn automatically to harvest an optimum amount of sunlight. The product also gives clients the ability to monitor panel performance… Continue Reading
AlertEnterprise bags $8M for security software
AlertEnterprise, provider of software that coordinates physical and IT security to prevent overlaps, just brought in $8 million in first-round funding, all from Opus Capital. The startup, founded by the same team that started compliance software maker Virsa Systems, will use the money to market its first products — AlertAccess and Alert Action, which monitor access privileges and geospatial activities.
Just 18 months old, AlertEnterprise is the team’s latest project, spearheaded after SAP AG bought Virsa… Continue Reading
Make-your-own content widget company iWidgets raises $4.1M
IWidgets is trying to help media companies (and anyone else) easily distribute videos and other content through embeddable widgets on social networks. Although there are many create-your-own widget services these days, the company has worked to differentiate itself by integrating widgets into social networking features such as news feeds on Facebook. The company has done well enough that its seed backer, Opus Capital, has led a first round of $4.1 million in venture funding in… Continue Reading
Space-Time Insight lets power plants monitor changing needs
Space-Time Insight (STI), maker of software that lets utilities and other infrastructure companies pinpoint data abnormalities on satellite maps, announced that it just brought in an undisclosed first round of funding to further develop its technology. Working primarily with electric-power utilities, the Fremont, Calif.-based company says its system can monitor the status of renewable energy, oil, gas and chemical plants — geographically pinpointing problems or anomalies like floods, fires, earthquakes and extreme weather.
Most infrastructure companies… Continue Reading
SolarEdge absorbs $23M to boost solar energy output
Israeli cleantech company SolarEdge has raised $23 million in a second round of funding to continue developing technology that could significantly increase the output of solar energy installations. The round — which included Vertex Venture Capital, Walden International, Opus Capital and Genesis Partners — remains open, but no target has been disclosed.
SolarEdge itself is still in stealth mode. What little information there is available indicates that it’s working to combine hardware and software to maximize… Continue Reading
TuneCore raises $7 million for music distribution services
Apple’s iTunes music-downloading service and its iPod music players disrupted the music industry’s CD business. TuneCore is helping to complete that process.
That’s how the company just raised $7 million in a first institutional round of funding from Opus Capital. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company allows artists to distribute their music, videos and films to iTunes and a host of other online vendors.
Jeff Price, an 19-year-music-industry veteran who started TuneCore in 2005, admits that he is a… Continue Reading
Jivox matches local advertisers and user-generated video, raises $10.7 million
With Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, acknowledging that Google has yet to find a way to make money with YouTube, it’s not clear that video advertising and user-generated content mesh. But Jivox, a San Mateo, California video ad network, would beg to differ. The company, which launched its advertising network in March of this year, says it has had early success placing ads in user-generated videos and has already grown to over 40 million monthly viewers… Continue Reading
Roundup of action: Opus Select, Boobik, Branson’s space warming & more
1. Yandex, Russian search engine, grows quickly
2. Opus launches hedge fund in New York
3. Matrix goes to China
4. Dogster takes $400,000 in financing
5. Semantic search engine Powerset raises $2M
6. Pubmatic, draw ads from all networks
7. Boobik, the Twitter clone, but for sex
8. Branson taking global warming to space
9. Oversee.net gets $150M to monetize domains
10. Google’s Palimpsest hosts terabytes of raw data
Yandex, Russian search engine, grows quickly — Yandex did more than a million billion searches last month,… Continue Reading
Pudding Media takes first funding, gives more details
When we first talked with Pudding Media CEO Ariel Maislos in September, he showed us his company’s software — a voice-recognition system capable of picking up keywords from conversations and using them to deliver contextual advertising to users.
The system isn’t working perfectly, but Pudding Media provides a good example of a company that’s moving into new territory hoping to succeed against significant technical barriers. Its potential has now led VCs to place a significant $8… Continue Reading
GainSpan receives funding for wireless sensors
Tucked unobtrusively away in corners and out-of-the-way places, sensors record the world around us — tracking air quality, electricity usage, temperature and other variables. The modern world needs such measurements, but installing and maintaining the sensors is costly.
GainSpan is a Sunnyvale, Calif. company that says it can help cut costs by using wireless sensors that tie into the same 802.11 WiFi radio bands that ordinary computers use, which reduces the number and complexity of the… Continue Reading
TrustedID raises $10M for credit fraud protection, though unclear how popular it is
TrustedID, a service that freezes your credit reports, so that fraudsters can’t open financial accounts under your name, has raised $10 million in a second round of funding after a prolonged period of looking.
However, the company has still not released any specifics about how it is doing. Co-founder Chief executive Scott Mitic has declined to say how many subscribers the company has, raising questions about how much traction the company has been able to get.
Opus… Continue Reading
Pudding knows what you say on cellphone – and serves ads to match
Pudding Media, an ambitious San Jose company, is developing a way to detect the words you speak on a mobile phone. It will then make your calls free. It will pay for them by serving ads and other content relevant to the words you speak.
We’re the first bloggers to be able to try out the technology. It isn’t working too well right now and certainly isn’t ready for usage by kids, but it is very… Continue Reading
Eye-Fi raises $5.5M for digital camera WiFi
Mountain View, Calif.-based Eye-Fi, a company building digital camera memory cards with built-in wireless and a service that allows users to automatically upload their photos to a PC or the Internet, today closed a $5.5 first round of funding from Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures.
Eye-Fi, which has yet to launch; it will do so this fall.
Companies such as SanDisk market similar Wi-Fi memory but the technology has not been widely adopted in digital photography. Canon,… Continue Reading
Kidaro raises $10M for virtual desktop product for companies
Kidaro (www.kidaro.com), an Israeli company that sells a virtual desktop computing product for enterprises (enabling remote workers to access their files securely) has raised $10 million in venture capital.
This is a hot area right now. We’ve witten about “virtualization” technology here.
The latest round was led by Opus Capital, and included existing investors Genesis Partners and Storm Ventures. Opus Capital General Partner Dan Avida will join Kidaro’s Board of Directors.
From the release:
Kidaro’s flagship product,… Continue Reading