OpenDNS takes funds to prevent outages, block sites
OpenDNS, a Domain Name Service provider that helps users avoid ISP outages and block specific web domains, has raised an undisclosed amount of first-round funding from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. Founded in 2006, the San Francisco-based service reported that it was handling 7 billion DNS queries a day, bringing in as much as $20,000 a day — that was a year ago. Today, it says it manages 15 billion queries.
In addition to its two… Continue Reading
Sense Networks gets $6M in hotly contested deal for “tribe” advertising
Sense Networks, a company that can track “tribes” of people — such as those who like the same bars and same movies — to better target them with instant advertising, has raised $6 million in new venture financing in a hotly contested deal.
Semiconductor giant Intel led the deal, after beating out Sequoia Capital, the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, we’ve learned from a source very close to the deal. The negotiations got tense after… Continue Reading
Mahalo plans to pay users who add “topic pages” to search engine
Mahalo, the underdog search engine that depends on human-generated content for a spam-free experience, has decided to pay users who add more content to its network. Right now it only has 100,000 pages in its system and draws 5 million unique monthly users. The only way it will grow is if it leverages its userbase to expand its horizons.
To do so, the Santa Monica, Calif. company says it will allow users who create and maintain… Continue Reading
Profitable: Sugar Inc raises $16M, buys Shopflick and those NBC shares, expands to LA
Sugar Inc, a women-focused media company, is in the middle of a big expansion. It has closed a new, $16 million round from existing investor Sequoia Capital and used some of that money to buy back shares from another investor, NBC Universal. It also used some of that money to purchase of women-focused “indie” video-driven shopping site Shopflick. The founder and chief executive of that company, David Grant, is becoming the president of a new,… Continue Reading
Bubble Motion raises $6M for mobile voice messaging
Bubble Motion, provider of a service that lets users send voice messages directly to others’ mobile phones like text messages, has raised $6 million in equity from undisclosed investors, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Based in Mountain View, Calif., the company brought in $14 million in March 2008 from Comcast Interactive Capital, NCD Investors and Sequoia Capital — the last of which provided $10 million in 2007.
MIT busts genome reader Navigenics on patents
Navigenics, a Foster City, Calif. company that checks consumers’ genomes for indications of disease, is being sued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for allegedly infringing on a patent that the university licensed exclusively to E8 Pharmaceuticals.
If MIT wins the suit, Navigenics will have to pay damages to both the school and E8. It will also have to pay to officially acquire the patent or pay royalties. This patent has been a sticking point before,… Continue Reading
MarkLogic raises $12.5M more for publishing infrastructure
MarkLogic, which makes software to help other companies deliver content, has raised $12.5 million in a fourth round of funding from existing backers Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital (previously Lehman Brothers Venture Partners).
The San Carlos, Calif., company’s flagship product is the MarkLogic Server, an XML server that allows companies to share information across various information systems, including the web. The company says it has more than 150 customers.
MarkLogic has raised a total of $45.5 million… Continue Reading
LogLogic scores $8M for data management services
LogLogic, the San Jose, Calif. company that manages data for information technology departments, says it brought in $8.8 million in a fourth round of funding to take better advantage of its recent acquisition, Exaprotect, a similar company base in Europe. It says it will use the money to build its overseas presence and adapt its new software offerings for more predictive and analytics services.
The recent round came from Invesco Private Capital, SAP Ventures, Sequoia Capital,… Continue Reading
Plug and Play startup incubator eyes $20M for seed fund
The Plug and Play Tech Center, a Palo Alto, Calif., accelerator program that provides office space, mentorship and a fundraising springboard for about 200 startups in the Silicon Valley, says it plans to raise $20 million for its own seed investment fund, to be called Plug and Play LLC. And it’s looking to its partners and several other capital firms — Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Sequoia Capital among them — to make it happen.
It seems… Continue Reading
Jive brings its business software to the Internet cloud
Jive Software, a company that offers collaboration and social networking tools for businesses, is announcing its new product, Jive Express, which is a version of its core product running on the Internet cloud. The goal, says Jive’s Senior Vice President of Products Chris Morace, is to take advantage of the online infrastructure offered by Amazon’s Web Services to make it quick, easy, and affordable to start using Jive, while also avoiding some of the pitfalls… Continue Reading
Quantenna channels $14M for HD home networking chips
Quantenna Communications, a provider of silicon chips for high-speed, wireless networking services, announced today that it brought in $13.85 million in a third round of funding to build its brand and expand its sales and engineering operations. Southern Cross Venture Partners led the round, which included Grazia Equity, Sequoia Capital, Sigma Partners and Venrock Associates.
Based in Fremont, Calif., the company focuses on chip sets that can support high-definition media content served wirelessly through set-top boxes,… Continue Reading
Stoke, the fixed-wireless convergence company, raises $15M more
Stoke, the company that wants to let you use your mobile phone or other device on your wireless carrier while on the go, but let you switch to your broadband connection at home, has raised $15 million more in a fourth round of financing.
The company recently partnered with WiFi Internet access provider Trustive, which has roaming agreements with more than 70 hotspot operators in more than 65 countries. The partnership will seek to enable a… Continue Reading
ImageShack aims to play media host to the Twitter ecosystem
Twitter’s traffic could more than double this month to above 30 million unique visitors on its web site in the US alone (that’s not counting Twitter traffic on other applications nor traffic outside the US). Expect to see the number of third party developers building applications for Twitter increase accordingly — and that’s what media-hosting startup ImageShack is betting on.
Today, the company is releasing Tweetero, an open-source Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch… Continue Reading
Luxim brightens with $12M for efficient plasma lighting
Luxim, provider of high-efficiency solid-state plasma lighting systems, has nabbed $12 million in a third round of funding from Sequoia Capital and others. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., the company plans to use the money to scale production of its existing products, which are largely used in stadium, city street, commercial and industrial lighting, as well as medical instrumentation. It has yet to roll out products suited to residential use.
The lights are unique not only in… Continue Reading
VCs already eyeing potential in new Chinese health care reforms
Last week, China’s State Council approved sweeping reform of its health care system, infusing it with $125 billion to provide universal medical coverage by 2011. And already venture capitalists all over the world are anticipating the opportunities in life science fields — pharmaceuticals, device making, etc. — that this avalanche of new funding will make possible.
Medical care in China has been somewhat of a disaster since the demise of the state-run system of the 1980s…. Continue Reading
Car battery maker A123 scores $15M more from GE
A123 Systems, maker of lithium-ion batteries — primarily for hybrid and electric cars — has nabbed another $15 million in funding from General Electric, marking the seventh time the conglomerate has invested in the capital-rich startup. This brings the total of A123’s recent round of financing to $69 million.
The Watertown, Mass.-based company says it plans to use the money to construct battery factories in Michigan close to its key automotive clients. These days, it’s rare… Continue Reading
RIP: Sequoia Capital’s hedge fund?
Sequoia Capital partner Eric Upin has left the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm to work at investment management firm Makena Capital Management, according to Forbes.
This news follows a report earlier this week that another Sequoia partner, Michael Beckwith, has also left the firm. Upin and Beckwith had joined Sequoia last year to help the respected firm (backer of Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube and many others) create a hedge fund for investing in publicly traded… Continue Reading
Jajah holds strong, dials up $2.8M to expand VoIP services
Jajah, a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) communication service, has taken in $2.75 million of an anticipated $5 million fourth round of funding, peHUB reports. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company provides service to millions of users, much like competitors mig33 and Jaxtr. Last April it scored a deal with Yahoo to provide phone-to-PC calling capabilities to the 90 million people who use the search giant’s messenger product.
Jajah has seen impressive growth over the three years… Continue Reading
Roundup: Checking out of Google Checkout, Surface 2.0 and more
Here’s the latest action:
Google Checkout raises transaction fees — It seems like a weird time to do so, as merchants are already poorer from the recession. They seem to be leaving in droves. Hello, PayPal!
There’s a second-generation of Microsoft’s Surface table computing systems coming — The BBC has more.
Blogger Robert Scoble joins Rackspace — His thoughts, here.
IBM sinks into water management business — The Wall Street Journal has more.
Sequoia loses Michael Beckwith, only a year after he launched a… Continue Reading
Y Combinator gets a $2M shot in the arm from Sequoia, angels
Seed-stage venture firm Y Combinator is branching out in its funding strategy today, raising about $2 million from Sequoia Capital and a handful of angel investors. Previously, the firm was funded solely by founders Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston and Trevor Blackwell.
The money from Sequoia will be funneled into a new investment arm of Y Combinator, which will increase the number of companies it can fund each year from 40 to about 60. With… Continue Reading