Ooma dials up $18.3M for free landlines via VoIP
Ooma, provider of a voice-over-internet box that lets users make free land-line calls, brought in $18.3 million in a fourth round of venture financing, reports paidContent. It raised $14 million of this sum back in June.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company says it now sells its box, priced at $249.99 a pop, through 5,000 retailers like BestBuy, Costco and others.
Ooma has now raised $61.0 million to date. The recent round came from Worldview Technology… Continue Reading
EditGrid syncs with Excel, useful for serious number-crunchers
Today, Hong Kong-based EditGrid is launching a plug-in that syncs data from actual Excel spreadsheets, so multiple users can work on a single spreadsheet at the same time without losing access to Excel’s industry-standard feature set.
With a single click, users can publish data from Excel spreadsheets to web pages through EditGrid. They can also select and lock down specific portions of a spreadsheet so two people can edit different parts of a page at the… Continue Reading
Cnano raises $6M for carbon nanotubes
Cnano Technology, a developer of carbon nanotubes, raised $6 million. CMEA Ventures and Pangaea Ventures led the round, joined by WI Harper.
Cnano, which maintains offices in Menlo Park, Calif., and a manufacturing facility in China, aims to improve the quality and efficiency of nanotube manufacture. Nanotubes are tiny tubes, often only a few atoms wide, that are formed out of a single-atom-thick carbon mesh-like structure. The tubes exhibit tremendous tensile strength and have other unusual… Continue Reading
DiBcom receives $27 million more to get dibs on mobile TV market
The mobile TV market is expected to have more than 130 million customers by 2011, according to Screen Digest.
So DiBcom, a France-based semiconductor-for-mobile-tv company has received another $27 million in funding from its many investors, this time adding French bank NATIXIS. The company says it will use the money to continue improving its TV-streaming technology, and to spread faster internationally to phones, laptops, cars and other devices around the world.
We’re speculating that the company timed… Continue Reading
WI Harper raises $133 million venture fund
WI Harper, a venture firm with headquarters in San Francisco, has raised a $133 million fund, its sixth.
You can get to a copy of the statement here.
The firm’s limited partners include established pension funds, university endowments, foundations, family offices, and corporate LPs from Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East.
It’s strategy is to invest in U.S-China cross-border companies.
Bridge Pharmaceuticals, which helps pharma companies do drug research in China, raises $35M
Bridge Pharmaceuticals, a San Francisco company which lets pharmaceutical companies do pre-trial drug research in China, said it has raised $35 million in a third round of financing.
Granite Global Ventures led the round, which also included existing investors. Helen Wong, of Granite Global Ventures’ Shanghai office, has joined the board.
Earlier, Bridge raised at least $22 million from investors that included SRI International and WI Harper, among others.
Mapbar, Chinese maping company, raises $10M
Mapbar, a Beijing mapping and local search company, has raised a total of about $10 million from venture capital firms IDG Ventures and WI Harper in two rounds.
The news was first reported by China Web2.0Review.
WI Harper led the second round of $5 million, with existing investor IDG participating. IDG invested led the first round in 2005
Currently, Baidu’s map search service is powered by Mapbar. Mapbar’s competitors include Go2map from Sohu, Mapabc who powered local search… Continue Reading
PayEase gets $14.5M for SMS mobile payment service in China
PayEase has raised $14.5 million in its latest round of financing, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission cited by VentureWire (sub req).
Based in Santa Clara, but serving the Chinese market, PayEase hasn’t said much publicly. But it says on its Web site that it offers companies a way to deliver mobile payments via SMS to their customers, as well as Internet banking, call centers, and point of sale terminals, and “data… Continue Reading