July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The race to own online comments continues: Livefyre, which provides commenting software that wraps in social media conversations for publishers, announced today that it has raised $15 million in a third round of funding.

The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners and also included existing investors Greycroft, Cue Ball, HillsVen Group, and ff Venture Capital. It brings the company’s total funding to more than $20 million — double the funding of its popular competitor Disqus (which VentureBeat currently uses). The company also announced today that it now has 10 million registered users.

Livefyre says the funding will be used to expand to new markets and continue innovating with its existing products. The company started out offering a commenting platform with social media integration, but it has since gone on to introduce a premium product, dubbed Streamhub, that consolidates comments, live blogs, and more for large publishers. Major publishers like the New York Times, CBS, AOL, and Fox news currently rely on Streamhub.

With publishers desperate to drive engagement with their audiences (and hopefully drive more pageviews in the process), it’s not a huge surprise to see investors jumping to put money in Livefyre.

The San Francisco-based company claims its network reaches more than 120 million people and pushes 1 billion live content streams every month. Its technology helped Fox increase its comment and social sharing engagement ten-fold, and it also helped American Idol get a 20-fold increase in engagement for its finale.

Photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

For a company that’s grown as quickly as the social ad targeting firm 33Across, it’s taken surprisingly little funding. Today 33Across announced that it has raised $13.1 million in a third round of funding led by Pelion Venture Partners — but even with that its total funding is only slightly more than $26 million.

33Across has approached the ever-growing social graph as a big data problem, allowing brands, publishers (with the acquisition of Tynt in January), and advertisers to gain insight into how their customers and readers behave. More than 375 advertisers use the 33Across Brand Graph to learn more about consumers, using a social and interest graph based on data from 1.25 billion global users.

“We’ve done an incredible amount with very little,” CEO Eric Wheeler said in an interview with VentureBeat yesterday. He went on to say that today’s funding is equivalent to a $50 million round, given what 33Across will be able to do with it.

Wheeler said the company is going to use the funding to drive growth in new products, expand its infrastructure, hire talent, and expand globally. “We’re building a big company,” he said. “We didn’t start this business to solve small problems.”

When it comes to Tynt, which helps publishers track reader engagement through the age old technique of copy and paste, Wheeler tells me that the the company is now fully integrated into 33Across’ technology and strategy. “The teams are integrated and reporting together, and are working together on cross-company initiatives,” Wheeler said.

33Across is based in New York City, and it has offices in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and Salt Lake City. Existing investors also participated in the round, including Flybridge Capital, Greycroft Partners, First Round Capital, iNovia Capital, Panorama Capital, QED Investors, Metamorphic Ventures, and Great Oaks Venture Capital.

Photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

While it’s been talked about for some time, Klout today finally confirmed that it raised a “strong” third round of funding — though it won’t say how much.

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez confirmed the funding with All Things D, and said that the round was led by Kleiner Perkins. In October, the company was said to be raising around $30 million at a massive $200 million valuation with Kleiner at the head.

As VentureBeat’s Tom Cheredar described it when word first hit about the funding, Klout works by measuring a person’s activity on a variety of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn Google+ and others. Based on that individual’s interaction within those social networks, Klout calculates the true reach of that person’s communications and issues them a 1 to 100 Klout score.

The funding is a good sign for Klout’s long-term viability, especially since the service has caught flack from the tech community over its seeming frivolity. It has been criticized as a mere popularity contest for the web, and the value of a Klout score is still unclear.

It seems the company is ready to tackle these common criticisms head on with the funding:

“We’ve already made significant investments in both engineering and infrastructure, and with this funding we’ll invest further in these areas so we can continue to provide the most accurate and transparent measurement of influence,” Fernandez wrote in a blog post today. “We’ll also help our community become better users of social media, expand Klout Perks so that all influencers are rewarded for their influence, and make it clear why it pays to have Klout.”

Fernandez also said that the service is now handling 10 billion API requests per month, up from just 100 million last January. There must have been a big jump in December for Klout, as the company announced it had hit 7.5 billion monthly API requests just last week.

In addition to this latest funding round, San Francisco, Calif.-based Klout has raised $11 million in funding over two previous rounds.

http://corp.klout.com/blog/2012/01/getting-ready-for-a-big-2012/

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud platform provider Morphlabs on Tuesday announced that it has received $5 million in third-round funding, with plans to expand its number of employees and open more data centers.

Los Angeles-based Morphlabs provides cloud infrastructure services to small and large companies across the globe. Its platform-as-a-service offering allows businesses to virtualize their application environments using its mCloud solutions. It’s relatively small compared to the likes of better-known players like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, but it has a strong international bent that sets it apart.

“We like to think of ourselves as the disrupters in this space,” CEO Winston Damarillo told VentureBeat. “We’re set apart by the fact that much of our funding is from international sources and that we’re serving clients in many countries.”

Specifically, the funding will go toward expanding the company’s presence in the Southeast Asia, and it will be opening data centers in Indonesia and the Philippines in the near future.

Morphlabs currently has 50 employees. Damarillo told us he expects the company will add an additional 25 to 50 employees before the end of 2011.

Previously, the company raised $1.5 million in March 2008 and $5.5 million in July 2010. The new $5 million round was led by BBT of Japan and a private Indonesian VC firm. This brings Morphlabs’ total funding to $12 million.