Photo-sharing may seem a very saturated space but there’s still room for disruption reckons Seattle-based startup Linea, which is aiming to reinvent how people share multiple sets of photos with its horizontally scrolling filmstrip of images. The startup has just closed a $4 million seed round, with investment from an undisclosed group of Angel investors, and is about to start raising a Series A. → Read More
Fanatix, the U.K. startup that’s made a mobile-first social network for sports fans to chew over their team’s performance as and after they watch them play, has bolstered its seed round with another $1 million, from a series of undisclosed UK-based Angels. The additional funding brings its total raised to $3 million to date. → Read More
Launched in late 2011 by Stanford grad and ex-Facebooker Ishan Gupta, Delhi-based EduKart is on a mission to bring online education to India and the developing world. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $500K in seed capital from a handful of institutional and angel investors. Participants include Kima Ventures, AKM Systems, Vibhor Mehra and Stanford alumni. The investment adds to the… → Read More
The mobile messaging space is exploding with ever more colourful ways to communicate, augmenting the basics of text and voice — whether that’s stickers, one-to-many video chats or the ability to leave random missives for strangers. Zoobe, a Berlin-based startup, has another cutesy option to add to the pile: cartoon avatars that animate your voice message so you can ramp up the kawaii. → Read More
Big data enterprise search marketing company BloomReach has acqhired the founders of ShopLogic, an AngelPad-backed big data startup that helps ecommerce businesses optimize the discounts they offer to maximize profits. ShopLogic says its investors were reportedly supportive of the deal, so it was likely more than just a soft landing, and BloomReach says this won’t be it’s last M&A deal. → Read More
Etece, a Spanish TaskRabbit style startup offering an online platform for people who need a job doing but don’t have the time to do it themselves, has just closed a €450k Series A funding round, with investment from Mola Capital, Faraday Ventures Partners and Starcaps Ventures. The company, which was founded in Madrid six months ago, had previously raised €500k from three European… → Read More
Canadian startup Busbud, which bills itself as the “Kayak for intercity bus travel,” today announced that it has raised a first $1 million funding round led by iNovia Capital and Real Ventures. Peter Kern, an Expedia board member and managing partner of private equity firm InterMedia Partners, as well as Luxury Retreats CEO Joe Poulin also participated in this round. iNovia Capital’s David Nault… → Read More
When digital marketers do competitive analysis today, they’re still cobbling together data from a variety of sources then tucking it into a PowerPoint presentation where, by the time it’s actually read, is already out of date. TrackMaven, a new, largely real-time competitive intelligence platform for marketers is changing that, now with $1.25 million in funding from Aol Ventures and other angels… → Read More
Thanks to the increasing consumption of digital video — and the fact that many of the largest content providers now force viewers to watch ads within those videos (Hulu, YouTube) — the growth of digital video continues to be one of the fastest growing areas of the online advertising market. Naturally, that rising tide (which is expected to continue) has begun to carry a handful of the veteran… → Read More
TuneIn, the popular online radio service, today announced that it has raised a $25 million funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) with participation from many of its previous investors, including Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and General Catalyst Partners. Jules Maltz, a General Partner at IVP, who will join the TuneIn board of directors. TuneIn Raises $25M Round Led By IVP… → Read More
Judicata, a legal research startup based in San Francisco, has closed its second round of financing, a $5.8M round led by Khosla Ventures. Keith Rabois, a former PayPal and Square executive who recently joined Khosla Ventures, will take a seat on Judicata’s board. → Read More
San Francisco-based startup Appurify is announcing its $4.5 million Series A round today, funding which will help the company continue to build out its exhaustive and extensive app testing platform, and to expand its sales and marketing teams to help spread the word among mobile developers. Appurify automates the process of wide-scale testing, allowing developers to see how their devices behave on… → Read More
Kickfolio, a company offering tools that allow iOS applications to run in the browser using HTML5 technology, is today announcing both a name change, just over $1 million in seed funding and Facebook integration. The startup will now go by “App.io” — a name that CEO Edward Dowling says better matches what the company is doing now and where it’s headed. → Read More
Nobody’s quite sure when (and if) Bitcoin will go mainstream, but plenty of investors and entrepreneurs have begun to place their bets. The snowball is off and rolling.
If this post doesn’t make it clear why venture capitalists are loving this emerging market, just in the last two months, we’ve seen the Winklevosses admit they have a crush on Bitcoin, Liberty City Ventures launch its own… → Read More
Google is the latest suitor to be reportedly circling around social sat-nav smartphone app Waze. Bloomberg reports ‘people familiar with the matter’ who say Mountain View is considering an acquisition, and that Waze is “fielding expressions of interest from multiple parties and is seeking more than $1 billion”. However sources contacted by TechCrunch have poured cold water on the Google rumour. → Read More
It was just two weeks ago that fast-growing enterprise cloud storage company, Box, went out and acquired document embedding service and Y Combinator grad, Crocodoc. Apparently Aaron Levie sees what Yahoo is doing and he wants to show that Box is ready to do a little acquiring of its own. → Read More
Imonomy, an Israeli startup which makes software that analyses webpages and automatically inserts relevant, copyright-free images to accompany the content, has closed a $400,000 seed round from a group of angel investors. Investors include Inon Axel, former CEO of Kasamba, Liron Rose, cofounder of AfterDownload, and Itai Levitan and Tal Shaked, partners at AfterDownload. → Read More
JustFab, the subscription-based fashion commerce site, is putting the $109 million that it has raised so far to use: today it is announcing the acquisition of The Fab Shoes, a European e-commerce shoe club in France and Spain, to build out its global operations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Fresh from closing its purchase of newsreading app Pulse, LinkedIn has made another acquisition to dive deeper into the mobile space. TechCrunch has found out, and confirmed, that the social network has aqui-hired Maybe, the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui — the man who set up, ran and then sold mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750 million. → Read More
Another step for Adobe in its bid to become the go-to place in the cloud for those working in design and other creative industries: it is acquiring Thumb Labs, a bootstrapped, New York-based mobile app design agency. Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs along with Rich Kern, tells TechCrunch that financial terms of the Thumb Labs acquisition are not being disclosed. The news follows… → Read More
People are afraid that if they drive an electric vehicle, they’ll run out of juice somewhere. So to convince more people to buy electric cars and dominate the charging station locator market, Xatori and Recargo are merging. The combined charge finder developers will go by the name Recargo to promote their station map and trip planner app PlugShare. Xatori and its co-founders Forrest North… → Read More
Web security provider Blue Coat Systems — itself acquired in a $1.3 billion deal by Thoma Bravo at the end of December 2011 — is making an acquisition today: it’s buying Solera Networks, a specialist in big data security, for an undisclosed sum (although we have reached out to the company to ask). The deal is expected to close in the next thirty days. → Read More
Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with… → Read More
Zalora, a Zappos-style fashion e-commerce site in South East Asia backed by the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet incubator in Germany, is today announcing its latest investment — $100 million, led by Rocket Internet itself, along with regular Samwer investing partners Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The is the largest investment in Zalora to date, and one… → Read More
Tumblr Literary Community Organizer” Rachel Fershleiser has family who read TechCrunch. And Tumblr founder David Karp think it’s the “greatest thing.” → Read More
As edtech startups continue to challenge the current state of higher education, and various niche startups focus on educating people through digital means, yet another company is getting a boost when it comes to helping people learn.
PopExpert, a learning marketplace that lets students connect with experts in one-on-one video chats, has just raised a $2 million seed round led by Learn Capital… → Read More
Postmaster, an Austin-based startup that aims to simplify shipping and parcel tracking through an easy to use REST API, launched earlier this year and today, the company announced that it has raised a seed investment round of $600,000 led by Capital Factory, Cloud Power and Zelkova Ventures, as well as a consortium of angel investors. The Postmaster team plans to use this additional funding – it… → Read More
TeamSnap, a company that provides tools for managing sports teams, has today announced that it is acquiring Weplay, a social networking site for athletes, parents and coaches to help facilitate coordination for events, games, practices, etc.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Change.org got its start in 2007 as a social network for non-profits. For years, growth was slow for the fledgling social action platform, but, over the last year, that changed dramatically. Change.org has grown from six million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today, and, as a result, has become one of the largest and fastest growing of its kind. → Read More
Expect a swathe of consolidation in the European e-learning sector in the coming months. Edxus Group, a new London-based corporate operating edtech company, is planning to plough in €50-60 million ($64-$77m) over the next 18 months to develop and acquire European e-learning businesses and build out a single regional player with the scale to compete against U.S. edtech giants, it said today. → Read More
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