Adly, a startup that connects advertisers with celebrities willing to post promoted messages on social networks, recently raised $2 million in additional funding.
The new funding came from previous backer GRP Partners and new investor Siemer Ventures. Adly has now raised a total of $7.5 million. → Read More
“Payment marketing” startup Swipely is announcing that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding.
Although founder and CEO Angus Davis (who founded TellMe, which was acquired by Microsoft) said that he’s focused on “looking forward to the future,” it’s worth noting that this is the first round that Swipely has raised since the company moved on from allowing users to share credit card… → Read More
Wanderful Media has raised another $9 million from the long list of media companies that were already backing the startup and its local deal service Find&Save.
The announcement comes after the relaunch of Find&Save last month. The service allows readers to browse deals aggregated from newspaper circulars, retailers, and other data sources. That was the first big redesign since Wanderful… → Read More
HasOffers, a startup that helps mobile app developers see which ad efforts are actually paying off, is announcing that it has raised a $9.4 million round of funding led by Accel Partners.
The company was founded in 2009 — the product that it initially built, and the one that’s still highlighted on the HasOffers website, is a system that helps ad networks and agencies manage their… → Read More
Skift, the travel industry-focused site that was launched in July 2012 by PaidContent founder Rafat Ali and Jason Clampet (who previously ran content and editorial partnerships at Frommers.com), is announcing today that it has raised $1.1 million in additional seed funding.
The new funding was led by Lerer Ventures, with participation from various funds and angel investors (skip to the end of… → Read More
As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding… → Read More
CapLinked, a startup offering workspaces for managing business deals, announced today that it has closed a $2.1 million Series A.
The company previously said that it raised a $1.6 million round from FF Angel (the seed-stage fund operated by Founders Fund), Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, and others, so this is basically a $500,000 addition. The new investors include Conversion Capital, Inflection… → Read More
A startup called Webflakes aims to bring some of the best international content on fashion, food, travel, and more to English-speaking readers with the help of volunteer translators. The site is officially launching today, and the company is also announcing that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding.
CEO Nathan Shuchami told me that people searching the web can sometimes struggle to find… → Read More
Mass Appeal, a joint venture that’s both reviving the Broolyn-based, graffiti-focused magazine of the same name and also moving into online content, is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in funding.
It’s backed by a mix of traditional firms and figures from the hip hop world. The rapper, (and one-time TechCrunch contributor) Nas announced last month that he had invested a “six-figure… → Read More
TenFarms, a startup working on a couple of interesting mobile product ideas, just announced that it has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.
The company has already released its first product, Photopoll, which allows users to share photos (you can pull them from your camera roll, Amazon.com, or Instagram), tell stories around those photos, and ask their friends for… → Read More
CircleUp, a startup that connects investors with retail and consumer companies that wouldn’t attract traditional venture funding, has raised a $7.5 million Series A.
The round was led by Union Square Ventures. New backer Google Ventures also participated, as did previous investors Rose Park Advisors, Maveron, and David Topper. Union Square’s Andy Weissman is joining the CircleUp board, while… → Read More
Chute, a startup that offers tools for collecting and displaying photos, has raised $7 million in Series A Funding.
The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and US Venture Partners. Chute previously raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Freestyle. → Read More
Jeet Singh and Joe Chung have already had a nice exit, taking their enterprise software company Art Technology Group public (it was acquired by Oracle for $1 billion back in 2010). Now they’re hoping to turn the act of building successful startups into a “repeatable process,” through their new firm Redstar ventures.
Singh and Chung, along with their third co-founder Matt Beecher, said they… → Read More
After 19 months of working with our founder, Michael Arrington, on setting up CrunchFund, MG Siegler has moved on to a similar role at a firm that continues to make waves in the venture world, Google Ventures. In a post on his own blog today, Siegler discussed the move, saying that he had been speaking with its team and managing partner, Bill Maris, for a few months now. He called the move a… → Read More
Those who know in the Valley know the name Sam Pullara. Whether it was his time as a repeat entrepreneur and technical founder, or stints as an EIR at some of the Valley’s most premier venture capital firms, or his time as a lead technologist at two of the largest tech companies in the Valley (most recently at Twitter), Pullara has occupied nearly every seat at the table throughout his career. → Read More
SocialWire, a startup building Facebook ads for retailers, has raised $1 million in “seed extension” funding. The company is also announcing that Chief Revenue Officer Bob Buch, a former exec at Aol and Digg, is taking on the role of CEO.
When I talked to Buch this morning, he acknowledged that when he tells people that he works in the advertising business, they usually respond, “Oh, I hate… → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Ashton Kutcher took the stage with Guy Oseary to talk about their A-Grade fund. Arrington started right away about a rumor that the fund is raising money at a $100 million valuation. The two partners confirm the rumors, saying that they are raising “enough money.” It means that financial institutions and companies will invest a certain amount of money in… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY, Ken Lerer and Ben Lerer took the stage to talk about Lerer Ventures and their respective entrepreneur stories. One thing that caught the attention of the audience is when Ken Lerer talked about gun control and a new StopTheNRA.com website. “We are going to launch StopTheNRA.com,” Ken Lerer said. The site should be up in about two weeks. They already own the domain… → Read More
MindMixer, a startup that helps organizations like the City of San Francisco gather ideas from their communities, has raised $4 million in Series B funding.
When the company announced its $1.9 million Series A last year, CEO Nick Bowden recalled his work in urban planning, when local governments and agencies would hold public meetings that no one attended. So MindMixer created tools for… → Read More
Local Market Launch, a startup that helps companies manage the online presence of local stores, is announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding.
The company was founded by Brian Coryat, who previously founded ValueClick, an online ad company that went public in 2000. Coryat told me that he spent much of the past decade working with small businesses, and that Local Market… → Read More
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said that he hasn’t spoken to investors in a year and half about raising capital, denying reports that the company is raising funding at a $1 billion valuation. Reuters reported that story earlier today, citing one source. We had heard similar rumors over the past few weeks but they weren’t substantiated enough to report. That said, just because Kalanick… → Read More
We knew CrunchBase was big. We knew because there are 2 million people using the startup database each month. We knew because more than 120k people have contributed 1.6MM data points on companies, entrepreneurs, fundings, exits and more. What we didn’t know, however, was what the investment community thinks about CrunchBase. → Read More
Search startup Leap2 is announcing that it has raised $1.6 million in new funding. It’s also releasing new versions of its iOS and Android apps.
Building a better search experience than the existing players is a pretty tall order. In Leap2′s case, it sounds like the focus really is on the experience, incorporating more images and social updates into a unified search result. Mixing different media… → Read More
ClickTale, a company that helps businesses understand what visitors are actually doing on their websites, just announced that it has raised $17 million in Series B funding.
The company tries to go beyond the standard information revealed by most other analytics services, offering things like recordings of visitor sessions, heat maps that show where people moved their mouse and clicked, and a… → Read More
Bill Gurley, a general partner at one of Silicon Valley’s top tier venture firms Benchmark Capital, said that the late-stage market is the “most frothy” he’s ever seen since the late 1990s. Even though Facebook, Groupon and Zynga shares are still all underperforming relative to where they debuted at in their IPOs, growth-stage investors are still pouring capital into… → Read More
Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of investment firm The Social+Capital Partnership, said today that the tech world should be “utterly ashamed,” because “we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started.”
Palihapitiya was interviewed on-stage at our Disrupt NY conference. He argued that in contrast to past decades, where tech entrepreneurs were… → Read More
Chris Dixon, the entrepreneur-turned angel investor-turned general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, today said that he believes the 3D printing movement has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing and that it is an area where he would like to make multiple investments in the future. In contrast, he described startups in areas like social networking facing “general fatigue”. Earlier… → Read More
People won’t stop talking about Google Glass, and rightfully so. Ever since the epic parachute-hangout demo, the Valley has been buzzing about the future coming of what is arguably one of the biggest potential advancements in computer interfaces since the iPhone. Lately, the buzz has been bubbling as Google employees, early adopters (Scoble just posted his detailed review), tech bloggers, and… → Read More
Another year has come and gone, and with it a brand new class of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator graduates. At demo day today, we saw ten companies launch out of development and into the public eye. Yes, all of them are interesting, disrupting industries from real estate to big data to financial services. But a handful of companies truly stand out as potential game-changers in the tech world. → Read More
SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms, says it’s starting to look heavily at health startups that take a “software-first approach” towards human biology, medical research and patient care. The firm has always had a list of six to eight “megatrends” that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce… → Read More
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