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Showing posts with label Raises. Show all posts

Sparkfly Raises $2.5 Million For Its Mobile Engagement Platform SparkQuest

Atlanta, GA-based Sparkfly has landed $2.5 million in funding for its mobile engagement platform, SparkQuest, which aims to connect consumer deal redemption with merchant point-of-sale technology.

This capability basically enables consumers to get instant and repeat rewards at the merchants they frequent most (merchant list here), as well as ‘experiences’ that are tailored to their personal interests.

SparkQuest also features interactive, game-like quests that are connected to merchant deals and rewards and allow consumers to engage with their friends and social networks.

Facts of Groupon’s and LivingSocial’s stunningly fast and continued growth notwithstanding, Sparkfly founder and CEO Catherine Tabor posits that consumers have ‘burned out on one-hit, mass-marketed daily deals’.

The company, founded in 2001, says it has dedicated several years to developing the technology that ‘fills that gap’, backed with a portfolio of more than 20 issued patents.

Sittercity Raises $22.6 Million To Connect Families With Caregivers

Chicago-based startup SitterCity has raised $22.6 million in funding led by New World Ventures and Baird Venture Partners, with Apex Venture Partners, I2A, and Point Judith Capital participating in the round. This brings SitterCity’s total funding to $30 million. Benedict Rocchio, BVP partner and Adam Koopersmith, partner with New World Ventures, will join the company’s Board of Directors.

SitterCity goes beyond just connecting families with child care. The site also offers access to caregivers for pet care, eldercare, home care and tutoring. Sittercity guides clients through an in-depth screening process of potential caregivers, which includes background checks, references and parent reviews.

To date, Sittercity has more than 2 million caregiver profiles across the nation, and has helped connect hundreds of thousands of parents find an in-home caregiver.

Sittercity has also built out a corporate program, where organizations and companies offer a branded Sittercity portal as a benefit to their employees. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense uses Sittercity to help military families, including active duty, reserve and guard, across the nation find in-home care. The Department of Defense actually provides these families with a paid membership to Sittercity. Other corporate clients include MasterCard, Avon, Sega, Fox and Northwestern.

The new funding will be used to develop additional corporate partnerships as well as for expanding the site’s services internationally.

Sittercity isn’t the first Chicago startup to raise a large venture round this year. GrubHub just landed $20 million in new funding.

PapayaMobile Raises $18 Million For Mobile Social Gaming Network

PapayaMobile, the developer of a plug and play technology that incorporates social gaming elements into iOS and Android games, has secured $18 million in Series B funding led by Chinese venture firm Keytone Ventures and DCM. This brings Papaya’s total funding to $22 million.

PapayaMobile hosts mobile games on its social network, which is comprised of over 15 million users and offers mobile developers the tools to build social gaming apps on Android and iOS. Since launching the gaming platform last year, 350 applications have integrated PapayaMobile. PapayaMobile has experienced over 375% growth in its user base since opening its social gaming network in June of 2010.

And Papaya has placed a big bet on the Android platform specifically. The company was one of the first developers to integrate Google Android’s in-app billing on its social gaming network to enable microtransactions.

The new funding will be used to help expand PapayaMobile’s developer ecosystem in both the U.S. and Europe and to improve serve infrastructure so that the company can scale. Papaya is also looking to expand its platform to the Chinese market.

Joe Zhou, founder and managing partner of Keytone Ventures said in a statement: Android growth in China over the next 2 years will be staggering…Couple this growth with the monetization potential of mobile games in China and we believe PapayaMobile is well positioned to be the leader in social gaming platforms for the largest mobile market in the world.

Busuu Raises Angel Round From Fon-Founder Martin Varsavsky

Busuu.com, the language learning community, has raised an Angel round from FON-founder and serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky.

The Madrid-based startup is remaining mum about the size of the investment, however, but says that to-date Busuu has received less than €1m in funding. That’s a figure dwarfed by its main competitors. US-based Livemocha has raised $14m, while European rival Babbel has raised over €1m. On that note, Busuu claims to have recently overtaken market leader Livemocha in terms of traffic, citing data from Compete.

Funding Circle, The Zopa-For-SMEs, Raises £2.5M Led By Index Ventures

Funding Circle, the peer-to-peer lending site for small businesses in the UK, has raised £2.5m in a Series A round led by Index Ventures. Unnamed co-investors as well as existing shareholders have also participated, while Neil Rimer, co-founder and Partner of Index, will take a seat on the Board. Before today’s round, the London-based company was Angel funded to the tune of $1.1m from private investor

Online Education Startup Instructure Raises $8M From Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Tim Draper

Instructure, a startup that develops and open-source online learning management system, has raised $8 million in Series B funding led by OpenView Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurveston. This investment brings Instructure’s total funding $9.2 million.

Instructure’s software, Canvas, presents a more streamlined online course management product than competitors like Blackboard. The hosted SaaS solution features an integrated gradebook, assessment tools, discussions, multiple assignment submission types, rubrics and web chat. The SaaS also includes drag-and-drop file uploads, HTML5 video and automatic speech-to-text conversion. And it integrates with Google Docs and Facebook.

In February, Instructure announced the availability of Canvas as an open source software product. The company is now servicing more than 30 educational institutions, the majority of which have switched from Blackboard to Canvas.

Instructure is led by Mozy Founder Josh Coates, who sold the online backup solution to EMC for $76 million in 2007.

Here’s a commercial the team created for the product, based on the Apple “1984? commercial.

News Reader FLUD Raises $1 Million From Cavs Owner, Others

FLUD, a news reader app for the iPad and iPhone, announced today that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from a flock of notable angel investors. The round was led by Quicken Loans Founder and Cleveland Cavaliers Owner Dan Gilbert and ePrize Founder Josh Linkner, through their new venture fund Detroit Venture Partners. Other investors include Ludlow Ventures and Behance Founder Scott Belsky.
Since launching in August 2010, the FLUD team has been working part-time on its news reader app, so Founder Bobby Ghoshal said that the startup will use its new funding to go after top engineering talent — and begin working on the project full time. At present, FLUD is only available on the iPhone and iPad, so the team will push towards becoming device and platform agnostic. With the new funding in tow, Ghoshal said that he expects FLUD for Android to launch within the next few weeks.
As an app that aggregates news feeds, you might be inclined to group FLUD in with other news apps like Flipboard and Pulse, but the founder tells me that the team has been working aggressively to reduce its reliance on RSS by building content partnerships with top publishers and news networks. And Ghoshal balked when I referred to FLUD as a “news reader”, telling me that the startup is trying to build a social news ecosystem that isn’t just another RSS-based news reader or social magazine (I think that’s a dig to you, Flipboard).
While the news reader was an important first step, his vision for FLUD builds a real peer-to-peer, social component on top of the traditional news reader app, but not just by relying on social networks to share. Ghoshal said that he wants to “go after realtime experiences of the kind of news that affects one person at a single point in time based on where they are, not who they know”. Right. The team is currently developing that underlying technology, but it sounds like FLUD will be adding some location-based services to serve us with hyper local news. (And probably deals.)
For those unfamiliar with the news reader, what’s great about FLUD is that it initially offers 25 curated feeds to choose from, but the options are unlimited. You can add as many feeds as you’d like, filling FLUD’s template through its list of featured feeds or by a simple keyword search, and a page is automatically created and filled with news from your chosen site.
On your iPhone, each feed fits neatly on screen, which highlights each site’s content, and both iPhone and iPad apps employ a scrubber that calls up a scroll bar, allowing you to quickly swipe past other stories. FLUD’s design and UI is sleek and impressive, I’m definitely a fan — I think the app does a great job of eliminating the feed mish-mash that’s part of so many mobile news reading experiences.
FLUD is nearing one million users, and as long as they can avoid the slow loading of previous versions, I think it could give your other news readers a run for their money.

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