Foursquare said Thursday it has raised $41 million to expand its location-based service, but the financing is convertible debt rather than equity, which increases the pressure on the company to prove it has a real business. Read more »
Reddit, the online community that gained fame last year for a Q&A with President Obama, is said to be raising venture funding that could value the company at $400 million — and would give it ammunition to compete with other new-media players such as BuzzFeed and Tumblr. Read more at paidContent »
T-Mobile will lean heavily on financing to execute its plan to end phone subsidies, but it’s not the only one. MetroPCS and Cricket are already largely subsidy free, but they’re using financing to get expensive high-end devices like the iPhone into their customers’ hands. Read more »
PayPal is enabling small and medium-sized merchants to offer Bill Me Later as a financing option for online transactions. Consumers can get no-interest financing for six months on purchases of $99 or more. The move should help small businesses by increasing order sizes and conversions. Read more »
Does the world need 2 Gbps Wi-Fi connections? Rusnano, Bright Capital and several other venture capital firms think it does. They have invested $79 million in Quantenna Communications to build the chips that will make such multi-gigabit wireless local area networks possible. Read more »
Is new legislation that is aimed at allowing startups to raise money from individuals really going to help the economy — or is it just going to increase the number of stock scams and help fuel a dangerous kind of bubble mentality around investing? Read more »
A new bill would allow entrepreneurs to raise up to $2 million from individual investors without having to be approved by securities regulators. But would this free up more entrepreneurial firepower to help the economy, or just cause chaos and confusion for investors and regulatory headaches? Read more »
Twitter wants to be “the world in your pocket,” according to CEO Dick Costolo — but more than anything, it wants to be the engine of mobile and real-time commerce in your pocket, judging by his comments at the Fortune BrainstormTech conference in Colorado on Tuesday. Read more »
As expected, Groupon announced today that it has completed a gigantic financing of $950-million from a group of high-profile funds, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Now all it has to do is prove that it can carve out a long-term business amid escalating competition. Read more »
E-books and tablet-based digital textbooks may be the cool new thing, but renting old-fashioned paper books still seems to be attracting plenty of interest: Chegg, the leader in the textbook-rental market, has just closed a new $75-million round of financing, according to multiple news reports. Read more »
Etsy, the “eBay for crafts,” has raised a new $20-million round of financing — its fifth — according to several reports, as sales at the user-generated site continue to grow rapidly. The funding round is from a group of venture capital funds led by Index Ventures. Read more »
Envivio has shuffled the management deck, replacing its CFO and COO while raising an additional $15 million in new financing. In addition to the new management team members, Envivio’s chairman of the board will take on a bigger role in the management structure as executive chairman. Read more »
As in so many other cities that aren’t located in or near Silicon Valley, the startup scene in Toronto is a fairly small and close-knit community. Now, a VC-backed school/competition called Extreme University will look for startups to “audition,” American Idol-style. Read more »
Backupify has landed a round of financing for its cloud-based backup service from First Round Capital, Betaworks and some high-profile angel investors including Jason Calacanis. But the new company will have to clear the same hurdles as any other cloud-based service — and then some. Read more »
BlueKai, which aggregates and sells data on 200 million online shoppers to advertisers and publishers, today announced a $21 million third round of funding led by GGV Capital and including former investors Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $34.7 million. Read more »
