Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has led a $5 million investment round in Henry Blodget’s website Business Insider, which lost about $3 million last year but has been increasing its audience rapidly. Read more »
Vasona develops traffic shaping technologies designed to ease the flow of mobile services over the airwaves. What sets the startup apart from the numerous competitors is where it does that shaping: at the cell site. Read more »
Pinterest has raised a new funding round of $200 million, putting the company’s valuation at $2.5 billion. The company has exploded in the last few years as users have flocked to collect images across the web and pin them to virtual boards. Read more »
Pinterest is in funding talks that would put the company’s valuation at over $2 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The company has captured the attention of users across the country through its virtual pinboards for images. Read more »
This is no Farmville. FarmLogs’ software-as-a-service tells you when the rows need tilling, when the fields need watering and when the crops are ready for harvest. Read more »
According to venture capital database, CB Insights, education technology companies raised a total of $1.1 billion in 2012, with about one-third of the funding going to about ten companies. Read more »
After an $8 million Series A round in July, Toronto-based education startup Top Hat Monocle said it has accepted $1.1 million in funding from Felicis Ventures. Read more »
A graduate of Excelerate Labs in Chicago, SpotHero wants to act as a parking spot broker for the big lots as well as offer consumers the cheapest parking rates through its mobile apps. The company’s $2.5 million round was led by Battery Ventures. Read more »
Want a coke with that $3 billion valuation? Spotify apparently does: The company just raised an additional $100 million in funding, with Coca-Cola being one of the more notable new investors. Coke has been experimenting with digital music for some time. Read more »
But more Kickstarter projects doesn’t mean a greater rate of funding. We took a look at which types of Kickstarter projects are more likely to succeed. Read more »
VCs would love to invest in your game, as long as you know how to answer their questions correctly. This excerpt is from Wagner James Au’s “Game Design Secrets” (Wiley) now available in paperback and ebook. Read more »
UPDATED: Room rental service Airbnb confirmed its Series B fundraising round from last year in a filing with the SEC. The company is been rumored to be raising a big $100+ million round at a possible valuation of $2.5 billion. Read more »
Airbnb is reportedly in talks to raise even more money, with a financing round said to be led by Peter Thiel. The cash infusion of $150 million would be more than double what the online room rental service company has raised so far. Read more »
Funambol’s first round of funding in four years comes just as mobile operators are mounting a challenge against the cloud storage services offered by Google, Microsoft and Apple. Funambol provides a white-label cross-platform service, which several of the big carriers have already tapped. Read more »
A new report from health startup accelerator Rock Health shows that funders have invested $1.08 billion in digital health startups this year, which already eclipses the $956 million they spent in all of last year. Read more »
T-Mobile is unloading its towers, selling the rights to manage them to Crown Castle for $2.4 billion. The 7,200 sites are only a small portion of T-Mobile’s 51,000 total cell sites, but the deal pretty much gets T-Mobile out of the real-estate business. Read more »
OpenSignal has collected 2.5 billion signal strength measurements from networks around the world. Now its collecting $1.3 million from a triad of investors to help it put all of that crowdsourced data to use. Read more »
Nujira has developed technology that eliminates the enormous energy waste of LTE radios. By utilizing a technique called envelope tracking it matches the power fed into the handset with the power it transmits, which could cut down smartphone battery drain by a quarter. Read more »
Karma not only encourages its 4G customers to share their connections with strangers, it rewards them with free bandwidth for doing so. The Dutch transplant’s social bandwidth vision now has a new convert. Venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson is participating its seed funding round. Read more »
Hopper’s multiyear mission to use big data tools to bring structure to the web’s travel-related information continues with a fresh infusion of cash. CEO Frederic Lalonde talked about how his company is taking advantage of acquisition-happy Google’s interest in travel information. Read more »
According to the New York Times, Apple has had discussions with Twitter about making a substantial investment in the real-time network. A closer relationship between the two — which has been rumored in the past — would make some sense for both companies. Read more »
Digital publishing company Say Media, which is home to brands like ReadWriteWeb and Remodelista, has raised $27 million in funding. The company will use the funding to acquire more brands and expand its platform. Read more at paidContent »
Pocket, the web-content-saving company formerly known as Read It Later, has raised $5 million in a Series B funding round and will use the money to expand its platform. The company now has nearly six million users. Read more at paidContent »
The big health news of the summer will undoubtedly be last week’s Supreme Court decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act. But the industry has also made headlines for the major investments in health tech startups. Here’s a look at how it’s tracking so far. Read more »
Big Frame is a Hollywood media company dabbling in virtually all portions of the YouTube business model. In addition to representing talents such as MysteryGuitarMan, Destorm Power and Mike Diva, the company produces branded content and operates its own channel, Bammo. Read more at paidContent »
DramaFever is quickly becoming one of the hottest video services for foreign niche content: The Korean drama service just announced some additional backing from Bertelsmann, AMC and NALA. The company wants to use the money to take on telenovelas and venture into Europe. Read more »
Popular YouTube video channel Machinima.com has landed a $35M round of funding, with Google leading the round. While Google has given its video content partners seed money in the past, this is the first time it’s given big-time VC dollars to one of them. Read more at paidContent »
Image-sharing site Pinterest is reportedly close to announcing a new funding round that values it at over $1 billion and includes a new social commerce investor. Read more at paidContent »
The $50-million funding round that Quora recently closed has raised some eyebrows. Is this just another example of a bubble-style atmosphere in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, or is the crowdsourced question-and-answer site really onto something that could be a multibillion-dollar idea? Read more »
The Berlin clone factory rakes in the cash, but from whom? We take an initial look at the the sources of Rocket’s fuel. 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 »
Boku, which recently introduced a white label platform called Boku Accounts with Mastercard that allows operators to offer in-store mobile payment services, has received $35 million in new funding from New Enterprise Associates and Telefonica Digital, to help it go after offline payments. Read more »
Sequoia’s $10m round of funding for concert database Songkick puts a lot of pressure on the London startup. But CEO Ian Hogarth says he’s ready to cope with everything that’s coming — and plans to make his site the hub for music on the web. Read more »
The decision to back a new $9 million round of fundraising for LA-based fashion website Nasty Gal shows exactly how deep Index Ventures — one of Europe’s most successful VCs — is invested in the market, and how big they’re betting online fashion will be. Read more »
London-based art discovery service Artfinder is set to step up its plans for taking high culture to the web, after bringing in a second round of funding from Northzone, Greylock, and Wellington Partners. Read more »
Could Apple spend its $100 billion in cash to create a virtual cable operator to compete with Comcast and the like? Sure. But it would have a really hard time offering a competitively priced service and building a profitable business out of it. Read more »
Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC has closed investment on its third fund at $55 million, making Fund III its biggest fund yet.
Clavier talked to GigaOM about why SoftTech decided to go so big, how the new cash will be invested, and the larger tech industry landscape. Read more »
Apple’s record quarter is prompting a lot of analysts and Wall Street watchers to up their estimates for the stock’s performance. A slew of investor notes released Wednesday suggest few believe Apple’s fortunes have reached their apex. Investors seem to agree, as Apple’s stock opened strong. Read more »
SquareTrade, a San Francisco-based company that provides warranties for gadgets like the iPhone, landed a $238 million investment from Bain Capital. The new investment is being made jointly by Bain’s private equity and venture capital affiliates. Further financial details about the deal have not been disclosed. Read more »
LuxeYard, a site selling high-end home decor products, is launching Tuesday. Yes, it’s technically another flash sales site. But what’s interesting about LuxeYard is that it’s doing things a bit differently from the established players in the space such as One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe. Read more »
