17 January 2012

Funding Round Up: Week of 09 January 2012

This week marketing process automation software vendor Neolane received US$27 million in funding for their conversational marketing technology.

BuzzFeed, the viral media site, raised US$15.5 million in a Series C round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Lerer Ventures, Hearst Media, Softbank and RRE Ventures. The funds will be utilised to change the way people receive their news. It was also announced that NEA GP Patrick Kerins would take up a place on the BuzzFeed board and Ken Lerer, co-founder of Huffington Post, would become BuzzFeed’s new Executive Chairman. Read more…

Elsewhere, Wemo Media raised US$2 million in seed funding to create the world’s first 3D digital animated world set in the ocean. It is said that the ocean world, called TheBlu, will be teeming with 3D sea creatures such as sharks, fauna and fish. The project has the production value of an online game with the aim of offering interesting educational experiences. Read more…

Startup tech company Flotype has received US$1.4 million in seed funding for it’s suite of technologies that aim to simplify real-time messaging for cloud and mobile applications. Flotype also announced that their first product would be called Bridge and would allow real-time communication between any device, any server, on any platform. Read more…

Meanwhile in Netherlands, online food ordering and delivery service Takeaway.com has received 13 million euros or about US$16.6 million from Dutch VC Prime Ventures. They hope to continue their international expansion after establishing markets in several European countries like the UK, Germany, Belgium and Austria. Read more…

Hackruiter has raised US$200K in seed funding for its hacker school. Although they could have raised more funds, they are already profitable because of startups like Tumblr, Weebly, Loopt, Artsy and Bit.ly pay them US$20K, on average, per programmer referral. Read more…

And finally, Techstars’ Seattle Accelerator program graduate Vizify has raised US$1.2 million in seed funding in order to help consumers make a better first impression online. Although Vizify is still in its private beta stage, it’s already offering ‘TweetSheet’, which instantly creates an infographic from your Twitter activity to show you things like your geographical impact, your most viral content and your top followers. Read more…