Ideiasnet sells a stake in Spring Wireless. (Ideiasnet) May 4, 2012 – Ideiasnet announces the sale of its 4.1% stake in Spring Wireless, a Brazilian enterprise with company value of R$ 329 million, that offers end-to-end solutions in mobile technology platforms, to Industry Ventures Fund.
Ideiasnet invested in the company in 2004, and with this transaction achieves an internal rate of return (IRR) of 19.6%, representing 2.6 times invested capital. A market leader in its segment, Spring Wireless operates globally and has AB InBev, Coca-Cola, Kellogg´s and L’Oreal in its customers portfolio, among others. The amount received by the sale represents nearly triple the invested capital, and an internal rate of return of 19.6% per year.
The transaction values Spring Wireless at R$ 329 million. Ualaa! lança no Brasil conceito “One Day, One Deal” Um produto por dia, com desconto agressivo.
Esse é o conceito do Ualaa! Fixar.me oferece quiz management automático nas mídias sociais e conta com empreendedor do Show de Ingressos como anjo. [VIDEO] Kazsek va por las startups con visión regional y Sequoia VC desembarca en Brasil este julio. YC Price Guide Startup Priceonomics Raises $1.5M Seed From Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel. How much should you pay for a used iPhone, TV, or bicycle?
Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and more think you need to know, so they’ve invested $1.5 million into Priceonomics, a Y Combinator winter 2012 startup. The seed round that shall be announced later today (Update: here it is) will go towards hiring front-end developers and back-end engineers to make the site beautiful but simple and beef up its machine learning technology. The site saw 250,000 page views in March and is still growing traffic by a brisk 65% every month. Investors see gold in possible business models built around the data Priceonomics crawls and ads shown to people about to make a purchase. Smart Education: How Lynda.com Hit $70M In Revenue Without A Penny From Investors. As Ned Flanders would say, education in the U.S. is in “a dilly of a pickle.”
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the cost of education has become unsustainable. Student loan debt is over $1 trillion, unemployment remains high for the recently graduated, and non-traditional students — older people, single mothers, workers looking to re-train — are returning to academia and learning programs in droves, putting even more competitive pressure on already-scant on-site resources. Higher ed institutions struggle with the cost of expanding to meet demand. Hootsuite Is Raising $50M At A $500M Valuation.
It was just over a month ago that social media management platform HootSuite picked up $20 million in a secondary investment round that valued the company at $200 million.
Now we have heard from multiple sources that the company is looking to better than double that: HootSuite is in the process of raising a $50 million round at a $500 million valuation. And what’s making this even more interesting are the investors that are being mentioned in connection with the round: HootSuite is looking to have discussions with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google – a sign of how the surge in social media investments is also giving a lift to companies that are figuring out ways to harness that for third parties. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter were described by one source as all having a “great relationship” with HootSuite already, and that the company was looking to build a deal that would give them all “upside in Hootsuite’s success.” Engrade Grabs $3M From Wireless Generation Co-founder To Help Teachers Manage Their Classrooms. As a high school student in 2003, Bri Holt found himself increasingly frustrated by the fact that there was no easy way for he and his classmates to view their grades online.
So, being familiar with the wizardry of web development, Holt decided to build his own, laying the foundations for what would become Engrade. While Holt went on to other projects, over the next seven-odd years, his simple, free online gradebook slowly found increasing, organic adoption among teachers. In 2010, Holt returned to Engrade, brought in some help, and over the next 18 months, focused on turning the education tool into a more robust, enterprise education platform. Evive Launches With $2M From Angels To Help Cure Our Addiction To Bottled Water.
While we all need water to survive, colleges and universities across the U.S. are betting that their students can survive without water of the bottled variety.
As Bloomberg recently reported, more than 90 universities, including Brown and Harvard, are banning or restricting the sale of plastic water bottles. Considering that bottled water represents a $22 billion industry in the U.S. and that more than 9 billion gallons were sold last year, the actions of these universities aren’t likely to scare “Big Water,” as they represent just a fraction of sales. But it makes an important statement about bottled water nonetheless. And let’s be honest: Whether or not you’ve recently hugged a tree, buying branded tap water in a plastic bottle for $1.50+ a pop seems … well … completely #$%^&-ing ridiculous — unless of course your village has yet to secure a reliable source of potable water.
In that case, we understand. Harris: 20% Of US Consumers Buy Via Mobile; 62% Couldn’t Care Less. WePay Raises $10 Million To Scale Its Online Payment Platform. Online payment platform WePay just announced that it has raised $10 million in a new financing round.
This round was led by Ignition Partners. Two of the company’s existing investors, Highland Capital Partners and August Capital also participated in this round. WePay, which bills itself as the “anti-PayPal,” is a Y Combinator alumni and was founded in 2008. The company raised a total of $9.15 million in two previous rounds over the last two years. In today’s announcement, WePay notes that this is a growth round and is meant to allow it to scale its technology and workforce. While WePay doesn’t reveal its revenues, its CEO and co-founder Bill Clerico told our own Leena Rao that it grew revenue ten-fold in 2011. WePay currently offers a range of payment products that are mostly geared toward the small and medium online businesses. WePay plans to launch its first mobile apps later this year, though the company remains mum about what exactly its mobile strategy will look like. Task-Based Marketplace Fiverr Raises $15M From Accel And Bessemer. Mobile Payments Startup Boku Launches Billing Partnership With Sprint.
Fresh off a $35 million round of funding, mobile payments company Boku is announcing a direct carrier agreement with Sprint that will allow Sprint customers to charge online purchases to their Sprint wireless bill through a two-step authorization process.
The agreement was made possible via a partnership with mobile payments operator BillToMobile. As you may remember, Boku offers an online payments platform that allowed users to pay for online goods by charging the transaction to their mobile phone bill. When a user wants to purchase a virtual item, he can enter his cell phone number on a site, the site sends a text message to the phone, the user confirms the transaction with a short reply, and all the charges show up on his phone bill. Direct carrier relationships are important because historically, mobile payments companies face the challenge of lofty carrier rates. NetPlenish Raises $1.9M For Mobile Shopping Service That Finds Lowest Prices On Household Goods.
A new mobile shopping service called NetPlenish is announcing today that it has closed a round of $1.9 million in seed funding from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Gold Hill Capital, BHV Capital, TEEC Angel Fund, Ludlow Ventures and several angel investors, including its founders.
The news was timed alongside the official launch of the company’s mobile application, available on both iPhone and Android. With the app, consumers are able to shop for everyday household items online which are sourced from trusted name merchants like Walmart, Target, Sears, K-Mart, Walgreens, Drugstore.com, Pets.com and Sephora. The interesting thing about the mobile experience in NetPlenish is that’s it’s aggregating the content from multiple merchants into one single application. Khosla Leads $25M Round In Enterprise Cloud Storage Company Nirvanix. Enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix has raised $25 million in Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures with previous investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures participating in the round.
The new investment brings Nirvanix’s total capital raised to $70M. Nirvanix is a fully-managed, enterprise cloud storage service capable of storing, delivering and processing storage requests. It’s an alternative to Amazon Web Services, or Box.net. The company specializes in storing amounts of large unstructured content files, and offers usage-based pricing across public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployments. Visage Mobile Raises $8M From Motorola Solutions, Qualcomm To Help Companies Manage Employee Wireless Devices. Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $8 million Series C funding led by Motorola Solutions with Worldview Technology Partners, Palisades Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures participating in the round.
The startup has raised a total of $16.1 million to date. Visage Mobile’s SaaS application, MobilityCentral, basically lets businesses have control and visibility over all of the wireless devices and spend within their companies. The service will organize how many wireless devices are being used in your company, which employee is using a device, your company’s monthly wireless spend and how your wireless spending breaks down. Additionally, Visage Mobile helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphone and mobile broadband.
Evernote Raises $70M At A $1B Valuation To Prep For An IPO, And The Next 100 Years. It’s official. To transition from a startup into a late-stage company that aims to be around for 100 years, Evernote today confirms it’s raised a $70 million Series D round of funding at a $1 billion valuation. Meritech Capital and CBC Capital were chosen to lead the round because they’re the firms that can help Evernote prepare for an eventual IPO. Evernote doesn’t need the money. It still has much of the $96 million that it’s raised to date in the bank plus over one million paying customers out of its 25 million+ users. Newvem Raises $4M From Greylock, Eric Schmidt To Help AWS Customers Spend Less Money. Startup Newvem, which offers a SaaS based service for Amazon/AWS customers that aims to help businesses spend less money and gain more value from Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, has raised $4 million in funding from Greylock Partners with participation from Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, as well as angel investors, including David Strohm, George Kadifa, and Maurice Werdegar.
As part of this financing round, Greylock’s Erez Ofer is joining the Newvem board of directors. Basically, Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is a free SaaS solution for Amazon AWS customers, that provides a 360-degree view of AWS cloud usage, revealing issues and anomalies in their cloud, and recommending actionable insights that help solve not just cost efficiency, but security, availability, and utilization issues. Cloud spending can be expensive and Newvem aims to help users pinpoint where to optimize their resource usage and budget consumption. CareZone, A Service For Caregivers, Raises $13M From NEA, Catamount And Jonathan Schwartz. Castlight Lands A Whopping $100M D Round To Bring Transparency To Healthcare Costs. GREE Acquires Mobile-Social Game Developer Funzio For $210M. Japanese gaming giant GREE just acquired mid-core, mobile game developer Funzio for $210 million in an all-cash deal that should boost its ability to build games for Western audiences.
Yuri Milner, Dave Morin, SV Angel, CrunchFund And More Hook Up Pair With $4.2M. DataSift Raises $7.2M For Powerful Social Data Analysis And Business Intelligence Platform. Twilio Rising: Microsoft Inks Deal To Offer Voice, Messaging APIs To ‘Tens Of Thousands’ Of Azure Developers. A potentially big move forward for cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio — and an intriguing development for Microsoft, given its would-be ownership of Skype: Twilio and Microsoft have formed a strategic alliance to offer Twilio’s APIs to developers on the Windows Azure platform. The offering will cover both Twilio’s voice and messaging services, and Twilio is sweetening the deal by giving developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes when they sign up. Vungle Hustles Its Way Into $2M All-Star Seed Round For Mobile App Video Trailers Network.
DIY Mobile Website Creator bMobilized Raises $1.5M Series A, Prepares To Take On DudaMobile. ChowNow Launches As A Food Ordering Platform For Restaurants On Facebook And iOS. Mobile Security Provider Appthority Raises $6.25 Million From Venrock and US Venture Partners. Crowdstar Raises $11.5M To Double Down On Mobile Gaming, Has Layoffs As It Leaves Facebook Behind. Talent Crowdsourcing Startup Talenthouse Raises $4.1 Million From Director Brett Ratner, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Others. Zillow Reports Record Q1 Revenue Of $22.8M, Buys Rental Software Developer RentJuice For $40M.
Engage:BDR Launches A Real-Time Bidding Platform With Direct Buying From Publishers. Princeton Review Founder Launches First Search, Recommendation Engine For Education. Marketplace For Customized Goods CustomMade Raises $4M From Google Ventures And Others. Weathermob Nabs Funding To Make Sharing Weather Reports More Social. Wrapp Brings Social, Mobile Gifting Service To The U.S.; Partners With The Gap, H&M And Others. Just-Eat Just Raised Another $64M From Vitruvian, Index, Greylock For Online Food Ordering. Microsoft, Barnes & Noble Partner Up To Do Battle With Amazon And Apple In E-books.