API Management Heats Up: Apigee Follows Mashery With Its Own $20 Million Round. Well, look at this – only yesterday, API management platform Mashery announced its close of an additional $10 million in Series D funding, and today competitor Apigee is announcing a $20 million round led by new investor Focus Ventures. Also participating in the round were existing investors Bay Partners, Northwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures.
This API business? It’s hot. Apigee has been busy this year, acquiring mobile cloud platform Usergrid in January, and just last week picking up the assets and personnel behind the operator-backed Wholesale Applications Community (WAC). It’s also powering that new “print to Walgreens” feature popping up in mobile photo-sharing apps. The acquisitions point to Apigee’s increased focus on mobile. With a trillion mobile devices soon to be connected to the Internet, Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor says that now “every business – from technology startups to brick-and-mortar giants, needs an API to compete.” Andreessen-Backed LearnSprout Wants To Help Developers Unlock Educational Data. APIs are marching into education, and it’s about time. Education is rife with legacy infrastructure, with one of the primary offenders being Student Information Systems (SIS).
Schools use these systems to store huge amounts of sensitive student information (class lists, attendance, grades and allergies, etc.), but they differ widely from school to school, which, among other things, forces developers to manually integrate with each unique system, making it difficult for their cool educational software or apps to achieve any kind of scale. LearnSprout, a recent graduate of the education-focused startup accelerator Imagine K12 wants to help both schools and developers unleash those opaque educational data silos with the help of a few clean, standardizing APIs.
While the recently-launched startup is not alone — Y Combinator-backed Clever launched a similar platform last month — LearnSprout now has the benefit of some notable investors to help fuel its fires. Bass Fishing Startup Mystery Tackle Box Hopes To Reel In Chunk of $45 Billion Industry. And now, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming of mobile and social startups to bring you an urgent and breaking news announcement: a bass fishing startup. Mystery Tackle Box, which launched last week, is an online subscription service that sends customers 3-5 unique lures per month.
Customers can sign up for month-to-month for $15 per, or commit to three, six or twelve months with lowering prices down to $13.75 per month. With around 200 subscriptions, the company has generated $3,000 in revenue in their first week with little to no marketing. Why is it important? CEO Jeremy Gwynne and advisor Ross Gordon quickly pull out the stats, excitedly explaining that it’s a $45 billion dollar industry (that’s 45 Instagrams!!) With over 40 million fishers in the U.S. alone. But scores of others have tried to target the very same market and failed.
The company is the brainchild of Gordon, founder of Craftjack and Tribe9 Interactive. Reel in. Fab Seals The Deal On $105 Million In New Funding. Design-oriented flash sales site Fab has raised $105 million in new funding, the company announced today. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and was subsequently confirmed by Fab CEO Jason Goldberg in a detailed blog post.
You can’t say we didn’t warn you: TechCrunch editor extraordinaire Alexia Tsotsis reported just over a month ago that Fab was raising some $100 million in new funds at a $700 million pre-money valuation. At that time, Alexia reported: In addition we’re hearing (we keep hearing things) that VC firm Atomico has already expressed interest in dropping $50 million into the pot, and existing investors have committed to $25 million.
It now looks like that was pretty on-point, and that Fab got just about what it was looking for. This round serves as Fab’s Series C, and brings its total outside investment to nearly $160 million. Much like a marriage, a nine-figure VC investment is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly. NEA Leads Educational Network Edmodo’s $25 Million Series C. Edmodo, the collaborative learning network for teachers and students, is announcing today it has closed a $25 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by new investor New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), and included participation from Edmodo’s existing investors Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Learn Capital.
To date, Edmodo has raised $47.5 million. With the new round, NEA General Partner Tony Florence will be joining the company’s board. TechCrunch recently took a longer look into this company, which allows students and teachers to connect and communicate in a social, but professional, platform. In addition to being used in every U.S. state, the platform is also available elsewhere in the world, with steady growth seen in southeast Asia, Australia and the U.K. NEA wanted to invest because, as Florence puts it, “Edmodo is far and away the most impressive social learning network in K12 education.” 3D Startup Real5D Raises $1.2m To Let You Walk Around Construction Plans. 3D visualization technology has been around for some time, so Real5D closing a $1.2 million Seria A rund from the U.S. venture fund DoubleRock might look out of place to some.
But San Francisco-based startup Real5D has taken 3D visualization to an interesting level of interactivity by applying it to the needs of the commercial real estate industry. Founded by the Hungarian Balazs Farago, Real5D received funds in its bank account within days after winning the competition at the Funders and Founders event Life 3.0 – Augmented Reality and New Media, and meeting its new investor Suraj Kumar Rajwani, the co-founder and general partner of DoubleRock Venture Capital, shortly afterwards.
The swiftness of the transaction (in less than 10 days) which, according to Farago is rather unusual even by Silicon Valley standards, goes hand-in-hand with the property development problems Real5D appears to have solved. This video shows how it works in more details. Pocket Raises $5M Series B; Plans To Bring Its ‘Save For Later’ App To More Devices And Platforms. In a doubling-down by existing investors, Pocket, the content-shifting company formerly known as Read It Later, has raised a $5 million series B round led by Foundation Capital, while Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures also participated. This follows a previous funding round of $2.5m, which all three VC firms participated in (along with Founder Collective, and several angel investors) — so effectively this is a follow on round.
The company plans to use the new funds to bring its “save for later” experience to more devices and platforms, expand its team, and improve its services for developers and content partners. Pocket, which often draws comparisons to Instapaper, lets users ‘save’ content on the web to read or watch on any device, anytime — otherwise referred to as space-shifting and time-shifting, two concepts almost as old as media itself. Growth-wise, Pocket claims its nearing 1 million ‘saves’ per-day, making it the number one in its space. Firespotter Labs, Makers Of UberConference, Raise $15 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures. Although it was only a month ago that Firespotter Labs CEO Craig Walker was telling us how his company (the folks behind UberConference, Nosh, NoshList and Jotly) wasn’t in urgent need of funding, today they’re announcing the close of a good-sized round – a $15 million Series B.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and saw participation from existing investor Google Ventures. For Andreessen Horowitz, the funding was mainly about getting in on recent TechCrunch Disrupt winner UberConference. It’s the latest big telephony project from Walker, the creator of GrandCentral (now Google Voice). “They were excited about the opportunity in the voice space,” Walker says of the VC firm’s interest. UberConference, which aims to offer a more modern, more useable alternative to the horror show that is conference calling today, has the potential to disrupt what Walker describes as a “sleepy but large” industry. Gogobot Launches Its Redesigned iPhone Travel App, Hits 2M Registered Users. Social travel site Gogobot has been on a roll lately. Just two months ago, the company announced that it had passed 1 million registered users. Today, Gogobot announced that it now has more than 2 million users, up 100% in the past 60 days.
Currently a new users signs up for the service every 15 seconds. To celebrate this milestone, the company also today announced its completely redesigned iPhone app. Gogobot claims it is now the #2 social travel site behind Tripadvisor. With the new “explore” tab, for example, users can now easily find nearby hotels and restaurants around them. As we noted earlier this month, Gogobot is putting a stronger emphasis on photos these days and this is also true for the new mobile app, which now offers full-screen pictures of interesting places your friends and other travelers from around the world are visiting.
Gogobot wants to be a service for both planning your trips, as well as while you are travelling and after you have returned. Say Media Says Yes To $27M, Will Build Out Publishing Platform, Buy More Assets. Another milestone for online publishing company SAY Media, just 10 days after it had announced that Time Magazine publisher Kim Kelleher would be coming on board as president in September: today it confirmed that it has raised $27 million in funding, which it will use to make acquisitions and enhance its publishing platform. The round was led by new investors New Enterprise Associates, Shea Ventures and Correlation Ventures, and also had participation from existing investors August Capital, First Round Capital, Maveron, WPP, Focus Ventures and Neoteny. Paul Hsiao, a partner at NEA, will be joining SAY’s board.
Although much smaller, SAY comes into the category of companies like (TechCrunch owner) AOL, which has looked to leverage its online expertise and ad sales business model with the ownership of online publishing assets, as well as traditional publishers have made moves into online publishing content to go after those same ad dollars. It will also be looking at acquisitions. Twist Aims To Replace Those Annoying Text Messages About Running Late, Raises $6M Led By Bridgescale. As many of my friends and colleagues will tell you, I’m someone who’s perpetually running late. As a result, I’m constantly sending out text messages that offer some variation on, “Running 5 minutes late, sorry!” A new startup called Twist promises a smarter, easier approach to sending those messages. When you’ve got a meeting, you can enter the destination, time, and contact info of the participants. Then, as the meeting time approaches, everyone will get automatic messages about your ETA. Ideally, they’ll just get two messages — one when you start heading to the meeting, and one when you’re about to arrive.
At first, this may sound like a relatively narrow, specific problem. Co-founder and CEO Bill Lee (previously co-founder of Remarq and Social Concepts) says that previous attempts at these kinds of notifications have focused on location rather than time (telling people where you are, not when you’ll arrive). Twist will personalize its estimates to each user.
RollUp Media Raises $1.4 Million From Arts Alliance. Lord knows niche and independent online publishers can sometime struggle to monetize what they do and over the last few years we’ve seen the rise of startups to address those problems in the market, from companies like SAY Media to Federated Media. In general they offer baked-in ad networks and publisher platforms. A new one has been plugging away since last year, but its traction has attracted the attention of investors. To whit, RollUp Media has announced it’s secured $1.4 million (€1.2 million) in funding from VC firm Arts Alliance and other investors, bringing total funding since its founding to €2M. The other investors are Assaf Topaz, Peter Read, Karim Attia, David Rosenblatt and former Googler Anil Hansjee. The new investment will enable the startup to expand its service for publishers with their bespoke suite of platform, tools and services.
RollUp Media was founded by a team drawn from Google, DoubleClick, Brightcove and Lycos and is headed up by Ben Regensburger, CEO. AppDirect Pins Down $8.5M To Build A Cloud App Store Empire In The Sky, Rackspace Newest Partner. AppDirect, a company that offers white-label cloud-based app stores, has today announced $8.5 million in funding to ride the wave of interest in cloud services and continue its expansion in partnership with third parties. And today the company also announced a new customer in that strategy: Rackspace, which has launched the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, an online store for cloud-based software and services to more than 180,000 Rackspace customers worldwide. The Series A round was led by iNovia Capital with participation from existing investors, and comes on the back of a seed round of $3.25 million raised last year. Cloud services have been steadily picking up momentum in the enterprise — Gartner just the other week noted that they will be the fastest growing segment of enterprise services in the years ahead and will total $109 billion this year.
In addition to Rackspace, AppDirect also counts Deutsche Telekom, Bell Canada and Appcelerator among its customers. Screw Bottled Water: Subscription Refill Service, Vyykn, Aims To Crush Plastic Waste. Bottled water is 2,900 times more expensive than tap water and burdens America’s environment and oil market with the equivalent of 37,800 gas guzzling delivery trucks. The House of Representatives alone spends nearly a million tax dollars a year on bottled water. The funny thing is, bottled and tap water are nearly identical, separated mostly by a fancy label that triggers our psychological susceptibility to perceive a better taste from a prettier presentation. A new company, Vyykn, aims to end America’s addiction to bottled water with a subscription refill service, which allows customers to fill up on oxygenated and filtered water for a yearly fee of $30. The subscription comes with a electronic keychain chip that activates the spout on a futuristic looking dispenser, complete with options for O2, filtered, and hot water.
*Disclosure: I consult for the Aspen Institute on a separate government innovation-related conference. Targeting Families, Sidebark’s Private Photo & Video Sharing App Debuts With Automatic List-Making Feature. Want more proof that the private, mobile social networking space is exploding? Today, there comes yet another entrant into the game: an iOS and web application called Sidebark, which targets families and friends interested in sharing photos and videos privately via mobile. Because there are so many of these apps, with Path perhaps being the one to beat in this space, each has to offer some differentiating factor in order to stand out.
In Sidebark’s case, that feature is an automated email analysis tool that smartly builds sharing lists for you. Sidebark’s user interface is pretty much par for the course, in terms of how media-sharing apps go – there’s a camera button, the ability to import from your camera roll, a profile page, an activity feed, and even photos filters. But before you get started with all this, the app walks you through an email analyzer that scans your Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo mail, or AOL mail, and then determines which groups you might like to share photos with.
GoDaddy Acquires Cloud-Based, Financial Management Application Company Outright. Gift Card Payment Network Openbucks Raises $4.8 Million Series A, Led By Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang. Ambitious To Be The Next Online-Only Uniqlo, India’s Freecultr Gets $9M From Ru-Net, Sequoia. Mobile Rewards Network Kiip Raises $11M Led By Relay Ventures, Plans Its Own ‘Kiipsake’ App. Mobile Video Sharing App Socialcam Acquired By Autodesk For $60 Million. Coursera Aims To Make America’s Higher Ed System Interactive And Public, Secures $22 Million. Y Combinator-Backed Virool Provides An Easy Way For Video Producers To Boost Their Views Online. Coursemodo Debuts A Student Engagement Platform For Higher Ed Backed By Scott Banister & Others. Flash Deals Site Totsy Lands $18.5M To Take On Zulily In The Battle For Shopping Moms. Zaarly Expands Web Presence, Launches API To Help Publishers Monetize Content.
Social Intelligence Startup Sunnytrail Helps E-Commerce Companies With Customer Support Online. AngelPad’s 10 Spring 2012 Startups Have Raised $10 Million In 60 Days. Startup Cater2.me Brings Its Catered Meals To New York City. MobiTV Pulls Its IPO: Unfavorable Market Conditions, Or Unfavorable Business Model? Twilio Evangelist Builds Popular Phone-Powered Rolling Robot, Hints Flying Bot Is Next. How Will The Web Monetize In 2020? Dropbox, TigerText Announce Partnership: Users Can Send Files With Expiration Dates, Remotely Revoke Access. Meetupcall Launches As A Painless Way To Host A Conference Call. Tag Management Company Tealium Raises $10.5M From Battery. Sonic Notify Raises $4.25 Million, Partners With Interscope To Deliver Interactivity To Mobile Apps. CivicScience Raises $2.86 Million From New Atlantic Ventures And Cox To Crunch Data From Online Polls. Thiel-backed Lore Bets The Newsfeed Is Education’s Future.
OnlineMechanix Makes It Easier To Hire A Wrench Monkey. Teamly Gets Backing From Yammer Founder To Make Employee Tracking Easier. Cedexis Improves Its Openmix Load Balancer To Boost Video Content Delivery.