Brazil's Fashion.me Targets the US. The Brazilian fashion social network Fashion.me is giving its international expansion a push, with the official announcement of its US launch. Last February, the startup had received an undisclosed amount of investment from Intel Capital to finance its growth. While the news was only made public today, the English version of Fashion.me’s platform has been online since the beginning of May – according to its CEO Flavio Pripas, the company opted for a soft launch, as it is still keen to gather feedback and see how users react to its new positioning. As some of you may remember, Fashion.me actually started as a joke in 2008 – or rather, a fun present from Pripas and his co-founder Renato Steinberg to their wives, Marcela and Karen. This is also the reason why the fashion-oriented site was initially named ByMK, until its recent rebranding.
However, the Fashion.me they are accessing has considerably evolved compared to early days’ ByMK. Online Ticket Seller Eventbrite Passes $1 Billion In Total Sales. Eventbrite has become the go-to platform for selling tickets online. And it’s announcing a major milestone to prove it today: It’s sold more than $1 billion tickets in total. For Eventbrite, the milestone also highlights some accelerating growth. It took nearly two years — from January 2009 to December 2010 — to go from $100 million in sales to $400 million. But it only took the next 18 months or so for Eventbrite it to more than double that amount and hit $1 billion of total ticket sales. Previously Eventbrite had said that it had doubled the number of events and tickets sold on the platform in 2011. Part of its revenue growth comes from Eventbrite leveraging social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
In its announcement, Eventbrite noted that on average, organizers receive an additional $2.52 in ticket sales whenever a user shares an event on Facebook. And part of it comes from a big push toward mobile platforms. With Obamacare Still In Play, GoHealth Lands $50M For Health Insurance Comparison Shopping. This month, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), deciding whether or not adults in the U.S. will be required to purchase healthcare. If the Court rules in favor, millions of Americans will soon be in the market for health insurance. This would be a boon for companies like GoHealth, the Chicago-based tech company behind GoHealthInsurance.com, an online portal that allows consumers to comparison shop for health coverage.
That’s part of the reason that GoHealth is taking on a $50 million equity investment from middle market investment firm, Norwest Equity Partners. In the event the individual mandate does pass, GoHealth wants to be ready for a potentially huge flock of irritated healthcare shoppers. So far, it’s been a slow burn. Today, the company works with more than 100 insurance carriers, 10K licensed agents, and has seen over 30 million Americans shop for and purchase health coverage on its platform. Constant Contact Acquires Business Listings Startup SinglePlatform, Deal Worth Up To $100M. Email marketing company Constant Contact has acquired SinglePlatform, a startup that helps local businesses manage their online presence. The deal is for $65 million cash, plus a $5 million cash and equity earn out for employee retention, as well as another $30 million tied to revenue targets.
Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman says that to get the full revenue earn out, the SinglePlatform team would need to bring in about $75 million over the next two years. Goodman says the acquired team will continue to operate “pretty independently” out of its New York City office (Constant Contact is headquartered in Waltham, Mass.), and that it will offer SinglePlatform as a standalone product. The startup’s CEO Wiley Cerilli will become general manager and vice president of SinglePlatform. Both Goodman and Cerilli emphasize the connection between the companies’ missions, saying they’re trying to serve local businesses in complementary ways. Snapguide Raises $5M From CrunchFund, Atlas And Index To Reinvent ‘How To’ Guides. Founded by former Yahoo and Google employees Daniel Raffel and Steve Krulewitz, iOS app Snapguide is announcing a $5 million Series A raise this morning, from investors Atlas Venture, Index Ventures and Michael Arrington’s* CrunchFund.
This financing comes after a sizeable $2 million seed (more like a “pit”) round. Snapguide’s simple UI makes it easy for users to build “How-To” guides via iPhone. Co-founder Raffel tells me that already the company has had 10K guides like “How to Make a Sock Bun” created since its launch this March, with millions of unique views spread among them. In the same space as Instructables or WikiHow, but more mobile-focused, the company is currently working on partnerships with “major” brands. We’ve also heard independently that the company received several acquisition offers, but decided to raise capital and expand instead.
When asked if that app update included Android, Raffel told me that the company is currently “focused on iOS.” Real-Time Messaging Startup PubNub Introduces Pulse To Facilitate One-To-One Communications. As developers add more interactivity to their apps, PubNub has emerged with a platform for sending out real-time messages and notifications without investing heavily in the infrastructure needed to support it. While it has historically been focused on one-to-many notifications, the latest product from the startup, PubNub Pulse, will allow developers to add persistent connections between users. PubNub works to allow developers to add robust messaging into their apps without having to “rebuild the wheel.” The startup’s initial product, PubNub Galaxy, was designed for app makers who wish to simultaneously push out real-time messages in a one-to-many fashion.
That allows publishers to push messages to mass-scale audiences during major events to multiple mobile and web applications. PubNub Pulse, by contrast, was designed with low-latency, one-to-one communication in mind. Verelo Debuts A New Take On Website Monitoring, Focuses On Site Health & Recommendations. A startup called Verelo is introducing a new type of website monitoring service, which plans to commoditize features like uptime and performance monitoring, with plans to give away as much of those services for free as possible. Instead, Verelo’s premium offerings will focus on other areas, including malware detection and site health, as well as a recommendations feature aimed at the less tech-savvy.
This latter feature will observe the site and suggest changes site owners can make and services they can add to cut down on frustrations. Explains co-founder Andrew McGrath, who previously worked at Syncapse prior to creating Verelo with co-founder Mike Curry, the company’s tagline is “Verelo wants to make the internet a better place.” He said the idea for the service was born out of frustration with existing offerings – and there are many: Pingdom, Uptrends, New Relic, AlertFox – to name just a few. There are also features aimed at non-technical business users. DoubleDutch Debuts Pride, A Mobile-Only Yammer Competitor. Following its $2 million Series A this spring, enterprise-focused mobile startup DoubleDutch is today introducing a new app called Pride whose debut coincidentally arrives alongside reports that Microsoft is after a startup that could be Pride’s competition: Yammer.
Like Yammer, Pride is also focused on workgroup collaboration, but, like most of what DoubleDutch does, it’s not just mobile-first, it’s mobile-only. Lawrence Coburn, founder and CEO at DoubleDutch, says the timing of Pride’s launch is “kind of unbelievable, actually,” given the reported Microsoft/Yammer deal. “It really is a ‘what are you working on?’ App with a couple of big differences from Yammer,” explains Coburn. He then goes on to describe Pride as a mobile-only way for teams to collaborate across locations by sharing status updates. But the major differentiator is that Pride was built around the concept of structured data. Any companies interested in signing up for Pride (iOS or Android) can do so here. TechCrunch. Drag-And-Drop Mobile App Builder Tiggzi Makes Building Native And Web Apps Easier, Adds SMS and mHealth Plugins.
We first wrote about Tiggzi, a DIY mobile app maker that gives you far more flexibility than most of its competitors, when it launched its public beta a few weeks ago. Since then, the service, which was developed by software engineering company Exadel, has added quite a few more features, making it even easier to develop relatively fully featured apps with its drag-and-drop interface. Among these new features are the ability to export native iOS binaries and to export Windows Phone source code (Tiggzi promises that the option to export the compiled binaries for Windows Phone is coming soon). Tiggzi also added support for AT&T’s text messaging and MHealth API. Starting later this month, Tiggzi will also launch its own database solution, Tiggzi DB. The idea behind Tiggzi is to give developers as much flexibility as possible by letting them use virtually any REST API on the Internet in their own apps. You can read more about how the service works in detail in our previous post here.
Hipmunk Raises $15M Series B, Promises Big Product Improvements. My favorite travel site Hipmunk just announced that it has raised $15 million in a Series B round of funding. The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, and IVP parter Todd Chaffee will be joining the Hipmunk board. Previous investor Ignition Partners also invested. In his blog post announcing the round, CEO and co-founder Adam Goldstein says that the IVP investment is a particularly noteworthy as a “vote of confidence”, since the firm normally invests in later-stage rounds. Hipmunk offers a different way of searching for flights — laying them out in a grid that makes it easy to compare a bunch of flights at once, and allowing users to sort them in a way that minimizes “agony” (for example making it easier to avoid longer flights or flights with multiple layovers). Since its launch in 2010, Hipmunk has also released iPhone and Android apps, to which it recently added hotel search and calendar integration Hipmunk has now raised about $20 million total.
LightSpeed Raises $30M From Accel To Help Retailers Serve Tech-Savvy Shoppers. LightSpeed, a company promising to help physical retailers adapt to the digital age, has raised $30 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners. This is one of those investments where Accel finds an already-successful company that has been bootstrapping for several years, if not longer. (The most recent announcement was Qualtrics, a 10-year-old data collection and analysis company.) LightSpeed was founded in 2005, and its services are supposedly used by almost 10,000 retailers. Last year, Profit Magazine named it the fastest-growing company in Quebec, thanks to revenue that grew a total of 2,000 percent over the previous five years.
Accel partner Ryan Sweeney, who is joining the LightSpeed board, says in the press release that the company is “helping solve the most crucial issue facing retailers today: creating an in-store experience exciting enough to compete against e-commerce.” As for spending the investment money, it sounds like DaSilva plans to grow on virtually every front. Spotify App Soundrop Tunes Into First Investment: $3M From Spotify Lead Backer Northzone. Spotify’s move last year to open its platform to other apps has created more stickiness for its streamed music services. Now, one of the startups based around that idea has found some traction of its own: Oslo-based Soundrop, which creates “listening rooms” and social jukebox-style service for Spotify users (think Turntable.fm here), has picked up its first round of investment, $3 million from Northzone, one of Spotify’s own leading backers.
Soundrop is a relatively young company: it had been bootstrapped before the Northzone investment and only went live in January 2012, but has already seen the creation of thousands of listening rooms and tracks played. Inge Sandvik, the CEO and co-founder, says that the new funds will be used to develop its product and to “execute on its road map.” “If Twitter can make a billion dollars on placement of tweets, will we also be able to make money on helping artists and labels reach out to their fans,” he says. Soundrop is also hiring. Roqbot Raises $1.2M From Google Ventures & More To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Social Jukebox. Sometimes finding a solution to those little annoyances in life can turn into a big business. Take Roqbot, a virtual jukebox solution that lets users crowdsource music in bars, cafes and stores. Frustrated by losing turns every time they went to pick a song at the jukebox at their local bowling alley, Roqbot co-founders Garrett Dodge and Ketu Patel developed a mobile solution.
The app, which runs on any internet-enabled device connected to a venue’s local sound system, allows users to personalize their music experience at their local hangout spots. The app took off, and Roqbot is now working with businesses in San Francisco, New York, and LA and has collaborated with brands like Miller Lite, Gap, and Samsung, and even bands like Motley Crue to bring public, crowdsourced song-selecting to the masses.
Simply put, the Roqbot co-founders say that they want to put an end to boring background music. Find Roqbot here. Flurry’s New Ad Analytics Service Will Reveal The Effectiveness Of Mobile Ad Networks. Mobile app measurement and advertising platform Flurry is expanding its product lineup with a new service that will allow app marketers the ability to track the effectiveness of their mobile ad campaigns. Flurry Ad Analytics, as the service is being called, works with the major ad networks, such as Apple’s iAd, Google Admob, and Flurry’s own AppCircle, for example, and will show from where users arrived, which campaigns were effective, and what any given network’s userbase looks like over time.
This is a big deal for mobile app developers and marketers because, currently, these folks are buying from something like ten to fifteen ad networks, and yet have little visibility into the types of users being returned. The timing is right for a service like this, explains Flurry VP of Marketing Peter Farago, because app publishers are starting to move beyond the typical “spray and pray” strategy where they would do anything to just get to the top of the charts. Yext Raises $27M More At a $270M Valuation. Yext, a company that helps local businesses synchronize their listings across 50 different sites, just announced that it has raised $27 million in Series E funding. Yext did not provide a valuation, but a source close to the company tells me that it was $270 million.
The round was led Marker, a new fund launched by Rick Scanlon, founder of Crescent Point Capital Group. CrunchFund (whose investor AOL owns TechCrunch) also participated, as did past investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, and WGI Group. The company demonstrated at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009, an appearance that CEO Howard Lerman credits with landing Yext a $25 million round shortly after. Now Yext is focused on its PowerListings service, which businesses use to make sure their information is up-to-date on all the different local search and listings sites across the Web.
There’s a new version coming next week, Lerman says, and the funding will be used to further develop the product. Mozilla Launches Thimble, A Web-Based Code Editor For Teaching HTML and CSS. YC-Backed Submittable Makes It Easy For Publishers To Manage Submissions. Knight Foundation Bets Mobile Sensor Startup, Behav.io, Is The Future of Journalism. Sonos Lands $135M For Its Classy Wireless Home Audio Systems. Aidin Finds $600K From General Catalyst & More For A Yelp For Continuing Care. Doo.net Lands Series A Funding To Organise Documents, Automatically For The People. From TC40 To $10.1M In Funding And A $120M Acquisition, TripIt Tells All. Denmark’s Iconfinder Snaps Up $1.5M To Take On Google And Shutterstock, Uses SV’s AngelList To Find A Danish Backer.
On Ubokia, Buyers Post What They’re Looking For — And Now It’s Embeddable On Partner Sites. Look Who Called – Sellfy Scores Angel Funding From Skype Co-Founder And Others. Video Services Provider Ooyala Lands $35M From Australian Telco Giant Telstra To Go Big Overseas. Nutmeg Raises $5.3M From Pentech, Tim Draper To Make Financial Management Less Stuffy. Switchcam Raises $1.2 Million From Mark Cuban, 500 Startups, Turner Media Camp, And Others. After Raising $1.6M, SimpleReach Launches To Become The PageRank Of Social. Let Them Eat Cake? Yammer’s Price Tag May Be About $1.4 Billion.
Focus Squarely On Europe, Mobile Payments Startup iZettle Gets $31.4M From Greylock, MasterCard & More. TheDatable Launches To Help You Discover The Singles In Your Social Graph. Founders Fund Leads The Climate Corporation’s Colossal $50M Funding Round. 10Sheet Will Cut The Bookkeeper Out Of Your Financial Equation. 500 Startups-Backed Bombfell Helps Nerds Get Stylish, For Just $69 A Month. Benchmark Capital Invests $5.5M In thatgamecompany To Take Emotional Gaming Beyond The Console. PeekYou Pivots From People Search To Social Analytics With The Launch Of PeekAnalytics.
Skills Marketplace SkillPages Raises $9.5M Series B Round To Fund U.S. Expansion, Mobile Push. Printstagram - We Print Your Instagram Photos. Easy photo books and calendars | Keepsy. Kanvess.com Will Print Your Artsy Instagram Photos For 25 Cents A Pop. Thismoment Raises $22 Million Series C Funding Led By Trident Capital For Social Brand CMS. Mobile-Friendly Pet Locator PetHub Closes $1.3 Million Seed Round. Clipping Virtual Coupons On The Go: RetailMeNot Launches Its First iOS App.
YC-Backed Kippt Launches Collaborative Bookmarking App To Become The GitHub For Links.