Ola, Uber’s Big Rival In India, Raises $400M To Grow To 200 Cities This Year

Jawbone Replaces The UP24 With The $100 UP2Ola, the largest rival to Uber in India, has announced that it has raised a $400 million Series E round to fuel further expansion in India.
The company, which was found to have raised $310 million last week according to filings, is aiming to grow its network to 200 cities in India before the end of the year. It currently serves over 100 cities, but it covered just 10 locations a year ago. (For comparison, Uber is in 11 cities in India, at this point.)
Ola’s Series E round was led by DST Global, and it included participation from new investors GIC, Falcon Edge Capital, and and existing backers SoftBank, Tiger Global, Steadview Capital and Accel. It values the company at $2.5 billion, and takes Ola well beyond $600 million from investors to date.
Anand Subramanian, director of marketing communication at Ola, told TechCrunch in an interview that the company plans to reach smaller towns in India where it believes its services can have a significant impact.
“The next wave of growth will come from smaller towns and cities where personal transportation is none existent. [These cities have] smaller populations, but there’s a genuine need,” Subramanian said.
In those smaller locations, Ola’s challenge is two-fold: enticing existing taxi drivers on to its platform and also convincing people to take up driving as a career. To that end, Ola has struck deals with car makers and loans companies to help make the cost of vehicle ownership palatable for its drivers. (Subramanian said 70 percent of Ola drivers own their vehicle outright or are paying it off.)
Related to that, Ola has set an ambitious target to reach 1 million drivers on its platform within the next three years. Currently the service has over 100,000 drivers, having grown that number from 10,000 one year ago.
Despite its quick progress in India, Ola is not looking overseas at this point.
“The opportunity in India is very, very large, we have a huge problem to solve,” Subramanian said.
And it’s easy to see that Ola’s vision is still very much in progress since, with a network of 200 cities under its belt, the company would have real potential to introduce other logistics-related services.
Food on-demand service Ola Cafe is its first move beyond taxis. The service covers four cities and is currently in “beta.” Subramanian declined to discuss more details about Ola Cafe or other services, but with Uber and Uber rivals moving into such spaces, it seems like a future for Ola too.
A $100 million portion of the new funding will also go towards TaxiForSure, the company which Ola acquired for $200 million. Like Ola, the plan will be to expand its network into more cities in India.

By: Unknown On 03:13

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Thiel Fellow Raises $25M For OYO Rooms, A Network of Branded Budget Hotels in India

Nintendo As A Service


In the largest funding round to date for a Thiel Fellow project, Ritesh Agarwal has raised $25 million from Lightspeed, Sequoia and others to build a branded budget hotel network across India.
Called OYO Rooms, the company partners with property owners across India and makes sure that their facilities meet a baseline of requirements from linen quality to breakfast to Internet access for a starting price of 999 rupees or $16 a night. The company, which has booked around 60,000 stays so far since starting almost two years ago, works with each partner hotel to improve their facilities over the span of a week before launching on the platform.
While other tech companies like Airbnb also have a growing footprint across the country, Agarwal says that the Indian short-term rental market needs to guarantee a basic quality level that a ratings or reviews system meets only some of the time. While the U.S. and other European countries have long had chains like Best Western or Ibis, he argues that the Indian budget hotel market is still lacking in this area.
He compares Airbnb to a Sidecar-like model while OYO has a more Uber-like approach where they focus on instant gratification and minimum quality standards. On the OYO platform, guests can do on-demand booking without waiting for a reply from a host, and they can check in and out instantaneously instead of waiting at a reservation desk.
They’ve partnered with more than 200 hotels across 10 cities in India. By the end of the year, they plan to quintuple in size with a network of 1,000 hotels in 25 cities.  Along with Lightspeed and Sequoia, Greenoaks Capital and DSG Consumer Partners also participated in the round.

Agarwal got his start programming when he was in third grade and he began living out of bed-and-breakfasts regularly before starting OYO. In that year of traveling across India, he realized how difficult it was to get any kind of consistency.
“The sockets wouldn’t be working. Or you couldn’t pay by card the next morning,” Agarwal said. “With OYO, you know exactly what you’re going to get.”
Agarwal’s big round comes at a time when the Indian consumer Internet market is finally flourishing after the country has served as a B2B or outsourcing platform for decades.
He decided to become a consumer Internet entrepreneur around the time that Flipkart and Snapdeal were founded. Both are now two of India’s “unicorns,” or web companies valued at well over $1 billion each.
“India was seeing its first iteration of high quality entrepreneurs,” he said. “It’s exciting times for startups here.”

By: Unknown On 02:59

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Android Co-Founder Andy Rubin Is Now A Partner At Redpoint Ventures, Raises $48M For His Own Hardware Incubator

The Future Of Messenger

Back in October of 2014, Android co-founder Andy Rubin parted ways with Google after nine years with the company.
At the time of his departure, word trickled out that he was building a hardware-focused incubator called Playground — and sure enough, that incubator just disclosed this morning that they’ve raised $48M .
Turns out, that’s not all he’s got on his plate: he’s also now a venture partner at Redpoint Ventures.
Prior to selling Android to Google in 2005, Andy was the co-founder of Danger — a company best known for creating the Sidekick/Hiptop.
Redpoint was founded in 1999, and has over 300 investments in its portfolio — including names like Nextdoor, Path, Sonos, Stripe, Twilio, and even Android-based Android competitor Cyanogen. It’s also an investor in Rubin’s Playground incubator, according to Redpoint’s Jeff Brody.
Rubin confirmed the new role with a tweet this afternoon.
"@rsarver: Couldn't be more excited for @ARubin to join @redpointvc http://t.co/6tpL9pUPVF" ;; I'm psyched too!!!
— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) April 6, 2015

By: Unknown On 02:29

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ZappRx Raises $5.6 Million In Series A Funding To Expand The Company

Tapingo Orders Up $22 Million In Series C Funding To Grow Beyond The College MarketPharmacy coordination platform ZappRx announced it has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding today. The new financing will go to further build upon ZappRx’s prescription data automation technology and help to scale operations for the startup.
ZappRx solves a unique dilemma in the prescription medication industry. Many pharmacies still use fax or phone to transfer medical prescription information from the doctor and ZappRx believes its main competitor is actually the fax machine. It can be frustrating for patients to find out the prescription paperwork has been lost or didn’t come in through on fax when the patient needs it.
ZappRx automates the process between doctor and pharmacy by sending information over an app in real-time instead of by fax to ensure these specialty patients get the medications they need.
ZappRx began with the goal to become the go-to app for prescription communications among all doctors, pharmacists and patients throughout the country. However, with just six employees at the time, that seemed to be a bit too lofty of a goal. The startup shifted focus to specialty pharmacies that provide care to patients with acute or chronic conditions instead. ZappRx says this was because it saw more of a need in the market for specialty medications to chronically ill patients. These are the patients that frequent the pharmacy the most to pick up various medications or must specialty order them.
This new round allows the company to hire more people to help execute on more deals with large pharmaceutical companies. ZappRx recently hired 17 people with the new financing and plans to hire 15 more in the near future.
Related ArticlesZappRx Lands $1M To Rethink Prescription Processing With A Pharmacy-Agnostic Mobile Checkout Platform
The round was led by GlaxoSmithKline’s funding arm SR One, with participation from early stage life sciences venture firm Atlas Ventures. ZappRx was SR One’s first investment in digital health, and both firms had participated in the previous round. This now puts the total amount of funding at $8.8 million for ZappRx.
Managing partner at SR One Jens Eckstein was bold on the firm’s renewed commitment to ZappRx’s vision. “We strongly believe in ZappRx’s ability to alleviate these inefficiencies…and to innovative IT solutions for our industry,” he said.

By: Unknown On 02:24

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SeatGeek Raises $62 Million In A Series C Led By Technology Crossover Ventures

Shyp Is Raising $50 Million At A $250 Million ValuationOnline ticket sales startup SeatGeek has raised $62 million in Series C funding. Co-founder Jack Groetzinger confirmed to TechSupport that the round was led by Technology Crossover Ventures, with participation from previous investor Mousse Partners as well as Accel Partners and Causeway Media.
This brings the funding total up to $103 million now. According to one source that puts the valuation at about $200 million.
The new funding will help the ticketing company take on competitor StubHub, particularly in the mobile space. SeatGeek launched in 2009 as a mobile-first ticket sales operation. It’s mobile applications have been downloaded over 3 million times, and over 60% of SeatGeek users now access the service via a mobile device, according to the company.
Both SeatGeek and StubHub see the majority of their ticket sales split between sports and music events. StubHub separates mobile ticket sales between StubHub Sports and StubHub Music. SeatGeek has, thus far, chosen to keep all ticket sales in a single app.
Both SeatGeek and StubHub have made some strategic partnerships in the mobile music space lately. StubHub Music partnered with Spotify earlier this year and has been focusing on an end-to-end experience for users involving music discovery and local event recommendations. SeatGeek made similar partnerships with Spotify, Rdio and Last.fm. Groetzinger affirmed the company would be focusing on relevant recommendations such as tickets that are available rather than localized recommendations for shows that may have already sold out.
A big priority for the startup will be to now focus on marketing and hiring more engineers to work on the mobile experience. SeatGeek has doubled the overall team in the last year, growing to 64 employees now. A majority of the money will be used for marketing purposes and to increase the team to 110 employees by the end of 2015.

By: Unknown On 22:24

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Sensai Raises $900K To Help Data Scientists Query Unstructured Data

ESPN Launches A Big Redesign For Its Web VersionsData analysis often involves looking at a large set of pretty uniform, well-structured data. But as companies continue to gather more electronic documents in all kinds of forms (and formats), those traditional techniques don’t work anymore. Companies like Palantir and IBM (with Watson) are now making it easier for data scientists and technical users to query unstructured textual information and the newest player in this field is Sensai, which is officially coming out of stealth and launching today.
The company also today announced that it has raised $900,000 in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Formation8, Chris Kelly, ValueStream Labs and others. The company got its start at big data incubator Data Elite and plans to raise a Series A round later this year.

Sensai says it will beat its competitors on price (subscriptions start at about $5,000 per month but can be customized based on customers’ needs), but also by making it easier for data scientists to use it (even when they are not “hard core,” as the company points out). Unlike other platforms, Sensai is also focused on unstructured data and argues that most other players “are only dealing with proprietary, structured (more perfect) data.”
Once a user has set up a query (which can pull data from internal files, social media, articles on the web and a library of over 500 million public documents), the results appear in a real-time dashboard, but the service can also generate custom reports and surface results through an API. Sensai can be hosted in the cloud or deployed on premise.
The company says it uses a number of artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques to power its service. This, it says, allows its results to be extremely accurate, and its system constantly learns about what works best for a customer and improves its results accordingly.
Without actually using the system, it’s impossible to know if these claims hold true, but Sensai has already signed up Siemens, the financial services company UBS, and asset management firm WorldQuant as early customers. Siemens is using the service for IT auditing while UBS is using it for its Evidence Lab surveys.

By: Unknown On 14:51

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Japan’s SmartNews Raises Another $10M At A $320M Valuation To Expand In The U.S.

Alibaba Signs Distribution Deal With BMG, Its First Music Partner Outside Of AsiaWhile general sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google stake their claims as news portals, apps focused squarely on reading news continue to duke it out.
The latest development comes from SmartNews, a popular app founded in Japan that competes against the likes of Flipboard and Nuzzel in the news recommendation and aggregation space. The startup behind it has raised $10 million to expand its presence in the U.S — specifically to staff up its San Francisco office. It’s on the hunt especially for machine learning and data science specialists to continue honing its recommendation algorithms, co-founder Kaisei Hamamoto tells me.
SmartNews, which now has 10 million downloads and 1 million monthly active users in the U.S., says that the $10 million in funding was made on a pre-money valuation of $320 million. As a point of comparison, Flipboard was last valued at $800 million back in was December 2013, when it last disclosed fundraising (Flipboard has raised just over $160 million to date).
This latest injection comes in the form of a bridge round led by games company GREE, with participation also from Globis Capital Partners, Atomico, Mixi and Social Venture Partners — all previous investors in SmartNews. Hamamoto and his co-founder Ken Suzuki are currently in the U.S. working on raising a larger Series C round, as well as signing the final details for a new office space. To date, SmartNews has now raised $50 million.
SmartNews’ move into the U.S. and the new funding come on the back of a strong year for the startup. In addition to its 1 million MAUs in the U.S. since launching a U.S. edition in October 2014, it has around 4 million MAUs in Japan, where it launched first.
That popularity is also being played out in the app stores, where over the last several months SmartNews has managed to remain consistently in the top 10 in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to App Annie figures. In doing so, it has more often than not outranked more higher-profile rivals like Flipboard.
Machine learning but not for news junkies
The company’s co-founders believe that part of the reason for SmartNews’ growth is because of how the app has been built built. Many aggregation service will claim to have intelligent algorithms directing what articles get recommended to users; SmartNews claims its are better.
The machine learning-based recommendations focus not only on what you click on to read, but where you pause when you are browsing in the app, and what people read and pause near when they like the same things you do, comparing all of this against a massive trove of articles, to deliver to users a clean interface of things they may want to read. (Hence, the “smart” of SmartNews.)
The algorithms, they claim, which can be fine tuned based on location and other parameters, are also why the company is able to grow quickly into so many markets — it’s now present in over 150 — without staffing up significantly or raising enormous amounts of cash, music to investors’ ears, too, it seems.
“The news is international, but not all news apps truly are,” Niklas Zennstrom said in a statement. “SmartNews machine learning is the key to breaking through to general consumers, even the emerging/developing world on mobile: SmartNews algorithms pick what’s trending and culturally relevant in different countries and regions. This is the breakthrough needed to scale news delivery to billions of mobile devices.”
What SmartNews doesn’t need to work is your social graph. In other words, no logins to Twitter and Facebook. This has a few advantages. One is just in terms of the kind of results you end up getting (avoiding the so-called “Filter Bubble” of too-narrow information).
This also means that not only is the app less dependent on third parties to propel its engine, but for those who are not happy about social networks collecting more data on them, it’s one less app to worry about. Interestingly, this fact also makes it attractive to another company, Google, which uses SmartNews to power news delivery in Google Now.
Hamamoto also contends that another reason why SmartNews is doing so well is that it tries to position itself as an app for the general public, not journalists, or tech buffs or news junkies — a target customer triumvirate that, some believe, has been a big failing of many of other news aggregation apps.
Hamamoto is all too aware of the pitfalls of building news apps for power users: his previous app, Crowsnest, aggregated news based on Twitter shares and RSS feeds and then delivered the results in a list. “It focused too much on personalisation and news junkies,” he says. “That was one reason why it failed. Based on that I built SmartNews. We try to keep our algorithms out of the way now.”
Publishers and making money
The other side of SmartNews’ business, working with publishers, has continued to develop at the same time. Globally, the company now works with over 150 publishers. Led by Rich Jaroslovsky, SmartNews’s VP of content and a former journalist himself, the company has signed on MSNBC, TIME, Buzzfeed, HuffingtonPost, VICE, Medium, Quartz, AOL, Upworthy, People, Vox, MTV News, The Verge, AP, Reuters, USA Today and Fox News.
Suzuki says that over 80 of the wider pool of publishers get at least 1 million pageviews — still an important metric for ad-based businesses — each per month via Smartnews. (Some get significantly more, some get much less.)
It’s on the publishing side that SmartNews will be focusing its monetizing efforts.
For now, SmartNews’ only revenue generation has been in the form of a small roll out of ads in its app in Japan. These run both near stories in SmartNews’ stream, as well as alongside stories when you click to read them. SmartNews’s take is to make ads relevant to the content (eg, food ads alongside food articles), and to only take a cut when the ads are in the stream (alongside articles, the publishers get all the proceeds).
The other area where the company will be turning on sales soon are in subscriptions and paywalls.
“A lot of publishers are interested in subscriptions, and they have been having a hard time developing something themselves,” Hamamoto says. “We are very open to launching something like this.” He says it’s likely to be based around the idea of a monthly rate, which would let users pay for specific channels dedicated either to a subject, or to a specific publisher.
The ads are not likely to launch in the U.S. until there are more MAUs, while the subscriptions will probably be turned on later this year, Suzuki says. “It’s a big part of the reason why we are moving so fast.”

By: Unknown On 04:05

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More Rain For Cloud Business Intelligence As Birst Raises $65M

Nintendo Teases NX, Its Next Dedicated Gaming Console
Birst, a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) platform, has raised another $65 million in funding — a Series F round that CEO Jay Larson said will be “the last one” before it gears up for an IPO. “We think it will not be this year, we’re not giving specific direction,” he said. “But the combination of the size of the BI market and us, we think we have the makings of a great company.”The round — led by Wellington Management Company LLP with participation also from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, DAG Ventures and Northgate Capital — brings the total raised by Birst to $156 million. It speaks to a lot of the activity and optimism for the future of new companies tackling the legacy BI space.The announcement comes less than a week after Looker, another cloud-based BI platform, raised $30 million to build out its business. Larson said that at the moment Birst is growing its revenues at a rate of between 80% and 100% annually, with a lot of that down to new and larger customers getting added to the client list, rather than the existing base simply buying more services. It is not yet profitable — “young SaaS businesses rarely are,” he reminded me — but he said that they are inching to it.The problem that a company Birst is tackling is the fact that businesses are collecting a mass of information electronically that, looked at intelligently, could help them make better strategic decisions. While there have been companies like IBM and others offering business intelligence solutions for some time now, the problem is that many legacy offerings are on-premise and are not able to cope with newer forms of data, let alone use newer algorithms to extract information, or the fact that these days it may be as likely that a person on the business side wants direct access to this information, bypassing heavy lifting from a data analytics team.“The legacy products are running out of gas and are dying,” Brad Peters, a co-founder of Birst that is now the company’s chairman (he had been CEO), said. “The desktop products for discovery and visualization don’t scale.”Tellingly, Birst also knows that cloud services are not going to win the day for everyone that soon: it offers solutions that let businesses source data both online and offline, and users can run Birst’s software either in the public or private cloud — the latter being the most common way that it is used when the customer in question is a government organization, Larson said.Companies that use Birst include Citrix and Reckitt Benckiser, the huge consumer packaged goods company behind brands like Lysol and Clearasil.Citrix as a customer is interesting in itself, considering the wider business trajectory for Birst and the fact that a lot of its competition comes in the form of companies like Oracle and IBM offering one-stop-shops to enterprises for BI and many other OSS/BSS functions.Larson is not commenting on the valuation of the company right now, except to note that “it is a big upround for us, we can say that much.”

By: Unknown On 13:09

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Lingua.ly, Which Turns The Internet Into A Language Textbook, Raises $1M

TC AppleCast 8: Our Video Recap Of The Apple EventLingua.ly, which saves language students from the tedium of traditional textbooks, has raised $1 million. Participants in the round include Udi Netzer (a returning investor), Shai Rephaeli, Yochy Investments, and Seed Fund 1776.
The site and apps pulls articles from the web-based on vocabulary lists and each users’ interests. TechCrunch last covered the startup when it launched its free Android app in April 2014 (it is also now available for iOS).
The latest funding brings Lingua.ly’s total raised so far to $1.8 million. Meredith Circerchia, a linguist and the startup’s director of communications and e-learning, says the fresh capital will be used to bring Lingua.ly’s free tools, which are available online as a Chrome extension and as Android and iOS apps, to new platforms and markets. The startup plans to monetize through premium features that it will release on the web and its apps later this year.
Lingua.ly is a nifty tool for aspiring polyglots because it has flashcards with recorded pronunciations, a dictionary, a repetition game to help with memorization, and several categories of articles to browse so users can see the words in common usage, instead of the more formal and stilted examples often found in textbooks.
“The Lingua.ly algorithm is based on research concerning vocabulary acquisition from context,” says Circerchia. “It estimates your vocabulary in a foreign language and then finds newspaper articles that contain mostly words you know.”
“This is because when most of the words in a sentence are familiar to you, you can take a more informed guess at the meaning of new terms. Even if you guess incorrectly, expending extra cognitive energy thinking about a word helps dig the memory in deeper,” she adds.
Providing deeper context and tailoring content to users’ interests is what sets Lingua.ly apart from (and makes it a good complement) to other language learning apps like Duolingo and Memrise. Circherchia says Lingua.ly is targeted at intermediate and advanced students who have already know a lot of vocabulary, but want to improve and maintain their language skills.
The app already has full support for 10 languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Russian, Arabic, and Hebrew. Users studying other languages can make flashcards and look up words in Lingua.ly’s dictionary, but they lack the benefit of audio pronunciations and articles. The startup has had a lot of requests for Scandinavian and Asian languages, however, and hopes to add several later this year, as well as better dictionary support for languages like Hindu and Farsi.
Future features will be based on natural language processing technology, which will help Lingua.ly pull up a more personalized and diverse assortment of articles for each user. Circherchia says that the site and app will also add more tools for beginning learners who aren’t ready to dive into articles yet, as well as multimedia. Classroom-oriented features, including a dashboard for teachers, is also in the works.

By: Unknown On 01:00

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Subscription Billing Startup ChargeBee Raises $5M Series B Led By Tiger Global

Lingua.ly, Which Turns The Internet Into A Language Textbook, Raises $1MChargeBee, a Chennai-based startup that helps companies manage their billing and subscription needs, is the latest investment for Tiger Global in India.
The startup has closed a $5 million Series B round led by the New York-headquartered investment fund, with participation from previous backer Accel — which put together ChargeBee’s $800,000 Series A round last year.
Founded in 2011, ChargeBee is focused on helping startups, and particularly those in the Saas space, get more from their billing subscriptions. It counts Freshdesk, Kissflow, Soylent and VinylMePlease among its customer base, which includes companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific, ChargeBee CEO and co-founder Krish Subramanian told TechCrunch in an interview.
“Billing is an amazing opportunity for conversation with customers but also a point of friction if not done well. In a subscription based business model it becomes crucial to deliver amazing customer experience in billing as much as your product and we focus on delivering this on top of global payment gateways like Stripe & Braintree,” said Subramanian.
ChargeBee is rivaled by Zuora, Recurly and Chargify. It provides both technical support and solutions, alongside consultancy-like services. The latter might include advice on necessary billing and payment-related processes for expanding into new markets, for example.
Subramanian explained that ChargeBee will use the funds to set up satellite offices in the U.S., UK and Australia, although its base in Chennai — where it has 37 staff — will remain its primary location. The startup also plans to “double down” on its engineering team to develop additional value-add services for customers, such as advanced analytics.
ChargeBee is currently processing $100 million in annual transactions for its customers, Subramanian revealed. It plans to scale by focusing on high-growth startups, rather than larger organizations, for a number of reasons — including shorter product adoption cycles, and the fact that growing companies represent growing revenue for third-party service providers like ChargeBee.
Subramanian said that the company would be unlikely to raise new funding for another two years. He added that it could turn a profit “very soon,” but is currently focused on growth.
Tiger Global raised $2.5 billion in fresh funds last year, and India appears to be a primary focus for that new capital. The firm’s most recent investments have included ShopClues, Grofers and News In Shorts. It is a long-term investor in Indian startups, having backed the likes of Flipkart and Uber-rival Ola from an early stage.

By: Unknown On 00:45

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goFlow Surf App Launches 10 New Sports And Raises A Seed Round

What To Expect From The Apple Watch EventgoFlow is an app for weather-driven sports like surfing, kiteboarding, skiing, and snowboarding, which gets its data from users uploading the conditions. Founded by Roni Eshel, a pro-surfer turned tech entrepreneur, it claims to have generated over 1 million surf reports worldwide in the last year.
It’s now launched ‘goFlow Sports’ with 10 new sports activities including: Surfing, Snow, Paddleboarding, Fishing, Diving, Cycling, Kitesurfing , Boating, Golfing, and Skateboarding.
The company has also closed a $500,000 seed round led by Angels Shalev Hulio, Omri Lavie and the founders of NSO group and Kaymera. In addition, Daniel Recanati of Rhodium, Mehrdad Piroozram from Widgetlabs.
Most competitors focus on one outdoor sport vertical only, like kitesurfing. A few other competitors are focused on particular sports verticals, such as ‘Weendy’ for kite surfers; ‘Surfr’ for surfers and ‘Fishbrain’ for fishing.
goFlow is going after 10 verticals. This means it can crowd-source weather conditions across the board, with GPS enabled mapping and private chat groups with friends.

By: Unknown On 01:14

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Photobucket Raises $3.6 Million, Plans To Acquire A Mobile Photo-Sharing App

Publishizer Is A Crowdfunding Solution That Connects Authors With PublishersDenver-based Photobucket, one of the web’s older brands which offers a photo and video-sharing service online and on mobile, has closed on $3.6 million in new funding, an SEC filing reveals and the company confirms. The additional capital is part of a larger, still-in-progress round, which sees the photo sharing service seeking around $8.1 million in new funding.
Listed on the filing are the company’s prior investors Voyager Capital (Bill McAleer, Tom Huseby), Oak Investment Partners (Ren Riley), Covera Ventures (Steve Coffey), as well as Erik Moreno and David Bagshaw. However, Photobucket declined to confirm who participated in the round and in what capacity, instead only confirming the $3.6 million figure. The company also declined to say what “series” this round was considered, though CrunchBase notes Photobucket’s Series E closed in early 2013, followed by an additional venture round last year.
Photobucket has had a lengthy history in the photo-sharing space, having once been sold to Fox Interactive Media/MySpace for $250 million plus earn-out, followed by a $60 million “fire sale” from MySpace owner News Corp to Ontela in 2009.

While perhaps no longer as relevant as it was in earlier days, the site still claims to have 100 million users and hosts over 17 billion photos and videos, though it won’t discuss specifics surrounding its current growth or revenue. It’s worth pointing out, however, that user growth appears to be somewhat stagnant – that “100 million” figure was cited as the size of the registered user base back in 2013, for example. And registered users aren’t necessarily active ones, as we all know.
The company today generates revenue through print, advertising and subscription services. It recently has been attempting to return to growth through the launch of its “Print Shop” service in September 2014, which is now available on both web and mobile.
This service, which makes Photobucket something of a competitor to Shutterfly, lets users create personalized prints and photo products, including things like seasonal cards, calendars, canvas prints, home décor and other items. In the next few months, the Print Shop will also offer a premium, lay-flat photo book which will be able to be printed from mobile and picked up the same-day at Walgreens.
According to Kate Hare, Photobucket’s chief product and marketing officer (who was able to be reached for comment while CEO Tom Munro was traveling), the Print Shop and in particular its move to mobile is helping the company find new footing. “We saw tremendous growth, about 10x in revenue year-over-year from 2013,” she notes, referring to the printing service. “So far we are seeing about 10 percent of print orders coming from mobile and expect that to become a larger percentage during the year.”
In other words, while Photobucket may be challenged with growing its user base, it’s figuring out how to extract more money from its existing users.
The new funding will serve two purposes, we understand. One is to expand the Photobucket Print Shop with new products to appeal to a broader user base. But the company is also doubling down on its mobile investments. Photobucket is poised to announce some new acquisitions, one of which is being announced as soon as next week. The company is interested in expanding its print offering around mobile, but also its overall mobile offering in the area of private group sharing. The forthcoming acquisition will aid in that effort.
“We’ve proven that print works and this investment is to continue to expand on print and group photos on mobile,” says Hare.

By: Unknown On 23:44

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LocoMotive Labs, Maker Of Todo Math App, Raises $4M To Expand In Asia

Math can be fun, but try telling that to a small child stuck behind a desk doing endless drills and worksheets. Founded by a former game developer, startup LocoMotive Labs’ mission is to make learning mathematic basics entertaining for all children, no matter their learning styles.
Its flagship app, Todo Math, has already been downloaded 1.1 million times, and now the Berkeley, California company has picked up a series A of $4 million to expand into Asia.
The round was led by Softbank Ventures Korea and TAL Education Group and brings LocoMotive Labs’ total raised so far to $5.15 million. Returning investors K9 Ventures, Kapor Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund, Joe Gleberman, D3Jubilee, and Jerry Colonna also participated.
LocoMotive Labs will first focus on China because the country currently accounts for half of its new users. Its apps have already been downloaded 350,000 times there.
Founder Sooinn Lee was inspired to launch LocoMotive Labs by her son, who has special needs. After he was born, Lee and her husband, also a game developer, began to brainstorm ways to keep kids like him motivated once they start school. Todo Math and other LocoMotive Labs apps, however, are made for all kids between the ages of three and eight, not just those with learning disabilities.
“We come from Korea, where academic environment is particularly competitive and intense,” Lee says. “We thought, how could our son have a good experience in his early academic career? That was our motivation to start this company.”
LocoMotive Labs’ goal is to instill confidence in kids who might struggle with traditional exercises and worksheets.
“If they feel like failures at an early age, it gives them a negative self-concept. If they keep failing, they think ‘I’m done. I don’t like math,'” Lee says.
A Friendlier Alternative To Cram Schools
While there are many other math-learning apps available, Lee thinks of programs like Kumon as LocoMotive Labs’ main competition. Founded in 1958 in Japan, Kumon is designed to reinforce math and reading concepts with a series of worksheets and teaching sessions. After school programs like Kumon (often referred to as “cram schools”) are extremely popular in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian countries (and also operate in the U.S.). But Lee says that paper worksheets aren’t the best way for very young children to learn math basics.
“As a game designer, I believe we can solve it in a much better way in the mobile era. Three year olds can touch and swipe before they even hold a pen,” she says, adding “games are designed for users. If they don’t want to play it anymore, it’s done. They give it a F and it’s done.”
To keep children engaged, Todo Math uses an exploration game with treasure boxes and other rewards that kids can unlock as they solve different levels of problems. LocoMotive Labs’ follows Universal Design for Learning concepts, which encourages educators to take different learning styles into account when designing teaching materials.
For example, children in the age group targeted by Todo Math are at widely different stages of motor development, so kids can either write or drag-and-drop numbers. The app also lets kids decide how math problems are presented. They can pick a word problem, play with tally sticks, or move around blocks. As they use the app, it will begin to tailor lessons to their learning preferences.
Bringing American Education To Asia
Todo Math is aligned with U.S. Common Core standards, but Lee says that early math curriculums followed by different countries aren’t too different (for example, Common Core has similarities with math education in Singapore and Japan). The process of localizing LocoMotive Labs’ apps for new markets will focus mainly on changing cultural references in word problems.
The bigger challenge of expanding into Asia, Lee says, is convincing educators and parents that mobile apps are a suitable alternative to paper worksheets and flashcards. Todo Math is already accepted by teachers in the U.S.—in fact, it is currently used in about 1,000 classrooms. Lee hopes that the program’s adaptability—and the fact that it keeps children engaged—will convince parents to use it instead of sending their kids to cram school.
One of LocoMotive Labs’ goals for its international expansion is to bring U.S. attitudes toward learning to Asia, where pedagogy often centers on rote memorization. While Lee acknowledges that the effectiveness of Common Core and other U.S. educational programs are widely debated, she says that Asian students can benefit from their focus on developing critical thinking skills.
“I know Asian parents and governments are still skeptical, but kids are learning in a new era. Schools still focus on memorization, but children can use tools like Google Search and access a larger way of learning beyond just memorizing answers,” she says.
 

By: Unknown On 09:34

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India’s HomeLane Raises $4.5M Series A Led By Sequoia Capital

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By: Unknown On 01:25

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AlleyNYC Co-Working Space Raises $16 Million

AlleyNYC, a co-working space founded 2012, has raised $16 million in funding led by Vandewater Capital Holdings, with participation from Entrepreneur Media.

AlleyNYC was started by Jason Saltzman and Nsi Obotetukudo who wanted to create more than a room full of desks. They wanted to create a community, where entrepreneurs were constantly bringing value to each other.

They have since grown the Alley to nearly 200 members with over 50 early stage companies calling the co-working space their home. With the new financing, AlleyNYC is expanding to a second space in Chelsea with 40,000 square feet. The current space, in Midtown Manhattan, has around 16,000 square feet.

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Roundme Raises $3M To Turn Panoramic Photos Into Virtual Tours

Round.me, which allows users to explore global locations through panoramic photos, has raised a $3 million round led by April Capital.

The app is available on both the web and iOS. It allows you to browse different Spaces, which are basically panoramic images of locations like a Taoist temple in the Philippines and an ice cave in Vermont (to pick two examples from Roundme’s front page). The iOS experience is particularly immersive

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CoVenture Raises $3M To Build Software For Startups

and he’s announcing that it’s raised $3 million in funding.
For the most part, the money won’t go directly into startups, but rather to funding CoVenture’s operations. Hamed told me the firm employs 55 developers and designers in Lahore, Pakistan, and it offers their services to startups in exchange for equity.

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SkyGiraffe Raises $3M More To Help Companies Build Mobile Apps

SkyGiraffe, a startup that helps companies quickly build and deploy apps, has raised a $3 million Series A round of capital, led by Trilogy Equity Partners. Prior investor 500 Startups participated in the capital event. Trilogy, unsurprisingly, picked a board seat as part of the round.
The market that SkyGiraffe focused on, custom apps for businesses, is a hot space at the moment. Earlier today, K2, another firm that helps companies build apps, recently raised over $100 million in a single Series C round. TrackVia, which also helps companies build mobile apps, indicated last year that it expected to grow its revenues 100 percent in 2014.
Of course, each company offers something different

By: Unknown On 01:50

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After Relaunching As A Full-Service Accounting Startup, inDinero Raises Another $7M

Hey, remember inDinero? We covered the Y Combinator-incubated company a couple times back in 2010, when it was trying to build a Mint-style service for small businesses and raised $1.2 million in seed funding.
Well, co-founder and CEO Jessica Mah told me that in the years since, the company nearly ran out of money, laid off all its employees, and switched to a new model. But it seems to have bounced back, and it’s accelerating those efforts with $7 million in new funding.
Instead of a self-service tool for tracking small business finances, inDinero now offers what Mah calls an all-in-one solution for accounting, taxes and payroll. That means businesses don’t need to piece together a bunch of different service providers and software products to get all their needs met

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Tailor Brands Raises $1.1 Million in Seed Funding To Build Out Its Automated Design Process

The algorithmic logo design startup Tailor Brands has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from Disruptive Fund and various angel investors.
We first wrote about the beta launch of Tailor Brands at Disrupt San Francisco this past fall. It tested various branding concepts in beta. It’s now ready to use the new funding to build upon those concepts and for the public to access its logo and design services.
The goal of the startup is to reduce the cost of design by letting a machine create the look of logos and various branding items. These include business cards, bags, mugs, pens and various online materials such as social media profiles for smaller businesses that can’t afford to hire a graphic designer to do the work.
A graphic artist might charge anywhere from $1000 on the lower end to upwards of $10,000 for the design of all branding material, depending on the job. The Tailor Brands site will design and let you download the logo for free for your own use. It will also allow you to have unlimited revisions to that logo for free.
The money is made when you want designed assets and higher resolution images. Higher resolutions and storage of the logo on the Tailor Brands site starts at $24 for one job and go up to $99 for a complete package of business cards, higher resolution images and social media profile designs. Compare that to ordering business cards from a site like Moo at $19.99. Moo will design the cards for you using pre-made stock designs and then adding your information in after. Note that Tailor Brands provides the design but will not actually make and ship the cards to you.
The startup has so far done business in over 35 countries since its launch at Disrupt, according to Tailor Brands CEO Yali Saar.
This has helped set the company up for both funding and some runway to build out the business. Saar says he and his co-founders plan to use the new funds to hire more designers and to build out the services offered such as app design. Though he says Tailor Brands is experimenting with a lot of different ideas.

By: Unknown On 04:15

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