Lending Startup Fundbox Raises $17.5M From Khosla To Help SMBs Improve Cash Flow

Fundbox, a startup that helps SMBs improve cash flow from clients, has raised $17.5 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures with SV Angel, Vikram Pandit, former CEO of Citigroup; Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters; Jay Mandelbaum, former Head of Strategy and Business Development for JP Morgan Chase; Emil Michael, SVP of Business at Uber, and other investors participating.

Fundbox wants to solves a simple problem many small businesses in the B2B space face-cash flow from client payout. Most business owners have customer invoices that may take 60-90+ days to get paid. Having to wait that long to clear those invoices puts a strain on their working capital. Fundbox lets small business owners choose invoices they want paid out, and Fundbox puts the money in their account the next day. Fundbox is focused on B2B businesses (companies that invoice for goods or services) rather than B2C businesses (with a point of sale)

Using Fundbox, a small business owner or bookkeeper connects with their accounting and bookkeeping apps, including Quickbooks, Xero, or Freshbooks, and the Fundbox risk engine assesses the customer’s network and invoices for risk automatically and instantly. The user can then view all outstanding invoices through their Fundbox account and choose which invoices to clear.

The company will actually loan the company the amount for the invoice so that the startup can continue paying its bills despite having to wait for the client check. Fundbox will evaluate data around the company’s financial health, the demographics of their customers, and even the seasonal nature of some specific businesses to determine whether to loan the money. Money for funded invoices is transferred to the user’s bank account the next business day. The business is charged fees for the amount loaned, which range between sub-1 percent and three percent. The ideal customer pays back the amount once they get paid by the client. Fundbox rewards customers who receive funds and repay them early, with refunds for early repayment and lower fees the more they use the product.

While the company has been operating in stealth since August 2013, the startup has signed up thousands of active users (small businesses), and clears tens of thousands of invoices daily for businesses in 42 states.

The technology behind Fundbox is their data-driven SMB risk engine, which takes a large amount of data points and builds a better picture of the company’s overall health and likelihood of repayment. It takes 50 seconds to run, and includes no human bias or error, says the company.

There a number of companies that are approaching the small business lending space including Kabbage, OnDeck, CAN and now Lending Club. Even Square is starting to provide working capital to merchants. Fundbox’s take is interesting because it actually connects the invoice to the loan, which can be useful for small businesses.

Social Music App-Maker Smule Raises Another $16.6M

Smule, maker of popular social music apps including Sing! Karaoke and Magic Piano, is announcing that it has raised $16.6 million in new funding.

Founded in 2008, Smule says it continues to grow at a healthy clip, with sales doubling in the first quarter of 2014 (compared to Q1 2013), and the company currently at a $30 million run rate for the year. (Of that total, 80 percent comes from subscriptions, the other 20 percent from advertising.) The number of monthly unique users also doubled, from 9 to 18 million. And the company is now break-even with regards to monthly cashflow.

Last year saw the launch of Smule Nation, the company’s first major initiative on the web, where users across the various Smule apps can share their performances. As a result, Smule says traffic to its website has tripled to 1.5 million unique monthly visitors. (2013 was also a big year for co-founder and CEO Jeff Smith personally — he received his Ph.D. in computer-based music theory and acoustics from Stanford.)

Smith told me that the new funding was led by Roth Capital Partners‘ new venture group, which brought in growth funds and other new investors. (Asked if the funding means Smule is bringing on new board members, Smith grinned and said no.) Past backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures, and Granite Ventures also participated. Smule has now raised a total of $42 million.

The money will go toward continued development of Smule products, including Smule Nation, Smith said, and toward international expansion, beginning with Asia. He also noted that while the company intends to launch new products this year, its business projections are based entirely on growth in existing products (so its future doesn’t depend entirely on new hits). And he said that his ultimate goal is to take Smule public, although it doesn’t sound like there are any definite plans in this area.

The Hunt Raises $10M From Khosla For Crowdsourced Shopping

The Hunt, a website designed to help shoppers find specific items to buy online, has raised $10 million from Khosla Ventures and Javelin Ventures. This brings The Hunt’s total funding to $15.5 million. As part of the funding, Khosla’s Ben Ling will join The Hunt’s board.

Past celebrity investors include Tyra Banks, Ashton Kutcher, and Guy Oseary (Madonna’s manager).

The Hunt provides a community-driven shopping experience that helps consumers find and purchase items inspired by photos on social networks. Since its launch in January, the site has allowed users to post “hunts,” or pictures of unidentified clothing items from Tumblr, Pinterest, or the like that they want to track down. Community members then jump in to either identify the exact product or to provide suggestions for similar ones.

Unlike sites that trade in inspirational photos — the Tumblrs, Pinterests, and Instagrams of the world — The Hunt’s aim is to serve those people who want to act on that inspiration. On member profiles, you can see how good members are at solving hunts, or what hunts they have started. Members can also follow other hunts for items, like hunts, or add a recommended product to go along with a hunted-for item.

The company says it now has 500,000 active users (MAU) and 100,000 daily active users (DAU) on mobile. The average user spends nine minutes per session on The Hunt, and more than 2 million Hunts are started and followed per week.

Part of the company’s growth, says CEO Tim Weingarten, is attributed to mobile. The service was already seeing mobile traction last year, but after the debut of The Hunt’s iPhone app, growth really picked up. In fact, much interaction has shifted towards mobile-only, he says.

In terms of revenue, The Hunt uses an affiliate model for purchasing products suggested by community members. The app also includes a tagging system that surfaces related tags for users, which helps with personalization. But there is definitely more The Hunt can do with customization, says Weingarten.

AppDirect Raises $35 Million From Mithril To Grow Its Enterprise Cloud Marketplace

AppDirect raised $35 million in a fresh round of financing for its service selling a white-label marketplace for business applications in the cloud.

Led by Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, the new financing will be used to expand the company’s international presence and continue its product development. Existing investors, including iNovia Capital and Foundry Group, also participated.

Founded in 2009, the company sells its online services marketplace as an unbranded platform to companies like Staples, Comcast, and AT&T, enabling them to then sell software as a service applications through to small and medium-sized businesses.

“For the developer, it’s easy to integrate into one standard platform and distribute across the board [and] businesses see value in centralizing around a single platform,” said AppDirect’s chief executive Daniel Saks. “We sit at the intersection of the developers and the businesses by enabling distribution.”

The San Francisco-based company generates revenue from a monthly subscription service that customers like AT&T and Comcast pay for its application platform and through a revenue share with applications that are accessed through its white-label service, according to Saks.

Given the growth of companies selling software as a service, AppDirect saw significant demand from investors for its latest fundraising. The company closed its latest Series C round within six weeks of launching its fundraising efforts, Saks said.

Part of the demand was based on the company’s growth, which has led to revenues of $9 million in 2013, according to Saks.

Now that the company’s round has closed, AppDirect is focused on growth in Europe and Latin America. The company is in the process of establishing an office in Munich, in addition to locations in Montreal, San Francisco, Boulder, Colo., Ottawa, and London.

The company is also on the hunt for new acquisitions, building off of its last two purchases. In 2012 it bought jBilling, a billing service for cloud applications. And last year it acquired StandingCloud, which sells a service packaging applications for cloud services, in a September 2013 acquisition.

Both acquisitions continue to operate as independent brands, while AppDirect has folded their technologies into its own suite of services, Saks said.

Given the company’s new cash position, additional acquisitions may also be in the cards. “The categories that we always look at are billing, identity management and security, and finally data management,” said Saks.

Photo via Flickr user Megan McCormick

Genesis Media Raises $6M For Ads That Interrupt But (Hopefully) Don’t Annoy You

Ad company Genesis Media is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series B funding.

When I discussed the funding with CEO Mark Yackanich, he described the company as “a data-driven decisioning platform that intercepts users with media” — which even he admitted was a bit of a mouthful. Put more simply, online publishers use the company’s ContentUnlock product to show ads (usually video ads) to their readers on a timed, targeted basis.

And yes, you have to watch those ads if you want to continue reading the article (or otherwise access the content). Yackanich pitched it as an alternative type of pay wall, where the reader doesn’t actually have to pay. He also said Genesis tries to “contextualize” the ad so that it’s clear that once you watch it, you won’t have to see another one for a while (the gap period may be “seven articles or 24 hours or 48 hours or one week”, depending on the publisher and the reader).

The real advantage to ContentUnlock, Yackanich said, is its recognition that “different consumers have different values to different publishers.” In other words, the type and number of ads will vary from reader to reader. For example, he suggested that a “loyal and engaged reader” who visits the site directly probably shouldn’t see an ad initially, while someone who comes to an article after from a link on Twitter probably won’t stick around very long, so publishers can pursue “more aggressive monetization.”

Genesis says that its publishers include American Media, Bonnier, USA Today Sports, and The Smithsonian. Yackanich added that the business model has evolved: “Our publisher partners are dragging us very happily — and this was always the plan — into more of a platform model.” In other words, instead of selling the ads, in some cases Genesis is just providing the technology to publishers, and it’s used by their sales teams.

The new funding was led by Blue Chip Venture Capital, with participation from Crown Predator Holdings. Including credit (and not just the $6 million in equity), the round totaled $10 million. Yackanich said.

Gowalla Founder Josh Williams Raises $2.1 Million To Have Another Go At Local Mobile Discovery Apps

Gowalla founder Josh Williams is nothing if not consistent.

After several years spent building location-based mobile apps and products for his own company, as well as Facebook, he’s back with another venture that’s focused on improving the way we explore our everyday world.

As you probably recall, Gowalla was one of the early location-based social check-in apps, aimed at helping users to pinpoint where they were and what they were doing, so that friends may find them.

Later, using the data that users had volunteered, the company pivoted slightly to be about creating guides and tools for discovering new things in the world around you. But soon after the launch of Gowalla 4.0, the team was acqui-hired by Facebook.

Last summer, after working on Facebook Pages, Location, and Events products, Williams left the company. And shortly after that he founded a new venture that they called The Last Guide Company along with former Dropbox and Facebook designer (and Gowalla alum) Adam Michela.

The idea was to use all the things that your mobile phone knows about you to make it fun to go out and explore the world. Since being launched, the brand name has been shortened to Last, and Williams and Michela recruited front-end Developer Tyler Stalder, illustrator and designer Brian Brasher, and photographer Daniel Agee to help them out along the way.

While Williams is staying mum on what the initial product created by the team will be, he did tell us that, like Gowalla and the Facebook products that he worked on, Last would be focused on harnessing the power of mobile phones and physical location to improve the way that users interacted with the world around them.

“How do we take your phone and what we understand about you and where you are in the world to make it easier for you to go out… and explore?” Williams said.

That functionality will be at the heart of whatever Last comes to market with later this year. And, whatever it is, will come as a bit of a departure from what Gowalla was more than five years ago.

In part, that’s because the world has changed. As Williams told us, the idea of using your mobile phone to pinpoint your location is not quite as novel today as it once was.

“When we first built Gowalla, it was on the first smartphone the masses had access to. Location was novel, and… coming out of the gate, there were a lot of people who hadn’t seen anything like it before,” Williams said. “Now everything uses location, even the things you don’t think of as being location-based.”

Our phones now also know a lot more about us these days, including our likes, dislikes, relationship status, where we’ve been to, and where we’re going. With all that data, Last could theoretically provide much better local discovery and recommendations than what’s currently available.

To push its vision forward, the Last team raised $2.1 million in seed capital led by Freestyle Capital. Along with its investment came money from firms that had previously put money into Gowalla, including Greylock Partners and Founders Fund.

Other investors in the round include Google Ventures, Sherpa Ventures, Designer Fund, BoxGroup, Launch Fund, SV Angel, Fuel Capital, Slow Ventures, Ruchi Sanghvi, Pete Cashmore, Tom Conrad, Todd Jackson, Tom Watson, and Semil Shah.

Crittercism Raises $30M More, Inks Mobile App Performance Deal With New Backer Accenture

Some big news today from Crittercism, a startup that operates a platform for companies to monitor their mobile app performance with customers including the likes of Netflix, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Pinterest, Home Depot, AT&T and a number of other Fortune 500 names.

It has raised another $30 million in funding, from a mix of VCs and strategic investors led by Scale Venture Partners with participation also from InterWest Partners, VMware and Accenture. Crittercism and its investors are not revealing any valuation at this time.

Separately, Crittercism has secured a significant deal with new minority investor Accenture that will see the consulting and outsourcing giant use Crittercism’s technology in its bigger mobile enterprise offering that designs, builds, tests and manages applications for enterprises, dubbed Accenture Application Factory.

And Crittercism is also releasing new services of its own, in the form of a new API and “zero-touch App Wrapping solution”, which will mean that Crittercism will not require source code to monitor an app.

The $30 million investment brings the total raised to date by Crittercism, which started as an AngelPad company, to $48 million, with past backers including Google Ventures, Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures.

Crittercism is one of the many companies out there riding the wave of mobile app usage worldwide, brought by the popularity of smartphones and tablets. A year ago, when Crittercism raised a round led by Google Ventures, the company estimated that it was already monitoring some 500 million devices for crashes and other performance issues. Andrew Levy, Crittercism’s co-founder and CEO, tells me that this number is now well over 1 billion.

This speaks to another trend: as the mobile app ecosystem matures, those companies that use apps as part of their business are becoming increasingly focused on quality.

Levy tells me that the investment will be used “to expand our channel efforts” with partners in South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, as well as invest a lot more in “enterprise initiatives” — a place where both Accenture and VMware (now newly interested in mobile enterprise with its acquisition of AirWatch) will likely play a key role. While Accenture is coming out today with information about how it’s involving itself with Crittercism as more than just a simple investor — it will effectively become a reseller for Crittercism’s mAPM product — it’s not clear yet how VMware will leverage its stake.

“There are a ton of great to market opportunities,” Levy says of its relationship with its new strategic investors. On VMware, he says that “they are becoming a lot more serious after AirWatch and that is very interesting for us. They are one of the cloud enablers that has figured out their mobile strategy. They’re not just sitting on the sidelines of this.”

Although the company is based in the U.S., it’s had a long-standing place in driving its business outside of the country. In fact, Levy tells me that Crittercism’s first paying customer was Qype, the user-generated reviews platform that was bought by Yelp in 2012.

But while a lot of the opportunity today has been on the B2C and B2B fronts — with the B2C playing a role particularly in driving that billion user number — ScaleVP partner Andy Vitus believes that the longer term opportunity may be in a third category altogether, in the slightly more nebulous category of the Internet of things, where we are talking about machine-to-machine communications.

“I do think Android is becoming the operating system of choice for the ‘headless Internet’,” he says. And while Crittercism already has some clients using is solutions for M2M deployments, “over time Crittercism will be able to push even more into that. You won’t even have a person to report that something has gone wrong,” making Crittercism’s solution even more essential.

Up to now, most of Crittercism’s efforts have been focused on mobile app solutions but it looks like its sights are being raised in more way than one: the API will let enterprises integrate mobile app performance management into a wider dashboard where they are monitoring other apps (for example server-based apps); while the zero-wrapping solution will give companies a way of monitoring apps even if they have not developed them in-house. This is an essential product when you consider that many companies outsource this kind of work (opening the door to how Accenture may use the tool), or use off-the-shelf solutions.

As a part of the funding round, Vitus will join Crittercism’s board. Accenture’s minority investment will also give it a seat on Crittercism’s advisory board.

Flayvr Raises $2 Million To Help Us Make Sense Of Our Growing Photo Collections

Before Apple’s iOS 7 update began organizing your photos into “moments” based on time and place, there was Flayvr. The Tel Aviv-based startup has built automatic organization technology which takes your smartphone’s photos and videos and places them into albums that you can quickly share with your friends and social networks. Today, the company has raised another $2 million in funding to continue to grow its company, whose app now reaches 2 million smartphone users.

The new funding comes mainly from regional investors, including Kaedan Capital, former Microsoft Corporate Vice President Moshe Lichtman, Aviv Venture Capital, iAngels, and angel investors Rafi Gidron, Zohar Gilon, Yariv Gilat, and Partam Hightech.

The company had previously raised $450,000 from Israeli angel investors.

Available on both iOS and Android, Flayvr has outlived several competitors in the photo organization space including much-loved Everpix, Evernote acquisition Snapjoy, long gone Batch, Google acquisition Flock, and others.

Once installed, the app can serve as something of a replacement to a user’s default photo gallery. It analyzes contextual data around the photos and videos saved on the device, using social, behavioral, user-generated, geolocation, computer vision and time-based signals. After the photos are organized, you can tap to share an album to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, WhatsApp, iMessage, or email.

The app is well-designed, too. In the album, the photos thumbnails are somewhat animated, slowly fading in and out from one picture to the next, as the layout is subtly rearranged with thumbnails that change from a rectangle to a square and back again, and more. This gives you an easy way to the see the album’s photos at a glance, without having to flip through a million photos one-by-one.

Led by technology veteran and former military intelligence officer Ron Levy (CEO) and Adi Ashkenazi (CTO), previously of Fring and Modu, Flayvr has now processed 1 billion photos since launching in 2012.

With the additional funding, the company plans to double its team to 10, and expand operations in the U.S.

In terms of the Flayvr product itself, the longer-term plan is to extend the platform and technology into the cloud, says Levy.

“Right now, we are focused on creating a new mobile photo and video gallery experience, built around memories rather than a never-ending scroll of thumbnails,” he explains. “There are obvious opportunities to take this same kind of innovation to the large, disorganized shoeboxes in the cloud, but the focus today is on perfecting the mobile experience. Flayvr technology can do for photos and videos what Waze did for maps and WhatsApp did for messaging,” Levy adds.

Bringing Flayvr to other platforms will also help the company begin to generate revenue, he also tells us, but declined to offer details about those specific plans at this time.

As for the iOS 7 elephant in the room – the introduction of a similar, if simplified organizational system built in Apple’s mobile operating system could mean fewer users will go in search of alternative technologies. But Levy says that Apple’s improvements bring more attention to the space of photo and video gallery organization, and that Flayvr will benefit from this increased focus.

“Apple took a great step in the right direction, and at the same time they have shown time and time again that they work with independent developers and encourage them to create improved experiences that complement and re-invent the native apps, such as Waze and WhatsApp,” he says. “We were actually happy to see the changes in iOS 7…There’s plenty of room for both of us to innovate and improve.”

Flayvr is available on iTunes and here on Google Play.

Quora Wants To Stay Independent, Raises $80M Series C From Tiger Global At ~$900M Valuation

Startups get acquired and shut down. That threat could scare people out of writing deep answers on Quora’s Q&A site. So it’s just raised an $80 million Series C because “We specifically want to stay independent for the long-term”, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo tells me. Sources close to the deal say the round values Quora at around $900 million.

Quora lets people ask or answer any question, and vote up or down other answers so the best ones rise to the top. Yet one big question about Quora itself has been just how popular it is.

Quora consistently refuses to divulge usage stats, though it did say it grew 3X in all metrics from May 2012 to May 2013. But Quora exec Marc Bodnick tells me that public measurement services “significantly underestimate” Quora, and “are off by a factor of 5X to 15X”. That does gel with our skepticism of these traffic trackers. But if you average comScore‘s 1.2 million web uniques estimate for Quora in February with Compete‘s 1 million, and multiply it by 5X and 15X, Bodnick’s comment would imply Quora’s web traffic could be somewhere between 5.5 million and 16.5 million monthly users, and you’d have to add another 40% for mobile on top of that. That’s a very broad range but brings some insight into Quora’s presence.

What we have straight from the Q&A horse’s mouth is that Quora’s total topic count has been steadily rising and 40% of its traffic comes from mobile. Plus Bodnick says 30% of traffic has “direct intent” or users are looking for or asking about something very specific. Similar to web search traffic on Google, this traffic could be highly monetizable with keyword advertising. And in Quora’s most straightforward comment yet about how its business model will work, D’Angelo tells me “it’s very likely that we will have an ad-based revenue model. We’ll experiment but I think that’s the most likely outcome.”

The potential for Quora to one day montize on its deep archive of evergreen content may be what attracted Tiger Global to it. Quora wasn’t fundraising. In fact it had most of its previous $50 million Series B raised in May 2012 still in the bank. But when New York’s Tiger Global Management approached D’Angelo, he says it felt right. “They’ve invested in a lot of similar companies. They understood all our metrics really well. They’re also very long-term oriented. We won’t have nea- term pressure to sell or make money. Tiger said they were willing to hold on to our stock for 10 years which is a perfect alignment with our strategy.”

The $80 million round was joined by Quora’s previous investors Benchmark, Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Peter Thiel. It more than doubles Quora’s valuation from the $400 million number from its Series B round.

The plan is to leave most of the money in the bank as a form of insurance. In case there’s an economic meltdown and it becomes tough to raise money, Quora will have a big enough nest egg not to have to be acquired. “I think we want our users to trust that Quora is a place that they can share their knweolgde and that we’re going to keep that knowledge available forever” D’Angelo tells me.

What it does spend will go on towards building out Quora’s product. D’Angelo says that includes making it easier for diehard users to find their old answers. He also admitted that now that Quora is almost five years ago, some top upvoted answers are out of date. The company is looking for a way to recognize which are stale so it can either encourage people to update their answers or slide more timely ones to the top.

Internationalization will also be a big endeavor in the coming years for Quora. It plans to get translated into several additional languages, which makes sense as I hear Quora is getting very popular in some places abroad including India. And Quora will invest in its infrastructure including growing the team beyond its current headcount of 70, strengthening spam prevention, improving its relevancy-filtered home feed, and buying servers.

Now it just has to fend off a new crop of mobile-focused Q&A sites including Biz Stone’s new project Jelly. Quora exec Marc Bodnick didn’t seem too worried though. Though he didn’t call out Jelly by name when I asked about fresh competitors, Bodnick says about mobile-only Q&A “If you’re just creating a light, highly perishable experience it might be okay. But if a writer is going to write a long, awesome answer to a question they’d like that question to appear forever.” He also notes that people end up asking and answering the same questions over and over on other sites and apps, but Quora has worked hard to de-duplicate questions so people can always find the canonical answer.

Quora will need to make good on this Series C round by finding more ways to make its service appealing to the mainstream. A subjective encyclopedia sounds a bit bland to some people, so Quora will have to spice things up without losing its intellectual identity. But despite all the changes over the last five years, D’Angelo maintains “Our mission is still the same as it was back then. To share and grow the world’s knowledge.”

[Image Credit: Digital Trends]

Moot Rebrands As Muut (Yes, Really), Raises $770K To Make Online Forums Less Ugly

Moot.it, a startup launched last April to do away with ugly online forums by offering a flexible, customizable and more modern-looking platform for online discussions, has raised $770,000 in new funding and is changing its name to Muut. (Hey, they wanted the .com, so you get what you get these days.)

The funding was led by Oregon Angel Fund, and the other notable investor is the Portland Seed Fund.

Over the course of the year, the company has grown its customer base to over 28,000 and its user base to 300,000, and is currently adding thousands of new users per day. Muut also says its application is now being loaded approximately 150 million times per month.

The company was founded by Portland-based serial entrepreneur Courtney Couch, along with jQuery Tools creator Tero Piirainen and Janne Lehtinen, both of Helsinki. The team had previously been working on a web video player called Flowplayer before creating Muut.

The idea for the startup, like many others, came about because it was something the founders needed for themselves. They were running a separate support system and separate forums, but wanted something that would combine the content, unifying the commenting and the forums, while not looking like something “from the ’90s,” Couch had once said. As it turned out, it was slim pickins’ out there, so the team created Moot, now Muut.

With Muut, site owners can design their discussion platforms however they want. You can use it for commenting, forums or both combined, and you can customize those discussions in a variety of ways – like flat or threaded comments, for example – while also allowing users to comment using their same login they might use for your own website or software. The platform works on mobile, too, including iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.

“Muut seems to fill a glaring void on the internet: that of a super fast, built-for-mobile, easy-to-use, lightweight, beautiful, uncluttered forum and commenting solution that you can embed on your site and style to your liking,” explains the company, in an announcement going up later today. (We took a deeper look into its feature set last year, which you can read here.)

Since its debut, Muut has added the single sign-on functionality, plus custom navigation (to change how the right navigation works, and what content appears in the “all posts” section), introduced a graphical designer with pre-built themes, private forums with developer accounts, made SEO improvements, added Google Analytics integration, support for image uploading and galleries, added an option to select and share text to quote on Facebook or Twitter, expanded its language support (now in 25 languages), and more. (Yes, these are just the highlights).

The company, which competes to some extent with products like Discourse, Livefyre, Disqus and others, declined to discuss revenue specifics. Its freemium service starts at $8/month for paid accounts, but Couch would not say what percentage of users are free vs. paid. However, he did note that revenue has been growing at 30% on average every month over the past 6 months.

Portland-based Muut, now a team of 9, will use the new investment to continue product development over the course of 2014, with plans for forum data importers, integrations into WordPress and other platforms, Muut API documentation for deeper integration, administrative features, and more.

Booktrack Raises $3M To Add Soundtracks To E-Books, Launches Classroom Version

E-book soundtrack platform Booktrack is announcing that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding, and that it’s launching of an education-focused version of its platform, Booktrack Classroom.

The idea may sound a little gimmicky, but co-founder and CEO Paul Cameron argued that the combination of music and ambient sound effects can make the reading experience much more immersive — it’s one thing to read that a character was standing on a noisy street, and another to hear the sounds of honking taxis.

The company’s last big launch was for Booktrack Studio, which allows anyone (not just professional publishers) to build e-book soundtracks. Booktrack says that in the five months since the launch, it has drawn 300,000 users to its site and mobile apps, with more than 3,600 Booktracks created in 30 different languages.

Cameron suggested that Booktrack is now pursuing “two distinct verticals”, publishing (including self-publishing) and education. With Booktrack Classroom, students will be able to read, create, and share soundtracked e-books for free.

When it comes to using the technology in the classroom, Cameron pointed to a University of Auckland study that looked at 248 middle and high school students and found that when they read text with a Booktrack soundtrack, they spent 30 percent more time reading and showed 17 percent higher comprehension compared to students who didn’t. (A previous study conducted at New York University found similar results among adults.)

Cameron also gave me a quick demo of the soundtrack-creation process. Users can select the text that they want to enhance, then add audio from a library of 20,000 tracks. (Half of those tracks are owned by Booktrack, while the other half is licensed, Cameron said.) The soundtrack is supposed to adjust to your reading speed.

The new funding was led by Sparkbox Ventures. Booktracks previously raised $2 million from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, filmmaker Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Productions, and others — the company said those previous investors also participated in the new round.

Sungevity Raises $70M To Expand Its Solar Business Globally

Sungevity, an integrator and marketer of solar installation services, has raised $70 million in new financing as it looks to expand internationally.

The round was led by Jetstream Ventures, a Nashville-based investor focused on companies that have an environmental and social benefits. Other investors included the Germany utility E.On, and GE Ventures, who previously invested in the company’s $125 million equity and debt funding in July 2013.

Oakland, Calif.-based Sungevity doubled its U.S. sales in 2013 and is expanding in the Netherlands and Australia, where it launched services in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

“As new, more customer-centric solutions around residential solar arise, we want to provide our customers with the best solutions available,” said Susana Quintana-Plaza, vice president of technology and innovation/strategic co-investment at E.On. “Our capital investment in Sungevity’s technology and customer-centric platform is a significant part of this.”

The company sells solar design and integration services to consumers in nine states and the District of Columbia, and is the exclusive partner to the home repair and furnishing retailer Lowe’s.

“We are the hub, if you will, for several partners in different areas of the industry,” said John Ordona, vice president of marketing at Sungevity. “We are the hub for equipment partners in terms of panels and modules and installers and also financing partners. We are the face to the consumer.”

The company’s financial partners include US Bank, Citibank, and SunRun, according to chief executive Andrew Birch.

Investors and corporations have warmed to solar installers over the past few years; despite its recent woes SolarCity is up from its initial public offering, and utilities are making moves to acquire their own solar installers.

“The fundamentals of solar have been improving over the last five to 10 years,” said Birch. “That’s going to continue.”

In January 2013, the company raised $125 million in venture capital and project financing from investors, including Energy Capital Partners, Brightpath Capital Partners, Lowe’s Cos., alongside Craton Equity Partners, Vision Ridge Partners and Eastern Sun Capital Partners.

Photo via Flickr user Martin Jakobsen.

AdsNative Raises $2M To Help Publishers Manage Native Ads

AdsNative, a startup that helps online publishers incorporate native ads, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding.

The company also says that it’s expanding its technology to include a supply-side platform. In other words, instead of just focusing on native ads (such as sponsored posts) that publishers sell directly, AdsNative is also helping publishers work with native ad networks and exchanges.

Co-founder and CEO Satish Polisetti told me that we’re still in “the first innings” of the shift toward native ads, with many “direct, handheld deals.” The next step has been the creation of native ad networks, and of demand-side platforms that work with advertisers — but Polisetti said that until now, there hasn’t been anything on the publisher side, allowing them to manage all their inventory in a way that maximizes their fill rate and revenue.

The goal, he added, is to “give the capability of Facebook-style advertising or Twitter-style advertising to the next generation.”

AdsNative’s seed round was led by Interwest Partners, with participation from Onset Ventures, the Foundry Group Angels syndicate on AngelList, KBS+ Ventures, and various angel investors, including InterClick’s Barry Honig, former Yahoo vice president Mike Kerns, and MdotM CEO Sourabh Niyogi.

AdsNative publishers include Politico, SourceForge and Rant Media Network. The company says it processes hundreds of millions of ads each month.

“We’re continuously approached by native ad networks to place their ads on our pages,” said Rant Media’s chief revenue officer Grant Brown in the funding release. “In an effort to maximize revenue and fill, we’ve turned to AdsNative to optimize fill and eCPM. Plus the ability to layer in a native marketplace and ease of executing direct buys through their platform gives us the best ability to maximize our potential revenue.”

ClearStory Raises $21M From DAG Ventures, KPCB, A16Z To Bring Data Intelligence To The Masses

ClearStory Data, a company that wants to bring data intelligence to the masses, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures with Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participating. The round brings ClearStory Data’s total funding to $31.5 million.

ClearStory Data wants to make it easy to gather and explore diverse, dispersed sets of data from internal data sources, corporate data sources, Hadoop and the Web to help business users to gain insights and discover new business opportunities. ClearStory analyzes data from a number of sources, both public and private, to uncover new trends and patterns. The result of this is the discovery of new business opportunities and deeper intelligence around what is and isn’t working.

The company’s platform integrates internal and external data using an in-memory database technology. This can be relational or NoSQL data, point-of-sale information or demographic statistics from external sources. ClearStory maintains that it gives companies an advantage by processing multiple types of data on the fly with a modern, visual user interface that people can access.

For example, Yogurt-maker Dannon is using ClearStory to bring together data to collaborate on the analysis of the company’s supply chain.

The company was co-founded by Aster Data (acquired by Teradata) alums John Cieslewicz and Vaibhav Nivargi. Fellow founder and CEO Sharmila Mulligan worked previously at Netscape, Kiva Software, Opsware (acquired by HP) and Aster Data. ClearStory also announced that former Google SVP, Shona Brown, who was instrumental in building Google’s business and people operations, joins the company’s Board of Directors.

Silent Herdsman Raises Another £3M For Its Wearable Collars That Keep Tabs On Cows

Wearables aren’t just for humans. Indeed, animals that don’t have a say in whether they wear tracking tech are a far more established market for this sort of remote monitoring.

Case in point: U.K. startup, Silent Herdsman, has spent years building a wearable collar for cattle that’s designed to help dairy and beef farmers better manage their herds by detecting decision-triggering conditions such as when cows are in heat.

It’s just raised £3 million in new funding to help accelerate growth and pick up more customers. Currently its wearables are being used by “hundreds” of farmers in the U.K. & Europe, with “tens of thousands” of collars in use.

The startup — which was originally spun out of the University of Strathclyde – launched the tech in the U.K. back in 2010 (at that time the business was known by the altogether drier and dustier name of Embedded Technology Solutions). This launch came after a lengthy period of R&D, between 2006 and 2009, into condition-based monitoring for livestock cattle – supported by £4.75 million in Scottish Enterprise-backed regional development funding.

The new £3 million investment comes from an investor syndicate led by Scottish Equity Partners (SEP) and comprising Albion Ventures and the Scottish Investment Bank, the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise.

In addition to aiming to grow its global customer base, Silent Herdsman said it will be using the new funding to expand the range of animal health and welfare services offered by its wearable technology.

Its current decision-support platform comprises the behaviour-monitoring collar, which uses proprietary predictive analytics software to detect conditions such as oestrus in cows. Once a condition is identified the collar sends the info to a wireless base station installed on the farm, which in turn sends an alert to a farmer’s mobile or desktop device.

The basic idea is to make it more efficient for farmers to monitor herds and also support taking swifter and more precision actions based on specific animal activity. Silent Herdsman claims its health predictions can result in improvements in animal health, increased milk yield, and enhanced profitability for famers with rapid payback on the tech investment.

Commenting on the funding round in a statement, Stuart Paterson, Partner at SEP said: “There are currently over 1 billion beef and dairy cows world-wide and over 34 million dairy cows in the E.U. and U.S. alone. This number is continuing to grow as countries get wealthier and demand for dairy products increases.  As a result, this represents a market opportunity of over $1 billion per annum to Silent Herdsman.

“Moreover, the solution significantly enhances the efficiency of world food production which is of global concern. The company is rapidly making sales both in the UK and internationally, and as a result, SEP is delighted to support the company’s growth plans.”

Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner at Albion Ventures added in another supporting statement: “We are excited about the opportunity to back the Silent Herdsman team and their ambitious growth plans. The animal health monitoring market is expected to grow rapidly and Silent Herdsman’s differentiated, and patented, products are poised to capitalise on this.”

Silent Herdsman holds patent on its technology in the U.K., China, New Zealand, Mexico and Europe thus far.

One-On-One Programming Help Site Codementor Raises $600,000

Codementor, a one-on-one learning platform for software developers, has raised $600,000 in seed funding. The Techstars-backed site, which launched to the public last week and currently has more than 600 programming experts, will use the capital to drive product development. Founder Weiting Liu says that the startup will also focus on building its user base.

The site’s angel investors include Techstars founder and CEO David Cohen; Will Ballard, CTO of Gerson Lehrman Group; Fabrice Grinda, Jose Marin, and Alex Oxenford, founders of online marketplace OLX; Funzio founders Anil Dharni, Andy Keidel, and Ram Gudavalli; Richard Chen; Rolf Mathies; Vineet Madan; and TMI.

Codementor lets its experts set their own rate in 15-minute increments and monetizes by taking a 20% share. Though Codementor operates in the same niche as sites like AirPair and HackHands, Liu believes that they aren’t necessarily competitors, but the beginning of a new industry as more people learn about software development.

“I believe that this is going to be a multibillion dollar industry. We are in a similar, nascent space, so there are overlaps here and there. But as time goes on, our angles will become much more different,” says Liu.

He adds that Codementor’s “microconsulting” services fits into the trend for on-demand help exemplified by Google Helpouts and Amazon’s Mayday. Codementor targets it services at people learning how to code on their own as well as companies that want to hire experts for a few hours to train engineers or solve issues.

“We have the technology that can enable instant help remotely at scale. We see industry giants like Google and Amazon working on instant help services for mass vertical markets,” says Liu. “Learning how to code is becoming more mainstream and there are not just companies, but also developers who don’t have a support group to help them.”

Vaavud Raises $375K To Tame The Wind With Your Smartphone

A Kickstarter success has just closed its seed funding round, raising $375,000 to continue its work of measuring the wind using a network of smartphones with a low-cost, electronics-free hardware accessory combined with a mobile app. Danish startup Vaavud‘s new funding comes from a group of angel investors, and according to Vaavud CEO Thomas Helms, it’ll help them expand at a faster rate than before, and offer more product features to its hobbyist audience, as well as build out more services that appeal to business and enterprise.

The startup builds a tiny wind meter that consists of just a couple pieces of plastic that fit into your smartphone’s headphone jack. The accessory communicates with your phone via soundwaves, which are translated by Vaavud’s app into a windspeed measurement. Those measurements are then collected and analyzed by the app, providing the company with a comprehensive look at wind speed measurements around the world.

This seems like a bizarre use case for a smartphone, but Vaavud has already attracted interested corporate clients from the agriculture industry. A joint project with the Swedish agricultural coop Lantmännen Maskin AB will see the startup build a custom solution for measuring wind speed that’s designed to comply with new, tighter safety requirements in Sweden around the use of pesticides for crops.

Helms tells me that Vaavud currently sees around 4,000 new measurements per week, and with spring arriving in many places where the device is popular, that number is rising quickly. They’ve also hired a new PhD in computer science to help them work on their Android app, as well as to refine their algorithms to help filter out measurements taken indoors,or artificial ones like those generated by people blowing into their Vaavud wind meters just to check them out.

Kickstarter success comes in all shapes and sizes, and the Vaavud wind meter is a perfect example of that. It’s a crazy invention, and one that you might have thought only had limited appeal with a small group of hobbyists, but it’s also proving its worth with big organizations who need a very specific problem solved with affordable, portable hardware.

Virtual View App Raises $500K To Bring Augmented Reality Campaigns To The Property Sector

Virtual View App, a London startup that offers an augmented reality publishing platform and app designed specifically for the property sector, has raised $500k in funding. The investment comes from unnamed private investors from a finance and professional services background. It’s the 2013-founded company’s only external funding to date.

Co-founded by London-based estate agent Domenic Versace, the Virtual View App offers estate agents and house sellers a Augmented Reality platform for marketing purposes. The Android and iOS app follows the usual AR affair. Users point their phone or tablet’s camera at a static image that is Virtual View App-enabled to access additional digital content such as 3D property models, 3D floor-plans, photo galleries and videos. Virtual View App campaigns can also provide links to an agency’s social media channels, website, or any other relevant content.

Another way to think of the startup is a vertical or niche version of an uber-AR platform like Layer, targeting a specific sector — in this instance, property marketing. It’s also similar to something like VirtualMob, but, again, tailored to the property sector.

You get the idea.

To that end, Virtual View App says it will use the new capital to grow the team, develop the platform and further expand in the UK and select property markets. As part of that expansion it’s currently developing a new product offering which it likens to Google’s ‘Street View’ but for inside a property.

The pull for estate agents is that by using AR — and Virtual View App, specifically — they’ll be able to secure a greater number of new properties, and provide a more engaging way for prospective buyers and tenants to check out a property, leading to increased sales and rentals.

The startup is also talking up the analytics side of the platform in that each campaign is fully trackable, enabling ROI to be measured and campaigns accountable.

Virtual View App says it is already working with a number of UK estate agency groups, including Fine & Country, Campsie, Orchard & Shipman, Newman, Jackson Stops and Harrods, as well as trialling the platform with a number of overseas estate agents.

Other competitors in the Augmented Reality platform space include Aurasma, Blippar and Metaio.

Data Management Startup Actifio Raises $100M At $1.1B Valuation

Actifio, a data visualization management company that is preparing for an IPO, announced today that it has raised $100 million led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from previous investors Greylock IL, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. This latest round brings Actifio’s total funding to about $207 million and puts its valuation at $1.1 billion.

Actifio says that it will use its new funding to expand globally and develop new features for its data management products. The startup announced a $50 million Series D in March 2013, at the same time a report said that it is considering an IPO in 2014. Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh told Re/code, however, that the public offering probably won’t happen until next year.

In its announcement, Actifio shared several operating metrics, including 182% year-over-year bookings growth in 2013; over 300 enterprise users worldwide; customers in 31 countries with 44% of bookings from outside the U.S.; and over 1 exabyte of data, 14 petabytes of active app data, and 55 petabytes of physical storage capacity under management.

Actifio’s data storage platform uses virtualization technology that allows businesses to create a single copy of production data and make changes to that master copy. This can help companies cut their storage costs by as much as 90%, says Actifio, and reduce recovery times.

“Having shone a light on the $46 billion global copy data problem, we will use this funding round to expand our copy data virtualization solution across the Global 2000; enable our cloud service provider partners to build thriving businesses powered by Actifio; and extend the reach of our technology down into an even broader base of the mid-market,” said Ashutosh in a statement.

Illustration by Bryce Durbin

Screenburn, Which Does Paid Video-On-demand Inside Facebook, Raises Angel Cash

Screenburn, which specialises in video-on-demand events, with fans paying to watch films or concerts, has raised $500K (£302k) in angel investment to expand. The company is used by musicians and filmmakers to monetize their Facebook presences.

Screenburn’s app works with Facebook pages, taking payments from fans, and then making video available to stream for time limits. So far the site has launched over 200 films on Facebook, such as projects for Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones.

The company also brought onto its board Steve Macallister from television distributor Zodiak Rights and Howard Kiedaisch from digital cinema firm Arts Alliance Media.