In terms of ad revenue, Google is now bigger than both the newspaper and magazine industries.

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I Listened to the Winklevii So You Don’t Have To

Yesterday, at the New York Times’ annual Dealbook conference, financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin sat down with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who long ago moved on from their battle with Facebook to become enthusiastic backers of the digital currency bitcoin.  

Little wonder: The twins began buying bitcoins at $9 apiece in the summer of 2012.  As of April, the value of bitcoins had shot to $120, making their investment worth $11 million. Fast forward to today, when bitcoins are trading at around $385 each, and you begin to appreciate the brothers’ fondness for this latest, financial phenomenon. Indeed, the twins – who hope securities regulators will let them move forward with an exchange-traded fund that would hold only bitcoins – say that they now believe bitcoins could enjoy up to a $500 billion market cap.

At the outset of yesterday’s interview, Sorkin offered that he’s still “perplexed” by bitcoin. Because a few of you might be, too, it seemed worth sharing some of the brothers’ insights.

* Speaking about the history of bitcoin, Cameron Winklevoss recalled the story of pseudonymous programmer Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2009 released the source code of bitcoin to the world. “Effectively, it [created] a digital currency with a fixed set of bitcoins at 21 million that’s divisible out to eight decimal points,” he said. In an effort to simplify his point, Winklevoss added that there’s no reason to be concerned by the apparently limited supply of bitcoin, as it’s “divisible out to a large, large amount.”

New Fundings

Clearleap, a six-year-old, Duluth, Ga.-based company whose software is designed to solve and simplify the logistics of managing large video libraries of content, then distributing them to any platform or device, has raised $20 million in funding led by Susquehanna Growth Equity. The round also included existing investors Trinity Ventures and Noro-Moseley. The round brings the company’s total amount raised to $36 million, it says.

Legend3D, a 12-year-old, Carlsbad, Calif.-based digital media and visual effects company, has raised $3 million in new funding, according to a new SEC filing. The funding appears to bring the company’s total $30 million. Previous investors include Augustus Ventures and Northwater Capital.

MAG Interactive, a three-year-old, Stockholm-based app maker behind a highly popular, word-finding game called Ruzzle, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Nokia Growth Partners.

Maxta, a four-year-old, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, has raised $10 million from Andreessen Horowitz to “simplify and redefine enterprise storage by eliminating the need for specialized physical storage arrays,” reports the Wall Street Journal, which does a deep dive of Maxta here.

PasswordBox, a  year-old, San Francisco-based password startup that allows users to manage all of their online credentials from a single point of service, has closed a $6 million Series A round led by Omers Ventures. Other participants in the round included BOKU chief executive Mark Britto, and Facebook’s head of e-commerce, Lee Linden.

Scoopshot, a three-year-old, Helsinki, Finland-based on-demand photography marketplace, has raised $3.9 million in Series A funding from Conor Venture Partners and Finnish Industry Investment. By GigaOm’s calculation, the new round of funding brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $11 million.

SmartThings, an 18-month-old, Washington, D.C.-based company that helps people control items in their homes through their smartphones, has raised $12.5 million in Series A funding from Greylock Partners and Highland Capital Partners. The company had raised $3 million in seed funding last December from a long line of investors, including First Round Capital, SV Angel, and A-Grade Investments. SmartThings had separately garnered $1.2 million from nearly 5,700 backers on Kickstarter in the summer of 2012.

Solarflare Communications, an eight-year-old, Irvine, Calif.-based company that develops networking software and hardware, has raised a fresh $5 million in debt, according to an SEC filing. The company has now raised at least $30 million in debt, and another $150 million in equity, according to Crunchbase. Some of its venture investors include Intel Capital, Anthem Venture Partners, and Oak Investment Partners.

Solicore, a 12-year-old, Lakeland, Fla.-based maker of lithium polymer batteries, has closed what it’s calling Preferred Series A-1 financing. The new funding was led by New Science Ventures, which committed $4 million in capital. Previous investors R.R. Donnelley, Rogers Corporation, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Braemar Energy Ventures, Firelake Capital, OPG Ventures and Hydro-Quebec CapiTech, also participated in the financing. Solicore has raised about $28 million in equity over the years and $5 million in debt, according to Crunchbase.

Visible Technologies, an eight-year-old, Bellevue, Wash.-based social media monitoring company, has raised $1.4 million in debt and other securities, according to an SEC filing. Visible has raised nearly $80 million from VCs over the years, including from In-Q-Tel and Ignition Partners.

Walkbase, a three-year-old Helsinki, Finland-based retail analytics company, has raised $3.86 in Series A funding from SBT Venture Capital and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, a former CEO of Nokia.

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New Funds

Five-year-old FirstMark Capital, the New York-based early stage venture firm, announced yesterday that it has closed its third fund with $225 million in commitments. The fund is exactly the same size as the firm’s second fund, which closed in late 2011. You can learn more about the new fund here. FirstMark’s highest-profile portfolio company right now is Pinterest. FirstMark participated in the company’s $500,000 seed round in early 2010, and it has participated in each of Pinterest’s five, subsequent funding rounds, including its whopping $225 million Series E round, which was led by Fidelity Investments last month. That new funding pegged Pinterest’s current valuation at $3.8 billion.

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IPOs

GeNO Healthcare, a seven-year-old Waltham, Mass.-based company that’s developing inhaled nitric oxide products to treat pulmonary and cardiac diseases, filed an S-1 yesterday to raise up to $50 million. Its biggest outside shareholder is the publicly traded biopharmaceutical company The Medicines Company, which owns 13.9 percent of its shares.

The eight-year-old, Santa Clara, Calif.-based textbook rental company Chegg goes public today on the New York Stock Exchange. Yesterday, the company priced its shares at $12.50; it’s expecting to raise around $180 million, at a valuation of roughly $1.1 billion. Chegg has raised nearly $200 million over the years. Its biggest shareholders include Foundation Capital (it owns 6.5 percent), Gabriel Ventures (it owns 10.3 percent), Insight Venture Partners (it owns 14.3 percent) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which owns 11.7 percent)

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People

Alan Dabbiere, the chairman of Airwatch, whose software helps companies securely manage their employees’ mobile devices, is interested in acquiring a similar business from BlackBerry, he told the Atlantic Journal-Constitution yesterday. He added that Airwatch hasn’t made a bid but that it’s been making “overtures” to Blackberry for nearly six months. In February of this year, 10-year-old Airwatch raised $200 million in funding in Series A funding from Insight Venture Partners.

Shane Smith, co-founder and CEO of VICE Media, tells Business Insider why going public may be the only exit for the fast-growing media company.

In Silicon Valley, there’s a new law firm in town. The Philadelphia firm Pepper Hamilton has just opened an outpost in Redwood City with three intellectual property litigators poached from Goodwin Proctor: Gregory Bishop, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and Andy Chan.

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Happenings

Tomorrow, the L.A. Tech Summit gets underway in Santa Monica. The one-day conference will feature Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures, Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Tinder founder Sean Rad and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. You can find out more here.

Meanwhile, today is the last day of Business Insider’s Ignition conference in New York. On the lineup this afternoon: Spark Capital’s Mo Koyfman, Samsung’s David Eun, and Gawker’s Nick Denton among others.

And yet another O’Reilly conference begins today. This time it’s Velocity, in London. You can find more details here.

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Data

CB Insights has published a bit of data around the increasing M&A interest that corporates like Cisco are showering on network virtualization startups. You can check out its findings here.

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Job Listings

Adams Street Partners is looking for a Chicago-based associate to join its direct investment team, which plugs between $5 million and $30 million into late-stage venture capital and growth equity companies in healthcare and tech. This particular role is for a  pre-MBA candidate who will be expected to head off to business school or to one of the firm’s portfolio companies after a couple of years. To apply, you need two to four years of experience in investment banking, tech consulting, or with a venture or private equity firm.

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Essential Reads

Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won.

Elon Musk’s new blue sky idea: electronic supersonic airplanes.

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Detours

John Cheever’s first short story, “Expelled.” (The story, written when Cheever was 18, fictionalizes his own expulsion from prep school.)

Washington, D.C. has the largest collection of “super zips” — neighborhoods that rank the highest on income and college education — in the U.S. “It’s a megalopolis of eggheads,” says a demographer.

Alexander Graham Bell’s first five phone calls.

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Retail Therapy

Cycling can be a pain in the you-know-what; this $195 vulcanized rubber bike seat designed by IDEO can help.

Are you a rakishly handsome European money launderer who skis in Verbier? We have the perfect sweater for you if so.

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Please feel free to send us any and all story suggestions (anonymous or otherwise) by clicking here. If you’re interested in advertising in our email newsletter, please click here. To sign up for the newsletter, visit strictlyvc.com.

 

 

* On how bitcoins are digitally “mined,” Cameron Winklevoss noted that while an individual could, theoretically, mine a bitcoin, there are “a lot of mining outfits that are building huge data centers and computers with applications that are specifically built toward trying to mint bitcoins.” (Put another way, he suggests leaving the mining to the professionals.)

* On how they got into bitcoin investing, Tyler Winkelvoss said the brothers were on vacation in Ibiza (of course), when a friend of a friend suggested they look into the digital currency. They followed up and soon realized it was a “pretty incredible invention.” (I was hoping for more from this anecdote, but there you have it.)

* On why bitcoin might be used to transfer money, rather than good old-fashioned dollars, Tyler Winklevoss compared the technology to email. “Bitcoin is a protocol, and just like [email protocols]…allow you to send an email free and instantly, you can now send money from [the U.S.] to anywhere for free, as opposed to wiring money through Western Union [and] paying a 10 percent clip, or going through banking systems that take maybe three to five days. The old legacy rails of the banking system…are slow, inefficient, and costly. So the promise of bitcoin is to bring technology to financial services like it did for email…”

* On regulation around bitcoin — or the lack thereof — Cameron Winklevoss said, “That’s the point. It’s based on your trust in math and cryptography. It’s not based on trust in an individual, or the back-room dealings of, let’s say, the Federal Reserve… This is an open-source code; everyone knows what’s going on. The rules are set in stone.”

* On whether bitcoin features an anti-government strain, Tyler Winklevoss acknowledged that there is “definitely a libertarian strain [of individuals] that gravitates toward this, [along with] certain economic schools of thought…But it’s more a response to a financial system that’s frankly very buggy. I don’t think it’s a bet against the dollar,” he said. “I think it’s a healthy check and balance that makes it better.”

* Asked about concerns that bitcoin isn’t traceable and therefore likely to be used for illicit purposes, both twins smiled. (They’d been waiting for this softball.) Tyler Winklevoss quickly noted that “you can’t track cash,” either.

* On what happens if U.S. regulators determine that bitcoin is too risky, Cameron Winklevoss suggested that the U.S. will be left behind if they do. China, he noted, “has implicitly given its blessing to bitcoin,” including by allowing Chinese search engine Baidu to accept it as a form of payment. He also noted that bitcoin has been declared “legal, private money” in Germany and that other countries, including Belgium, see “no problem with it. Said Winklevoss, “If there’s a scenario where bitcoin is regulated out of existence in the U.S., I think bitcoin continues to thrive in other places in the world.”

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee defends his relationship with local technology founders, which has been characterized by many as overly cozy.

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Diagnose What’s Wrong, With Your Smartphone

Last week, Slate reported on a brilliant UCLA professor who is “changing the field of medical testing by turning smartphones into portable laboratories.”  But there are a growing number of entrepreneurs finding ways to transform our phones into diagnostic tools. Among the latest is Walter de Brouwer, the founder of Scanadu, a three-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based company that just raised $10.5 million in Series A funding led by the firm Relay Ventures. (Tony Hsieh’s VegasTechFund, Jerry Yang’s Ame Cloud Ventures, and numerous angels also participated.) 

Right now, Scanadu makes a puck-shaped scanner that’s packed with sensors designed to read your vital signs — including heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and blood oxygen levels — and beam the information wirelessly to your iOS or Android smartphone. Next, the company plans to produce a disposable urine analysis testing platform to help determine, say, whether you’re developing heart-related kidney problems. 

Yesterday, I chatted with de Brouwer — a serial entrepreneur and former academic — about his company’s next steps.

What’s the big idea here?

We want to bring [to consumers] the complete diagnostic experience of a hospital. That consists of the emergency room, which basically measures the electromechanical information on the surface of the body; imaging, or what you see through the skin; and labs, where bodily fluids — blood, urine analysis, saliva — are examined.

One day, this will come together in a way that’s FDA approved, so that patients have accurate information that both they and their doctors accept and understand.

You don’t yet have FDA approval. How long do you anticipate it will take?

We’re starting our first clinical trials with [the] Scripps [Translational Science Institute] and will deliver a feasibility study to the FDA in March. Normally, [the turnaround takes] 100 days, though you can never predict, especially if there are more questions, and you have to do more trials. So our hope is to have the product out to consumers for the holidays in 2014, but our expectation is that [it will be available for sale] in 2015.

Will you try to sell to both Western and developing countries?

Because we’re small – we have 19 employees right now – we’re targeting the U.S. market for the moment.

Who will have access to your customers’ data?

Users will basically own their data, which they can send to their doctor to view, even in real time.

In summer, you raised a separate $1.6 million for Scandu in a record-breaking Indiegogo campaign, during which pre-order prices rose from $149 to $199. What are you planning to charge for your first product?

The app will be free. But $199 is what we found consumers are willing to pay [for the device]. Over time, they can expect to pay less. The first digital thermometers cost $950.

New Fundings

Bill.com, a seven-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based company whose online platform provides services for payables, receivables and cash management for small and mid-size business owners, has raised $38 million in financing led by new investor Scale Venture Partners. Other participants in the round included Bank of America, American Express, Fifth Third Bank, CheckFree founder Pete Kight, and Commerce Ventures, as well as all of Bill.com’s previous investors August Capital, Napier Park Global Capital, TTV Capital, Jafco Ventures, Emergence Capital and DCM.  The round brings Bill.com’s total funding to date to $80 million.

Bitcasa, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based, cloud storage service company, has raised $11 million led by Horizons Ventures, with participation from Pelion Venture Partners, Samsung Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and First Round Capital. The company, which installed a new CEO in September, has now raised $20 million.

CardioInsight Technologies, a seven-year-old, Cleveland, Oh.-based company that makes a non-invasive electrocardiographic mapping technology, has raised $15 million in new funding. In a release about the round, the company did not name its investors. According to Crunchbase, CardioInsight has now raised $26.5 million in equity and $1.65 million in debt altogether.

CustomInk, a 13-year-old, Tysons Corner, Va.-based custom-apparel company, has raised $40 million from Revolution Growth – its first institutional round of investment. TechCrunch has much more on the company here.

FoundationDB, a four-year-old, Vienna, Va.-based maker of a distributed database, has raised $17 million in Series A funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, reports TechCrunch.

Futurelytics, a two-year-old, Wilmington, Del.-based company that helps its clients understand what to do with their customer data, has raised $800,000 in seed financing led by Index Ventures and Credo Ventures. Kima Ventures and Rob Keve, former CEO of FizzBack, also participated in the round.

GAIN Fitness, a four-year-old, San Francisco based mobile fitness application developer, has raised more than $2.1 million in new funding led by previous investor InterWest Partners. The company has now raised about $2.9 million, including a seed round that was announced in December 2011.

itBit, an 18-month-old, Singapore-based bitcoin exchange, has raised $3.25 million from Canaan Partners, RRE Ventures and Liberty City Ventures. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to date to $5.5 million.

LendUp, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based online platform that offers an on-demand, “socially responsible” alternative to payday lenders, has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures. Data Collective and QED Investors are participated in the round.

Servergy, a four-year-old, McKinney, Tex.-based company that makes energy-efficient data servers, has raised $20 million in Series C funding raised by the accredited investors of The Williams Financial Group, an independent broker-dealer based in Texas.

ShapeUp, a seven-year-old, Providence, R.I.-based company whose online social-wellness platform encourages employees to engage through team workout challenges, has raised $7.5 million in debt and equity. Cue Ball Capital and Excel Venture Management, which have backed ShapeU previously, led the $5 million equity portion of the financing, while Silicon Valley Bank provided another $2.5 million in debt. The company has raised $10 million altogether.

Validic, a three-year-old, Durham, N.C-based company has raised $760,000 in seed money from Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, along with an array of angel investors. Validic helps wellness companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and health plans access and aggregate data from apps and devices that have open APIs, including Fitbit.

Written.com, a months-old, Austin, Tex.-based startup that works with marketers to find existing online content that’s supportive of their products and services, has raised $1 million in seed funding. The money comes from LiveOak Venture Partners, Floodgate, and various angel investors.

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New Funds

KPMG, the global consulting giant, has created a new, London-based corporate venture arm that aims to back big data and data analytics companies. Called KPMG Capital, the unit is launching with about $100 million, an amount that KPMG is reportedly prepared to increase if needed. Forbes has much more here.

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IPOs

Twitter‘s IPO created 1,600 millionaires, along with a $2.2 billion tax bill, says PrivCo.

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People

Fab.com is starting to remind StrictlyVC of Boo.com, a luxury e-tailer that that quickly raised $188 million to fuel its plans for world domination, only to abruptly implode in 2000. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Fab is losing its chief operating officer, Beth Ferreira, who joined Fab in 2011 from Etsy. The revelation comes less than two weeks after the departure of Fab cofounder Bradford Shellhammer. Two-year-old Fab has raised at least $325 million from investors. In an email to Fab’s board about Ferreira, CEO Jason Goldberg added that he plans to “downsize” the company even further.

John Pleasants is out the door at Disney, reports AllThingsD. Pleasants landed at Disney when it acquired Playdom, where he was CEO. Before joining Playdom, he was COO of Electronic Arts. Pleasants has also served as the president and CEO of Revolution Health and as CEO of Ticketmaster.

Before Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley spent an unhealthy amount of time scrutinizing another female executive, Kim Polese. Polese talks about that experience, telling the Guardian of the continuing challenges that women in tech face: “That we’ve gone backwards is still stunning to me.”

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Happenings

Business Insider‘s Ignition conference revs up for a second, star-studded day in New York.

Dealbook, meanwhile, kicks off its 2013 conference today in New York. Barry Diller will be there, as will the Winklevoss twins, ThirdPoint founder Daniel Loeb, and Sal Khan of Khan Academy, among others. You can watch a live stream of the event using this link.

O’Reilly also kicks off day two of its Strata conference in London today. You can learn more here.

It’s also day two of the Techonomy 2013 conference in Tucson, Ariz. Among the speakers today: Zappos CEO and VegasTechFund founder Tony Hsieh.

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Job Listings

Samsung is looking for a New York-based associate to search out investment opportunities for its Open Innovation Center (OIC) which is based in Silicon Valley but has an outpost in Chelsea. The OIC’s mission is to incubate and build software that’s better than Apple’s (essentially), but the center is also looking to bring in startups through acquisitions, to seed-fund startups, and to form partnerships with startups that don’t necessarily want to go to work inside of Samsung. To apply, you need an MBA and at least three years of experience at a tech company, plus two or more years of experience in venture capital, private equity, investment banking, or in business development.

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Essential Reads

More tech startups are spying new opportunities thanks the Affordable Care Act. (More on the trend in StrictlyVC later this week.)

Wild: Google is trying to patent an electronic tattoo with a microphone. The company says the tattoo could be used by security personnel in emergency situations (to start).

Tesla was just hit with a 40-page, securities class-action suit, after three of its cars burst into flames in recent months. The  suit seeks to sustain losses during the stock’s precipitous fall afterward.

Bad news: About 600,000 bats were killed by wind turbines last year.

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Detours

“I’m Josh Fletcher, and I’m the last employee at Blackberry…You want keyboards? You don’t want keyboards? You want it bigger? You want it smaller? Just tell us what you want. Just &$%ing tell us what you want.”

AshleyMadison, the site for adulterers, is being sued by a woman who says she was paid to create 1,000 fake female profiles to entice men to the platform. Her complaint? That all that typing hurt her wrists. (You cannot make this stuff up.)

China doesn’t think Jimmy Kimmel is so hilarious. During a regular skit in which Kimmel asks kids to debate contemporary political issues, he asked the children, during an October episode, how the U.S. might solve its debt problem with China. “Kill everyone in China? OK, that’s an interesting idea,” Mr. Kimmel said in response to one child’s suggestion. Growing protests over the skit have now led to demands by China’s Foreign Ministry that ABC fire Kimmel.

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Retail Therapy

Colorful chinos are in, friends. Give in and acquire a pair or two. Your jeans will still be waiting for you.

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Please feel free to send us any and all story suggestions (anonymous or otherwise) by clicking here. If you’re interested in advertising in our email newsletter, please click here. To sign up for the newsletter, visit strictlyvc.com.

With no hands-on technology experience and a tight deadline, entrepreneur Jeffrey Zients, who is leading the effort to fix HealthCare.gov, has his work cut out for him. “To try to come in, in six weeks, and sort something like this out – I just have a lot of sympathy for him,” said Joshua Bolten, a friend of Zients and a chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

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AppNexus on Ad Tech IPOs, and Why It’s Not Yet Public

New York-based AppNexus has been having a very good run. The six-year-old ad platform, which oversees the real-time buying and selling of online display advertising, has grown to 600 employees. The company, which had nine offices at the start of the year, has since opened two others. And so many billions of ads are being processed on AppNexus’s platform each day that it’s now the “largest [ad tech] company outside of Google,” says AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein. 

So when is AppNexus going to follow in the footsteps of other ad tech companies to go public? On Friday, I asked Rubenstein, who was director of Google Ad Exchange before joining AppNexus in 2009 (and who spent a decade at DoubleClick before that). Our conversation has been edited for length. 

When we last talked much earlier this year, you’d just closed on $75 million in funding. What are some of the highlights since?

It’s been an amazing growth year. We’ve just about doubled our revenue [since 2012]. We decided to accelerate our international expansion and just recently opened offices and a data center in Sydney and Singapore. The other major investment we’ve made this year was mobile. Because it’s such an explosive trend in the digital media industry, we dedicated a team of dozens of people inside the company to building the best mobile ad technology in the world based on our existing capabilities.

You recently partnered with the mobile ad network Millennial Media. Why do you think its stock hasn’t performed better?

They went public at a very high valuation and the stock has come down a lot since then, but I’m not an expert on [why]. What’s clear is that Millennial is building a leading business in what’s likely to be the fastest-growing and most exciting area of the ad market for a long time to come.

Any thoughts on why another ad tech company, the automated ad buying startup Rocket Fuel, has received a warmer reception by public investors? 

Rocket Fuel is doing a really great job of serving its customers and building a very strong ad business. Whether that means its stock price is justified or over- or undervalued, it’s hard to say with valuations all over the place.

Why are ad tech valuations so seemingly schizophrenic?

I don’t know if the market really knows how to value these businesses. It could be the market is trying to sort out which are the great companies and which aren’t.

Can you share anything about your revenue and whether or not you’ve ever been profitable? The standard for going public still seems to be revenue of more than $100 million.

We’ll do significantly more than that [in 2013]. We’re not profitable because we continue to invest very heavily in the long term. We’ve invested massively in mobile advertising and had very little revenue from [it], for example, but that will change next year. And by 2017, the [Internet Advertising Bureau] is forecasting that mobile advertising will [represent a slight majority of U.S. online ad spending].

It is safe to say you’re thinking about an IPO?

We had some thoughts about it and decided to do that big round at the beginning of the year instead because we felt like we’d be best off building value rather than going public. An IPO is something that we’d like to do in the future, but it would be more of a financing event than anything else.

Will we see AppNexus make an acquisition any time soon?

We always look. But acquisitions are a big deal, and, having been involved in a number at DoubleClick and Google, I can tell you that an acquisition can be a terrific catalyst for growth if done right. But often, they are not done right. So you have to pick your pitch.

New Fundings

DesignCrowd, a five-year-old, Sydney, Australia-based crowdsourcing marketplace for freelance designers, has raised $3 million in new funding from investors led by Starfish Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to date to $6.3 million. (In a related story, Starfish cofounder John Dyson told The Australian this weekend that he welcomes the entry of U.S. venture firms into the Australian market, including Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Accel Partners. “Bring it,” Dyson did not say.)

The Honest Company, a two-year-old, Santa Monica, Calif.-based company that was co-founded by actress Jessica Alba and sells baby diapers, wipes, bath and body care products and non-toxic cleaning products, just raised $25 million in fresh capital. The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, which was joined by ICONIQ Capital. Previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners also participated. The company has now raised $52 million.

SkyFuel, a six-year-old, Arvada, Colo.-based company that makes thermal concentrating solar power (CSP) equipment, is raising a $2 million debt round and is a quarter of the way there, shows an SEC filing. The company announced that it raised $17 million in Series B funding in 2008, led by publicly traded Leaf Clean Energy Company. Filings show it raised another $3.5 million in equity in 2010, and that it has subsequently raised about $20 million in debt.

Spartz, a four-year-old, Chicago-based startup that produces websites with “viral potential” every six weeks (among them is OMG Facts), has raised $2.4 million of a targeted $10 million round, shows an SEC filing. Inc. profiled the company this past spring.

uBid Holdings, a 16-year-old, Chicago-based online marketplace for closeout and overstocked items, is in the market for a new $6 million round, according to a new SEC filing that shows that uBid has so far raised $500,000. The company has raised at least $14.5 million in equity and debt since 2010, Crunchbase shows.

Uniplaces, a two-year-old, London-based marketplace that invites students to rent their homes (so a focused Airbnb, essentially), has raised $1.06 million in seed led by Octopus Investments and angel investors Alex Chesterman (founder of Zoopla) and William Reeve (chairman of Grace.com). Uniplaces launched in Lisbon last year, but expanded into London, where it moved its headquarters last summer.

Via Motors, a three-year-old, Orem, Utah-based company that specializes in extended-range electric trucks, vans and SUVs, has raised $5.7 million as part of a $10 million round, shows a new SEC filing. Silicon Valley real estate billionaire Carl Berg is listed as a non-executive director on the filing, as is automotive executive Bob Lutz, who has held senior management roles at GM, Ford, Chrysler and BMW over his career.

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New Funds

Atomico, the U.K.-based venture firm that has expanded into numerous countries in recent years, has closed its third fund with $476.6 million, a new SEC filing shows. The firm began raising the capital in October 2012.

Seven-year-old Atomico was founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom to (mostly) seek out investments in non U.S.-based startups. Among its portfolio companies is the three-year-old, Berlin-based task management app developer 6Wunderkinder, which just closed on $30 million in new funding led by Sequoia Capital. (The deal marked Sequoia’s first investment in Germany.)

In 2011, Atomico also participated in the $42 million Series A round of the 10-year-old Finnish game maker Rovio, of the Angry Birds franchise. It’s the only funding that Rovio has publicly disclosed to date.

Atomico presumably saw a very nice return last month, when the Climate Corporation was acquired by Monsanto for roughly $1 billion. Climate Corporation helped its agribusiness customers predict crop yields using big data to examine soil quality, historical rainfall and more. Altogether, Climate Corporation had raised $109 million, and Atomico was there from the beginning, leading its $4.3 million angel round in 2007 with Index Ventures.

Atomico has offices in São Paulo, Beijing and Istanbul, and  Tokyo. It closed its second, $165 million, fund in 2010.

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IPOs

Cara Therapeutics, a nine-year-old, Shelton, Conn.-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company at work on drugs to treat pain and inflammation, has filed an S-1 to raise around $60 million. Its principal stockholders include Esperante AB, which owns 9.2 percent of the company; Ascent Biomedical Ventures, which owns 9.9 percent; Alta BioPharma Partners, which owns 10.7 percent; MVM International Life Sciences, which owns 9.7 percent; Healthcare Private Equity Limited Partnership, which owns 5.3 percent; Devon Park Bioventures, which owns 9.4 percent; and Rho Ventures, which owns 14.5 percent.

Globoforce, a 16-year-old, Southborough, Mass.-based company that was incorporated in Ireland (where it still maintains one of its principal offices) filed an S-1 on Friday to raise about $75 million. The company’s software powers recognition and rewards programs for its enterprise customers. Its principal shareholders include Atlas Venture, which owns 31.4 percent of the company, and Balderton Capital, which owns 41.5 percent. (Balderton invested in 2002, when it was still affiliated with Benchmark Capital and known as Benchmark Europe.)

Ultragenyx Pharmaceuticals, a 3.5-year-old, Novato, Calif.-based clinical-stage biotech company that’s developing treatments for metabolic genetic diseases, filed an S-1 on Friday to raise up to $86 million. Its biggest shareholders include TPG, which owns 13.2 percent of the company; Beacon Bioventures, which owns 13.2 percent; HealthCap, which owns 11.8 percent; Adage Capital Partners, which owns 7.4 percent; and A.M. Pappas Life Science Ventures, which owns 5.9 percent.

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Exits

Curbed.com, a nine-year-old, New York-based media company with three Web publications –Curbed, Eater, and Racked — has been acquired by the 10-year-old online publisher Vox Media. The price isn’t being disclosed, but outlets have been reporting that Curbed.com went for between $20 million and $30 million. Vox Media has experienced hypergrowth since raising its first round of venture funding in 2008 from Accel Partners, Allen & Co., and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis. Vox, whose properties include SB Nation and The Verge, is run by Jim Bankoff, another former AOL executive. The company has raised nearly $80 million to date, including through a $34 million round (that is expected to reach $40 million) that was reported last month.

On Friday, Intel announced it was acquiring the four-year-old, Santa Clara, Calif.-based, education-software maker Kno, providing what appears like a soft landing for the company. Kno’s original focus was on making tablets, and it raised $55.4 million in equity and debt within its first year toward that end, including from Andreessen Horowitz, along with First Round Capital and SV Angel. The company switched gears in 2011 to focus on interactive textbooks for mobile devices; according to an SEC filing, it then raised an additional $37.2 million. Terms of Kno’s acquisition aren’t being disclosed.

Last week, when Facebook‘s shares reached a record high, Andreessen Horowitz sold a third of Facebook holdings, Bloomberg reports. According to a filing flagged by the outlet, the firm offloaded 2.28 million shares at $49 and $50 apiece for about $111 million. Andreessen Horowitz still owns 4.57 million shares. (A year ago, it reportedly distributed about 4.6 million shares of Facebook, most of which were acquired in Facebook’s purchase of Instagram.) Andreessen Horowitz had invested at least $80 million in Facebook shares in 2010 at what was then a $35 billion valuation.

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People

Kerry Cooper is the new CEO of Choose Energy, a five-year-old, Plano, Tex.-based site that invites users to compare and shop for plans from energy suppliers. Cooper was previously the CMO and COO of clothing retailer ModCloth. Choose Energy has raised $11.5 million to date, including a newly raised $7.5 million round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Stephens Capital Partners, BlueScape Resources, NGEN Partners, and Michael Polsky, the president and CEO of Invenergy, a Chicago-based renewable energy company.

Profiled over the weekend: Shana Fisher, one of New York’s “best angel” investors who you’ve likely never heard of before. (Fisher’s bets include Vine, Refinery29, Makerbot and Pinterest.)

Evan Williams and Medium also get the long-form treatment. Says Williams of the type of journalism he aims to attract to the platform: “I want to give rationality a fighting chance.”

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Happenings

Business Insider‘s three-day Ignition conference gets underway in New York today, featuring Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington, and Russell Simmons among others. Here is the agenda.

O’Reilly kicks off its three-day Strata conference in London today. You can learn more here.

The three-day Techonomy 2013 conference also gets rolling this afternoon, in Tucson, Ariz. Among the panelists today is Samir Arora or Glam Media and Konrad Feldman of Quantcast.

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Job Listings

Dropbox is looking to add someone to its corporate development team in San Francisco. This person will identify and recommend acquisition targets for Dropbox; support related deals through the acquisition process; and represent Dropbox at events. To apply, you need two to four years of experience in venture capital, investment banking, and, preferably, a B.A. from a “top tier” university.

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Data

In honor of Veteran’s Day, Pitchbook is publishing its findings on VC-backed startups that in some capacity serve the military. Over the last decade, says the firm: 280 such companies have raised about $3.27 billion. Most of that flowed to the IT industry (42%), followed by B2B (33%), B2C (9%), Energy (7%), Healthcare (5%) and Materials and Resources (3.5%). Military and defense-related companies have already landed 36 financings this year, including for CyPhy Works (which StrictlyVC wrote about on Friday) and RallyPoint, a social network for active-duty military members and veterans.

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Essential Reads

Big Data is so yesterday. The real insights, say a growing number of startups, can be found through hyperdata.

Why is encrypted email so rare in the first place?

Lawyers for Apple and Samsung are reportedly ready for the second “Trial of the Century.”

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Detours

Think you may work with a psychopath? The odds are higher if work in one of these professions.

Confronted with an unprecedentedly secular crop of young people, Jewish leaders work overtime to convince Millennials to just come on and “marry a nice Jewish boy.”

An ESPN columnist admits how hard it has become for him to watch NFL games. “I used to love football the way German shepherds love sirloin…I see too much sorrow and ugliness now…”

Aging liberals have far more sex than conservatives, according to a decades-long Harvard study. Says the Harvard professor who led the research, “I have consulted urologists about this, they have no idea why it might be so.”

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Retail Therapy

Beautiful maps of national parks.

The $670 Bonneville Red Selvedge Denim Coverall. Who knew you could look so stylish while repainting/rebuilding/fixing stuff? Just don’t wear these anywhere near your auto body shop or, for that matter, around anyone who uses their hands for a living. You will be mocked mercilessly, and you will deserve it.

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Good news: The U.S. economy may be stronger than many thought; it added more than 200,000 jobs last month.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden may have tricked up to 25 colleagues into giving him their login credentials before he leaked classified material to the media, sources tell Reuters.

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The FAA Shows Drone Companies a Way Forward

Yesterday, the Federal Aviation Administration released its first “roadmap” for allowing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) access to U.S. national airspace beginning in 2015. The idea is to permit some drone activity while preserving enough flexibility for the FAA to adjust its rules and regulations if it needs to.

The step was a welcome one for entrepreneurs who are working on flying robots for the military (whose airspace isn’t regulated by the FAA) but who will soon be able to sell to a variety of commercial industries, including agriculture, construction, oil, gas, and mining.

“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel now,” says Bilal Zuberi, a Palo Alto-based partner at Lux Capital, who sees a whole new industry about to emerge, with droids as just the starting point. He likens the moment to “when the satellites first went into space and data became available. You could do so much more with it than people imagined.”

Think maps that update in real-time or sophisticated applications that notify farmers when crops have been afflicted with specific diseases.

“Right now, people are thinking about just the hardware,” notes Zuberi, “but the hardware will lead to huge software opportunities downstream.”

CyPhy Works is one example of a startup that is building UAV hardware but betting on a future in software. The Boston-based company —  which announced $7 million in fresh funding this week led by Lux Capital — makes a 3-pound flying robot and a larger, 12-pound model that are both tethered to portable command stations but can float up to 500 feet off the ground and hang there for hours while beaming down high-definition video.

The company’s primary customer right now is the U.S. military, which is using the drones at combat outposts to monitor compounds and facilities. (The drones can accept a variety of payloads, from three-dimensional scanners to sensors for chemical detection.)

CyPhy founder Helen Greiner —  who earlier cofounded iRobot, which remains best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaners – sees a huge software opportunity coming when UAVs are permitted to share the skies with civilian aircraft.

“It’s a good time to be developing commercial applications, which we view as any opportunity to help manage a project using a bird’s eye view, whether it’s monitoring a bridge being built, a pit being dug, or a facility to see what people are doing,” she says.

Part of that process will involve convincing customers that they need satellites of flying cameras to replace their stationary cameras. But Greiner wants to be able to provide them with automatic detection and imagery analysis, too.

I ask Greiner about the privacy concerns that have been holding up the FAA. What about people buying UAVs to spy on their neighbors? “I share that [privacy] concern,” she says. “I don’t want one outside my house. But that’s not what we’re building here.”

What of the competition? After all, according to the FAA, there could be at least 7,500 commercial drones in use within five years.

Greiner suggests she isn’t concerned with what others are doing. She tells me about the top engineers she has hired from iRobot and other UAV companies. Grenier also talks about her passion for her work. “I’ve wanted to build robots since I was 11…it’s exciting stuff to be doing.”

Most crucially, she notes, no one is leading the pack at this early date. “It’s still very early in the game.”

New Fundings

Ecovative Design, a six-year-old, Green Island, N.Y.-based company, has raised over $14 million in equity financing from new and existing investors, including existing investors the DOEN Foundation and 3M Company. Terms were not disclosed. Ecovative’s technology is used to grow compostable composites intended to replace the plastic foams used in packaging, automotive components, and building and construction materials.

Espresso Logic, a new, Santa Clara, Calif.-based “reactive programming database service” that promises to reduce application development from months to days, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding led by Inventus Capital Partners. Individuals Anurag Jain, Lee Nackman, Gokul Rajaram, and Raju Reddy were among the individual investors to join the round.

Granify, two-year-old, Edmonton, Canada-based company whose software is being used to improve e-commerce conversion rates, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Valar Ventures, iNovia Capital, Klass Capital, the Business Development Bank of Canada, Extreme Startups, Social Starts and numerous individual investors. The company had raised a separate, $1.5 million round in 2012, according to Crunchbase.

Jut, a new, San Francisco-based startup that’s operating in stealth mode but says it has “built an ambitious vision around the future of big data applications,” has closed $20 million in Series B financing. Accel Partners led the round, with participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners and Wing Ventures.

Nuvyyo, a three-year-old, Kanata, Ontario-based company whose technology helps stream TV programming to mobile devices, raised $4 million from Celtic House Venture Partners earlier this year, it has told Dow Jones.

Project Frog, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based modular building developer, has closed $20 million in Series D funding from Convergent Capital Management and some members of the Cleantech Syndicate, a consortium of 11 family offices. The capital brings Project Frog’s total funding to date to roughly $50 million.

RadPad, an 18-month-old, L.A.-based iPhone app that renters can use to search for apartments, has raised $800,000 in seed funding from Deep Fork Capital, the first backers of Trulia. The WSJ has more on technologies transforming the real estate business here.

Surefire Medical, a four-year-old, Westminster, Colo.-based medical device company that’s developing an infusion device for treating liver cancer, has raised $18.2 million in Series B funding from MCG Partners, Partisan Management Group and High Country Ventures. The round brings Surefire’s capital raised to date to at least $24.3 million.

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New Funds

Targeted Technology Fund —  a San Antonio-based venture capital fund that seeks out biomedical device investments in Texas, Alabama, Colorado and Georgia —  is raising its second fund, according to an SEC filing that shows the firm has garnered $20 million of a targeted $50 million in capital. You can find more background on the firm right here.

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IPOs

Twitter’s shares closed yesterday at $44.90, 73 percent above the company’s $26-per-share IPO price but slightly below its opening figure of $45.10. Dealbook tries to assess what it all means.

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Exits

Sincerely, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile gifting startup that had been cofounded by Matt Brezina of Xobni fame, was acquired yesterday. The buyer: Provide Commerce, a privately held e-commerce company. Sincerely had raised at least $3 million from Charles River Ventures, First Round Capital, Spark Capital, and SV Angel, among others. Brezina told TechCrunch yesterday that the all-cash deal “could not have been better” for everyone involved.

Sky Motion Research, a five-year-old, Montreal, Canada-based company whose app combines radar data and ground observations to provide hyperlocal forecasts, was acquired yesterday by AccuWeather, reports Mashable. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.

Ticket Monster, a Korean subsidiary of LivingSocial, has been acquired by Groupon for “at least $100 million in cash and up to $160 million in stock,” reports AllThingsD. LivingSocial acquired the business in 2011 for terms that were never disclosed publicly.

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People

Reggie Davis, who has served as Zynga’s general counsel for the last four years and led the company through its IPO, is stepping down, with plans to take a year off to spend time with his wife and four sons. Law.com has the story. Davis previously worked for Yahoo and Duane Morris.

Todd Papaioannou joins venture-backed Splunk as its chief technology officer. Papaioannou was most recently an EIR at Data Collective, the big data-focused venture capital firm. Papaioannou also co-founded a Battery Ventures’ portfolio company called Continuuity, which arose out of his tenure as an EIR at Battery, beginning in 2011.

As many as 52 people are being laid off at the e-commerce company ShoeDazzle.com. The Journal has the scoop. ShoeDazzle sold to a competing company, JustFab, earlier this year.

Matt Van Horn resigned yesterday from the social network Path, where he was head of business, reports TechCrunch. According to TechCrunch’s sources, Van Horn is teaming up with Path iOS developer Nikhil Bhogal to co-found a new company. For more on the story, click here.

Data

A preliminary study released on Wednesday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund Study of Endowments, suggests that educational endowments have been goosed by the stock market’s strong performance in 2013. The study, based on responses from 206 endowments and foundations, shows that education endowments averaged 11.7 percent in fiscal 2013 (which ended in summer), compared to an anemic .03 percent in fiscal 2012. You can learn more about the study here.

Just as you suspected: It takes about seven years to exit a venture-backed company, says CB Insights in a new analysis of venture-backed companies that you can read about here.

Job Listings

The Palo Alto office of law firm Perkins Coie is looking for an associate to join its emerging companies and venture capital group. To be considered, you need two to five years of experience in either handling emerging companies or direct venture capital work. (General corporate experience will “not be sufficient,” says the firm.) Land the job, and you’ll be working alongside Adrian Fenty, who rose to national prominence at the mayor Washington D.C. between 2007 and 2011, and who joined Perkins Coie to expand its emerging companies practice in September.

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Essential Reads

The New York Stock Exchange was not-so-subtly talking trash about Nasdaq all of yesterday, observes Business Insider. (Among other things, the NYSE was noting that it now lands more tech deals than Nasdaq.)

Plenty of people still don’t understand how Twitter could possibly be worth its $24.4 billion market cap (at close yesterday) before ever turning a profit. This Newsweek piece might be one of the more effective explainers we’ve seen.

“If anybody has any real conviction, one way or another, with regard to whether Twitter’s stock is overvalued or undervalued, you can be pretty sure that they don’t really know what they’re talking about.”

AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant firmly believes that bitcoin is the future of Internet money. Here’s why.

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Detours

Gizmodo takes stock of Hart Island, the largest mass grave site in the U.S. (It’s a grim but fascinating exploration.)

These famous black-and-white photos have been colorized to dramatic effect.

A family of anchorman: A post by Ron Burgundy.

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Retail Therapy

Food goddess Alice Waters has published a new book.

Someone has created Sriracha-flavored candy canes that look exactly like your standard peppermint-flavored variety. We’d advise against handing them out or hanging them on your Christmas tree unless you have something against young children.

This belt buckle carries a beer in your waistband, which sort of begs the question: Exactly how lazy do you have to be to buy this belt buckle?

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