Hi, everyone, good morning! The countdown to Game 4 begins, woot!

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Top News in the A.M.

Jawbone is really putting the screws to its biggest rival in the wearable fitness device market, Fitbit. For the second time in two weeks, its parent company, AliphCom, has lodged a lawsuit again Fitbit, reports the WSJ. Its newest complaint: that Fitbit infringed on a patent for “a wellness application using data from a data-capable band” after Jawbone spent more than $100 million on R&D toward that end. Fitbit said in a statement, “We are unaware of any confidential or proprietary information of Jawbone in our possession and we intend to vigorously defend against these allegations.” In late May, Jawbone filed its first lawsuit against Fitbit, saying it hired away Jawbone employees who nabbed its intellectual property on their way out. Eight-year-old Fitbit unveiled plans to go public in early May.

Google is launching a new company tasked with developing technologies that improve urban life, reports the New York Times. Called Sidewalk Labs, the company will be headed by Daniel Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg. Among other technologies the company is expected to pursue are those thatreduce pollution, curb energy use, and lessen the cost of city living. In September 2013, Google similarly launched another company, Calico, that aims to extend human life.

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Amid Unicorn Talk, High-Potential, Low-Glamour PayNearMe Slogs Along

PayNearMe doesn’t get a lot of attention from the press. Partly, that’s because the five-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca., company doesn’t seek it out. But PayNearMe is also in a business that’s not nearly so relatable to many in Silicon Valley as enterprise messaging or high-end black-car services. It’s focused on the roughly 25 percent of people in the U.S. who don’t have bank accounts but buy things — like the rest of us — that would be hard to pay for in cash, like rent, healthcare, and online goods.It’s a huge market, one that’s remarkably underserved excepting older players like MoneyGram and Western Union. It’s also a lot of work to build, making it a fairly long-term bet, one into which investors like True Ventures, August Capital, and Khosla Ventures have already sunk $71 million, including a $14 million inside round earlier this year.

How does it work? Say a person needs to pay their rent or buy a bus ticket. PayNearMe has relationships with both brick-and-mortar stores –including, crucially, 7 Eleven, Ace Cash Express and Family Dollar — as well as businesses like property management software companies. Together, the companies make it possible for anyone to walk into one of more than 17,000 locations with cash, and walk out with a receipt for payment.

This week, we talked with PayNearMe founder and CEO Danny Shader – previously a CEO of Good Technology, an EIR at both Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark, and cofounder of Accept.com, an online consumer-to-consumer payments service that sold to Amazon for $175 million in stock in 1999 – to learn more about the gritty, complex business he’s been building.

PayNearMe doesn’t give out a lot of numbers, but you say that overall payment volume has more than tripled from this time last year. 

Our business is growing five to 10 percent a month, which keeps compounding, so it’s getting to be a pretty sizable business. It’s extremely hard to build up an entirely new payment network, but we’ve done it, it’s working, it’s growing, and it’s incredibly defensive. But it’s not for the faint of heart.

You could boil the ocean, trying to go after everyone who’s unbanked. What’s your process like?

We pursue things vertical by vertical. So the biggest vertical is lending, then rent and municipal government payments, and now healthcare is driving a lot of new people into the insured ranks and they need to pay their premiums. Within a vertical, there’s a handful of software companies that are systems of record, whether it be for property management companies or government agencies, and we integrate into those software systems. For rents, for example, we integrate with AppFolio and ManageAmerica, a property management system for manufactured housing, meaning mobile homes.

We try to go after very large accounts directly or go downstream.

Going downstream [to smaller players] sounds like a lot of work. How do you do it? How many employees do you have altogether?

We have more than 50, roughly half of whom are in Sunnyvale, with the rest scattered [around the U.S.]. And it does take time to get going on a new vertical. Say we want to do something in health, in medical records. We’ll go to a trade show and call on [some of the vendors] , and they’ll typically say, “Go away, my customers aren’t asking for you.” So we’ll go to end customers and invest heavily in getting them to work with us, and they do, and they talk about it, and a year later, the software providers say, “We want to integrate with you.”

Processing rent payments is one of your biggest businesses, but we understand that Family Dollar will no longer be accepting rent payments, that it grew worried about safety issues around people walking in with large sums of cash. We’ve asked the company about it but they haven’t responded.

I can’t speak for Family Dollar, but rent is a big vertical and we’re processing rent at a ton of other locations. Other folks will be joining our network, too.

PayNearMe shares its economics with stores like Family Dollar and 7 Eleven. Do you discuss that split? Is it 50/50?

I can’t comment on [the percentage of transaction fees we pay out], but it’s [a good deal for them]. Imagine: Hey, our sales force will sign up big entities like municipalities that will include your logo [so people know where to pay their bills], and we’ll pay you a commission, and by the way, we’re sending you valuable foot traffic.

PayNearMe has a lot of stuff coming. Can you give readers a curtain raiser?

I can say that we now have a complete set of money transmitting licenses in the U.S. and Puerto Rico that we spent the last three years and millions of dollars [to obtain]. The licenses allow us to act as an agent of a consumer, taking their money and delivering it to some other location. It lets us enter adjacent markets. [But that’s all I can say.]

Do you anticipate these adjacent businesses will be larger than what you’ve already built?

I think we could build a big public company doing what we’re doing. It’s a massive market hidden in plain sight. Most people in the Valley are asking if cash is going away. Actually, the cash market is increasing, and the bifurcation between the 1 percent and everyone else is contributing to that.

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New Fundings

AbilTo, a seven-year-old, New York-based online video conferencing platform that delivers targeted health-changing programming, has raised $12 million in Series C funding led by HLM Venture Partners, with participation from earlier backers BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, .406 Ventures and Sandbox Industries. The company has now raised $21 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Bright Funds, a three-year-old, San Francisco, Ca.-based platform for individual and workplace giving, has raised $1.8 million in funding led byAspiration Growth, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, 10K Investments, Wellspring Growth Partners, Mission & Market, and individual investors. Per Crunchbase, the company has now raised roughly $3 million altogether.

Dojo Madness, a seven-month-old, Berlin, Germany-­based startup that makes a digital coaching app for a popular e-sports game called “League of Legends,” (and has broader plans up its sleeve), has raised $2.25 million in seed funding from DN Capital, London Venture Partners, March Capital Partners, 500 Startups, The HIVE, and numerous angel investors. VentureBeat has more here.

Kolibree, a two-year-old, Paris, France-based company whose “connected” electric toothbrushes enable parents to follow their kids’ brushing on their mobile devices with real-time feedback, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from SEB Alliance, Innovacom, Cap Horn Invest and the Dental Investment Group for Health.

Local ID, a nine-month-old, Venice, Ca.-based intelligence platform designed to maximize brands’ local marketing efforts, has raised $1.9 million in seed funding led by Crosscut Ventures, with participation from Technicolor, TenOneTen, Baroda Ventures, Double M Partners, Tallwave, Wavemaker Partners and Queens Bridge Venture Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

Locent, a year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based company that’s aiming to help merchants sell products and services using two-way text messaging, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Chaac Ventures, a seed-stage firm focused on Princeton University’s alumni tech founders. (Locent founder Matt Joseph, who previously worked in investments and operations at LaunchPad LA, graduated in 2010.) More here.

Luqa Pharmaceuticals, a five-year-old, Hong Kong-based pharma company focused on dermatology, has raised $15 million in new funding led byMorningside Ventures.

QualMetrix, a three-year-old, Miami, Fla.-based company whose cloud-based healthcare analytics platform that provides reporting to payers, providers and employers, has raised $5 milion in Series B funding led by VSS Monitoring founder Terence Breslin. (His company was acquired for an undisclosed amount in 2012.) QualMetrix has now raised $9.3 million altogether.

Tuhu Yangche, a four-year-old, Shanghai, China-based online car maintenance platform that invites customers to book car services appointments, as well as shop for products online, has reportedly raised roughly $100 million in Series C funding from Yuyue Capital, Far East Horizon, Legend Capital, and Qiming Venture Partners.

Unum Therapeutics, a year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotechnology company developing an antibody-directed cellular immunotherapy, has raised $65 million in Series B funding led by New Leaf Venture Partners, with participation from Brace Pharma Capital, Seattle Genetics, Cowen Private Investments, Jennison Associates (on behalf of certain clients), Novo A/S,Sabby Management,Sectoral Asset Management, and Wellington Management Company. Earlier backers Fidelity Biosciences, Atlas Venture and Sanofi-Genzyme BioVenture also joined the round. The company has now raised $77 milion altogether, shows Crunchbase. More here.

XTuit Pharmaceuticals, a four-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biopharmaceutical company that’s developing products for use in the diagnosis and treatment of oncological, tumor, and inflammatory diseases, has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Polaris Partners, CTI Life Sciences, Arcus Ventures and Omega Funds.

ZypMedia, a two-year-old, San Francisco, Ca.-based programmatic media-buying platform for local advertising, has raised $4.4 million in Series B funding led by publicly traded Sinclair Broadcast Group, with participation from earlier investor U.S. Venture Partners.

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Exits

In April, Fortune reported that Ouya, the startup video game console maker, was on the auction block after tripping a debt convenant that it wasn’t able to restructure. Now, word is the company is talking with Razer, a computer and accessories maker popular with gamers. CNet has the story here.

Whitepages, the online people and phone number directory, has acquired San Francisco-based NumberCop to bolster its abilities to detect spam and scam calls within its Caller ID smartphone application. CrunchBase doesn’t list any investors for NumberCop. More from TechCrunch here.

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People

Venture capitalist Matt Murphy, who left Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers earlier this year, didn’t travel far for his new job, joining another  Sand Hill Road firm — Menlo Ventures — as managing director. He becomes one of seven investing partners at the firm, including Mark Siegel, with whom Murphy attended business school at Stanford. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

For the year ended in April, Google CEO and cofounder Larry Page received a 97 percent approval rating from employees who submitted reviews to the career site Glassdoor. That makes him the most popular tech CEO, according to the site, which shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t doing too shabbily, either, with a 94 percent approval rating by employees. More here.

The CEO of Otter Media, the Web video joint venture between AT&T and The Chernin Group, is leaving after less than a year on the job, reports Recode.

In a letter to employees, Virasb Vahidi, formerly chief commercial officer at American Airlines, wrote that “it has become clear to [Chernin Group CEO Peter Chernin] and me that the role of the CEO is different than we had originally envisioned.”

“Unicorn” companies are increasingly hunting for talent at the Googleplex.

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Jobs

eBay is looking for a director of corporate development. The job is in San Jose, Ca.

Hi, happy Wednesday, everyone! We have a slightly abbreviated version of the newsletter today. Between celebrating a certain 8-year-old’s birthday and watching yet another incredible NBA Final’s game last night, we were offline much of yesterday.

On a separate note, we’ve heard from a number of you who’ve been finding your copy of StrictlyVC in spam. We’ve talked with our new email service provider about it, and the best advice it can offer is to a.) unmark the email as spam when you find it in the deepest recesses of your digital junk mail and b.) add our email address to your contact list. (We’ll be over here, cursing at Gmail, in the meantime.)

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Top News in the A.M.

Chinese web giant Baidu will reportedly launch its first driverless car in the second half of this year, with the help of an unnamed car manufacturer. Worth noting: Baidu owns a stake in Uber, which also looks to be aggressively pushing into autonomous driving technologies. The BBC has the story here.

That Spotify round is official. According to the WSJ, which reported in April that the music-streaming company was assembling another huge financing, Spotify just closed on $526 million in funding that values the company at $8.5 billion — twice the valuation of its publicly traded rival Pandora. (Both companies operate at a loss). Spotify’s new investors include a wide range of investors, including British asset managers Baillie Gifford, Landsdowne Partners and Rinkelberg Capital; Canadian hedge funds Senvest Capital and Discovery Capital Management; Nordic telecom operator TeliaSonera; and U.S. investors Halcyon Asset Management, GSV Capital, D.E. Shaw & Co., TCV, Northzone, P. Schoenfeld Asset Management, and Goldman Sachs. Founded nine years ago, Spotify has now raised $1.1 billion altogether.

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New Fundings

Arrowlytics, a year-old, Charlotte, N.C.-based company whose online analytics dashboard helps healthcare organizations by pulling data from their various platforms nightly into one system, has raised $3 million in funding led by Surgical Care Affiliates. More here.

Duolingo, a 3.5-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based free language education platform, has raised $45 million in new funding led by Google Capital in a round that values the company at $470 million. Duolingo had previously raised $38.3 million across three rounds, including from Union Square Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Business Insider has more here.

Fetchr, a three-year-old, Dubai-based, Shyp-like company that picks up and delivers mail and other packages to customers in the Middle East (where not everyone has a street address), has just raised $11 million in Series A funding. New Enterprise Associates led the round, with participation from Triple Point Capital, Ben Narasin, Delta Partners, and Dhabi Holdings, among others. VentureBeat has more here.

Melinta Therapeutics, a 15-year-old, New Haven, Ct.-based company that develops and commercializes antibiotics to overcome drug-resistant infections, has raised $67 in funding led by Malin Corporation, with participation from earlier backer Vatera Healthcare Partners. The company has now raised roughly $280 million altogether, according to Crunchbase data. Previous investors include Warburg Pincus, ABS Ventures, and Oxford Bioscience Partners, among many others.

PAX Labs, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of vaporizers (the kind you inhale instead of smoking cigarettes), has raised $46.7 million in new funding from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sivia Capital and earlier backers Tao Capital Partners and Sand Hill Angels, among others. TechCrunch has more here.

Spreemo, a five-year-old, New York-based health-care software company that focuses on workers’ compensation specialty benefits management, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Pamplona Capital Management.

SumUp, a three-year-old, Berlin-based mobile payments startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Swiss backer Venture Incubator that brings its total funding to $45 million (€40 million), it tells TechCrunch. The company’s earlier investors include Tengelmann Ventures, Groupon, andBBVA Ventures. More here.

Tile, a 2.5-year-old San Mateo, Ca.-based maker of a location-tracking device and app that helps users find items that are lost, has raised $3 million more in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. The company has now raised $13 million in Series A funding altogether, including from GGV Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, Slow Ventures, Rothenberg Ventures, and Tandem Capital, among others. Altogether, the company has now raised $18.8 million, shows Crunchbase.

Twist Bioscience, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company that helps scientists create chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other products using synthetic biology, has raised $37 million in Series C funding led by publicly tradedIllumina, with participation from Fidelity Management & Research, Foresite Capital Management and earlier backers ARCH Venture Partners, Paladin Capital Group and Tao Invest. The company has now raised $82.1 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Volta Industries, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based company that designs, installs, and maintains electrical charging stations in five cities, including San Francisco and L.A., has raised $7.5 million in funding: $4.5 million in equity financing led by Three Bridges Ventures and a $3 million financing facility from SQN Capital. More about the company here.

Voonik, a two-year-old, Bangalore, India-based e-commerce platform that features the clothing and jewelry merchandise of numerous stores, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from earlier backer Seedfund. The company has now raised $5.5 million to date.

WalkMe, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose cloud-based service aims to help professionals guide and engage prospects and customers and complete online tasks, has raised $25 million in Series D funding led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from earlier backers Gemini Israel Ventures, Giza Venture Capital and Scale Venture Partners. The company has now raised $42.5 million altogether, shows Crunchbase data.

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New Funds

High Alpha, a new, Indianapolis, Ind.-based venture studio focused on conceiving, launching, and scaling new enterprise cloud companies, has raised $35 million from investors, including Emergence Capital, Greenspring Associates, Hyde Park Venture Partners and numerous angel investors. The company’s partners include Scott Dorsey, cofounder and former CEO of ExactTarget (which sold to Salesforce for $2.5 billion in 2013); Mike Fitzgerald, ExactTarget’s former EVP of corporate development and cofounder of Gravity Ventures; Eric Tobias, founder and CEO of iGoDigital (which sold to ExactTarget); and Kristian Andersen, founder of Studio Science and cofounder of Gravity Ventures.

Intel Capital yesterday took the wraps off a new fund that’s investing in tech startups run by women and underrepresented minorities. The Intel Capital Diversity Fund will commit $125 million to startups across a broad spectrum of industries, and it’s being led by Intel Capital managing director Lisa Lambert. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here. The fund has already made four investments, including Brit + Co, a San Francisco-based media and e-commerce platform. (We talked briefly with founder Brit Morin earlier this week about that new round.)

OurCrowd, a early three-year-old, Jerusalem-based global equity crowdfunding platform, has launched a specialized $10 million early-stage fund focusing exclusively on seed-stage startups. The minimum investment is fixed at $50,000 for accredited investors while the fund will provide up to $500,000 for a select group of companies.

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Exits

AOL has acquired a predictive analytics startup called Velos for an undisclosed amount, shutting down the startup’s service in the process. VentureBeat has more here.

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People

Online measurement and advertising company Quantcast has hired a new CFO: Stephen Collins, former CEO at Bazaarvoice, reports TechCrunch. He replaces Peter Kuipers, who joined Quantcast at the end of last year from The Weather Company. Quantcast says Kuipers “has left the company to pursue other opportunities.”

Indian e-commerce company Snapdeal has hired former Yahoo exec Anand Chandrasekaran as its chief product officer. According to the WSJ, Chandrasekaran will be working with Snapdeal’s roughly 1,000 software engineers, a group that’s expected to double in the next year as it increasingly focuses on improving Snapdeal’s mobile application, which now accounts for 75 percent of its sales.

Being a billionaire isn’t as easy as it looks, Jack Ma suggested in a talk at the Economic Club of New York this week. The Alibaba founder and executive chairman, whose stake in the company is currently valued at roughly $37 billion, told attendees: “If you have less than $1 million, you know how to spend the money.” Once you become a billionaire, you’re expected to spend your wealth to benefit “society.” The New York Post has more here.

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Jobs

Orix, the financial services giant, is looking to hire a managing director into its venture group. The job is in San Francisco.

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Essential Reads

A simmering battle between the “unicorn” HR benefits company Zenefits and payroll giant ADP became public yesterday when Zenefits took to its site to tell those of its customers who are paid through ADP that ADP has been systematically deactivating Zenefits accounts that those small businesses had expressly set up. In a statement, ADP attributed its move to Zenefits “pulling sensitive information, including unmasked Social Security numbers and employee banking information, in a manner that did not comply with ADP’s standards for data security.”  TechCrunch has more here.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has asked the federal government for permission to begin testing a project that would see a constellation of 4,000 small, cheap satellites beam high-speed Internet signals to all parts of the world. It “would be like rebuilding the Internet in space,” Musk has said. The Washington Post has more here.

The attorneys general of New York and Connecticut have been quietly investigating Apple‘s negotiations with music companies in search of potential antitrust violations. (So has the European Commission.) The New York Times has the story here.

The Apple Watch: a break-up story.

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Detours

Sixteen ways you’re using LinkedIn wrong.

Jerry Seinfeld is tired of political correctness.

“This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp. I don’t intend to look for another tech job.”

Unusual homes around the world.

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Retail Therapy

The D’Hauteville Concrete Chair. Cool. Also conducive for short meetings.

Happy Monday, everyone. Did you catch last night’s NBA Finals game? What an incredible series this is! (Go Cavs!)

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Top News in the A.M.

According to a new report from The Information, Facebook has just ditched its plans to spend as much as $1 billion to build and launch a satellite to provide Internet service on continents such as Africa. Facebook’s decision follows a pull-back by Google regarding a big investment in satellites. More here. (Subscription required.)

Apple‘s eagerly anticipated Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off at 10 a.m. PST. Among other things, Apple is expected to finally reveal its new streaming music service and to introduce tools that provide app developers with deeper access to the Apple Watch. The Verge already has a live blog up and running here.

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The Opportunity: Servicing the On-Demand Service Worker

While consumers wade through the ever-ballooning list of brands wanting to wash their clothes, clean their homes, park their cars and deliver them dinner, a newer crop of startups has begun catering to the needs of those contract workers who make the on-demand economy possible.

They’re smart to be zeroing in these independent contractors. On-demand employees represent a huge and growing wave of people who now operate as free agents, with the freedom and flexibility — and often instability — that’s part of life without a corporate parent. In fact, Intuit has somewhat famously predicted that fully 40 percent of U.S. workers will be “contingent” workers by 2020.

Patricia Nakache, a general partner at Trinity Ventures who has led deals in on-demand companies, including Eat Club, calls 1099, or contract, workers  part of a generational shift. “Millennials are much less receptive to the monolithic education or work-experience notion that, ‘I’m going to have this job with a single company for 10 or 12 years or take all my classes from one-four year institution,’” she says. “They’re really beginning to question the boundaries of those experiences.”

And VCs have begun meeting with companies that cater to them.

For example, Homebrew cofounder Satya Patel points to several companies that hope to serve the most immediate needs of contract workers — which, in most cases, is frequent and steady work. Peers, for one, a San Francisco-based, still-in-beta startup launched by RelayRides founder Shelby Clark, wants to make it easier for people to find, compare and manage on-demand work opportunities. (It also points them to tax, financial and legal resources.) Kung Fu, an eight-month-old San Francisco-based company, is similarly building a platform to help people earn income based on their location and skills.

“I definitely think there is a major opportunity” here, says Patel.

Nakache is meanwhile seeing more startups approach contract workers from specific service angles. One such group are applicant tracking systems startups that — unlike predecessors catering to larger companies — are designed for batch processing. OnBoardIQ, an eight-month-old, San Francisco-based outfit, is among the newest startups trying to streamline the process hiring hundreds of people quickly. Playbook HR, a 10-month-old, San Francisco-based company, also began life as an applicant tracking system (though, sorry investors, Intuit acquired it in March).

According to Nakache, WorkPop, a year-old, L.A.-based company that’s been building a marketplace for hourly workers to find food and retail jobs (and which Trinity has backed), is beginning to eye the category, too.

A separate group of companies has sprung up around background checks. One of them is year-old, San Francisco-based CheckR; another is three-year-old, London-based Onfido. While background checks are nothing new, the industry hasn’t traditionally needed to act quickly or process large numbers of people at once; meanwhile, newer companies are only too happy to do both, even if their predecessors aren’t readily ceding the territory. (Uber, the ride-hailing company, uses Hirease, a 13-year-old, Southern Pines, N.C.-based company, to vet its drivers. Competitor Lyft similarly uses a more established company, 40-year-old, New York-based SterlingBackcheck.)

Yet there are other types of companies catering to the specific needs of contract workers.

Don’t be surprised to see more shift-planning startups like five-year-old, San Francisco-based ShiftPlanning and four-year-old When I Work in St. Paul, Mn.

Payroll startups that make for contractors to get paid are also springing up, from four-year-old ZenPayroll in San Francisco, to 1.5-year-old Tiempo in Sunnyvale, Ca.

Of course, healthcare — which most contract workers don’t receive from their employers — may represent the biggest opportunity of all. Among the startups beginning to eye the space: two-year-old, San Francisco-based Stride Health, a health insurance recommendation engine that’s targeting the needs of small businesses and sees 1099 workers as a potential source of business.

There are so many startups beginning to target 1099 workers, in fact, that Nakache says Trinity has yet to pull the trigger on a related investment. She doesn’t expect it will be long, though.

“We haven’t found quite the right fit for the stage at which we invest,” she says. “But it’s safe to say that we’re actively looking and actively engaged in the sector. We have a lot of companies on our radar screen.”

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New Fundings

AmnioLife, a two-year-old, Gainesville, Fla.-based research and development organization focused around “placental-derived technologies,” has raised $833,000 in Series A funding led by Fountainhead Investment Partners. More here.Colabo, a five-year-old, San Carlos, Ca.-based company whose software platform provides marketers with self-service analytics, has raised $7 million in new funding led by Marker LLC, with participation by Kaedan Capital and earlier backers Paul Maritz, Ray Rothrock, and The Hive. The company has now raised $10.5 million altogether, shows Crunchbase. VentureBeat has more here.

Delivery Hero, the four-year-old, Berlin-based takeout food ordering service, has raised $110 million from two unnamed, U.S.-based “public market” investors at a post-money valuation of more $3.1 billion, says the company. That’s roughly triple the nearly $1 billion in equity that Delivery hero has raised so far — $600 million of it in 2015 alone — including from Insight Venture Partners, General Atlantic, Point Nine Capital, Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kite Ventures, and Rocket Internet. TechCrunch has the story here.

Jimdo, an eight-year-old, Hamburg, Germany-based company that helps users create sites on their computers, smartphones, or tablets, has raised €25 million (roughly $28 million) from the growth equity firm Spectrum Equity. The company, which also has offices in Tokyo and San Francisco, had previously raised just €500,000 in outside capital. More here.

Luxury Retreats, a 16-year-old, Montréal, Quebec-based marketplace for people to list and find high-end homes for short-term rentals, has raised $11 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor iNovia Capital. The company has now raised $16 million altogether. TechCrunch has more on the company (and the broader trend of high-end home rentals) here.

Menlo Security, a two-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based security company that isolates all web and email content in the cloud before it reaches an endpoint to eliminate the threat of advanced malware, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst Partners, Osage University Partners and Engineering Capital. The company has now raised $35.5 million altogether. More here.

Skeleton Technologies, a six-year-old Estonia and Germany-based company that makes high-performance ultracapacitors for transportation, industrial and grid applications, has raised €9.8m ($10.7 million) in Series B, including from Harju Elekter Group, which owns electrical equipment manufacturing plants in the Nordic-Baltic markets, and UP Invest, one of largest investment firms in the Baltic region. The company has now raised $18.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Spero Therapeutics, a year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company that’s developing drugs to combat drug-resistant bacteria, has raised $30 million in Series A funding from Lundbeckfond Ventures, Kraft Group, Merck Research Ventures Fund, Atlas Venture, Partners Innovation Fund and SR One.

SQream Technologies, a nearly five-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based company that says its technology enables customers to load and analyze as many as 100 terabytes of raw data on a single computing node in near real-time, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by Blumberg Capital. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

Springbot, a three-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based ecommerce marketing platform designed for small to mid-sized online businesses, has raised $6 million in new funding led by TTV Capital, with participation from earlier investors TechOperators and Silicon Valley Bank. The company has now raised $10 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

TaskUs, a seven-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based company that provides outsourced business process tasks to other startups, has raised $15 million in new funding from the Philippines-based private equity firm Navegar. The outlet Inc. has much more on the company here.

Vinli, a year-old, Dallas, Tex.-based connected car platform, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Samsung Venture Investment Corp., with participation from Cox Automotive, Continental ITS and the Westly Group. TechCrunch has more here.

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New Funds

Cradle Seed Ventures, a months-old, Malaysia-based seed-stage group, has announced plans to invest between $270,000 and $800,000 in promising Malaysia-based startups. The outlet e27 has more here.

Fuel Capital, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based, early-stage venture firm founded by Christopher Howard (as a longtime principal with Ignition Partners previously, he’d launched the firm’s seed-stage investment program), is looking to raise $35 million for its second fund, shows an SEC filing. The firm’s bets so far include Homejoy (reportedly in talks to be acquired by competitor Handy); recently shuttered Secret; and Layer, which closed on $14.5 million in Series A funding last month.

Tribeca Venture Partners, a four-year-old, New York-based venture firm that primarily backs early-stage startups in New York, is raising its second fund with a $100 million target and $125 million hard cap, according to Fortune’s Dan Primack. The firm had closed its debut fund with $65 million. StrictlyVC talked with firm founder Brian Hirsch last year about Tribeca and New York more broadly.

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People

Joanne Bradford, who joined Pinterest as its head of partnerships in December 2013, is leaving the company, Recode reported on Friday. The move comes as Tim Kendall, the company’s head of monetization and Bradford’s boss, decided to take on some of Bradford’s responsibilities. Bradford had joined Pinterest from the San Francisco Chronicle, where she was briefly president. She has also held executive roles at Demand Media, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Google has hired Sissie Hsiao away from Microsoft to take over as director for all mobile ads, including AdMob, the mobile exchange. Recode has the news here. She is replacing her current boss, Jonathan Alferness, who is heading over to lead commerce, a role that was vacated last month when Sameer Samat left to join Jawbone as president.

India’s tech boom is luring many of India’s brightest back home from the U.S., reports Bloomberg Businessweek. India “is like the late 1990s in the U.S.,” says Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal‘s CEO, who attended the University of Pennsylvania and founded his company — now among the most highly valued in India — after his application for a U.S. visa was rejected.

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Jobs

Andreessen Horowitz is looking to hire a corporate development associate. The job is in Menlo Park, Ca.

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Essential Reads

From St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a company formed specifically to turn Elon Musk’s hyperloop idea into reality, says it has secured the agreements needed to break ground on a five-mile test track near the town of Quay Valley, California.

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Detours

John Oliver toasts FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s demise by chugging a Bud Light.

Housing through the centuries.

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Retail Therapy

The 10 best Nerf dart blasters you can buy right now. (It’s nearly summer, after all!)

Friday! We’d squeeze your cheeks if we could.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

(Note: No column today.)

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Top News in the A.M.

Apple predicted that 2015 would be the year of Apple Pay. But many retailers remain skeptical about the payment system, says a new Reuters report.

In more potentially bad news for Apple: Just days before it plans to reveal a music streaming service, the company is still negotiating with record labels over terms, reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

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New Fundings

Hi, everyone! Hope your Thursday is off to a good start.

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Top News in the A.M.

Dish Network is reportedly in talks to merge with T-Mobile US — a deal that would accelerate a wave of consolidation across the U.S. media and communications industries, reports the WSJ.

On Monday, Apple will begin its annual developer conference, where the company is set to release new tools for software developers to create smarter apps for its Apple Watch. The New York Times has more here.

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Madrona Venture Group Seals Up Its Sixth Fund in Seattle

Madrona Venture Group, the 20-year-old, Seattle-based early-stage venture capital firm whose bets include Redfin, Apptio, iSpot.TV and others, has closed its sixth fund with $300 million. Yesterday, we chatted briefly with longtime managing partner Matt McIlwain about the fund and the investing scene in the Pacific Northwest more generally.

Your new fund is the same size as its predecessor, closed in 2012. 

Same size fund, same strategy. It’s all systems go.

Is the team the same?

One of our managing directors, Greg Gottesman, is transitioning to a venture partner role. [Gottesman, who joined Madrona in 1997 and was previously CEO of the dog-owner community Rover.com] will still be involved but he’s been kicking around some new entrepreneurial ideas that he wants to pursue and he’ll be talking about them later in the summer. We also added three strategic advisors [Isilon co-founder Sujal Patel; retiring F5 CEO John McAdam; and Concur CEO Steve Singh].

You’re obviously a big proponent of the Pacific Northwest investing scene. 

I hate to use the word, but it’s really become a juggernaut of innovation in cloud, in big data, augmented reality, next-generation consumer… Related to that, the rise of Amazon and revitalization of Microsoft is attracting all kinds of talent to this region, which bodes well for us.

How are you measuring the impact of [Microsoft’s newest CEO] Satya Nadella? 

I was over at Microsoft last week getting a tour of its HoloLens [holographic goggles technology] and I was blown away by the demos. Operationally, there’s a huge difference, too. One of our startups, Smartsheet [which makes cloud and mobile-first productivity tools], had tried unsuccessfully a few years ago to integrate with Microsoft. [Under Nadella], the company has gotten traction with Office 365 and was just featured at a recent conference as an example of a great integration partner. The pace at which Microsoft folks are understanding and building integration with the startup community is significantly enhanced over the last 18 months. Satya has just set a different tone — more humble and more outward looking about what the ecosystem and customers want.

Madrona was super active last year, investing $463 million into the Pacific Northwest with its syndicate partners. Are valuations still comparatively more reasonable up there?

[Laughs.] Yes, they’re somewhat more reasonable, and the cost of living is somewhat more reasonable. We roll our eyes when square footage hits the high $30s; you [in the Bay Area] start rolling your eyes when it hits the high $70s. It also doesn’t hurt that we don’t have a state income tax.

[As important] we have a growing [well of] deep talent here. Some people have come to work at Microsoft and Amazon but Facebook and EMC and Google also now have hundreds if not thousands of employees here. We’ve funded 15 companies that have come out of the University of Washington. Our LPs are also very excited about this multi-generational effect we’re starting to see. For example, we backed Isilon [the enterprise storage company that was acquired by EMC in 2010 for $2.25 billion]; now we’ve backed two teams to come out of the company, the next-gen storage companies Igneous and Cumulus. There’s just talent all over the place.

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New Fundings

1World Online, a 3.5-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company that sells web and mobile-based engagement applications, content, and analytics for publishers, political candidates, and brands, has raised $2.5 million in funding from DEFTA Partners, Altair Capital, GV Launch Gurus, and Nest HK. The company has now raised $4 million to date, shows Crunchbase. More here.

Auspherix, a 1.5-year-old, Sydney, Australia-based early-stage anti-infectives company that’s developing antibacterials, has raised £6 million ($9.2 million) in Series A funding led by new investor Imperial Innovations, with participation from earlier backer Medical Research Commercialisation Fund. More here.

Believe Digital, a 10.5-year-old Paris, France-based digital distributor and label services provider for artists and labels worldwide, has raised $60 million in funding from Technology Crossover Ventures, XAnge, GP Bullhound, and Ventech. More here.

Blend Systems, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based social app whose users create a trend (a movement, inside joke, or challenge), then nominate their friends and others to join them, has raised $6.3 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Metamorphic Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, Great Oaks Capital, and the Al Nowais family from Dubai’s Waha Capital. Earlier investors, including CAA Ventures, Foundation Capital, Galvanize Ventures, BaseVC, and others also joined the round. The company has now raised $10 million altogether. More here.

Bolt Threads, a year-old, Emeryville, Ca.-based company that’s creating engineered silk fibers based on proteins found in nature, has come out of stealth mode with $32.3 million in Series B funding led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Formation 8 and Founders Fund. The company has raised a total of $40 million to date. Forbes has much more here.

Calhoun Vision, an 18-year-old, Pasadena, Ca.-based vision correction company whose technology centers on a light-based procedure, has raised $69 million in its first outside funding from Longitude Capital, Balance Point Capital Partners, H.I.G. BioVentures and RA Capital Management. More here.

Cockroach Labs, a five-month-old, New York-based company focused on creating an open source database designed to scale and survive disasters, has raised $6.25 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark. More here.

Electronic Commerce, a 19-year-old, Elkhart, In.-based HR platform company, today announced it has secured a $40 million majority growth investment from Frontier Capital. More here.

FourKites, a three-year-old, Chicago, Il.-based logistics platform that tracks delivery trucks, has raised $1.25 million in seed funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners, with participation from Hyde Park Angels, Harvard Business School Angels, Bluestein & Associates and Otter Consulting. The Chicago Tribune has more here.

LaunchDarkly, a year-old, San Francisco-based feature-flags-as-a-service product (note: feature flags allow software teams to turn features on and off for users at different times), has raised $2.6 million in seed funding led by SoftTech VC, with BloombergBeta, 500 Startups, Cervin Ventures and numerous angel investors participating. More here.

Layer3 TV, a two-year-old, Boston-based “next-gen cable company,” has raised $51 million in fresh funding from earlier investors Evolution Media Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, along with new, unnamed investors. The company has now raised more than $80 million altogether. More here.

MineSense, a seven-year-old, Vancouver, British Columbia-based developer of sensor-based ore sorting systems, has raised an undisclosed “multi-million dollar” amount of Series B financing. The round was led by Prelude Ventures, with participation from Export Development Canada, Cycle Capital Management, and earlier backer Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital. The company had previously raised $8.9 million, shows Crunchbase.

PicsArt, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based photo editing app on Android and iOS, has raised $15 million in new funding from Insight Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. The round follows a $10 million investment from Sequoia earlier this year.

Plotly, a two-year-old, Montreal, Canada-based collaborative data science company, has raised $5.5 million in funding from MHS Capital, Siemens Venture Capital, Rho Ventures, Real Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. Vator has more here.

Qnergy, a five-year-old, En-Harod Ihud, Israel-based energy technology company, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Tene Investment Funds. More here.

Sphero, a five-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based company that develops “connected” play toys, has raised $45 million in new funding led by Mercato Partners, with participation from a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company and other strategic investors. The company has now raised at least $80 million altogether, including from earlier investors Techstars, Grishin Robotics, Highway 12 Ventures, Shea Ventures, SK Ventures and individual investors. TechCrunch has more here.

TabbedOut, a five-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based mobile payment startup, has raised $21.5 million from investors in what it tells Venture Capital Dispatch will be its final funding round before going public. The company has now raised $39 million altogether, shows Crunchbase; its backers include Heartland Payment Systems, Morgan Creek Capital Management, and New Enterprise Associates.

Welocalize, an 18-year-old, Frederick, Md.-based supply chain management software company, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Norwest Equity Partners. According to Crunchbase, the company had raised at least $34 million previously, via a 2010 round from Riverside Partners.

Zentera Systems, a three-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based cloud network company that connects enterprise applications and data from on-premise environments to private or public cloud data centers, has raised $4.9 million in Series A funding from CDIB Venture Capital, along with unnamed earlier investors.

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New Funds

Paige Craig, a Marine-turned-entrepreneur-turned-angel investor who has made more than 100 investments, including in Lyft, Postmates, AngelList,Twitter, and Plated, has officially launched a seed fund called Arena Ventures that intends to lead up to 20 deals a year in San Francisco and L.A., where Craig is based. He’ll also be sharing his deal information and other insights via a weekly email that can sign up for here. (We met Craig late last year while moderating a panel about seed investors’ pro rata rights. If you’re interested in learning more, L.A. Business Journal has just published a nice profile of him.)

Kensington Capital Partners, a 19-year-old Toronto-based investment firm, has held a second closing of its newest fund of funds, which now has investor commitments of $193 million (or $154.6 million in U.S. dollars), up from $160 million when it held a first close last November. Among the fund’s newest LPs: Torstar Corporation. Among its biggest LPs: the Canadian government. More here.

Next Frontier Capital, a new, Bozeman, Mt.-based venture capital firm, has raised $11 million for a debut fund that it hopes will close with $20 million. Founder Will Price tells the Bozeman Daily Chronicle he plans to fund up to a dozen companies with the capital. Price was previously CEO of a San Francisco-based ad tech platform named Flite. He also spent several years as a principal, then managing director, at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (now known as HWVP).

Valor Equity Partners, the 20-year-old, Chicago, Il.-based private equty firm, has closed its third fund with $490 million. The firm says it has made 66 investments in 34 platforms over the years and that as of March, roughly a third of its newest fund’s capital had been committed in companies, including Addepar, Fooda, Porch.com, and Renovate America. ChicagoInno has much more here.

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Exits

Cisco is acquiring Piston Cloud Computing, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup known for its own distribution of the OpenStack cloud software stack. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Piston had raised at least $22.4 million from investors, shows Crunchbase. Its backers include Data Collective, Swisscom Ventures, True Ventures, and Cisco itself. eWeek has more here.

eVestment, a 15-year-old, Marietta, Ga.-based company that produces traditional and hedge fund data and analytics for the institutional investing community, has acquired TopQ, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based private equity analytics platform. The amount of the deal was not disclosed.  According to Crunchbase, eVestment has raised $19 million from Silicon Valley Bank.

IBM is buying Blue Box, a 12-year-old, Seattle-based private-cloud-as-a-service company that had raised at least $26.6 million from investors, including Founder Collective and Voyager Capital. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Fortune has more here.

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People

Jason Child, who has spent the last four years as the CFO of Groupon — and who helped take the company public in 2011 — is joining Jawbone at July’s end, becoming CFO of the consumer gadget maker. Before joining Groupon, Child had spent eight years at Amazon, serving as VP of finance among other roles.

OpenView Venture Partners has promoted four employees — Blake Bartlett, Mackey Craven, Devon McDonald and Ricky Pelletier — to partner. More here.

Mina Radhakrishnan, who was long Uber’s head of product, is becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures, reports Recode.

Early (and continuing) Twitter shareholder Chris Sacca finally publishes some of his highly anticipated advice for the company and where it can go from here.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who abruptly lost her husband, Dave Goldberg, one month ago while their family was vacationing in Mexico, marked the end of sheloshim  — a 30-day period of mourning for close relatives– with a moving tribute on Facebook. “[I] am sharing what I have learned in the hope that it helps someone else. In the hope that there can be some meaning from this tragedy.”

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Data

According to new data out of the IVC Research Center, venture capital dollars shot up 300 percent in China between 2013 and 2014, and more Chinese investors are looking to plug capital Israeli high tech companies, too. IVC estimates that Chinese investors will invest at least half a billion dollars in Israel-based startups this year and that half of the funds that raise money by year end will have at least one Chinese investor. Globes has more here.

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Essential Reads

Oh, it is on: According to Bloomberg, the fantasy sports company DraftKings just signed a multiyear marketing agreement with Madison Square Garden Co., displacing rival FanDuel in a contract that gives the No. 2 daily fantasy sports company its first sponsorship that includes multiple teams and a venue. More here.
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Detours

My 977 days with Somali pirates.

Costco’s amazing pizza sauce machine.

Serious balloon art.

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Retail Therapy

Now you can customize your air, too.