2017 – Page 18 – StrictlyVC, LLC

StrictlyVC: February 2, 2017

Hi, happy Thursday, everyone.:)

Top News in the A.M.

A Dallas jury decided yesterday that Facebook will need to shell out $500 million to tech company ZeniMax in a lawsuit that questioned the origins of the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift. The jury found that cofounder Palmer Lucky did not comply with a non-disclosure agreement he had signed; it also said that Oculus did not steal trade secrets, as alleged by ZeniMax in its suit. More here.

Dropcam Cofounder Aamir Virani Joins Felicis

Last week, we learned that Dropcam cofounder Greg Duffy has headed over to Apple. Today, Felicis Ventures, the early-stage venture firm, is disclosing it has brought aboard Dropcam’s other cofounder, Aamir Virani, as its newest partner.

The move seems a perfect fit for both sides. Felicis wrote one of the earliest checks to Dropcam, an internet-connected security camera company that was sold to Nest Labs in 2014 for $555 million, months after Nest was itself acquired by Google for $3.2 billion.

As StrictlyVC reported in late 2014, the acquisition proved far from a seamless fit, and by last year, Duffy had gone public about his regrets over selling Dropcam to Nest, which he left in 2015.

For his part, however, Virani — who also left Nest in 2015 — stayed mum, calling Google “one of the great companies” of the world during a call earlier this week. Explaining his departure, he said simply that “I wasn’t really a big company person. I just don’t think that mentality is right for me. I like trying to figure out how to make something useful for customers, then figuring out how to create a business that will ensure it survives.”

It largely explains why, over the past year or so, Virani has chosen to do a limited amount of angel investing and to advise a small group of startups, many of them through his network, which includes friends from Rice University, where the Houston native nabbed his undergraduate degree, and Stanford, where he went to grad school.

New Fundings

Against Gravity, a year-old, Seattle-based virtual reality company that makes a social VR app called Rec Room, has raised $5 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Acequia, Vulcan Capital,Maveron, Anorak, Betaworks, and the Venture Reality Fund. More here.

Airware, a 5.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose cloud-based software and services aim to help large enterprises use drones throughout their operations, has raised an undisclosed amount of money from the venture arm of Caterpillar, the construction and mining equipment company. TechCrunch has more here.

ApcinteX, a young, Cambridge, England-based spin-out of the University of Cambridge that’s developing a new therapy for haemophilia, has raised £14 million ($17.6 million) in Series A funding led by Medicxi and Touchstone Innovations Group. More here.

Aquilon Energy Services, a six-year-old, Lisle, Il.-based cloud platform that enables energy companies to settle financial energy transactions, has raised $19 million in Series B funding from investors (and, the company says, customers) Citi, Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments, Invenergy, and Macquarie Group. More here.

Disruptor Beam, a six-year-old, Framingham, Ma.-based community-centric games company, has raised $8.5 million in Series B funding from earlier investor GrandBanks Capital and Romulus Capital. GrandBanks, which participated in Disruptor Beam’s $3.2 million Series A, says it bought out another early investor, Midverse Studios, as part of the deal. TechCrunch has more here.

GAN Integrity, a 2.5-year-old, Brooklyn, New York-based maker of compliance management software for managing corporate risk, third-party due diligence, and whisteblower concerns, has raised $9 million in funding led by Edison Partners. Other participants in the round include NorthCap, Chicago Ventures, MissionOG, and Cultivation Capital. Tech.eu has more here.

GoldenKey, a three-year-old, Raleigh, N.C.-based service that unbundles real estate services and gives buyers a three percent rebate when they buy a home through the startup, has raised $1.75 million from Lowe’s Ventures, NFX Guild (whose accelerator program it passed through last year), and others. The company has now raised $3.4 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

MapAnything, an eight-year-old, Charlotte, N.C.-based software service built on top of Salesforce for developing location-based workflows, has raised $33.1 million in Series B funding led by Columbus Nova, with participation from ServiceNow Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Opti, a 2.5-year-old, Boston-based IoT company that monitors and controls stormwater infrastructure in real-time, has raised $5.5 million in funding led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund, with participation from earlier investors MissionPoint Partners, the Renewal Funds, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and Geosyntec Consultants. More here.

PointClickCare, a 22-year-old, Mississauga, Canada-based maker of cloud-based software for the senior care industry, has raised $85 million in funding led by Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from JMI Equity. BetaKit has more here.

Scytl, a 16-year-old, Barcelona, Spain-based company that develops secure electronic voting technologies, has raised €12 million ($13 million) in funding from earlier investors Vulcan Capital, Balderton Capital, Nauta Capital, Spinnaker Invest, Sapphire Ventures, Vy Capital, Industry Ventures, and Adams Street Partners. Tech.eu has more here.

SIM Partners, an 11-year-old, Chicago-based location marketing company, has raised $5 million in funding led by River Cities Capital Funds, with participation from Jump Capital. More here.

Suplari, a year-old, Seattle-based stealthy enterprise “intelligent app” company, has raised $3.1 million in funding led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Amplify Partners. GeekWire has more here.

Tarveda Therapeutics, a 4.5-year-old, Watertown, Ma.-based cancer drug developer, has raised $30 million in fresh funding led by Versant Ventures, with participation from earlier backers New Enterprise Associates, Novo A/S, NanoDimension, and Flagship Pioneering. Xconomy has more here.

Text IQ, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based platform that streamlines the document review process for attorneys, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Floodgate. Forbes has more here.

Vividion Therapeutics, a 2.5-year-old, San Diego, Ca.-based biotech company whose drug discovery platform applies chemical proteomics to expand the druggable proteome, has raised $50 million in Series A funding co-led by ARCH Venture Partners and Versant Ventures. Cardinal Partners also participated in the funding. FierceBiotech has more here.

Wity, a year-old, Paris, France-based AI-driven virtual assistant that aims to help small businesses with their accounting and other administrative needs, has raised €4.7 million ($5.1 million) in funding from M Capital Partners. Tech.eu has more here.

Xnor.ai, a young, Seattle-based company bringing AI computational frameworks to mobile devices, raised $2.6 million in funding led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (from which the company spun off). TechCrunch has more here.

New Funds

Grab, the Singapore-based ride-sharing service, has created a $100 million fund to invest in Indonesian startups. TechCrunch has more here.

In a boost for the European life sciences start-up ecosystem, Dublin, Ireland-based venture capital firm Seroba has closed a third life sciences fund with €100 million ($107.9 million). Silicon Republic has more here.

Exits

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has acquired Niara, a 3.5-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based security analytics company, for an undisclosed sum. According to Crunchbase, Niara had raised around $30 million from investors, including Venrock, New Enterprise Associates, and Index Ventures. eWeek has more on the deal here.

OpenSky, a marketplace for small businesses that’s backed in part by the juggernaut Alibaba, has spent a “few hundred thousand dollars” to acquire the assets of Dot & Bo, a San Francisco-based online furniture retailer that had raised $18.5 million from investors before shutting down in September. Recode has more here.

Salesforce, which is looking to sell more services to its customers that complement the software they are already buying, has acquired Sequence, a 12-year-old, user experience design agency based out of San Francisco and New York. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but according to Crunchbase, Sequence had raised less than $1 million. TechCrunch has much more here.

IPOs

Hamilton Lane, the 26-year-old, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.-based alternative asset manager, filed to raise up to $200 million in an IPO yesterday. Renaissance Capital has a bit more here.

People

Carl Schachter, a Google VP who was one of the public faces of its cloud computing business under Diane Greene, is leaving the company, reports The Information. No word yet on where he’s headed. The story is here.

The 10 people who know everybody in New York’s startup scene.

Jobs

The early-stage venture capital firm White Star Capital is looking to hire an associate. The job is in Montreal.

Essential Reads

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and other U.S. companies are circulating an open letter to President Trump expressing concern about his recent order on immigration and offering their help. Bloomberg has the story here.

Samsung Electronics may build a manufacturing base in the U.S. for its home appliances business amid growing concerns about protectionist policies pursued by the Trump administration. Reuters has more here.

Facebook had another strong quarter at the end of last year. TechCrunch has much more here on its newest earnings report.

Detours

Ron Hill ran every day for 52 years . . . until Sunday. The decision ended the longest-recorded streak of running every day.

What a bunch of turd balls.

Why Silicon Valley’s young elite won’t invest in art.

Retail Therapy

The Supreme x Louis Vuitton collection is now available for pre-order. (Just mentioning.)

Connie

StrictlyVC: February 1, 2017

Thank God it’s February. We’re not sure how much more of January we could have taken.)

Hope you’re having a nice Wednesday, everyone.:)

Top News in the A.M.

Online lender Social Finance is acquiring a digital-banking startup as it looks to accelerate its expansion into more pockets of consumer finance (and become the central financial services hub for its customers). Its new purchase: Zenbanx Holding, a four-year-old firm that offers online and mobile bank accounts in multiple currencies and performs international money transfers. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but a WSJ source pegs the all-stock deal valued at nearly $100 million. More here.

Why East Coast Investors are Better Off if the Market Turns

A new trends report published by the law firm Cooley report suggests that the venture market remains largely healthy for now. In the fourth quarter, for example, Cooley handled 187 “disclosable” (versus stealth) deals that represented more than $2.7 billion of invested capital. That’s 18 percent more deals than it closed in the fourth quarter of 2015 — though the amount of money involved fell 23 percent from the year-earlier period. (VCs were writing smaller checks into a greater number of startups.)

Of slightly more interest to us were the deal terms involved in these fundings, some of which suggest that East Coast VCs have more safeguards than their West Coast peers if the market changes.

We talked with one of the study’s author, Cooley attorney Dave Young, about what he found and what it might mean.

This report seems pretty positive on its face.

I think it shows a surprisingly strong, healthy venture market. In 2015, there was this sense that maybe things were getting overheated, with nontraditional investors coming in and leading later-stage rounds in companies that hadn’t proven themselves yet. And that led to the view that things would slow down meaningfully in 2016. That didn’t really happen, though. People were being more disciplined around valuations and the size of rounds, but a lot of deals were getting done.

You also focus on the terms in this report. Are you starting to see anything onerous?

I’d say founder-friendly terms are still really prevailing, and by that I mean plain vanilla terms. Whenever we inevitably head back to where the economy turns down, terms will get tough, and the levers will shift back toward [investors].

So no pay-to-play provisions [meaning if a company needs to raise money and resorts to insiders for it, those who can’t or don’t want to contribute their pro rata share will see their preferred shares reduced to either common stock or some other subset of equity with fewer rights]. I think there was some expectation that those would start reappearing in deals as this tech boom runs on and on.

We’re seeing some, but it’s been steady over the last three or four quarters or so, which is a good sign. We’re seeing them in situations when it makes sense — when it’s the right tool for that particular situation. But it’s not something people are defaulting to.

That said, sometimes with those down rounds and recaps and pay-to-plays, there’s a bit of a lag, because if companies are having a hard time getting funded, earlier investors will put in six, nine, 12 months of cash. If you have $10 million in a company already, you’d rather do that than see it crater. But you only do it once. Without a new lead investor and a new plan, those companies [are going to go out of business].

East Coast investors have historically been a little more metrics-driven than West Coast investors. Is that still true and does that impact how the market could shake out if there’s a downturn?

This has always been the case, but you see East Coast terms that are way more investor favorable, compared with West Coast [terms]. It’s more surprising to me that that hasn’t changed over time.

How do the terms differ, exactly?

In East Coast deals, you see more of what are called redemption provisions and cumulative dividends. Redemption provisions basically give investors the right to be bought out four or five years down the line — to get their money back if a company joins the living dead. They’re very rarely seen in Silicon Valley, but they appear in 25 to 30 percent of the deals on the East Coast.

New Fundings

AIM, a 1.5-year-old, New York and Seoul-based startup behind an artificial intelligence-powered app for financial investments (largely for customers in Korea), has raised $1.6 million in seed funding from DT&I, Soorim, Seoul Business Agency, and Startup Bootcamp. TechCrunch has more here.

ClearMotion, an eight-year-old, Boston-based digital chassis developer that replaces traditional automotive shock absorbers with software-controlled actuators, has raised $100 million in Series C funding from clients of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, with participation from New Enterprise Associates, Qualcomm Ventures, World Innovation Lab, and Eileses Capital. The company, founded out of MIT, has now raised more than $130 million altogether. More here.

Glide Technologies, an Oxford, U.K.-based pharmaceutical development and device company, has raised £3.2 million ($4 million) in funding from earlier backers Invesco Perpetual, Oxford Technology Venture Capital Trusts, Oxford Capital Partners and Hygea VCT. More here.

Inmoji, a 2.5-year-old, Boston-based startup that creates emoji-focused marketing campaigns, has raised $1.5 million in fresh funding that brings its total funding to $9 million. The capital comes from previous investor John Wigneswaran (a longtime pharma and medical device exec) and a group from MIT’s Sloan business school. TechCrunch has more here.

InovyTec, a six-year-old, Hod-Hasharon, Israel-based developer of emergency medical devices, has raised $3 million in fresh funding from Hong Kong-based Vincent Medical Holdings. The Times of Israel has more here.

Kinestral Technologies, a 6.5-year-old, South San Francisco-based maker of “smart-tinting glass,” has raised $65 million in Series C funding led by glass manufacturer AGC Asahi Glass, with participation from Hermes-Epitek and earlier backers 5AM Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, Capricorn Investment Group, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Versant Ventures. Silicon Valley Business Journal has more here.

LatiPay, a year-old Auckland, New Zealand-based cross border payments company looking to expand into Singapore and elsewhere, has raised $3 million in funding from Singapore-based Jubilee Capital Management, with participation from Tuhua Fund, Zino Fund and an unnamed angel investor. e27 has more here.

Netgain, a 16-year-old, St. Cloud, Mn.-based company offering IT-as-a-service for healthcare providers, has raised $25 million in funding from Bluff Point Associates. Tech.mn has more here.

Reserve, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based startup offering table and customer management tools for restaurants, has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Expa, the startup studio where it was first incubated. Other investors include First Round Capital and Human Ventures. Reserve has now raised more than $27 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

Trussle, a 1.5-year-old, London-based online mortgage broker, has raised £4.5 million ($5.7 miillion) in funding led by Orange Growth Capital,with participation from existing investors LocalGlobe, Zoopla, Seedcamp, and angel investors Ed Wray and Ian Hogarth. The Times has more here.

Uptake, a 2.5-year-old, Chicago-based predictive analytics startup that was founded by Groupon cofounder Brad Keywell, has raised $40 million from Revolution Growth. The company has been valued at $2 billion in the deal, says the WSJ. More here.

Wealthsimple, a 2.5-year-old, Toronto, Canada-based robo-adviser startup, has raised C$20 million ($15.3 million) from Power Financial Corp. Reuters has more here.

Xometry, a 3.5-year-old, Gaithersburg, Md.-based on-demand manufacturing marketplace, has raised $23 million in new funding from GE Ventures and earlier investors, including Highland Capital Partners. More here.

Exits

Fingerprint Cards, a Gothenburg, Sweden-based company, is paying $106 million to acquire Delta ID, a five-year-old, Newark, Ca.-based iris recognition technology company. According to Crunchbase, Delta ID had raised roughly $6 million, including from Intel Capital. More here.

Video app Flipagram is getting acquired by the Chinese company Toutiao for an undisclosed amount. Flipagram was once a social media darling — raising money from both Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital and attracting both star VCs John Doerr and Michael Moritz to its board — but the startup appeared to lose momentum over the last year. TechCrunch has more here.

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding service, has acquired the 1.5-year-old Canadian video streaming startup Huzza. The purchase follows a close collaboration between the two parties that led to the launch of Kickstarter Live back in November, a live streaming feature with real time feedback designed to give creators a direct channel of communication with their community. Terms aren’t being disclosed. It doesn’t look like Huzza raised outside funding (tho’ we aren’t positive about that). TechCrunch has more here.

Publicly traded games maker Take-Two Interactive has acquired Social Point, a nine-year-old, Barcelona-based social game publisher, for $276 million. According to Crunchbase, Social Point had raised roughly $44 million from investors, including Highland Capital Partners Europe, Idinvest Partners, and Nauta Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

IPOs

ForeScout, a 16-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based security company, has filed confidentially for an IPO, reports TechCrunch. The company has raised more than $158 million since it was founded, including from Accel Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and Pitango Venture Capital. More here.

People

Michael Cardamone has joined SaaStr Ventures as a venture partner. Cardamone — an early Box employee — is also a managing director at Acceleprise, an enterprise software focused accelerator.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio’s honeymoon with President Donald Trump is looking to be short lived. Bloomberg has the story here.

Star VC Jim Goetz is stepping away from his management responsibilities at Sequoia Capital, and Roelof Botha is stepping up. We have more here.

Martin Hauge, long a partners at the Nordic venture capital firm Creandum, has joined the growth-stage venture firm Frog Capital as its non-executive chair. More here.

Angela Tran Kingyens, a data scientist, PhD and former entrepreneur, has been promoted to principal at Version One Ventures, which she joined as an associate in 2013. Before joining Version One, Kingyens co-founded Insight Data Science, a YC-backed Silicon Valley startup that helps PhDs transition from academic research to careers in the industry.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — who did not join the global Women’s March on January 21nd and has stayed relatively mum about the new U.S. administration — opened up about her stance at an event this morning, saying that a personal obligation kept her from joining the massive protest. “I think we don’t know what’s going to be effective yet,” she added. “It’s very early days of the new administration, but we know that the issues for women in leadership are real and it is about the steps we take as a society. It’s about the public policy we take. It’s also about the individual steps women take.” TechCrunch has more here.

Officials in New Zealand released documents last night related to investor Peter Thiel’s application to become a citizen there. Wrote Thiel on a form that would eventually help win him citizenship: “I am happy to say categorically that I have found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand.” The New York Times has more here.

Jobs

Grishin Robotics, a hardware-focused venture firm that’s currently investing its second ($100 million) fund, is looking to hire an analyst or associate. The job is in Menlo Park, Ca.

Essential Reads

Amazon said yesterday that it plans to build its first air cargo hub to accommodate its growing fleet of planes, signaling the company is ramping up its expansion into transporting, sorting and delivering its own packages. The WSJ has more here.

Snap is now working on virtual reality lenses that let people overlay images onto landscapes in the real world. The Information has more here.

Detours

Every single Ivy League school has now spoken out against Trump’s executive order on immigration.

Kung fu plus wildly out-of-place music! (H/T: Awesomer.)

Beyonce is pregnant — with twins!

Retail Therapy

The best noise-canceling headphones of 2017. We’re going to be needing some of these.

Connie

StrictlyVC: January 31, 2017

Hi, everyone! Quick mention: we’re genuinely sorry we can’t accommodate everyone for our upcoming StrictlyVC event next week; we’re already over capacity. For what it’s worth, we’re looking at putting together another event in San Francisco in early May, so if you miss this one, we hope you can make it to the next.

In separate news, we’ll be sitting down with AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant in a fireside chat at an event, the SaaStr conference, that’s also taking place in San Francisco next week. The organizers have given us three seats to the event and we’re happy to pass them along to readers on a first-come-first-served basis. Just let us know if you’d like to go.

Top News in the A.M.

Sequoia Capital, the storied venture firm, informed its LPs today that partner Roelof Botha will now lead its U.S. business. Jim Goetz is stepping aside from his leadership responsibilities but will continue to invest and represent Sequoia on boards, according to a spokesman. (More on this soon.)

Apple‘s cash hoard just reached a record high.

In Silicon Valley, Plotting to Get Foreign-Born Workers to Vancouver

For many U.S. startups and their foreign-born employees, a kind of back-up plan may be starting to sound like a good idea right about now.

Yesterday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that administration officials have drafted a new executive order aimed at overhauling, among other things, the H-1B work-visa program that U.S.-based tech companies have long relied on to bring top foreign engineering talent into their ranks. Spicer said the possible executive order is “part of a larger immigration effort” related in part to Friday’s hot-button immigration ban targeting immigrants and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

According to Bloomberg, the draft proposal states that: “Our country’s immigration policies should be designed and implemented to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest. Visa programs for foreign workers … should be administered in a manner that protects the civil rights of American workers and current lawful residents, and that prioritizes the protection of American workers — our forgotten working people — and the jobs they hold.” (The shorter version: companies have to try hiring U.S.-born employees first.)

Whether and when that executive order gets signed is an open question, but at least one small group of cofounders has banded together to make it easier for U.S. companies to create subsidiaries in Canada and to move their U.S.-based employees to a new, Vancouver-based office, and all within what they describe as weeks, not months. They haven’t created a nonprofit. They’ve instead formed a new company called True North that’s right now offering a $6,000 package that includes airfare for one person to Vancouver, two nights of accommodations, and a day with “world-class immigration professionals who will walk you through the process and answer any questions you have.”

The package is somewhat rich.

New Funds

Comparably, a 1.5-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based job placement service, has raised $7.25 million in funding led by Greycroft Partners, with participation from Comcast Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Upfront Ventures, Lowercase Capital, Alpha Edison, Cornerstone on Demand, Accelerator Ventures, and Rincon Ventures. VentureBeat has more here.

Earnix, a 16-year-old, Ramat Gan, Israel-based developer of predictive customer analytics software for financial institutions, has raised $13.5 million in new funding from Israel Growth Partners, with participation from earlier backers JVP and Vintage Investment Partners. Globes has more here.

Feedvisor, a nearly six-year-old, New York-based algorithmic repricing platform for Amazon sellers, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

GoKid, a 1.5-year-old, Detroit-based startup helping parents coordinate carpools for their kids, has raised $1 million in seed funding, according to Fortune. InMotion Ventures led the round, with participation from Fontinalis Partners. More here.

Qvivr, a 2.5-year-old, Fremont, Ca.-based company whose programmable card and smartphone app combines all of a user’s credit, debit, gift and loyalty cards to create an easy way to pay and organize money, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Radish, a year-old, San Francisco-based application for reading bite-sized chunks of serialized fiction, has raised $3 million in seed funding, including from Greylock Partners, Lowercase Capital, Softbank Next Media Innovation Fund, Sherpa Capital and numerous individual investors, including author Amy Tan. TechCrunch has more here.

SoundHound, an 11-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based developer of voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies, has raised $75 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the SharesPost 100 Fund, MKaNNm, NVIDIA, GPU Ventures, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Nomura, Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Insurance and Recruit Holdings. Earlier investors also joined the round, including Global Catalyst Partners, Walden Venture Capital and TransLink Capital. Bloomberg has more here.

TeamSnap, a six-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based maker of mobile and web-based team and group management software, has raised $25 million in funding led by Foundry Group, with participation from Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited. The Denver Post has more here.

YouEarnedIt, a four-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based SaaS platform for employee engagement, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding co-led by IDG Ventures USA and Silverton Partners, with participation from earlier investors WPP, Social Starts, the Motley Fool and Capital Factory. Austin Business Journal has more here.

Third Kind Venture Capital, a New York-based firm led by longtime angel investor and Andreessen Horowitz board partner Shana Fisher, has raised $44.3 million for its first fund, shows an SEC filing.

Centerfield, a five-year-old, El Segundo, Ca.-based ad tech and search engine marketing company, has raised $156 million from investors that include H.I.G. Growth Partners and Falcon Investment Advisors. The capital is being used, in part, to purchase Qology Direct, a nine-year-old, Florida-based performance-based marketing company. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. MediaPost has more here.

Exits

Eventbrite, the 10-year-old, San Francisco-based event ticketing platform, has acquired Ticketscript, a 10-year-old Amsterdam-based event ticketing platform. No financial terms were disclosed. Eventbrite has raised roughly $200 million in funding over the years, including from Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital and Tiger Global. Ticketscript had raised £7 million from Fleming Family & Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

Radware, a publicly traded, Tel Aviv, Israel-based cybersecurity company, has acquired Seculert, a six-year-old, Israeli cloud-based cyber security company. Seculert raised $15.6 million in venture funding from investors including Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. Globes has more here.

Razer, a 12-year-old, Irvine, Ca.-based maker of gaming hardware and wearable devices, has acquired the assets of smartphone developer Nextbit. According to Crunchbase, Nextbit had raised $18 million from investors, including from Accel Partners, GV and Dentsu. Razer has meanwhile raised more than $125 million, including from LianLuo, Intel Capital, IDG Capital, Temasek and Accel Partners.

Return Path, a 16-year-old, New York-based email marketing service, has acquired ThreatWave, a 1.5-year-old, Louisville, Co.-based email data firm. No financial terms were disclosed. The Denver Post has more here.

SmartRecruiters, a 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based talent acquisition platform that has raised roughly $55 million from investors, acquired Jobspotting, a three-year-old, Berlin-based job-discovery engine that had raised $705,000 in investors, shows Crunchbase. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.

Upworthy, a five-year-old, Brooklyn-based viral news and video site, is merging with 10-year-old, L.A.-based media and consulting firm Good Worldwide. No financial terms are being disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Upworthy raised $12 million in funding, including from Spark Capital. Politico has more here.

IPOs

Snap chooses the NYSE. The WSJ has more here. Meanwhile, The Information reminds readers that tech stocks don’t tend to do so well their first year as public companies. More here.

People

More than 2,000 employees of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, walked out of work yesterday afternoon to protest Donald Trump’s recent executive orders curtailing immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google cofounder Sergey Brin were out there with them, with each delivering a strong rebuke to Trump’s orders. Forbes has the video here.

Elaine Chao is officially the new U.S. Secretary of Transportation. TechCrunch has more here.

Jim Dai, formerly the CTO of Coupang, has joined Oakland, Ca.-based early-stage firm Illuminate Ventures as a venture partner.

Ted Price, founder and CEO of the independent games publisher Insomniac Games, has taken to YouTube with some of the company’s employees to encourage gamers to stand in opposition to Trump’s immigration policy. “Is discriminating based on religious faith or national origin American? Absolutely not.”

Political strategist and investor Bradley Tusk has launched a new bi-monthly podcast called “Firewall” on iTunes that will feature him in conversation with investors, policy makers and entrepreneurs about the latest trends in the venture space, tech world and political arena. More here.

Rashaun Williams, a founding partner with Queensbridge Venture Partners, has joined merchant bank Manhattan Venture Partners to launch a new secondaries fund. TechCrunch has more here.

Jobs

Cambridge Associates is looking to hire an investment associate. The job is in Menlo Park, Ca.

Cisco is looking to add a senior manager to its corporate development unit. The job is in San Jose, Ca.

Essential Reads

Washington-based companies Amazon and Expedia have joined the attorney general of Washington state in a lawsuit that challenges Donald Trump’s controversial immigration order. BuzzFeed has more here.

Uber and Germany’s Daimler AG — maker of the luxury Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks — announced a partnership this morning. In the coming years, Daimler plans to incorporate its own self-driving Mercedes-Benz into Uber’s growing fleet of self-driving cars. Reuters has more here.

Y Combinator just added the ACLU to its winter 2017 batch of companies. The idea: to help it put to effective use the $24 million it raised this weekend.

Detours

The five personality traits that make for a better life.

The right way to say, “I’m sorry.”

Angry voicemails to Congress, or texts to a cheating boyfriend?

Retail Therapy

Bed Tents.

Connie

StrictlyVC: January 30, 2017

Hi, everyone. What a weekend. Blergh.

Top News in the A.M.

Trump out. Refugees in.” Silicon Valley companies entered the debate over Trump’s immigration policy this weekend, criticizing a new, seven-country immigration ban of people from predominantly Muslim countries and, in some cases, outlining plans to support the employees it affects.

Among the fastest to respond, Airbnb offered free housing to those who flew into the U.S. Friday night, only to discover they wouldn’t be allowed on to their destinations.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president of Alphabet, joined protesters at San Francisco International Airport Saturday night as demonstrators assembled at airports across the country in opposition to the immigration order. Brin told The Verge that he was attending “in a personal capacity” and would not be giving comment. But Forbes’ Ryan Mac separately overheard him saying, “I’m here because I’m a refugee.”

Y Combinator Sam Altman was also at the SFO protest, telling Forbes, “I hope this will be one of the defining moments where people came together against this administration. This is an unacceptable action, and we need to make our voices heard.”

Lyft, the ride-hailing company, also reacted strongly, saying it will be donating $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union over the next four years. (The ACLU filed suit against Trump’s administration for the refugee ban, and succeeded in getting a temporary stay of the order from a federal judge on Saturday.)

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, who is now a member of an advisory board that will be meeting quarterly at the White House to talk about manufacturing, tweeted (somewhat dispassionately), “The blanket entry ban on citizens from certain primarily Muslim countries is not the best way to address the country’s challenges.” (The Archbishop of Chicago agrees, writing yesterday that the weekend “proved to be a dark moment in U.S. history” and that the executive order runs “contrary to both Catholic and American values.”)

By yesterday, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus appeared to reverse a key part of the immigration order, saying that people from the affected countries who hold green cards will not be prevented from returning to the U.S., but that border agents have “discretionary authority” to detain and question suspicious travelers from certain countries. A number of federal judges across the country also halted the implementation of the order. According to reports this morning, however, U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees continue to detain people coming into the country.

According to a new Bloomberg report, it could get worse, too, particularly for high-tech companies. The outlet has reviewed a draft of an executive order aimed at overhauling the work-visa programs they depend on to hire tens of thousands of employees each year. If implemented, the companies would have to try to hire American first, and if they recruit foreign workers, priority would be given to the most highly paid.

With Snap’s IPO Around the Corner, L.A.’s Amplify Lands New Fund

L.A. is getting a star turn, with the most iconic of its local startups — Snap — on the cusp of going public. Locals expect much more than an endless string of headlines about its IPO performance, too. “The initial performance of the stock will be almost irrelevant,” says Paul Bricault, cofounder of the L.A.-based accelerator and seed-stage venture fund Amplify. “The IPO will shine a bigger spotlight on L.A. tech, and it will likely spin out more Snap execs as founders of new startups over time — as well as likely inject more capital into angel funding of startups in L.A.”

Bricault has reason for optimism. Five-year-old Amplify just closed its third fund with $10 million, and it could use new, promising startups to fund, as well as more capital sloshing around L.A. for follow-on funding. Investing $12.6 million across its first two funds, Amplify has already invested in 50 startups. Fourteen have raised a Series A round, five have raised a Series B round, and ten have subsequently been shut down.

Amplify has nurtured almost all of them at its campus in Venice, Ca., where companies of various, early stages stay for five months on average and are given opportunities to meet with investors for whom they would seem to be a fit. (Rather than stage demo days, Amplify invites investors to its offices four times a year for pre-arranged one-on-one meetings with its portfolio companies.)

On average, the firm, led by Bricault (who is also a venture partner with Greycroft Partners), takes a 10 percent stake in each company in exchange for mentorship, introductions, and initial checks of between $100,000 and $250,000.

Bricault says a proliferation of seed-stage funds is already helping Amplify’s companies attract funding in their “post accelerator round,” but that L.A. is still falling short when it comes to Series A, B, and later rounds.

New Fundings

BitFury Group, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based bitcoin blockchain security and infrastructure provider, has raised $30 million in funding from Credit China Fintech Holdings Limited. Crowdfund Insider has more here.

The Bouqs, a four-year-old, L.A.-based online flower retailer, has raised $24 million in Series C funding led by Partech Ventures, with participation from NextEquity Partners, Reimagined Ventures, Azure Capital Partners, KEC Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, and Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec. TechCrunch has more here.

Budbee, a three-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based freight-forwarding service, has raised €3 million ($3.2 million) in funding, including from H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, and former Qliro Group CEO Paul Fischbein. Tech.eu has more here.

CafeX Communications, a three-year-old, New York-based maker of software for real-time collaboration within business applications, has raised $18 million in Series C funding led by Rakuten. SiliconAngle has more here.

Entrypoint, a year-old, New York-based startup whose self-service platform helps users “drag and drop” elements into an interactive video, has raised $2 million in seed funding. Samsung NEXT and Two Sigma Ventures led the round, with participation from Indicator Ventures, KBS Ventures, Galvanize Ventures, Social Starts, Female Founders Fund, and Virtual Reality Investments. Fortune has more here.

Land Life Company, a three-year-old, Amsterdam-based startup whose planting technology aims to allow trees to grow in arid soils, has raised €2.4 million ($2.6 million) in Series A funding, including from Postcode Lottery Green Challenge Fund, SystemiQ, and Vectr Ventures. More here.

Mindspace, a two-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based network of workspaces for freelancers and teams, has raised $15 million in Series A funding from undisclosed private investors. Tech.eu has more here.

Reviver, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based developer of digital license plates, has raised $6.8 million in Series A funding co-led by WRV and ACK Group. More here.

Skinjay, a 4.5-year-old, Paris, France-based startup that makes in-shower micro-nebulization devices to deliver “essential” oils to the skin and into the lungs, has raised €3.5 million ($3.7 million) in funding from Seventure Partners. More here (if you read French).

Spoke, a 3.5-year-old, London-based online menswear brand, has raised $1.8 million in funding led by Oxford Capital, with participation from Forward Partners, Seedcamp, and a numerous angel investors. Tech City News has more here.

Exits

Ebates, a San Francisco based provider of online rebate service (it’s also a subsidiary of Rakuten), has acquired Cartera Commerce, an 11-year-old, Lexington, Ma.-based company that creates rewards and offers for card issuers, airline frequent flyer programs and merchants. Terms weren’t disclosed, but according to Crunchbase, Cartera had raised roughly $37 million from investors, including Flybridge Capital Partners. More here.

People

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein left a voicemail for the firm’s 34,400 employees last night, saying Trump’s executive order of Friday is at odds with the firm’s long-held policies on workforce diversity and could disrupt Goldman Sachs’s business. “This is not a policy we support,” he said. Bloomberg has more here.

Australia’s largest venture firm, AirTree Ventures, has added James Cameron, formerly of a vice president with London-based Accel Partners, to its team. TechCrunch has more here.

Fitbit kicked off the week by announcing a six-percent reduction in global work force, following disappointing fourth quarter financials. The company will go into greater detail on an earnings call today, but a preliminary statement issued this morning details the loss of 110 jobs as part of a “reorganization of its business.” TechCrunch has more here.

Jobs

Dropbox is hiring a director to add to its business strategy and operations team. The job is in San Francisco.

Essential Reads

Sequoia Capital now makes the majority of its investments outside the United States.

Snap reportedly plans to publicly file for its much-anticipated IPO late this week.

Detours

Why you’re paying so much to exercise.

That was some tennis match yesterday!

Eeek. A top European hotel says it had to pay thousands in Bitcoin ransom to cybercriminals who managed to hack their electronic key system, locking hundreds of guests out of their rooms until the money was paid.

Retail Therapy

The Polycade. (You are welcome, startups everywhere.)

Connie

StrictlyVC: January 27, 2017

Happy Friday, everyone! We have a super streamlined version for you today as we’re racing around this a.m. Hope you have a restful weekend. Keep your blood-pressure down; stay off Twitter.:)

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Top News in the A.M.

Microsoft‘s market capitalization topped $500 billion this morning — for the first time since 2000.

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New Fundings

Biscayne Neurotherapeutics, a Miami, Fl.-based clinical-stage biotechnology company that was spun off from Biscayne Therapeutics to focus on treatments for neurological disorders, has raised $3 million in Series B funding led by Quark Venture, with participation from Mesa Verde Venture Partners of San Diego and earlier backers. More here.

Koru Kids, a year-old, London-based nanny sharing platform, has raised £600,000 ($752,000) in seed funding from Global Founders Capital, 7pc Ventures, Gumtree founder Michael Pennington, and Alice Bentinck and Matthew Clifford of the accelerator and fund Entrepreneur First. More here.

UberCloud, a 2.5-year-old, Los Altos, Ca.-based cloud marketplace for engineers, scientists and service providers to discover, try, and buy computing on demand, has raised $1.7 million in funding led by Earlybird Venture Capital. More here.

WorkFusion, a 6.5-year-old, New York-based startup that combines crowdsourcing with artificial intelligence to tackle business processes that corporations want to outsource, has raised $35 million in Series D funding led by Georgian Partners, with participation from existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, iNovia, Nokia Growth Partners, Greycroft Partners and RTP Ventures. The company has now raised $71 million altogether. Business Insider took a longer look at the company last spring.

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New Funds

Nyca Partners, the venture capital firm launched by Lending Club chairman (and former Visa president) Hans Morris, successfully closed fundraising for its second fund to invest in financial technology startups. The company said today it has gathered more than $125 million in commitments for the new fund and that it will focus on backing young companies in sectors such as alternative lending, digital investment advice and financial infrastructure. The WSJ has more here.

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Exits

As part of its ongoing globalization push, Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial is acquiring the publicly traded U.S. payments firm MoneyGram for $880 million. Ant Financial is paying $13.25 per share, premium over its $11.88 trading price Wednesday. TechCrunch has more here.

Germany’s Daimler is closing in on a deal to acquire Taxibeat, a profitable ride-hailing app based out of Athens, for a price of around €40 million ($43 million). Taxibeat had raised under $7 million, according to Crunchbase, representing a good return for its investors, which include Hummingbird Ventures and Openfund. TechCrunch has more here.

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People

Why Marissa Mayer‘s team may be looking to get fired from Verizon.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has published a lengthy post on her Facebook page noting the “terrible consequences” Trump’s abortion policy could have for women around the world.

PR tips from Margit Wennmachers and Kim Milosevich.

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Jobs

Clocktower Technology Ventures, the 1.5-year-old, fintech-focused venture arm of the asset management firm Drobny Capital, is looking to hire an associate. The job is in Santa Monica, Ca.

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Essential Reads

Airbnb turns profitable (and plans to stay profitable).

Amazon and PayPal have been talking payments.

How a 29-year-old built Odyssey, a vast network of college students who are happy to fuel multi-million dollar marketing campaigns for peanuts.

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Detours

How to leak information to the press.

Why succeeding against the odds can make you sick.

Hollywood’s most under-the-radar couples. (What? You’re curious, admit it!)

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Retail Therapy

Mia Visits Carrara.

Connie

StrictlyVC: January 26, 2017

Hi, happy Thursday, everyone.:)

Top News in the A.M.

So that’s why Hugo Barra is coming back to Cali. Yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post that Barra — a former executive at Google and, more recently, the Chinese phone maker Xiaomi — has joined the company to lead its virtual reality business. More here.

Why Silicon Valley is High-Fiving Over Trump’s SEC Pick

Wall Street lawyer Walter “Jay” Clayton hasn’t been officially appointed to the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission yet. But given the finite amount of political capital that Democrats wield right now, it’s easy to imagine that he’ll be confirmed and fairly easily when it’s his turn on Capitol Hill.

That’s probably welcome news for startup founders and investors who’d seen greater interest in their affairs by the SEC over the last year and will now most likely be left to their own devices.

If haven’t read about him yet, Clayton is the “insider’s insider — a deal maker,” as Dealbook noted earlier this month, when then President-elect Trump selected him to run the agency. A Washington lawyer at the white-shoe firm Sullivan & Cromwell, Clayton has spent his career focused on public and private M&A (including advising Goldman Sachs on various acquisitions), capital markets offerings (including working on Alibaba’s 2014 IPO), and enforcement proceedings (including to help clients settle some mortgage related securities claims after the financial crisis of 2008).

What does that background mean for Silicon Valley? Two things, says political strategist and investor Bradley Tusk, who advises startups on how to navigate changing regulations. For starters, Clayton has “some tech experience, which should be appealing to the tech industry,” he says.

Tusk acknowledges that working on the Alibaba IPO isn’t akin to managing the “deal flow you’d see at Wilson Sonsini,” a law firm that has long and famously worked with startups. “But he’s not a total stranger to the sector; he understands its impact on the economy.”

Perhaps more notably, says Tusk, Clayton “isn’t a policy activist. I don’t think this is someone with an ideological view about how security regulation should be expanded.”

New Fundings

Jiobit, a 1.5-year-old, Chicago-based self-learning location tracking technology, has raised $3 million in seed funding, including from Lior Ron, the cofounder of Otto (now owned by Uber) which is developing autonomous trucks, Chicago-based MATH Venture Partners and Inflection Equity. TechCrunch has more here.

Lighthouse, a three-year-old, New York-company whose app takes data from sensors like Bluetooth beacons to deliver information about users’ surroundings based on their exact position, has raised $940,000 from Tamarisc, an early stage venture capital firm that invests in real estate technology companies. Other participants in the round include Morningside Technology Ventures and Storm Industries Investments. TechCrunch has more here.

Raisin, a 3.5-yearold, Berlin, Germany-based financial marketplace that enables savers to access deposit rates across Europe, has raised €30 million ($32 million) in Series C funding led by Thrive Capital, with participation from earlier investors Ribbit Capital and Index Ventures. Tech.eu has more here.

Reflektive, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that aims to replace the typically painful review process with a lightweight, real-time feedback system that integrates into an employee’s daily workflow, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by earlier backer Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from fellow earlier investor Andreessen Horowitz. TechCrunch has more here.

Verily Life Sciences, the medical arm of Alphabet, has raised $800 million from the Singapore-based investment company Temasek Holdings, which aims to bring the company’s futuristic healthcare approach to Asian markets. Bloomberg has the story here.

New Funds

Venrock, the 47-year-old venture firm that started as the venture arm of the Rockefeller family, has closed its eighth fund with $450 million, which longtime partner Bryan Roberts calls “not too big and not too small, but just about right” in a new blog post. More here.

Exits

The Waterloo, Ontario-based messaging company Kik has made its second major acquisition, acquiring the nine-year-old, Tel Aviv-based mobile video app maker Rounds in deal that Israeli media is reporting to be in the region of $60 million to $80 million. According to Crunchbase, Rounds had raised $17 million from investors, including Verizon Ventures and Sequoia Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

People

Tesla is suing former employee Sterling Anderson, who acted as Director of its Autopilot Programs for just over a year, for breach of contract. The suit accuses Anderson of having tried to recruit away employees from Tesla with the intent of starting his own autonomous driving company, and of also taking Tesla proprietary confidential information to support this goal. TechCrunch has more here.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and Facebook board member, is leading the Trump administration’s search to fill the government’s two top antitrust enforcement jobs, including the head of the Federal Trade Commission and the head of the Justice Department, BuzzFeed reports.

Jobs

Accomplice, the Boston-based venture firm, plans to hire a partner and either one or two junior investment professionals in San Francisco, according to a new report in Axios. Work those connections if you want to be one of them.

Aster Capital is looking to hire an associate. The job is in San Francisco.

Essential Reads

The $99 billion idea: How Airbnb and Uber beat everyone.

Doctors in London say they have cured two babies of leukemia in the world’s first attempt to treat cancer with genetically engineered immune cells from a donor.

Detours

@MerriamWebster speaks up.

Why fractals are so soothing.

Ten really unexpected styling tricks for men.

Retail Therapy

The Warehouse Hotel (H/T: Uncrate).

Connie

February 18, 2017

StrictlyVC: January 25, 2017

Wednesday! Yes, we’re very late. Just know we did not forget you!

Top News in the A.M.

So much for the first big tech IPO of the year. As you’ve likely heard, Cisco has snapped up software developer AppDynamics for $3.7 billion on the eve of its IPO. That stinks for other pre-IPO companies hoping to use it as a weather gage; it’s great for early investors, given the premium they’re seeing over the $1.9 billion valuation AppDynamics was assigned in late 2015. Either way, if you’re wondering what happened, TechCrunch says investment bank Qatalyst Partners — an M&A specialist — injected itself into the process at the eleventh hour.

A Cross-Border Investor Ponders What’s Next, as U.S.-China Relations Grow Frosty

President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch a trade war with China, threats that the country is beginning to take ever more seriously.

Over at GGV Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that’s been actively investing in China for more than 15 years, managing director Hans Tung seems to be watching the jockeying with some wonderment – and patience.

The China native suggests he’s taking his cues from his network, including in Shanghai and Beijing, where GGV has offices. “China isn’t so much concerned with [President Trump yet]; they understand that he can turn right one day and turn left the next to win support. The general thinking is: Let’s see what happens when it comes to actual negotiations. I think the [Chinese government] doesn’t want to overreact in any given moment.”

In a call yesterday, Tung also referred repeatedly to Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, a firm that GGV backed in its earlier days. Ma had said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos that China should give Trump some time to settle in, adding that a “trade war would be a disaster for the world.”

Ma said he felt so passionately that, given a theoretical choice between keeping his company alive or averting a trade war he would “shut Alibaba down.” (That’s not simple theatrics, seemingly. Ma stated his concerns about a trade war in August, telling CNN, “We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good . . . when trade stops, war comes.”)

Tung yesterday suggested that China is largely being made a scapegoat by Trump – or sees things that way, in any case. The government “looks at how much the U.S. has spent on wars with Iraq and other things instead of creating jobs and boosting its own capabilities in the Rust Belt. China [will tell you it] never tried to steal jobs. If the U.S had done a better job of reinvesting its money and gotten multinationals to repatriate their money back to the U.S., it would be in much better shape.”

The big question specifically for Tung, who logs hundreds of thousands of miles each year traveling between the two countries, is how suddenly icy relations between the Trump administration and China could impact his own work.

He seems genuinely unconcerned for now.

New Fundings

Button, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based marketplace for app integrations, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from earlier backers Redpoint Ventures, DCM, and Greycroft Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

Cleo, a 15-month-old, London-based startup behind an AI-powered chatbot to help users manage their finances, has raised $700,000 in seed funding from a powerful list of angel investors, including Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Zoopla co-founder Alex Chesterman, and Wonga co-founder Errol Damelin. TechCrunch has more here.

Doctolib, a 3.5-year-old, Paris-baed online and mobile booking platform that helps users find specialist doctors nearby and book appointments, has raised $28 million in new funding led by Bpifrance, with participation from Ludwig Klitzsch and earlier backers Accel Partners, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Nicolas Brusson. TechCrunch has more here.

KenSci, a 1.5-year-old, Seattle, Wa.-based healthcare data platform, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led by Ignition Partners, with participation from Osage University Partners and Mindset Ventures. The Seattle Times has more here.

Ring, a four-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based video doorbell and connected security device startup whose newest product is a video motion floodlight, has raised $109 million in Series D funding led by DFJ Growth, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Qualcomm Ventures. Other participants in the round include Sir Richard Branson, American Family Insurance, Shea Ventures, and True Ventures. The financing also includes “a small amount” of debt funding from Silicon Valley Bank, says the company. TechCrunch has more here.

SentinelOne, a four-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based endpoint security company, has raised $70 million in Series C funding led by earlier investor Redpoint Ventures , with participation from Sound Ventures and earlier backers Third Point Ventures, Data Collective, Granite Hill Capital Partners, Westly Group, and SineWave Ventures. SentinelOne has now raised $110 million to date. TechCrunch has more here.

Vestiaire Collective, an eight-year-old, Paris-based e-commerce marketplace for clothing and fashion accessories, has raised $62 million in fresh funding led by Vitruvian Partners, with participation from earlier investors Eurazeo and Idinvest. TechCrunch has more here.

People

Greg Duffy, the cofounder and CEO of Dropcam, who came to both privately and publicly loathe Nest co-founder Tony Fadell after Nest acquired his company, has joined Apple in a role that neither Duffy or Apple are prepared to discuss. The Information has the scoop here.

Elon Musk seems to be serious about digging a tunnel from SpaceX’s Hawthorne, Ca., headquarters to destinations unknown for now.

Musk, now part of a group of business leaders who will be meeting at the White House quarterly to discuss manufacturing in the U.S., also believes longtime ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson would be an “excellent” U.S. Secretary of State.

Apparently, lawmakers in New Zealand are just as surprised as the rest of us that Peter Thiel quietly acquired citizenship in the country back in 2011.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to run for president, he told BuzzFeed News yesterday.

Jobs

Samsung is looking to hire an investment manager to help with its $100 million Catalyst Fund (which looks to back startups focused on components and subsystems). The job is in Menlo Park, Ca.

Essential Reads

Computer scientists at Stanford set out to create an artificially intelligent diagnosis algorithm for skin cancer. It can now perform as well as dermatologists in identifying skin cancer. (The ubiquitous Sebastian Thrun was involved in this effort.)

Detours

The secret code of modern snobs.

The heroism of incremental care.

RIP, Mary Tyler Moore.

Retail Therapy

Keen to join Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach resort owned by the Trump Organization? Better save up; it just doubled its initiation fee to $200,000.

Connie

February 18, 2017

StrictlyVC: January 24, 2017

Hi, happy Tuesday, everyone!

We’re still running a fever over here, so if we aren’t responding to your emails, this is why. We fully hope/plan to be back in top shape for our upcoming StrictlyVC event on February 8. We ran out of seats about 10 days ago, but we’ll be posting plenty of content for those of you who can’t make it. Giant thanks again to sponsors Rosebud Communications, Crunchbase and Bolt, without whose help the night would not be possible.

Earlier that same week, we hope to see some of you at TechCrunch’s annual Crunchies awards ceremony, happening in San Francisco. It’s always a fun night. (We’re especially excited to be giving away the award for best VC of 2016 with renowned brainiac Sebastian Thrun.) You can buy tickets for that show right here.

Top News in the A.M.

Publishers are receiving far less money than you might guess from placing their content on the third-party distribution platforms owned by companies including Facebook, Google, and Snapchat, according to a new report by Digital Content Next. Business Insider has more here.

Cowboy Ventures Adds Longtime Attorney Ted Wang as a Partner

Ted Wang has spent his career helping startups make important decisions, from Facebook, to Twitter, to Dropbox, to Jet. He’s done it as a partner with the law firm Fenwick & West over the last decade. Now he’s betting his skills can translate as an investor. Indeed, today, Wang joins the seed-stage venture firm Cowboy Ventures as a full-time investment partner.

Firm cofounder Aileen Lee, who remains Cowboy’s only general partner, sounded highly enthusiastic about Wang when we chatted about his new appointment yesterday. Lee and Wang met a dozen years ago at an election night party, and they became fast enough friends that they’ve taken family vacations together, including in Buenos Aires, where Wang and his family were based for some time.

Beyond their friendship, Lee says, Wang has alerted her to companies he has found particularly interesting in the past (including a young Twitter). She has also steered numerous portfolio companies to him owing to his strong track record with startups. (As Wang himself is quick to note, founders are careful in picking both investors as well as lawyers. “In both cases, the founder is looking for who can help the most and with whom they have have the best chemistry.”)

Wang also authored Series Seed Documents, a set of open-sourced financing documents posted on Github.

Asked yesterday if Wang thought he was prepared to dive right into investing, or whether there’s a learning curve to manage first, he laughed. “I always advise people going in to the industry to take their time. We’ll see if I can follow my own advice.”

New Fundings

EquipmentShare, a 2.5-year-old, Columbia, Ms.-based startup that helps contractors rent out their under-utilized equipment, has raised $26 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Romulus Capital and Y Combinator. The round included $6 million in shares that converted from an earlier Series A round, and $20 million in new capital. More here.

LiquiGlide, a four-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company whose patented coatings ensure a permanently wet, slippery surface, has raised $16 million in new funding from Structure Capital, Valia Investments, Struck Capital, Pilot Grove and others who the company isn’t naming. LiquiGlide has raised $25 million to date. TechCrunch has more here.

Prattle, an eight-month-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based startup that sells sentiment data analysis to research analysts, traders and other finance professionals, has raised $3.3 million in seed funding led by GCM Grosvenor. New Enterprise Associates, Correlation Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and numerous unnamed angels also joined the round. More here.

Redox, a three-year-old, Madison, Wi.-based integration platform for digital healthcare applications, has raised $9 million in Series B funding led by RRE Ventures, with participation from earlier backers .406 Ventures, HealthX Ventures, and Flybridge Capital Partners. More here.

Secret Double Octopus, a 1.5-year-old, Israel-based network security company, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners, Liberty Media’s Israel Venture Fund, Iris Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures and angel investor Yaniv Tal. TechCrunch has more here.

Voodoo Manufacturing, a 1.5-year-old, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup that’s building a virtualized manufacturing service atop a networked cluster of low-end 3D printers, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and KPCB Edge. TechCrunch has more here.

New Funds

Merus Capital, a nine-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based early-stage venture firm focused on enterprise opportunities, has raised $85 million for its third fund — roughly twice what its raised for its last fund. Fortune has more here.

Origin Ventures, a 17-year-old, Chicago venture capital firm, has raised $65.9 million toward a $100 million target for its fourth fund, shows a newly amended SEC filing. More here.

Exits

Airbnb is nearing a deal to buy Venmo-competitor Tilt for its expertise in payments, reports the Information. Tilt has raised at least $62 million from investors. The Information’s sources peg the price at between $10 million and $20 million; meanwhile, TechCrunch is reporting the price is north of $50 million (so apparently, a few things are still being negotiated!).

Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic organization made its first acquisition, buying Meta, a website that makes it easier for scientists to find the latest academic research. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative intends to improve Meta’s product, which reads all scientific research and uses an algorithm to provide it to clients based on relevance. Terms aren’t being disclosed. Meta has raised $7.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Bloomberg has more here.

People

John Lee who joined the venture firm Osage University Partners in 2012 as a senior associate, has been promoted to principal. Osage, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., invests in university startups.

Kevin Scott, the senior vice president of infrastructure for LinkedIn, is now Microsoft’s CTO, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. ZDNet has more here.

Another senior executive hightails it out of Juicero. This time it’s Kristina Simmons, the company’s former head of marketing and business development. TechCrunch has more here.

Ford has hired Apple marketing exec Musa Tariq as a VP and its chief brand officer. MacRumors has more here.

Jobs

Revolution Growth is looking to add an analyst to its team in Washington, D.C. To apply, reach out to VP Chris Hughes, at chris.hughes@revolution.com.

Essential Reads

Investors have slashed the price they’re willing to pay for Magic Leap shares in the secondary market by about 20 percent in recent weeks, say stockbrokers, a turnabout for one of last year’s most coveted private tech stocks. The Information has more here.

Detours

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer says he churns through and swallows 35 pieces of Orbital cinnamon-flavored gum before noon every day.

No, really?

Oscar Nominations 2017: See the full list.

Retail Therapy

This takes the coffee-as-jet-fuel meme a little far, but fun concept.

Connie

February 18, 2017