Happy Tuesday, everyone! Looks like we have a big, fat fight on our hands (see below); grab your popcorn.

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Top News in the A.M.

Google is preparing to offer its own ride-hailing service, reports Bloomberg. This is a Very Big Deal for numerous reasons, as many readers will know. First, Google Ventures is among the biggest investors in the popular ride-hailing service Uber, with Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, even sitting on Uber’s board. (Drummond wouldn’t be the first fox in the henhouse. Many are already drawing comparisons to Google chair Eric Schmidt sitting on the board of Apple — right up to the point when Google launched Apple’s biggest competitor, Android.)

Putting aside what the development means for Google Ventures (and its reputation with entrepreneurs), it looks to put Uber in a serious bind technologically. As Bloomberg notes, Uber’s smartphone app for drivers and riders is “based on Google Maps, which gives Google a fire hose of data about transportation patterns within cities. Uber would be crippled if it lost access to the industry-leading mapping application, and alternatives . . . are widely seen as inferior.”

Uber’s product chief, Jeff Holden, tells the WSJ that Uber has been working on its own mapping technology “for some time” and is now accelerating development.

A “person familiar with the matter” further tells the WSJ that the “news that Google is developing an app to rival Uber has been blown out of proportion,” that “a Google engineer has been testing an internal app that helps Google employees carpool to work,” and that the app “isn’t associated with the company’s driverless cars program.”

Just in case, Uber has quietly begun building a robotics research lab in Pittsburgh, Pa., home to Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, which Uber has “cleaned out,” says TechCrunch. To wit, Uber has reportedly hired more than 50 senior scientists from the university’s affiliated research entity and the university itself to spin up its own autonomous taxi fleet. Uber’s seeming message to Google, which is famously developing self-driving cars: Two can play this game.

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Bolt Heads West, with $25 Million to Spend on Hardware

Move over Bay Area hardware outfits. There’s a shiny new player in town called Bolt, and it has some creative ideas about how to win over hardware entrepreneurs and co-investors alike.

A new, $20 million machine shop on a pier along San Francisco’s eastern waterfront should help. So should a $25 million new venture fund, care of some powerful limited partners, including Cisco, Logitech, Autodesk, and the robotics-focused venture firm Grishin Robotics.

It’s a big step up from its start in Boston, where Bolt was founded two years ago with just $4 million — money it has stretched across 18 companies. Each has received an initial check of around $100,000, engineering and business help, and unfettered access to Bolt’s 10,000-square-foot downtown digs, replete with metal-working, plastics, electronics, wood-working and 3D printing equipment. In exchange, Bolt has taken stakes in the companies ranging from 8 to 15 percent in common stock.

Now, the firm is super-sizing the operation. For one thing, founder Ben Einstein – an amiable design engineer who’d previously run a design consultancy — says Bolt will begin writing initial checks in the neighborhood of $500,000.

Bolt, which is co-managed by former Atlas Venture partner Axel Bichara, is also hiring a team of 10 full-time engineers in San Francisco to work with the startups it funds. “In our [new] machine shop, you’ll find mechanical, electrical, embedded, prototyping, manufacturing – all types of engineers whose sole job is to help our portfolio companies,” says Einstein. “Bolt is a little like if IDEO [the industrial design company] and a venture firm had a baby,” he adds.

A third “special partner,” Scott Miller, who founded and runs Dragon Innovation, a Cambridge, Ma.-based manufacturing services firm, makes Bolt’s proposition all the more compelling. Dragon is the manufacturing partner of many young hardware companies, and any company that Bolt invests in receives automatic access to those same, well-oiled services.

Given so many bells and whistles, it’s easy to imagine why top co-investors might see Bolt as a useful syndicate partner. Now, the young firm just needs to build its track record.

It’ll happen through connected devices and, more specifically, the subscription businesses that come with them, says Einstein. Petnet, among Bolt’s portfolio companies, is a prime example of how. Though Petnet makes a pricey “intelligent dog feeder” that alerts pet owners when their pet has eaten, it also sends those customers fresh dog food via a monthly service plan.

Occasionally, companies create breakout brands without a subscription business, Einstein notes, but “those are incredibly rare, and you can typically only dominate a category for a year or 18 months.”

After that, he says, “companies with deeper pockets start to manufacture it faster, cheaper and better than you. Then you’re in trouble.”

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New Fundings

AnyPerk, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that provides employee perks like discounts on fitness, entertainment, and travel, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led by DCM Ventures, with participation from earlier backer Digital Garage. The company has now raised roughly $13 million altogether, it says.

CampusQuad, a two-year-old, San Carlos, Ca.-based mobile engagement platform designed to connect collect students with extracurricular activities and university services, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by ICG Ventures. The company has raised $6.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

FirstCry.com, a 4.5-year-old, Pune, India-based online shopping store offering a range of baby care products and toys, has raised $26 million in Series D funding led by Valiant Capital Partners, with earlier backers IDG Ventures India, Vertex Venture Holdings, and SAIF Partnersparticipating. The company has raised $55 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

FiscalNote, a two-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based company that uses artificial intelligence to predict the outcome of legislation, has raised $10 million in new funding led by the Chinese social network Renren. The funding comes just four months after the company announced $7 million in funding led by Visionnaire Ventures, with AME Cloud Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Winklevoss Capital, Enspire Capital, Green Visor Capital, Middleland Capital and individual investors participating. The company has raised now raised $18.2 million to date.

Guardant Health, a two-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company that makes a biopsy-free blood cancer screening test, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Formation 8 and earlier backers Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The company has now raised roughly $90 million altogether, including from investor Bobby Yazdani and Pejman Mar Ventures.

KnCMiner, a 1.5-year-old, Stockholm-based bitcoin mining company that’s being sued by some of its customers, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Accel Partners, with participation from CGP Bullhound, angel investor Martin Wattin, and earlier backer Creandum. The company has now raised $29 million altogether. Venture Capital Dispatch has much more here.

Pley, a two-year-old, San Jose, Ca., that rents Legos via monthly subscriptions (it then cleans the pieces between rentals), has raised $10 million in new funding led by Sozo Ventures. Earlier backers Floodgate, Correlation Ventures, Maven Ventures and Allegro Venture Partners also joined the round, which brings the company’s funding to $16.8 million.

Revinate, a 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose software-as-a-service platform helps hotels engage with guests and collect their feedback, has raised $15.3 million in Series B funding from new investors Industry Ventures, Northgate Capital, and Tenaya Capital, along with earlier backers Benchmark, Formation 8, Tao Capital Partners, and others. The company has now raised $30.5 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Wave Life Sciences, a two-year-old, Boston-based company that develops nucleic acid therapeutics, has raised $18 million Series A funding led by RA Capital Management and Kagoshima Shinsangyo Sosei Investment, with participation from earlier investor SNBL Ltd. Xconomy has more here.

Yumist, a three-month-old Gurgaon, India-based online food delivery startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Orios Venture Partners. The company was founded by Alok Jain, former CMO at Zomato. The Economic Times has more here.

Zhaosuliao, an eight-month-old, Guangzhou, China-based online platform that matches buyers and sellers of plastic, has raised $20 million in Series A funding from co-led by IDG Capital Partners and QiMing Venture Partners, with participation from Matrix Partners China and angel investor Li Zhujie. China Money Network has more here.

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New Funds

The streaming video company Netflix is planning to offer $1 billion in senior notes, proceeds from which it plans to use for “general corporate purposes” that may include content acquisitions. TechCrunch has more here.

OrbiMed Advisors, the 25-year-old, New York-based investment firm, has raised $924 million for a fund devoted to health-care royalty and credit investments, up from the $600 million the firm raised for its first royalties vehicle in 2011. The firm had raised a separate, $325 million, fund last fall to back health care companies in Asian nations. (That, too, was significantly bigger than its predecessor. OribMed’s debut Asia fund closed in 2008 with $182 million.)

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IPOs

Invitae, a 4.5-year-old, San Francisco-based genetic diagnostics company that registered to go public last month, has estimated it will sell 5.35 million shares at between $13 and $15 per share, raising roughly $75 million. At the midpoint of the estimated range, the company would be valued at about $417 million. Invitae has raised roughly $200 million from private investors. According to its S-1, its biggest institutional shareholders include Baker Brothers Life Sciences, which owns 20.6 percent of the company; BlackRock, which 17 percent; Thomas, McNerney & Partners, which owns 15.2 percent; and Genomic Health, which owns 9 percent.

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Exits

DataStax, the five-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based commercial face of the open source Apache Cassandra database, has acquired the open source graph database company Aurelius for undisclosed terms. DataStax has raised roughly $190 million from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, Next World Capital and investor Salil Deshpande, among others. Aurelius, launched in Oakland, Ca., last year, appears to have been bootstrapped.

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People

Jeff Diehl, head of investments at Adams Street Partners, has been promoted. Effective July 1, Diehl becomes the firm’s managing partner, with longtime CEO Bon French shifting into the role of company chairman. Diehl joined Adams Street in 2000. He’d previously worked as a principal at the Parthenon Group.

Harry Heymann, Foursquare‘s original chief technical officer has left the company after more than five years, reports The Verge. Heymann — who formerly worked with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at his last company, Dodgeball — joined Foursquare in 2009. He’s the latest in a string of top Foursquare executives to leave the company as it pivots from a location-based social network into a Yelp-like local search engine, notes The Verge.

Yoky Matsuoka, formerly Nest Labs’s VP of technology , announced yesterday in her very first tweet that she’s joining the “flock” at Twitter as its VP of technology and analytics. Matsuoka was long a professor (assistant, then adjunct) at Carnegie Mellon University. She also spent one year as Google’s Head of Innovation.

Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who is suing the venture capital firm for gender discrimination and retaliation, has asked for $16 million in damages, it emerged in a related hearing yesterday. Now Kleiner is trying to learn how much Pao stands to make from Reddit, her employer of the last two years, and whether that amount should offset any potential damages. Reddit has said it’s willing to provide Kleiner with Reddit’s private valuation but not the details of Pao’s pay package. Venture Capital Dispatch has the story here.

Yesterday, Pao’s camp was also granted permission to question former colleague Aileen Lee about a dinner at former Vice President Al Gore’s apartment that only male members of Kleiner attended. They’ve also been granted permission to ask about an instance in which Pao’s attorney claims Lee was not offered a partnership in one of the firm’s funds in 2012. Lee left the firm that same summer to found her own firm, Cowboy Ventures. Kleiner quickly signed on as an LP.

Alec Saunders has joined Microsoft Ventures as principal technical evangelist to work with startups in Canada. He was formerly VP of developer relations at BlackBerry.

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Essential Reads

Twitter is rolling out plans for a new revenue stream: Twitter ads that don’t appear on Twitter.

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Detours

A free diver rides an underwater ocean current.

Matt Malone, professional dumpster diver.

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Retail Therapy

Bluewire, to record conversations from your phone or apps like Skype.

Move over Bay Area hardware outfits. There’s a shiny new player in town called Bolt, and it has some creative ideas about how to win over hardware entrepreneurs and co-investors alike.

A new, $20 million machine shop on a pier along San Francisco’s eastern waterfront should help. So should a $25 million new venture fund, care of some powerful limited partners, including Cisco, Logitech, Autodesk, and the robotics-focused venture firm Grishin Robotics.

It’s a big step up from its start in Boston, where Bolt was founded two years ago with just $4 million — money it has stretched across 18 companies. Each has received an initial check of around $100,000, engineering and business help, and unfettered access to Bolt’s 10,000-square-foot downtown digs, replete with metal-working, plastics, electronics, wood-working and 3D printing equipment. In exchange, Bolt has taken stakes in the companies ranging from 8 to 15 percent in common stock.

Now, the firm is super-sizing the operation. For one thing, founder Ben Einstein – an amiable design engineer who’d previously run a design consultancy — says Bolt will begin writing initial checks in the neighborhood of $500,000.

Bolt, which is co-managed by former Atlas Venture partner Axel Bichara, is also hiring a team of 10 full-time engineers in San Francisco to work with the startups it funds. “In our [new] machine shop, you’ll find mechanical, electrical, embedded, prototyping, manufacturing – all types of engineers whose sole job is to help our portfolio companies,” says Einstein.

“Bolt is a little like if IDEO [the industrial design company] and a venture firm had a baby,” he adds.

A third “special partner,” Scott Miller, who founded and runs Dragon Innovation, a Cambridge, Ma.-based manufacturing services firm, makes Bolt’s proposition all the more compelling. Dragon is the manufacturing partner of many young hardware companies, and any company that Bolt invests in receives automatic access to those same, well-oiled services.

Given so many bells and whistles, it’s easy to imagine why top co-investors might see Bolt as a useful syndicate partner. Now, the young firm just needs to build its track record.

It’ll happen through connected devices and, more specifically, the subscription businesses that come with them, says Einstein. Petnet, among Bolt’s portfolio companies, is a prime example of how. Though Petnet makes a pricey “intelligent dog feeder” that alerts pet owners when their pet has eaten, it also sends those customers fresh dog food via a monthly service plan.

Occasionally, companies create breakout brands without a subscription business, Einstein notes, but “those are incredibly rare, and you can typically only dominate a category for a year or 18 months.”

After that, he says, “companies with deeper pockets start to manufacture it faster, cheaper and better than you. Then you’re in trouble.”

Hi, everyone, welcome back. What a game last night! What a terrible play! “Of course I can say now I wish we had done something different,” said Seahawks’s delated offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell afterward.

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Top News in the A.M.

President Obama will announce today that he wants U.S. companies to pay a 14 percent tax on the approximately $2 trillion of overseas earnings they’ve amassed, reports the WSJ. They could reinvest those funds in the U.S. without paying additional tax, says the piece. They would also face a 19 percent minimum tax on future foreign profits. Tech and pharmaceutical companies hold the greatest share of overseas cash, accounting for 30 percent of the total; Apple alone has roughly $160 billion in offshore cash.

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On the Bias Toward Writing About Bias

The last two years have seen countless articles about why there aren’t more successful women in tech. First, a story is published about the dearth of female entrepreneurs or female investors (or both), then people either applaud the piece or enumerate why its wrong-headed (or both). Finally, someone else is legitimately wronged by some knucklehead, and the cycle begins anew.

Much of the coverage has had a positive impact. By shining a light on age-old behaviors that were deemed acceptable for too long, more tech startups are instituting sensitivity training and diversity initiatives. Women who felt isolated in facing gender bias have learned that they’re far from alone.

The many reports about women in tech have also put a finer point on some differences between male and female entrepreneurs that are now being actively addressed.

For example, Mar Hershenson, a serial entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist, now advises some of the female entrepreneurs with whom she meets to “raise their voice – not be afraid to talk about the best-case scenario for their startups.” Talking up their work doesn’t always come as naturally to women, says Hershenson. But “venture firms look for big vision, nothing-is-going-to-stop-me type pitches,” and getting that memo beforehand is useful, she adds.

Still, some think much of the coverage around women in tech is becoming counterproductive.

Mada Seghete, cofounder of the deep-linking tech company Branch Metrics, says some of what she reads in the media rings true. For example, she observed more of a “risk-taking attitude, to some extent” by her male classmates at Stanford, where Seghete — who has two engineering degrees from Cornell — recently snagged her MBA.

Yet Seghete also notes that a higher percentage of her female classmates have seen their businesses take off since graduating, partly because “a lot of guys played with the ideas and took their time” while their female peers dove into things that are “less risky,” says Seghete.

Among those companies is The League, a dating startup cofounded by Seghete’s former classmate Amanda Bradford. It just closed on $2.1 million in funding last week.)

Seghete also seems to think the ongoing narrative of women as victims can have unintended consequences – namely, making women unnecessarily ill at ease.

“Even as a software developer, I don’t consider that I’m different, and maybe it’s because I don’t anticipate bias that I’m confident in a way that people don’t look at me differently,” says Seghete, whose own company — cofounded with classmates Alex Austin, Dmitri Gaskin, and Mike Molinet — has raised $3 million led by New Enterprise Associates.

“If I thought I’d be facing bias in a situation, then I might be more self-conscious. It would be a self-fulfilling process.”

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New Fundings

Apttus, an 8.5-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based company that helps customers manage the second half of their sales cycle, has raised $41 million in Series B funding led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from K1 Capital and Iconiq. All three were previous investors in the company, which has now raised $78 million altogether, says TechCrunch.

Coursmos, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that offers short “micro courses” for users via a web and mobile platform, has raised $600,000 in seed funding from Altera Capital Group, with participation from Imperious Group. The company has now raised $1.2 million altogether.

ERelevance, a 1.5-year-old, Austin, Tx.-based healthcare IT startup that makes patient-engagement software, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by Martin Ventures. The company had previously raised $1.3 million.

MileIQ, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose mobile app tracks mileage, has raised $11 million in funding led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from earlier backers CRV, SV Angel and Marc Benioff. The company has raised $14 million to date.

Pulsate, a 1.5-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based startup whose tech platform helps brands communicate with customers based on their location, context, interests and behavior, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from PayPal and the marketing research company Dunnhumby. TechCrunch has more here.

QASymphony, a nearly four-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based software company that sells testing services for testing organizations and quality-assurance teams, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Buckhead Investment Partners, Poplar Ventures, and KMS Technology.

Siva Power, an 8.5-year-old, San Diego, Ca.-based company that makes third-generation thin film PV technologies to increase solar cell efficiency, has closed on $10 million in Series D funding from earlier investors Trident Capital, DBL Investors, Medley Partners, and Acero Capital. The city of Wuxi, China, also participated as a new investor. The round includes $3 million in debt financing that Siva received last May. The company, which has now raised roughly $115 million altogether, was formerly called Solexant.

Skipta, a six-year-old, Lancaster, Pa.-based operator of online communities for health-care professionals, has raised $2.5 million in Series A financing from Mansa Capital.

Sportsman Tracker, a 3.5-year-old, Grand Rapids, Mi.-based company with a suite of mobile applications for hunters and anglers, has raised $950,000 in seed funding led by Huron River Ventures and Start Garden, with participation by Detroit Innovate, Muskegon Angels and Karis Capital Partners.

Zapproved, a 6.5-year-old, Portland, Or.-based company whose software platform helps companies comply with legal rules and regulations, has raised $15 million funding round led by K1 Investment Management. The company has now raised roughly $20 million altogether, including from numerous individual investors.

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New Funds

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has created a $130 million fund called the Alibaba Hong Kong Young Entrepreneurs Foundation, with the aim of enticing founders to build up businesses through Alibaba’s platforms, including its main shopping sites Taobao Marketplace and Tmall. TechCrunch has much more here.

Aspect Ventures — cofounded by Theresia Gouw, formerly of Accel Partners, and Jennifer Fonstad, formerly of DFJ — is looking to raise its first outside fund, and it’s targeting $150 million for the effort, shows an SEC filing. The pair began investing their own money a year ago. Among their bets to date: Vida, a young, San Francisco-based company whose mobile app connects consumers with coaches and doctors to improve their health; BaubleBar, a four-year-old, New York-based e-commerce company focused on “on-trend” fashion jewelry; and Exabeam, a 1.5-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based big data security analytics startup.

August Capital has set out to raise a $450 million seventh fund, according to a new SEC filing. Interestingly, the fund size is moving in the opposite direction of many recents funds. August closed on $550 million for its sixth fund, down from the $650 million it had raised for its fifth fund. Among some of its newer bets: Open Garden, a nearly four-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile broadband network for Internet of Things devices; Avant Credit, a two-year-old, Chicago-based online consumer lender; and Quandl, a three-year-old, Toronto-based data management platform and marketplace where people can buy, sell, and download financial and economic data.

Blumberg Capital, the 24-year-old, San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm, is looking to raise up to $200 million for its fourth fund, according to an SEC filing. Blumberg had closed its third fund with $150 million in November 2013. Some of the firm’s newer bets include Kreditech, a three-year-old, Hamburg, Germany-based consumer finance startup that focuses on lending money to “unbanked” consumers with little or no credit rating; and Credorax, a six-year-old, Southborough, Ma.-based small startup that enables online payment processing for a range of online merchants.

Cendana Capital, the five-year-old, San Francisco-based firm that has made a name for itself by backing so-called micro funds, has added $40 million to its Cendana Co-Investment Fund, money it manages with capital from the University of Texas Investment Management Company. (UTIMCO had originally commited $60 million to the fund in July 2012.) You can find the SEC filing here.

Northern Light Venture Capital, a 10-year-old, Beijing-based early-stage venture fund, is looking to raise $365 million for its fourth fund, shows an SEC filing. It closed its last fund with $404 million, according to Thomson Reuters.

Victory Park Capital, the eight-year-old, Chicago-based alternative investments firm, is setting up a listed fund to invest in loans originating on sites like the peer-to-peer platforms Prosper and Funding Circle, reports the WSJ. The fund — VPC Specialty Lending Investments — plans to hold a £200 million ($224 million) IPO in London, says the report.

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Exits

SolarWinds, the publicly traded IT software company, has acquired the San Francisco-based analytics company Librato for $40 million in cash. According to Crunchbase, Librato had raised $5.1 million from investors, including Baseline Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and Harrison Metal.

Swyft Media, a three-year-old, New York-based digital marketing company that had raised $1 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors, has been acquired by publicly traded Monotype, a company specializing in typesetting and typeface design. Swyft Media is reportedly being paid $12 million up front and could see up to $15 million more in additional earn-outs.

Ticketea, a Madrid-based ticketing startup, has acquired TodayTickets, a two-year-old, Berlin-based last-minute ticket booking app, for undisclosed terms. TodayTickets had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding; Ticketea has raised $5.7 million from investors. TechCrunch has more here.

TripAdvisor, the travel planning and booking business, has acquired San Mateo, Ca.-based ZeTrip and its travel journal app app Rove, which provides a travelog of users’ movements based their GPS coordinates. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. ZeTrip had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2012 from Inspiration Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

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People

New Jersey state Treasury investigators found no wrongdoing in venture firm General Catalyst Partners‘ decision to not report a political contribution from one of its EIRs – now Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker – months before the pension committed millions to the firm. The outlet peHUB has more here.

On Friday, Nest Labs told employees that founding VP of technology Yoky Matsuoka and Greg Duffy, who’d joined Nest last summer when it acquired his connected-camera company, Dropcam, have left the company. The company didn’t provide employees insight into why Matsuoka was leaving but credited her with having a “tremendous impact” on the team. As for Duffy, they said he was “leaving to pursue other opportunities.” As we’d reported last November, the cultural fit between Dropcam and Nest was a poor one, with both Dropcam and earlier Nest employees describing a frustrating environment at Nest under Tony Fadell’s leadership.

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Job Listings

Cue Ball Capital, the Boston-based venture capital firm, is looking to hire an investment associate.

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Data

According to VentureSource, investors poured $15.5 billion into China-based deals last year, more than twice the previous record of $7.3 billion set in 2011. More here.

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Essential Reads

So-called zombie apps are on the rise.

Twitter hopes to display its value to new users through a feature called Instant Timeline that shows tweets to people who haven’t yet followed anyone.

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Detours

Vintage portraits of (modern) Hollywood celebrities.

Saturday Night Live takes on football commercials in this very funny parody.

The case of the next U.S. housing boom in eight charts.

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Retail Therapy

Srirachup. You can have it both ways.

Happy Friday, everyone. Hope you have a super weekend. (Web visitors, this version of today’s morning email is easier to read than what you see below.)

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Top News in the A.M.

AOL is cutting 150 employees. More details here.

Google‘s fourth quarter results missed the mark yesterday.

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Mike Rothenberg: Virtual Reality is Not a Sector, People

Late last year, three-year-old Rothenberg Ventures announced it would be launching a startup accelerator, River, that planned to provide $100,000 in seed funding to virtual reality companies expressly. To some, it might have seemed like a calculated, and possibly unwise, bit of counterprogramming. After all, by backing a variety of startups, most accelerator programs are able to hedge their bets and reduce the risk that a whole batch will fall out of fashion.

Yet the San Francisco firm argues that the the 13 companies it has selected, from roughly 200 applicants, is as diverse as any early Y Combinator class. An eye-mounted head-tracking display that helps the physically challenged with daily tasks? Check. Virtual reality technology that changes the way people experience news events? Check. “Everyone keeps calling it a ‘sector,’” says the firm’s founder, Mike Rothenberg. “But just as the Internet is ubiquitous, virtual reality will be ubiquitous in 10 or 20 years. This technology is really going to change everyone’s life.”

We talked about it yesterday.

You’re about to welcome 13 companies into your new accelerator program, which will run from February through May. What was the criteria for acceptance?

We were really looking for the most innovative applications across every industry. We also wanted a mix of hardware and software. We didn’t know what we’d get, but we have companies coming from Japan, South Africa, New Zealand France — companies building great companies in education, in pain management . . .

How far along are they?

They’re pretty mature companies for the most part. Some have been building their companies for eight to ten years. Fove, which makes an eye-tracking head mounted display that lets users navigate using their eye movements, has a complete product that works and is amazing.

Have these companies raised capital in the past?

Some of them have some capital. [Fove, for example, passed through Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in London last summer.] But in general, venture capital hasn’t been focused on virtual reality too much yet, so in some cases, the companies hadn’t raised anything prior. We have a South African company that bootstrapped and figured out a way to get customers to pay for VR from the beginning.

What size stake are you taking in exchange for your $100,000?

We aren’t disclosing that. We looked at Y Combinator and other accelerators and incubators and tried to learn [from what they do].

Just two companies you’ve accepted are hardware companies. Is that by design? Do you think most people will be creating virtual reality technology for platforms like Samsung Gear VR and the upcoming Oculus Rift?

We didn’t have set targets, but in my opinion, the big companies know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of good hardware being built by great tech companies with deeper pockets; smartphone use will become more common, too. So software and content companies might be a little more of a fit [for this program].

We also just saw so a lot of mind-blowing applications. We have a company, Psious, a smartphone-based tool that’s solving phobias by simulating heights and plane travel and spiders. Another, DeepStream, tackles pain management. Burn victims enter into a world of snow and it lessens their pain. A third company, Emblematic Group in L.A., is doing immersive journalism, showing reporters what it can feel like to be on the streets when a bomb goes off and hopefully making them more empathic in the process.

Why announce the companies now? Why not wait until they’re ready to meet with investors at a demo day you’re staging in May?

We want them to take advantage of their affiliation with River while they’re here in America. Some of them are already planning to move to San Francisco. Many of them are here for three months alone, and we want them to meet with the people they want to meet, including investors.

Those investors will invariably be conjuring up exit scenarios. Aside from Facebook and its subsidiary Oculus, which acquired two VR companies last month, do we know what companies are actively shopping for VR technologies?

The smartest companies. It’s the same for everything. Who’s going to buy the 360-degree action sports camera? Whoever is making cameras and wants to stay in business.

(For a full list of River’s companies, click here.)

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New Fundings

Anews, a two-year-old, Russia-based international news aggregation platform, has raised $2.7 million in venture backing, including from include TMT Investments, Run Capital, and 101Startup.

Aspire Bariatrics, a four-year-old, King of Prussia, Pa.-based company that’s commercializing a reversible, minimally invasive weight loss device for obesity, has closed on $12 million in venture debt financing from Hercules Technology Growth Capital. According to an SEC filing, the company had separately raised $5 million in equity last summer.

Atlas Genetics, a 10-year-old, U.K.-based company that makes molecular diagnostics tests for infectious diseases, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by RMI Partners, with participation from return backers Novartis Venture Funds, Consort Medical, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, BB Biotech Ventures and South West Ventures Fund.

Bench, a 2.5-year-old, Vanouver, B.C.-based online platform that pairs users with bookkeepers and bookkeeping software, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Altos Ventures with participation from Contour Venture Partners. The company has now raised $10 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

BioNano Genomics, a 12-year-old, New York-based company whose nanoscale imaging and analytic platforms are used to analyze DNA and other genome-related peptides and proteins, has raised $68.4 million in funding, according to an SEC filing — an amount that reportedly includes $53 million that BioNano raised in Series C funding last November. Legend Capital and Novartis Venture Fund co-led the round and were joined by Federated Kaufmann Fund and Monashee Investment Management. Earlier investors Domain Associates, Battelle Ventures, and Gund Investment Corporation also participated.

The 7.5-year-old parent company of CarDekho, a 6.5-year-old, Jaipur, India-based online marketplace for new and used cars, has raised $50 million from the Chinese investment firm Hillhouse Capital and the Hong Kong-based hedge fund Tybourne Capital. Earlier backer Sequoia Capital — which had provided the company with $15 million in Series A funding in 2013 — also participated. VCCircle has more here.

Cargomatic, a 1.5-year-old, Venice, Ca.-based company that enables users with shipping jobs to find truckers who are available to move their cargo, has raised $8 million led by Canaan Partners, with participation from Volvo Group Venture Capital, Morado Venture Partners, SV Angel, Sherpa Ventures, Structure Capital, and numerous angel investors. The company has now raised $10.6 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Cyanogen, a 5.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that distributes smartphone software based on Google’s Android mobile operating system, is raising a $70 million round of financing that values the company in the “high hundreds of millions,” and Microsoft is poised to be a minority investor in that round, reports the WSJ. (The Information had published a smart piece about Cyanogen back in October.)

D-Wave Systems, the 16-year-old, British Columbia-based quantum computing company, raised $29 million Canadian dollars ($23 million) late last year from an unnamed “large institutional investor,” reports Venture Capital Dispatch. According to Crunchbase, the company has now raised roughly $124 million from investors, including Business Development Bank of Canada, DFJ, and Goldman Sachs.

Depop, a two-year-old, U.K.-based mobile marketplace that enables individuals to buy and sell their items, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital and Holtzbrinck Ventures. The company has raised $10.3 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

FullContact, a five-year-old, Denver-based company that sells a suite of suite of cloud-based contact management solutions for businesses and individuals, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by earlier backer Foundry Group, with participation from earlier investors 500 Startups and Blue Note Ventures. The company has raised $16.2 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Giphy, a two-year-old platform that makes it easy to search and share GIFs, has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst Partners and earlier investors, including Lerer-Hippeau Ventures, betaworks, RRE Ventures, and CAA Ventures. Of the round, $225,000 has been set aside for accredited investors who might be interested in acquiring a stake in the company via the crowdfunding platform Alphaworks. The company had previously raised $2.5 million from investors.

The parent company of Grabhouse a two-year-old, Mumbai, India-based online rental accommodation site, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital and Sequoia Capital. LiveMint has more here.

Handpick, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose iOS app provides users access to more than 10 million socially shared food posts from Instagram, food blogs and recipe sites, has raised $3 million in funding led by ClearVue Partners, with participation from angel investors.

MaestroIQ, a 1.5-year-old, New York-based recommendation engine app used by marketers to help drive app engagement, has raised $1.75 million in seed funding from Foundation Capital, Deep Fork Capital, KEC Ventures, First Round Capital, Crosslink Capital, angel investor Jim Pallotta, and Eniac Ventures, where the company was incubated.

Ouya, a three-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based game-console maker, has raised $10 million from Alibaba, which has discussed incorporating Ouya’s software and library of more than 1,000 games into Alibaba’s set-top box, according to WSJ sources. Ouya had previously raised $15 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund, Shasta Ventures and chipmaker Nvidia; it had also famously raised $8.6 million on Kickstarter.

Spotify, the 8.5-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based music streaming service, is working with Goldman Sachs Group on a new round of private fundraising, potentially putting off an IPO for another year, reports the WSJ. The amount to be raised and the valuation are yet to be settled, says the story, but talks include T. Rowe Price.

Swipe, a new social networking app that combines aspects of Instagram, Tinder, and Snapchat, has raised $6.5 million from Sherpa Ventures, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital and Binary Capital at a $50 million pre-valuation. Just two months ago(!), the company had raised $1.7 million in seed funding at a $10 million valuation (we’re not sure if that’s pre- or post). TechCrunch has the story here.

Ttyongche, a year-old, Beijing-based carpool mobile app maker, has raised roughly $10 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital, which had provided it with $3 million in Series A funding last June, according to Chinese media reports.

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New Funds

Cyber London (CyLon), a new startup accelerator based in London, hopes to launch a new wave of cyber-security technology companies from across Europe, reports The Guardian. Its first 13-week program kicks off in April. More here.

Utah-based Kickstart Seed Fund has closed a $39 million fund to fund very-early-stage startups in the state. It’s the firm’s third, and largest, fund. TechCrunch has more here.

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IPOs

Spark Therapeutics, a company that’s developing a treatment for rare blindness, hit the pubic market this morning. We’ll tell you on Monday how things go.

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Exits

DMG Media, owner of DailyMail.com, is acquiring the U.S.-based news website Elite Daily for undisclosed terms. According to Crunchbase, the three-year-old, New York-based startup had raised $1.5 million in a convertible note from Social Starts, Red Sea Ventures, Vast Ventures, and Greycroft Partners. According to Daily Mail, Elite Daily now boasts 74 million monthly unique visitors, mostly between the ages of 18 and 34.

SnipSnap, a 3.5-year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based company that makes a mobile couponing app, has been acquired by Toronto-based Slyce for $6.5 million in cash and stock. SnipSnap had raised $2.8 million from mostly individual investors. Slyce, a visual product search platform, has raised $28.7 million from investors, shows Crunchbase. Its backers include Beacon Securities, Cormark Securities, Salman Partners, and Canaccord Genuity Corp.

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People

Chrys Bader, one of the co-founders of the anonymous messaging app Secret, is leaving the company a year after its launch. Bader “won’t go away empty handed,” reports the WSJ. He and cofounder David Byttow collected roughly $6 million as part of a $25 million funding round last year, says the outlet.

Bain Capital Ventures has lost Boston-based managing directors Todd MacLean and Jeff Crisan, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack; he says the pair plans to launch a new venture capital firm with Jim Quagliaroli, who has stepped down as a managing director with Spectrum Equity. More here.

Billionaire Jim Clark, who left the tech scene in Silicon Valley more than a decade ago to build condos in Miami, is on a new real estate buying spree. According to the New York Post, Clark and wife Kristy Hinze just paid $37 million for the 40-foot-wide, eight-bedroom, 11,000-square-foot Mellon mansion on New York’s Upper East Side. (That’s down from the original asking price of $46 million in 2013.) Clark also recently shelled out $27.5 million for the Westchester, N.Y., mansion of director Ron Howard, a 17,000-square-foot property with pool, horse barn, greenhouse and much more.

Former Yahoo COO Jeff Mallett is ready to make a deal, apparently. According to Realtor.com, in 1999, Mallet bought an estate in Napa, Ca., that includes a private, USGA-member nine-hole golf course, and he’s been trying to sell it since 2012. Mallett was originally asking for $17.5 million. With no one coming “even close to making par on the offer,” says the outlet (ha, ha), Mallet has slashed the price by $8 million, meaning you can now acquire his vast property for $9.5 million should you be so inclined. More here.

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Job Listings

PayPal is looking to hire a director into its growth and special operations team. The job is in San Jose, Ca.

SoftBank is reportedly looking to set up a five-member team in India. The firm is meeting with people now, says the Economic Times.

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Essential Reads

Rap superstar Jay-Z is about to take on Beats and Spotify. More here.

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Detours

Your shopping habits are one in a million — literally.

How Nick Hornby keeps his writing fresh.

The pursuit of beauty: Solving a pure math mystery.

—–

Retail Therapy

Measuring Paris wall sticker (great for the kids’ room).

Happy Thursday, everyone! No column today. We are way, way under the weather this week.

We also spent an inordinate amount of time last night reading over the explosive lawsuit filed Tuesday against entrepreneur-investor Joe Lonsdale by a former Stanford student and girlfriend who’s accusing him of gender violence and sexual assault.

It’s a major shocker. Lonsdale — a protégé of Peter Thiel who worked with Thiel at his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, before cofounding the big data company Palantir with Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings — has been described by Fortune as a “man in a hurry” given his hard-charging work ethic.

In addition to Palantir, Lonsdale also cofounded Addepar, whose software helps rich clients manage their wealth. The five-year-old company has raised $65 million from investors, including $50 million that poured in last spring. And Lonsdale cofounded four-year-old Backplane, a social network for people with “like-minded interests” that has raised roughly $14 million from investors.

More recently, Lonsdale has dived into the world of venture capital, co-founding Formation 8, a two-and-a-half-year-old firm that has already raised nearly $1 billion from investors across two funds. (Its first fund, the biggest debut fund raised since 1999, included an early bet on the virtual reality company Oculus VR, bought for $2 billion by Facebook last year.)

Despite his extensive network, Lonsdale is not a terribly public figure. He has tweeted 23 times in the last five years, almost exclusively to promote his business interests or those of his friends. Conference appearances are rare. On Quora, an anonymous poster characterizes working with him as “intense,” saying Lonsdale “tends to favor potential over experience, which results in a lot of personal and professional growth for the individuals he works with.”

Lonsdale won’t be battling this lawsuit quietly, though. Soon after the filing was leaked yesterday to the media, Lonsdale — who credits his start in the industry to his days “as a little kid at PayPal” — published a highly detailed, personal, and e-mail laden personal statement in a move meant to quickly quash questions raised by the suit.

Not only does he include love letters written to him by his accuser, Elise Clougherty, whom he dated for one year, but anyone curious can also find a two-page letter written to him by Clougherty’s mother, asking Lonsdale not to part ways with her daughter, and a somewhat excruciating email that Clougherty had written to Lonsdale about her history of mental health issues.

Lonsdale is also planning to file a defamation suit against Clougherty today. “I will counter these vindictive attacks at every turn,” he says in his statement. “I will not be bullied by lies and threats.”

According to Clougherty’s lawsuit, she and Lonsdale began a romantic relationship in February 2012 after becoming linked in a mentorship program at Stanford, where she was an undergraduate and Lonsdale, an alum of the school, was a volunteer. Lonsdale says in his statement that they’d first met the previous year, at a “meeting arranged by her mother in New York,” when Clougherty and her mother “sought me out through a mutual friend.”

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Top News in the A.M.

Microsoft’s Office for Android tablet apps arrive today.

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New Fundings

99.co, a 1.5-year-old, Singapore-based property rental and sales site that launched publicly late last year, has raised $1.6 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. The company had previously raised $650,000 in seed funding, including from 500 Startups.

Araxid, a 2.5-year-old, Mclean, Va.-based company whose software helps its customers link and privatize disparate identities stored in one or more databases, has raised $12.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital.

AutoBot, a year-old, Beijing-based startup that provides smartphone-using drivers with analytics about their speed, proximity to other cars and more, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Gobi Partners and ABC Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Business Insider, the 7.5-year-old, New York-based business news site, has raised $25 million in fresh funding from a syndicate of investors led by Axel Springer SE, with participation from earlier backers, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The WSJ has more here. Business Insider is the most-visited business news site in the U.S., according to analytics firm comScore. It has now raised $57 million altogether, says the WSJ.

Datadog, a five-year-old, New York-based monitoring platform for cloud applications, has raised $31 million in Series C funding led by earlier backer Index Ventures, with participation from RTP Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners, and Amplify Partners, among others. The company has now raised $53.4 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Deliveroo, a 2.5-year-old, London-based food delivery company that focuses on high-end restaurants in densely populated areas, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Accel Partners. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

Iterable, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company behind a marketing-automation platform for e-commerce companies, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Merus Capital, 645 Ventures, TEEC Angels, 500 Startups and individual investors.

Koru, a 1.5-year-old, Seattle-based talent marketplace that helps college grads find jobs at tech companies, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Maveron, with participation from City Light Capital, Trilogy Equity Partners and earlier backers Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. The company has now raised $12.6 million altogether.

Mashable, a 10-year-old, New York-based media site that covers tech, entertainment, and business news, has raised $17 million in new funding led by Time Warner Investments, reports the WSJ. The company has now raised $31 million altogether.

Meta, a two-year-old, Portola Valley, Ca.-based augmented reality headset maker, has raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Horizons Ventures, Tim Draper, BOE Optoelectronics and Y-Combinator partners Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian. Other participants in the round include Danhua Capital, Commodore Partners and Vegas Tech Fund. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

Tripda, a 10-month-old, New York-based long-distance carpooling platform, has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Rocket Internet AG and an unnamed New York venture firm.

Tune, a 5.5-year-old, Seattle-based company whose software helps marketers manage their performance advertising relationships, has raised $27 million in fresh funding led by Icon Ventures, with participation from Performance Equity Management and earlier backer Accel Partners. The company has now raised $36.4 million altogether. Recode has more here.

Whistle, the 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of dog activity trackers, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Nokia Growth Partners, with participation from Qualcomm, Melo7 Tech Partners, and QueensBridge Venture Partners. The company, which has now raised $25 million altogether, has also acquired a competitor, San Diego-based Tagg, for an undisclosed sum.

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New Funds

Recruit Holdings, a Tokyo-based human resources company, is launching a $20 million strategic corporate venture fund that will invest in human resource startups across various stages.

Techstars Ventures, which got its start nearly eight years ago in Boulder, Co., has closed a $150 million early-stage fund. Venture Capital Dispatch has much more here.

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Exits

Esker, which makes document process automation software and trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, has acquired TermSync, a Fitchburg, Wi.-based cloud-based accounts receivable platform, for undisclosed terms. TermSync had raised $2 million from individual investors.

Fingerprint, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based kid-focused learning and entertainment platform, has acquired two smaller children’s mobile education companies: Cognitive Kid and Scribble Press. Fingerprint has raised $20 million from investors, including Reed Elsevier Ventures, Corus Entertainment, and DreamWorks Animation. TechCrunch has more here.

Performant Financial Corp., whose software helps its customers reduce waste and recover lost assets, is acquiring Premier Healthcare Exchange for $108 million in cash and $22 million in Performant common stock. Premier had raised $4 million from the growth equity firm Edison Partners.

Slack, the enterprise collaboration service, has acquired Screenhero, a Y Combinator alum that competes against WebEx. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Screenhero had raised $1.8 million from investors, shows Crunchbase. TechCrunch has the story here.

Teespring, a Providence, R.I.-based custom apparel startup, has acquired London-based competitor Fabrily for undisclosed terms. Fabrily was bootstrapped. Teespring has raised $57 million from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator.

—–

People

Arsenal Venture Partners, a Winter Park, Fl.-based venture firm, has appointed two new partners, promoting principal Jennifer Dunham and hiring Ryan Waddington. Dunham joined the firm nearly 17 years ago. Waddington most recently cofounded Michigan-based Huron River Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm.

Bryan Hale has re-joined DFJ as an EIR, the firm announced earlier this week. Hale worked for DFJ before joining its portfolio company, Chef Software, in 2009. Before first coming to DFJ in 2007, Hale worked in corporate development at Salesforce and as an analyst at UBS.

TPG has sued its former spokesman, Adam Levine, claiming he took confidential documents from the private-equity firm and leaked them to the New York Times after he was denied a promotion and told that TPG was considering replacing him atop its public relations group. Levine’s camp unsurprisingly has a very different story, saying he had “alerted TPG senior management to serious issues of noncompliance and defrauding its investors of millions of dollars in fees and expenses,” and calls the suit a “blatant and shameful attempt to discredit a whistleblower.” Much more here.

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Happenings

StrictlyVC’s first INSIDER event takes place two weeks from today in San Francisco, featuring Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Strava cofounder Mark Gainey, Sigma West cofounder Greg Gretsch, and Haystack founder Semil Shah. Much thanks to our wonderful sponsors Ballou PR, Next World Capital and Standish Management for making the whole thing possible.

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Job Listings

Yahoo is looking to add an associate to its corporate development team. (We’d told you about this one a couple of weeks ago without a link; the company shot it to us yesterday.)

—–

Data

Facebook reported fourth quarter financial results yesterday that topped analysts’ estimates. Some of the interesting data points from its call: More than half a billion people access Facebook exclusively from their phones. Mobile now accounts for 69 percent of its ad business, up from 53 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013. And video on the platform is exploding, with daily video views hitting 3 billion in the fourth quarter, up from 1 billion last September.

—–

Essential Reads

Apple and Samsung are in a dead heat for smartphone dominance, according to new data from the research firm Strategy Analytics.

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Detours

The rich design history of the selfie stick.

Optical illusions using typography.

Writer and blogging pioneer Andrew Sullivan signs off.

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Retail Therapy

After eight years in the making, the Acura NSX is available for purchase.

Way to ruin meal time, Ronit Baranga.

Happy Tuesday, dear readers. (Hope you’re holding up in New England; we’re thinking of you.)

By the way, a few of you let us know you’d found yesterday’s email in your spam folder. Perhaps it was all the exclamation points! If you missed your issue, you can check it out here.

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Top News in the A.M.

You can now post videos and send group messages on Twitter.

The Waze mobile traffic app by Google can also be used to hunt and harm police, say some in law enforcement, who want Google to disable users’ ability to notify other users about nearby police. As notes the Associated Press, the “growing concern is the latest twist in Google’s complicated relationship with government and law enforcement.”

Yahoo will report its newest earnings after today’s market close.

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Pushbullet, Beloved by Users, Shoots for Fresh Funding

Pushbullet, a San Francisco-based, six-person software startup whose free app makes it easy for users move notifications, links, and files between devices, is announcing $1.5 million in seed funding from General Catalyst Partners, SV Angel, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Paul Buchheit, and other angel investors.

It’s in the market again, too. As is often the case with today’s startups, Pushbullet is announcing a round that came together some time ago – 10 months ago in this case – as a way to kind of raise its flag. Says founder Ryan Oldenburg, a former Android developer at Hipmunk who formed Pushbullet with several former Hipmunk colleagues: “We don’t need a giant round to power a sales force – just a standard Series A. Everyone here has two jobs and I’d like to start making that not be the case anymore.”

VCs could certainly do worse. Since launching in 2013, Pushbullet says it has distributed “tens of millions” of notifications and transferred hundreds of thousands of links, files, and text snippets across users’ various devices, garnering rave reviews from CNet, Wired, and LifeHacker in the process. Just this morning, GigaOm described it as “one of those rare apps where, once you start using it, you’ll likely begin wondering how you lived without it for so long.”

Now, it’s a matter of raising user awareness, preferably before Apple and Google find other ways to better tie together their operating systems across devices. (With Pushbullet ranked far below the most downloaded productivity apps, according to both AppAnnie and Android Rank, the race is on.) We talked with Oldenburg about the company last week.

What compelled you to start Pushbullet?

It started about a year-and-a-half ago. I had a smart phone, but as a programmer, I spent a lot of time working on computers, which traditionally didn’t work with smart phones, nor did anyone think they should. As a result, people were doing odd things, like emailing themselves to get their files on their phone. A world where people have both smart phones and tablets is great, but nobody had been acknowledging the opportunity to make it much better.

How did you know you’d struck on something?

It was just a side project, but it had an unexpectedly awesome reception. The first 15,000 [users] signed up within a couple of weeks without any PR. I just submitted it to Reddit and it struck a nerve.

You then headed to Y Combinator. What did the program do for you?

Y Combinator has a way of making you feel not good enough and like you have to work 10 times harder – which isn’t a bad thing. If you’re the right person [to lead a startup], it makes you want to do what it takes to grow beyond tens of thousands of users to tens of millions. It got us to think much bigger.

How much bigger? Will we see an enterprise version of Pushbullet?

At this point, we’re focused on building it for consumers. But as we get later stage, this [technology] is definitely something that will fit into enterprises and [where we’ll probably get the most financial support]. Dropbox [straddles] both worlds, too, and that model works for us.

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New Fundings

3Scan, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s focused on new technologies for pathology, including a “knife edge scanning microscope” that sections and images tissue samples, has raised $6.67 million in Series A funding led by Lux Capital.

Beckon, a four-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based company that makes analytics software for marketers, has raised $13 million in new funding led by Venrock, with participation from earlier backers August Capital and Canaan Partners. The company has now raised $23 million to date. (StrictlyVC talked with CEO and cofounder Jenny Zeszut last year about what it’s like when things don’t go as planned.)

CaratLane, a 7.5-year-old, Chennai, India-based online jewelry store, has raised $31 million in Series D funding from earlier backer Tiger Global Management. CaratLane has raised roughly $52 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

CloudBees, a 4.5-year-old, Los Altos, Ca.-based company that’s focused on the “continuous delivery” market in which developers make their code ready to deploy at all times instead of in fixed release cycles, has raised $23.5 million in Series D funding led by earlier backer Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other participants in this round include previous investors Matrix Partners, Verizon Ventures, and Blue Cloud Ventures. The company has now raised $51.2 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Colu, a new, Tel Aviv-based bitcoin blockchain platform and upcoming consumer app, has raised $2.5 million in funding led by Aleph and Spark Capital, with participation from BoxGroup and Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. Venture Capital Dispatch takes a longer look at the company here.

Curiyo, a 4.5-year-old, Jerusalem-based company whose software enhances online articles with links that direct readers to related facts, has raised just less than $1 million in new funding from new and existing investors, including the crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, and Techra Investments. The company had previously raised $1.9 million in seed funding.

Dizzion, a 3.5-year-old, Denver, Co.-based company whose cloud-based service allows users to access their desktop applications and data from any device, has raised $3.9 million in Series A funding co-led by Access Venture Partners and Grotech Ventures, with participation from Correlation Ventures, Point B Capital and the new venture outfit Service Provider Capital. The company has raised $4.6 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Ele.me, a 6.5-year-old, Shanghai, China-based food delivery service, has raised $350 million in Series E funding from CITIC, Tencent Holdings,JD.com, Dianping.com, and Sequoia Capital. Tencent, which owns stakes in both JD.com and Dianping.com, looks to be playing catch-up with this deal, suggests TechCrunch, which notes that its biggest rivals, Alibaba and Baidu, already have investments in food delivery services (Meituan and Nuomi, respectively).

EnGene, a 15-year-old, Montreal-based company that’s been developing a mucosal immunotherapy platform to deliver genes to cells lining the gastrointestinal tract, has raised $10.8 million in Series B funding led by Forbion Capital Partners, with participation from new investors Pharmstandard International and Quebec’s Fonds de solidarité FTQ. Earlier backer Lumira Capital also participated in the round. The company has raised at least $31.2 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Fuse, a 3.5-year-old, Oslo, Norway-based mobile app development platform, has raised $2.8 million in new funding led by Northzone. The company, which recently opened an office in Palo Alto, Ca., has now raised $7 million altogether, it says.

MoFang, a two-year-old, Beijing, China-based mobile game media platform, has raised RMB100 million ($16 million) in Series A funding led by Shenzhen Capital Group, reports China Money Network. Earlier backer Matrix Partners also joined the round.

Research Now, an 11-year-old, Plano, Tx.-based digital data collection provider, has a new shareholder in Court Square Capital Partners, after it acquired its stake from shareholders TA Associates, Polaris Partners, and Sutter Hill Ventures. More here.

Roadie, a nine-month-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based startup whose mobile app helps connect people who have stuff to ship with neighbors and other drivers already heading in that direction, has raised $10 million from investors, including UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, TomorrowVentures, and individual investors, including Warren Stephens, chairman and CEO of the boutique investment bank Stephens, and Square co-founder Jim Mckelvey. Roadie was founded by Marc Gorlin, who also cofounded the six-year-old online lending company Kabbage.

Scout RFP , a two-year-old, Cleveland, Oh.-based cloud-based project-bidding platform, has raised $2.75 million in seed funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Google Ventures, Zapis Capital, and numerous angel investors, including former LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy.

Starcounter, an 8.5-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based company behind a high performance database for real-time transactional applications, has raised $1.8 million in funding, most of it from Industrifonden.

USGI Medical, a 14-year-old, San Clemente, Ca.-based company that’s developing incision-less procedures for weight loss, has raised more than $19.5 million in equity and debt. Earlier, unnamed investors contributed the equity portion of the financing. Meanwhile, GE Capital and Healthcare Financial Services provided the company with a senior secured debt facility, with East West Bank participating as a syndicate partner.

Xenex Disinfection Services, a six-year-old, San Antonio, Tx.-based maker of robotic pesticide devices designed to kill germs in hospitals, has raised $25 million in new funding from new investor Brandon Point Industries, along with earlier backers Battery Ventures, Targeted Technology Fund, and RK Ventures. The company has raised $36.3 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

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New Funds

A new secondary player has officially emerged on the scene: New York-based Manhattan Venture Partners, a merchant bank “focused on the emerging secondary market for late-stage private technology companies.” More here.

Partech Ventures, the 33-year-old, Paris-based venture firm, has closed its newest fund with 200 million euros ($224 million), from LPs that include the state-owned bank BPI France; insurers CNP Assurances and AG2R La Mondiale; the French IT services group Ingenico; the carmakerRenault; and Europe’s largest retailer, Carrefour. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

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IPOs

Zosano Pharma, a 8.5-year-old, Fremont, Ca.-based maker of transdermal delivery patches that treat severe osteoporosis, has increased the proposed size of its offering. According to a filing yesterday, the company now plans to raise $47 million via 4.3 million shares priced at between $10 and $12, up from 3 million shares at the same range. Zosano first filed to raise $70 million at a $139 million market cap last July but postponed the offering amid a then-shaky market. The company’s biggest outside shareholders include BioMed Realty, which owns 45.5 percent of the company; and New Enterprise Associates, which owns 38.8 percent.

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Exits

American Healthcare Lending, a Sandy, Ut.-based network that gives doctors and other healthcare providers the ability to offer loans to patients for elective medical procedures at their offices, has been acquired by the online lending company Prosper Marketplace for $21 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Code School, a four-year-old, Orlando, Fl.-based online learning platform that teaches programming and web design skills, has been acquired by the online IT training company Pluralsight for $36 million. More on Code School, which appears to have been bootstrapped, here. And here, more on its acquisition in Wired.

Pixelapse, a four-year-old, Palo Alto-based startup that offers version control and other collaboration tools for designers, has been acquired by cloud storage company Dropbox for undisclosed terms. Pixelapse had been incubated by Y Combinator and StartX and had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding, including from Spark Capital.

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People

New York Times reporter Nick Bilton is at work on a book about the black-market bazaar Silk Road, and 20th Century Fox has already acquired the rights to a film based on it. Bilton’s last book, the best-seller “Hatching Twitter,” was published in 2013.

Osuke Honda, who joined DCM Ventures in 2007, has been promoted to general partner at the firm. Honda was among the earlier investors in the mobile social network Gree. StrictlyVC talked with Honda last fall about the evolving startup scene in Japan.

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Job Listings

Venture-backed Coinbase, which opened the first licensed bitcoin exchange in the U.S. yesterday, is looking to hire a VP of finance. The job is in San Francisco.

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Essential Reads

Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, will cut its massive workforce, as the Apple supplier faces declining revenue growth and rising wages in China.

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Detours

The fight to save Japan’s young shut-ins.

Scenes from New York’s empty, snowy streets.

The newest chapter of Deflategate has the NFL interviewing a locker room attendant who allegedly took footballs “to another area on the way to the field” before the start of the game.

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Retail Therapy

Rent (or rent out) an unused suite at your favorite NBA, NFL, or NHL stadium.

Power up your phone, with your wallet.