Good Monday morning, everyone!

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Top News in the A.M.

What jurors in the Apple-Samsung case will hear today instead of closing arguments.

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Bigcommerce Primes Itself for a Big Round

Bigcommerce, a five-year-old, Austin-based start-up whose software-as-a-service helps more than 55,000 companies create and manage their online stores, is in the market for more funding, co-founder and CEO Mitchell Harper suggested in a wide-ranging conversation with StrictlyVC last week.

The company — which charges its customers a flat rate of between $24 per month, all the way up to $1,000 per month for “white glove service” — raised $40 million last July from Revolution, the investment firm cofounded by AOL cofounder Steve Case. At the time, Case told me that neither BigCommerce nor its previous investors, including General Catalyst Partners and Floodgate, were looking for such a big injection of fresh capital. The company, which has raised $75 million altogether, is operating in a space that has since heated up considerably, though.

Most notably, Shopify, an eight-year-old, Ottawa-based startup with which BigCommerce competes most directly, raised $100 million in December led by OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners. The funding is helping Shopify in its ongoing expansion from online commerce into the brick-and-mortar world, where it has launched a point-of-sale version of its software that’s optimized to run on tablets like the iPad. (Shopify has raised $122 million altogether.)

In our conversation, Harper wasn’t specific about whether BigCommerce’s strategy going forward will involve the same path. But he did say the company might soon begin acquiring its way into new markets.

“Most decisions have been build versus buy or partner,” he said, “but that could change. Small business use a lot of tools, from email marketing to social media to inventory; there are probably 30 or 40 adjacent products” that the company could explore. While it doesn’t have specific plans to launch into any of them, he added that in “three months that could change, the market is moving so quickly.”

In the meantime, BigCommerce, whose revenue is currently growing 20 60 percent year over year, appears to be stepping on the gas. For example, the company, which has offices in Austin and Sydney, is opening an office in San Francisco, too, and earlier this month used some guerrilla tactics to staff it, including descending on engineers at tech bus stops that fill with Facebook, Google, and Yahoo employees. (Using both recruiters and its own engineers to hand out invitations to a happy hour, BigCommerce managed to engage with roughly 1,000 people and snag about a dozen, Harper says.)

Harper noted that no new funding announcement is imminent, but that because capital right now is “cheap,” a new round is “definitely not off the table at the moment. It depends on the valuation, the dilution, the potential upside that an investor can bring . . . and whether they share the same vision that we do.”

He added that that while the 320-employee company has been “optimizing for growth” and isn’t profitable as a result, it could be “very profitable” if management were focused instead on getting the company into the black.

New Fundings

Big Health, a five-year-old, London-based digital health start-up, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures andForward Partners. The company tracks data to create highly personalized behavioral medicine programs; its first product, Sleepio, targets customers with sleeping issues.

Blue Apron, a two-year-old, New York-based grocery delivery service company, is raising $50 million in Series C funding led by Stripes Group, according to TechCrunch. To date, Blue Apron has raised a total of $8 million, according to CrunchBase, with two earlier rounds led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Datumate, a two-year-old, Nazareth, Israel-based image-mapping software maker whose technology aims to reduce the time civil engineers and architects spend taking technical measurements for projects, has raised $5 million in funding by Battery Ventures. Earlier investor Al-Bawader, an Israel-based investment firm, also participated in the round.

Fundrise, a two-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based company that helps any resident (and not just accredited investors) invest in properties in their local market, has raised $20.5 million, according to an SEC filingthat shows a target of $32.8 million. The company had previously raised a $2 million seed round, including from WestMill Capital, according to Crunchbase.

InsideSales.com, a 10-year-old, Provo, Ut.-based company whose predictive analytics software aims to help salespeople close deals, has raised $100 million at a valuation of nearly $1 billion, according to Venture Capital Dispatch. Polaris Partners led the round — contributing “sizably more than anyone else,” it says in the story — joined by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which chipped in $25 million from its $1 billion digital growth fund. InsideSales has raised $143 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

OurCrowd, a 1.5-year-old, Jerusalem, Israeli-based equity crowdfunding platform for accredited investors, has raised $25 million in Series B funding from unnamed investors.

Paddle8, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based virtual auction house focused on fine art, has raised $7 million in debt, according to an SEC filing that shows the company is looking to raise $18 million in debt. The company has raised $10 million in equity to date, including from Mousse Partners, Founder Collective, the Mellon Family, Redline Capital Management,Haystack, and artist Damien Hirst.

SI-BONE, a six-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based medical device company that’s focused on lower back pain and making surgery for the sacroiliac joint minimally invasive, has closed a $33 million round of funding led by OrbiMed and Novo A/S. Earlier investors Skyline Ventures andMontreux Equity Partners also participated.

SocialFlow, a five-year-old, New York-based social media platform that helps brands engage with existing and potential customers, has raised $2.4 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing that lists a target of $2.6 million. SocialFlow had previously raised $24.8 million, shows Crunchbase, including from AOL Ventures, Fairhaven Capital Partners, RRE Ventures, SV Angel and Betaworks.

Streem, a nearly two-year-old, San Francisco-based cloud storage startup, has raised $875,000 in seed funding, including from Y Combinator, 500 Startups, IronFire Capital, Arbor Ventures, Start Fund, and numerous angel investors, according to TechCrunch.

Tiny Speck, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based company behind a real-time messaging, archiving and search tool called Slack, has raised a fresh $42.75 million in Series C funding led by Social+Capital Partnership. Other participants in the round included Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, which had funded an earlier iteration of Tiny Speck that had focused all of its efforts on a multiplayer game called “Glitch.” The company released an early version of the Slack app last summer and launched it officially in February. Tiny Speck had raised $17.2 million previously.

Tradier, a 1.5-year-old, Charlotte, N.C.-based brokerage platform and trading and analytics application hosting environment, has raised $3 million in new funding from its founders and Devonshire Investors, which is the private investment arm of Fidelity Investments’ owners, the Johnson family.

Verdezyne, a nine-year-old, Carlsbad, Ca.-based industrial biotechnology company focused on producing renewable chemicals, has raised $48 million led by the Malaysian multinational conglomerate Sime Darby Berhad. Earlier investors in Verdezyne include BP Alternative Energy Ventures, DSM Venturing B.V., OVP Venture Partners, and Monitor Ventures.

Voluntis, a 13-year-old, Suresnes, France-based healthcare software company that specializes in Patient Relationship Management (PRM), has raised $29 million in Series D financing co-led by Bpifrance Large Venture and Innovation Capital. Earlier investors, including CapDecisif Management, CM-CIC Capital Innovation and Sham, also participated in the round.

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New Funds

Hamilton Lane, the Bala Cynwyd, Pa.-based fund-of-funds firm, has closed its newest vehicle with $426.8 million. It says its original target was $400 million.

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IPOs

Three newly public companies had a rough first day on the stock market Friday, joining the broader market sell-off. Shares of stent maker Lombard Medical closed down 9.1 percent. Quotient, a blood test developer, also saw its shares sink 6.9 percent. And app maker Viggle dropped the most at 28 percent. Viggle’s biggest venture backers include Adage Capital Management, which owned 6.5 percent of the company heading into its IPO; DAG Ventures, which owned 9.2 percent; Accel Partners, which owned 6.4 percent; and Frazier Technology Ventures, which owned 6.2 percent. Quotient’s majority shareholder is the healthcare venture firm Galen Partners, which has a 51 percent stake in the company. And Lombard’s biggest shareholders include Invesco, which owned 39 percent going into its IPO; Abingworth, which owned 17.8; Fidelity, which owned 9.5; and Life Sciences Partners, which owned 5.7 percent. USA Today has more here.

Radius Health, an 11-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company that tried to go public in 2012 but withdrew its application, is again trying to go public in an effort to raise $92 million from investors. Radius Health, originally called Nuvios, makes a bone-density-boosting drug that’s in the middle of a Phase III study. Xconomy had written about some of the company’s earlier woes, including turnover at the top, in December. Its shareholders include MPM Capital, The Wellcome Trust, HealthCare Ventures, Saints Capital, and BB Biotech Ventures.

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People

Over the weekend, the board of RadiumOne, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based venture-backed ad tech company, voted to remove its founder, Gurbaskh Chahal, from his job as CEO after he was convicted of two misdemeanors for domestic violence and battery. Its official statement is here. Chahal has posted his reaction to his firing here. (Disclosure: A family member of StrictlyVC is among RadiumOne’s roughly 300 employees, so you’ll have to go elsewhere for more extensive coverage of this one!)

Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, who cofounded the Chinese e-commerce giantAlibaba, have set up philanthropic trusts funded by share options that represent about 2 percent of the Alibaba’s current equity. In an interview with the WSJ, Ma talked of his growing alarm at lung and liver cancers that have impacted his family, friends, and colleagues, saying he believes environmental pollution is the cause. “Somebody has to do something,” he added. The Journal says the trusts highlight what many see as the dawn of a new era of giving among China’s freshly minted billionaires.

Elon Musk‘s SpaceX plans to sue the U.S. Air Force to challenge a $7.2 billion contract awarded to a company called United Launch Alliance, Musk said at a news conference on Friday. Musk alleges the United Launch Alliance contract is costing taxpayers “billions of dollars, for no reason” as SpaceX could provide launch rockets far more inexpensively.

San Francisco Magazine interviews tech reporter and entrepreneur Kara Swisher, who calls Google, where her wife, Meghan Smith, is a VP, “pretty dangerous and thuggish.” Asked how Smith feels about her assessment, Swisher says, hilariously: “She doesn’t care. She’s, like, a computer genius. She doesn’t pay attention. She’s not a political person, she’s not a corporate person—she’s a techie. And she has a different opinion of Google: She thinks it’s all daffodils and sunshine and that they’re helping the world—like most of these idiot techies. I gotta listen to that sh_t all day. But they believe it. So whatever.”

Time released its annual list of “the 100 most influential people,” and asked big-league influencers to write about the winners. Peter Thielwrites glowingly of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square fame, meanwhile gushes about Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, calling them “fresh, a little raw and just plain cool.” In a twist, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick gets called “super rad” not by another tech celebrity but by actor Neil Patrick Harris. The broader list might be worth checking out(?).

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Job Listings

Lending Club is looking for a VP of corporate development. The job is in San Francisco.

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Happenings

ThingsCon, a two-day conference about the future of the hardware business, gets underway in Berlin this Friday.

TechCrunch Disprupt kicks off one week from now in New York. Here‘s the agenda.

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Data

According to the analytics company RJMetrics, the top 10 startup cities in the U.S., in descending order, are 1.) San Francisco 2.) New York 3.) Seattle 4.) Washington, D.C. 5.) Austin 6.) Boston 7.) Chicago 8.) Mountain View, Calif. 9.) Palo Alto, Calif., and 10.) Denver. You can learn more about RJMetrics’s methodology, along with other highlights from its startup report, here.

China-based venture firms raised $1.07 billion in the first quarter of this year, 35 percent more than in the first quarter of 2013, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. But only six firms managed to close new funds in the first three months of the year, a meager number compared to previous quarters. The WSJ has more here.

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Essential Reads

Turning New York into a hotbed of innovation has been harder than people anticipated, reports Jenna Wortham of the New York Times. “The most harmful thing that limits a company in New York is that they are not part of the milieu of Silicon Valley,” Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, tells her. Being in the San Francisco area, he said, helps start-up founders know the right people to pick up on bits of gossip about new product releases or venture financing rounds.

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Detours

Why the Internet fetishizes old photos.

New York City in 17 syllables.

A three-bedroom, three-bath penthouse at the Four Seasons in San Francisco just hit the market for $11 million, or a stunning, $3,056 per square foot. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and husband Zachary Bogue reportedly own a penthouse at the same Four Seasons, while other luminaries have come and gone, including PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who looks to have sold his penthouse in 2005 for $6.5 million.

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Retail Therapy

Hooray — earphones that don’t fall out.

A table for you and your cats, at long last.

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Happy Thursday, everyone!

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Top News in the A.M.

Goodbye net neutrality; hello net discrimination? FCC Chair Thomas Wheeler has reportedly proposed a new rule that would permit broadband carriers to act as gatekeepers, charging different Web sites different prices to access customers through a “fast lane.”

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Roger Lee of Battery Ventures: This Ain’t No Bubble

Roger Lee has some specific ideas about what’s going on in the market these days. For example, the longtime general partner at Battery Ventures thinks the “entire enterprise stack is getting rewritten right now” and that there’s “a trillion dollars up for grabs.” One major driver of the trend, he notes, is the “consumerization of IT. Part of the success of Box and Dropbox and Zendesk is their embrace of consumer design. I’d guess that from day one, they had designers on their founding team, whereas if you looked at an enterprise software company ten years ago, a designer was, like, your 55th employee.”

Battery — which is currently investing a $900 million fund and writing checks that range from $500,000 to $60 million – also believes in doubling down when the opportunity calls for it. For example, Battery made big bets on both on Angie’s List, the site for local service providers, and Groupon, the daily deals phenomenon, that paid of “very, very well,” for the firm, says Lee. (Battery invested $50 million in Angie’s List and $60 million in Groupon, both of which are now publicly traded.)

Maybe it’s no wonder then that Lee thinks the recent string of outsize bets by firms like T. Rowe Price and Tiger Global Management – bets that have everyone from reporters to hedge fund manager David Einhorn fretting about a second tech bubble – are “actually pretty rational.” We talked about it last week over coffee in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood.

Battery has a long history of investing in growth-stage companies. What do you make of the flood of mutual fund and other late-stage money pouring into the industry? Good? Bad?

I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but I’m not surprised. The markets are so much bigger now, and the opportunity to create multibillion dollar companies much more present today than historically.

When you’ve seen these huge funding rounds in the past, people have laughed at them. Think of Yuri Milner’s investment in Facebook six or seven years ago at a $10 billion valuation. People thought he was crazy. When we did the Groupon investment, people thought it was crazy. Well, lo and behold, both turned out to be great investments.

Another good example: When T. Rowe Price [first] invested in Twitter [in 2009], that was probably a relatively risky investment for it to make because Twitter was still a relatively immature company. But if you look at where Twitter is today, it’s probably a 25 or 30x return [for T. Rowe] and makes [its New Horizons’s fund manager] Henry Ellenbogen look incredibly smart that he was so early.

It’s important for people to recognize that the opportunities in these markets dwarf what has historically been available to investors. So it makes sense for pubic market investors– be it Tiger Global or someone else – to try and cherry pick which companies in an era 10 years ago would probably already be public and that, once they are [public], [will] have a chance to become multibillion dollar companies because they’re selling into markets measured in the billions.

What do you make of these shorter periods between fundings? Eventbrite, for example, raised two enormous rounds less than a year apart from the same investors.

Investors’ job is to allocate capital, and when they see a chance to allocate capital to a winner – to double down because they think the risk-adjusted return is better than their alternatives — it’s a very rational decision. So that’s what they do. They’re always looking at their portfolio and looking at the alternatives and saying, “We’ve got X amount of money to put to work. Where do we think we can generate the biggest return?” Sometimes they put a dollar in, they watch it for six or nine months, see that a company is doing great, then decide they want even more exposure to it. It’s the same way they operate in the public markets.

You have no concerns about the market?

I really focus on each company at a time. Is any one company overvalued relative to where it should be? That’s a very company specific discussion. In terms of the broader market, I could argue both sides frankly. With certain companies, the opportunities are so large that we’re underinvesting in them.

New Fundings

2Checkout, a 15-year-old, Columbus, Oh.-based payment services company, has closed a $60 million round of funding, led by Chicago Growth Partners and Trident Capital, with participation by management and strategic individuals. The company says it provides online-payment processing for more than 22,000 e-commerce businesses around the world.

Aerpio Therapeutics, a 2.5-year-old, Cincinnati, Oh.-based biopharmaceutical company focused on therapies for vascular diseases, has raised $22 million in funding led by OrbiMed. Earlier investors who also participated in the round included Novartis Venture Funds, Satter Investment Management, Kearny Venture Partners, Venture Investors,Triathlon Medical Ventures and Athenian Venture Partners. The company has raised $63 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Avalanche Biotechnologies, a 7.5-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on retinal disorders like age-related macular degeneration, has raised $55 million in Series B financing led by Venrock. Other participants in the round included Deerfield, Adage Capital Management, Redmile Group, Rock Springs Capital, Sabby Capital, an affiliate of Cowen & Company, and two undisclosed blue chip health care funds.

BioDatomics, a 3.5-year-old, Bethesda, Ma.-based bioinformatics and analysis software and services company, has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health, along with an undisclosed amount of funding from the venture firm of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.

Codasip, a 7.5-year-old, Brno, Czech Republic-based company behind a new application-specific processor design tool, has raised a $2.8 million round of funding led by the regional firm Credo Ventures. Individual investors, including Codasip’s co-founders, contributed $1.3 million of the overall round.

Connectivity, a two-year-old, L.A.-based company whose customer intelligence software aims to help businesses identify their best customers (and strongest competitors), has raised $6.35 million in Series A funding led by Greycroft Partners. Other participants in the round included Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners,TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.

CorvisaCloud, a three-year-old, Milwaukee, Wi.-based cloud-based contact center company, has raised $30 million in funding from its publicly traded parent company, Novation Companies.

Kala Pharmaceuticals, a 4.5-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based biotechnology company that’s developing drugs to treat eye conditions, has raised $22.5 million in Series B financing led by new investor Ysios Capital. The round also included a new, unnamed strategic investor and earlier investors Crown Venture Fund, Lux Capital, Polaris Partners and Third Rock Ventures. The company has raised $46.2 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

InVisage Technologies, a 7.5-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based fabless semiconductor company the claims to improve the quality of pictures taken with mobile phone cameras, has raised $18 million from GGV Capital, Nokia Growth Partners, RockPort Capital, InterWest Partners, Intel Capital and OnPoint Technologies. The company says it has raised $100 million altogether.

Quibb, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose service helps industry professionals share and discuss relevant news stories, has raised $650,000 in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Betaworks,Lightbank, and angel investors. The company says it is also looking to raise an additional $100,000 via Alphaworks, a new crowdfunding platform created by Betaworks earlier this year.

Placester, a 3.5-year-old, Boston, Ma.-based real estate advertising network, has raised $5.5 million in Series A fundng led by Romulus Capital, with participation from earlier investors, including Angel Street Capital. Placester has raised $8.9 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

Recon Instruments, a six-year-old Vancouver-based startup behind an increasingly popular smart glasses platform that’s largely used by athletes, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Motorola Solutions Venture Capital. (Worth noting: the company filed a Form D, disclosing a $7 million investment from unnamed investors, last month.)

Renewable Funding, a 5.5-year-old, Oakland, Ca.-based clean energy finance company, has raised $20 million in funding led by Prelude Ventures, Angeleno Group and Apollo Investment Corp., with participation from NGEN Partners and Claremont Creek Ventures.

ShopKeep, a 5.5-year-old, New York-based point-of-sale technology company, has raised a $25 million Series C round led by Thayer Street Partners. Earlier backers also joined the round, including Canaan Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, TTV Capital, Contour Venture Partners and individual angel investors. The WSJ has much more on the company here.

Synack, a 20-month-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based company that acts as a middleman between companies and the researchers they bring in to test their Web applications for security flaws, has raised $7.5 million in funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Other participants in the round — which brings Synack’s funding to $9 million — included Google Ventures, Allegis Capital, and Greylock Partners.

Tubular Labs, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based online video marketing platform, has raised $11 million in Series B funding led by Canaan Partners. Earlier investors, including FirstMark Capital and Lerer Ventures, also participated. The company has raised $15.2 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Wish, an 18-month-old, San Francisco-based mobile commerce platform founded by Google and Yahoo alums Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang, have raised $19 million in fresh funding led by GGV Capital and Formation8. Existing seed investors also participated, including Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

Workforce Software, a 15-year-old, Livonia, Mi.-based workforce management software company that targets customers with complex policies and compliance concerns, has sold a majority equity position in its business to Insight Venture Partners for an undisclosed amount of funding.

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New Funds

Artiman Ventures, a 14-year-old, East Palo Alto, Ca.-based venture firm, has begun raising its fifth fund, Artiman Ventures 2014, according to SEC filings first flagged by peHUB. The filing does not state a target for the new fund, which is being packaged with a second vehicle called Artiman Ventures Select 2014. Artiman, which has raised $385 million across its first four funds, says it prefers to fund startups at the “concept stage,” when founders are still refining their key ideas and concepts. The firm, which typically invests as little as $100,000 and as much as $10 million in its startups, most recently funded Crossbar, a Santa Clara, Ca.-based start-up that says it’s pioneering a new class of non-volatile resistive RAM memory technology.

Merus Capital, a 6.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based early-stage firm has raised a new, $43 million fund, reports the WSJ. Merus was founded by three former corporate development executives: Salman Ullah and Sean Dempsey of Google and Peter Hsing of Microsoft. The firm, which focuses on commerce, cloud, and mobile startups, most recently re-upped in the ad tech company AdRoll, raising a separate, $10 million, special opportunity fund in order to participate in a $70 million round that AdRoll announced earlier this week. Merus’s newest fund is slightly bigger than its last fund, which closed with $37.5 million.

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Exits

Grand St., a year-old, New York-based startup that sells indie electronics online, has been acquired by Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade items, for less than $10 million in cash and stock, reports Re/code. Grand St. had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from First Round Capital,Betaworks, Quotidian Ventures, Mesa+, and angel investors.

Quantason, a 4.5-year-old, Philadelphia-based company that has been building a platform technology for diagnostic imaging and active screening, including to detect breast cancer, has filed for Chapter 11 protection,reports VentureWire. In court papers, Quantason said its “precarious financial position” drove its decision to seek a quick sale in bankruptcy. The company had raised $4.6 million from backers, including individual investors Martin Sarafa, Carolyn Bivens, Michael DiGregorio, Peter Seidel, and Jeffrey LeSage.

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People

Facebook CFO David Ebersman is stepping down from the job on June 1, Facebook announced as part of its first-quarter earnings statement yesterday. Ebersman, who took the company public and has overseen its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp (and is managing its acquisition of Oculus VR), is expected to move back into the healthcare space, sources tell Re/code. Ebersman had joined Facebook from Genentech, where he’d long been CFO.

Zynga founder Mark Pincus is formally dropping any operational duties at the 6.5-year-old social gaming company, he disclosed publicly yesterday. As part of the change, he’s giving up his title as chief product officer. Ultimately, he tells Re/code, a “ship is better with one captain putting a hand on the wheel.”

Felix Salmon, a popular financial columnist for Reuters (earlier this week, he wrote a widely read piece asserting that “Silicon Valley is gripped by a mass delusion, compounded by a deep ‘fake it til you make it’ attitude toward success”) is leaving the media giant. Salmon is joining the cable network Fusion for a role that he says will allow him to “communicate in the ways that people are going to consume information in the future. Which is not 1,500-word blocks of text.” The New York Times has more here.

Stanford graduate Douglas Tarlow is in a heap of trouble, after trying to extort money from billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. According to the Smoking Gun, Tarlow, who dated Khosla’s daughter Nina for two years, threatened to distribute private pictures of her if he wasn’t paid to suppress them, even sending the pictures to her mother with the message: “[I]t seems you’re going to be the mother of the next Paris Hilton,” according to Smoking Gun’s report. In another email, he wrote that, “Everything is going to reddit. From there, it will be impossible to remove from the internet forever.” FBI agents arrested 27-year-old Tarlow last week in connection with the alleged extortion plot. He’s scheduled for a U.S. District Court preliminary hearing today.

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Job Listings

The Chinese conglomerate Fosun Group is looking for a managing director to develop its Africa-focused investment business.

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Happenings

TechDay NYC kicks off today; it could be a mob scene but it might be worth swinging by as 450(!) startups are expected to be on hand.

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Data

More Baby Boomers are embracing smartphones. According to Nielsen data, as of the first quarter of this year, a majority of Americans of all age groups own smartphones for the first time, including 51 percent of adults over the age of 55. (That number is up 10 percent from the first quarter of last year.) More here.

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Essential Reads

The rise of the mobile addict.

And now we know: Facebook had a great first quarter.

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Detours

Michael Pollan on Wall Street’s powerful influence over what we eat.

The future of luxury: Avoiding people.

Basic etiquette tips for New Yorkers.

“Action Movie Kid.”

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Retail Therapy

You may not be the Most Interesting Man in the World, but you can look the part with one of these bags. H/T: InsideHook.

Modern Sprout windowsill planters, because not everyone has a green thumb. (Ask our plants.)

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Good morning, everyone! It looks like roughly 20 percent of you didn’t receive yesterday’s email. (Sorry. We’ve no clue what happened.) If you’d like to check out the entire newsletter, it’s here. If you’d prefer to read yesterday’s column alone, “Inside Mysterious Mithril Capital,” it’s here.

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Top News in the A.M.

With today’s Apple earnings expected to be ho-hum, does the company have a surprise up its sleeve?

Meet the One, OnePlus‘s $299 Nexus killer.

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Upstart Takes a Turn Into a Bigger Market

Two years ago, Upstart, a two-year-old, Palo Alto-based company debuted a newfangled funding platform that pairs accredited investors with students or recent graduates who are looking to finance their ideas. The idea, essentially: investors lend their own capital against the future earnings of the borrower, capital that is expected to repaid with interest within 10 years.

Though the peer-to-peer lending aspect isn’t novel, the way that Upstart assesses risk, which is tied directly to a borrower’s academic credentials, seemed to be.

Now, says Upstart, it’s using similar analysis to roll out a new and surprisingly old-fashioned product: three-year, $25,000 loans which will be assigned to people based not on their future earnings potential but their basic employability.

It’s a natural fit for the company. Not only is Upstart planning to target people without much work or credit history (a demographic it knows well), but it will be again be assessing those individuals’ risk profiles based on where they went to school and what they studied while there.

A Harvard graduate who majored in business, for example, might be assigned an annual percentage rate, or APR, of 6.5 percent, while someone who studied education at Bowling Green State University might be assigned an APR as high as 20 percent. (Those are lowest and highest ends of the loans’ range, respectively.)

The move isn’t a pivot, says CEO Dave Girouard, who says the business of funding future earnings is strong, with 30 percent more “Upstarts” on and backers on the company’s lending platform as last year.

Still, Girouard sounds even more enthusiastic in describing the market opportunity for traditional loans. By his account, most banks won’t touch anyone without a credit or employment background and neither will alternatives like LendingClub and Prosper, which creates an opening for Upstart.

Its window is limited. Girouard notes that once people drift into their 30s and 40s and gain employment histories that can be assessed by a broader spectrum of lenders, Upstart loses its advantages as an underwriter.

But that still leaves 20 million potential borrowers in the U.S. alone, and “there are a lot of places we could take this over time in terms of underwriting,” he adds.

Upstart has raised $7.6 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, First Round Capital, and Google Ventures, among others. It hasn’t raised any capital in the last year, though. Girouard says he expects to raise another round in the “second half of this year.”

New Fundings

Declara, a 1.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based social learning platform that connects large numbers of people to massive amounts of content, has raised $16 million in Series A financing led by GSV Capital, with Data Collective, Founders Fund and Catamount Ventures joining the round.

Delivery Hero, a 3.5-year-old, Berlin-based online food delivery service, has raised $85 million in Series F funding led by an undisclosed investor that TechCrunch hears is Luxor Capital Group. The company has now raised roughly $285 million to date, including from Insight Venture Partners, Kite Ventures, Phenomen Ventures, Ru-net, Kreos Capital,Team Europe, WestTech Ventures, Point Nine and Tengelmann Ventures.

Everplans, a 1.5-year-old, New York-based company whose online platform is designed to help users create, securely store, and share important documents like wills, life insurance, and health information, has raised $2.07 million in a second round of seed funding. Participants include Scout Ventures, along with individual investors David McCabe and Mark Seelig. The company has raised roughly $3.45 million to date.

Guardant Health, a year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company whose blood test for cancer aims to replace standard tissue biopsies, has raised $30 million led by Khosla Ventures, which was joined in the round by earlier investor Sequoia Capital and new investor Pejman Mar Ventures. To date, the company has raised at least $40 million, shows Crunchbase.

HackSurfer, a 1.5-year-old, Glenelg, Md.-based data analytics company focused on cybercrime, has raised $3.5 million in funding led by Boulder Ventures and CNF Investments.

Piqora, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based company that makes an enterprise level marketing and analytics suite, has raised $7.7 million in Series A funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Other participants in the round included Freestyle Capital, Baseline Ventures , Lazerow Ventures, Firebolt Ventures and Altos Ventures. The company has now raised $11 million altogether.

Principia Biopharma, a 5.5-year-old, South San Francisco-based company that’s developing advanced treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases, has raised $50 million in new funding led bySofinnova Ventures. All of the company’s previous investors also participated in the funding, including Morgenthaler Ventures, New Leaf Venture Partners, OrbiMed, SR One and Mission Bay Capital.

Pure Storage, the 4.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based enterprise storage company, has raised $225 million in fresh funding led by previous institutional investors, including T. Rowe Price and Tiger Global, along with new investor Wellington Management. Earlier investors Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Sutter Hill Venturesalso participated in the round, which brings the company’s total capital raised to date to $470 million. Re/code has much more on the funding here.

Salesvue, a seven-year-old, Round Rock, Tex.-based mobile payment software company that targets mobile workers needing to process different types of payments, has raised $3 million led by Cultivation Capital, which was joined by a group of angel investors. The company has raised at least one, $600,000, round of funding prior, shows Crunchbase.

Sentinel Labs, a year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based cybersecurity startup, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led (in a twist) by late-stage investor Tiger Global Management. The company has now raised $14.5 million altogether, including from Granite Hill Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Data Collective, and UpWest Labs.

Weebly, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based consumer service that lets people create a website, blog or online store, has raised $35 million in new funding in a round that values the company at $455 million, says the WSJ. The Series C round was led by Chinese Internet giant Tencent and Sequoia Capital.

WellCentive, a nine-year-old, Roswell, Ga.-based company that makes chronic disease management and health information exchange systems, has raised a round of growth equity led by Summit Partners. Noro-Moseley Partners and Harbert Venture Partners also participated in the rund.

Yerdle, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based sharing-and-bartering site, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from new investorDBL Investors, which joined earlier investors the Westly Group, Claremont Creek, Prelude and Mindful Investors in the round. Yerdle had raised $500,000 in seed funding led by the Westly Group last summer.

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New Funds

Chinese conglomerate Fosun International has launched a venture arm in Silicon Valley with up to $100 million to invest in companies that are looking to expand into China, according to the WSJ. Fosun Chairman Guo Guangchang says that Fosun is interested, above all, in investments related to smartphones and the mobile Internet, and that the money will be invested through Kinzon Capital, a venture firm in which Fosun is the sole limited partner.

Lifeline Ventures, an early-stage venture firm that’s based in Helsinki and backed the games phenom Supercell in its earliest days, has formed a new, $21 million investment vehicle with several members of Supercell, including its chief executive, Ikka Paananen, who is the single biggest investor in the new pool. The investment vehicle is a firm, not a venture capital fund with a fixed investment period and expiration date when its investments are liquidated, reports the WSJ. Its focus will be on startups from Finland and neighboring countries like Estonia and Sweden.

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Exits

Stipple, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based image-tagging advertising startup, is shutting down, the company tells Venture Capital Dispatch. “Like many companies we got into the Series A crunch and we weren’t able to raise more money,” said the company’s founder and CEO, Ray Flemings. VentureWire records show the 14-person company had raised $10 million from investors, including Floodgate, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,Thomvest Ventures, Quest Partners, and singer Justin Timberlake.

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People

Sam Altman, the new president of Y Combinator, announced some new changes to the Mountain View, Ca.-based program yesterday. Most significantly, he said that Y Combinator will now invest $120,000 in each startup — up from about the $97,000 that startups were being given in cash and a convertible note — because of the increased cost of living in the Bay Area. Altman is also doing away with Y Combinator’s formal arrangements with venture firms, which have partnered with the firm in recent years to get closer to its startups. (Most recently, that group has included Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Maverick Capitaland Khosla Ventures.) Altman cited signaling risk as the driver.

Pavel Durov, the ousted founder of VKontakte, Russia’s top social network with over 100 million users, says he’s on to the next and “likely to start building a mobile social network this year,” he tells TechCrunch. Answering questions via email, he added, “I’m out of Russia and have no plans to go back . . . Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment.”

Hedge-fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital says we’re seeing another tech bubble in his fund’s newest quarterly investor letter. “Now there is a clear consensus that we are witnessing our second tech bubble in 15 years. What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand, and what might pop it,” he writes.

Pat Kinsel has been made a venture partner at Polaris Partners in Boston, after joining the firm last year as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Kinsel’s social discovery startup, Spindle, which was backed by Polaris, among others, was acquired last year by Twitter for an undisclosed amount. Earlier in his career, Kinsel was a product manager at Microsoft Startup Labs.

Brad Peters, who co-founded the business intelligence software company Birst in 2005, has stepped down from his role as CEO, reports WSJ. Peters transitions to the role of chairman and chief product officer, while former Jive Software sales executive Jay Larson becomes CEO. Birst and its backer, Sequoia Capital, say the maneuver will help the company shift into higher gear.

Uh oh. Even tech evangelist Robert Scoble is starting to feel self-conscious about wearing Google Glass, telling Valleywag that he only “sporadically” wears it these days.

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Job Listings

OpenView Venture Partners in Boston is looking to hire an associatewho will focus on the business-to-business software market.

Also, for StrictyVC’s junior PR peeps, Emergence Capital Partners is looking for a marketing associate. The job is in San Mateo, Ca.

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Data

You aren’t imagining things; the periods between investment rounds is shrinking, including between Series A and B rounds, says CB Insights.

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Essential Reads

The Supreme Court signaled on Tuesday that it was struggling with two conflicting impulses in considering a request from television broadcasters to shut down Aereo, the Internet start-up they say threatens the economic viability of their businesses.

If a bubble bursts in Palo Alto, does it make a sound?

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Detours

The ways food tricks our brains.

The best Brian Williams mash-up ever.

You still can’t get new HBO shows, like this season’s “Game of Thrones”, without paying for TV. But starting in May, you’ll be able to get some of the premium cable channel’s older stuff online via an Amazon Prime subscription.

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Retail Therapy

Vegetable-flavored ice cream is headed to Japan. (As if the country hasn’t been through enough, Häagen-Dazs.)

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Good Tuesday morning, everyone, and happy Earth Day!

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Top News in the A.M.

Amazon sales take a hit in states with online tax, according to new research out of Ohio State University.

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Inside Mysterious Mithril Capital

One of the best-known things about Mithril Capital Management is that it is named after a fictional metal from J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy writings. Put another way, the 22-month-old investment firm, cofounded by influential investor Peter Thiel and his longtime colleague Ajay Royan, remains mostly a mystery, even to those in San Francisco, where it’s based.

That’s probably because local investors don’t see much of the firm, suggests Royan, sitting in a modern conference room at the firm’s well-appointed offices in the Presidio, where roughly a dozen people — principals to vice presidents who’ve worked for one of Thiel’s past companies — are trying to create a kind of modern-day Berkshire Hathaway.

More specifically, Mithril is assembling a highly concentrated portfolio of companies that most in Silicon Valley have never heard of, let alone would ever fund. (Think underwater robots in Toulouse, France, and a Boston-based technology company that’s enabling travelers to book train tickets the same way for every rail line.) It’s going long on these companies, too. When the firm raised $540 million for its debut fund, it turned not to institutional investors but “larger family endowments and sovereigns,” who agreed to let Royan and Thiel lock up their money for as long as 12 years. The pair, who personally contributed up to a fifth of the fund’s capital, told investors they wanted the option to wait out markets if necessary.

Of course, Berkshire Hathaway’s founder Warren Buffett famously doesn’t invest in technology. But Royan, who speaks in elegant paragraphs peppered with scholarly references, says that’s a product of timing. Tech was a “boom and bust” industry once, not a long-term bet. Today, he says, “If you ran the Warren Buffett gambit in 2014 de novo, you’d probably only be doing technology-driven investing, because that’s where you build [today’s] lasting franchises.”

StrictlyVC talked with Royan last week; here’s some of that chat, edited for length:

You were born in India, raised in Abu Dhabi and graduated from Yale – a degree in political economy in hand — by age 20. What did you want to do, and how did you wind up working alongside Peter Thiel?

I wanted to be an industrial designer; I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I became aware of Peter through mutual friends around a friend’s wedding in New York. At the time, he’d recently sold PayPal to eBay and was thinking about [starting his hedge firm] Clarium [Capital Management] and our initial conversations were around my joining him as an entrepreneur in residence and starting a company.

And you did, eventually becoming a managing director at Clarium. Why leave to co-found Mithril with Thiel in 2012? What was the impetus?

With a hedge fund, people can invest whenever they want but they can also redeem whenever they want; it doesn’t matter how successful you are. And a big macro event like the 2008 financial crisis created a [system-wide need for liquidity] precisely when, because you have convictions and a view of the future, you wanted to invest more. That led to a conversation about permanent capital and longer-term investing.

What was the initial idea?

The initial idea was to have permanent capital, for it to almost be like a corporation that would go public 15 years down the line, and Peter and I would happily lock up our own capital for that period. [But] that turned out to be a very radical proposal. People were like, “Whoa.” [Laughs.] So we ended up defaulting to a more standard fund structure. But we asked for people to be thoughtful about how to make it a long term fund, so it has almost a six-year investment period [so we can wait out frothy markets if we want]. It’s also . . . almost a 12-year fund, so when we talk with entrepreneurs, we can say [that while] we started in 2012, we can have a view inside this balance sheet all the way to 2024.

You’ve made seven bets so far, in very disparate types of companies. One of them is C2F0, a collaborative cash flow optimization company in Kansas City that tries unlocking capital trapped in trade relationships. What kind of process led you to the company?

There was this question-asking process basically saying: Are there things other than credit underwriting that make sense in an economy where it’s hard to mobilize capital? Who’s thinking about this? And our team ran a screen and we looked at companies in the space; we looked to see if they were working with good investors and whether they had a technology DNA, because you do have a lot of financial people who think about stuff like this, but we didn’t want a transactional business. We didn’t want to do an exchange on Wall Street.

How many companies do you talk with, who at the firm ultimately decides what Mithril will fund, and what size checks is the firm writing?

I think we’ve [funded] less than 1 percent of what we’ve looked at in the last 20 months . . . The investment committee is Peter and myself [because] we want to be able to make decisions quickly . . . And we make investments between $20 million and $100 million-plus in size.

Have you written a $100 million check?

We have a $100 million exposure, including reserves, to a company, already [though I can’t say which]. It’s not in stealth, but we haven’t announced the investment at the company’s request. But we do have about 20 percent of the fund committed to a single name at this point.

(We’ll be running more of our interview with Royan this week, readers, so stay tuned.)

New Fundings

PX Labs, a 3.5-year-old, Washington, D.C.-area startup that’s helping businesses use wearable tech to boost worker productivity, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates. The WSJ has much more here.

Baoku, a 6.5-year-old, Beijing-based, corporate travel and expense management startup, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by China Broadband Capital and the telecom software firm Asiainfo-Linkage, reports Tnooz.

BigTeams, a 12-year-old, Warrenton, Va.-based company that creates sites for high school athletic programs, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Capital Sports Ventures, which was joined bySWaN & Legend Ventures and individual investors. (StrictlyVC introduced readers to Capital Sports Ventures a few months ago.)

CrowdRise, 3.5-year-old, Royal Oaks, Mi.-based crowdfunding platform for charitable causes, has raised $23 million in funding led by Union Square Ventures. Other participants in the round included Spark Capital, Index Ventures, RatPac Entertainment, Bezos Expeditions, and CAA Ventures and United Talent Agency‘s venture fund.

Electric Cloud, a 12-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based company that offers continuous delivery products, services and support to businesses, has raised $12 million in Series E round with participation from Siemens’ Venture Capital, US Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, RRE Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. As TechCrunch notes, the company had first announced its Series E back in September; at the time it had raised $8 million, but it opened up the round for additional funding afterward. Electric Cloud has raised roughly $25 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

ProNAi Therapeutics, a 10-year-old, Plymouth, Mich.-based life sciences company, has raised $59.5 million in Series D after clinical studies showed that its lead cancer-fighting drug, PNT2258, can help non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients. Vivo Capital led the round, which included other new investors Frazier Healthcare Ventures, OrbiMed Advisors, Adams Street Partners, RA Capital Management, Caxton Alternative Management, Hopen Life Science Ventures, Sectoral Asset Management, and Janus Capital Management. Earlier investors including Capital Midwest Fund, Apjohn Ventures Fund, Amherst Fund, and Grand Angels also participated in the financing round (which comes just three months after ProNai raised $12 million in Series C funding). The company has raised roughly $93 million to date.

SimpliSafe, a 7.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company that makes a portable, wireless home security system, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital following an intense bidding war, reports TechCrunch. The company was started by HBS graduates Chad and Eleanor Laurans after several of their friends’ homes were robbed; today Chad Laurans is the CEO, while Eleanor is a senior principal at the Parthenon Group.

Yik Yak, an eight-month-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based maker of an anonymous app akin to Whisper and Secret, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from investors, including Vaizra Investments, DCM, Azure Capital Partners, and other angels. TechCrunch has more here.

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New Funds

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a new $150 million for-profit program designed to provide venture capital to help small agricultural businesses in rural areas. Called the Rural Business Investment Company, its capital will be managed by Advantage Capital Partners, a New-Orleans-based firm with experience in investing in small rural businesses. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said examples of the types of businesses that could receive money include biotechnology companies and regional food hubs. The Associated Press has more here.

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IPOs

Ulthera, a 10-year-old, Mesa, Az.-based aesthetic device developer, has filed paperwork with the SEC to raise around $86 million in an IPO. Its biggest shareholders are Apposite Capital, which owns 33.8 percent of the company, and New Enterprise Associates, which owns 40.8 percent.

Shares of Weibo, the Chinese social network, are still priced attractively to investors, apparently. Last week, during the company’s first day of trading, it shares soared 19 percent; yesterday, on Weibo’s second day of trading, the shares closed up another 12 percent — about 38 percent above their IPO price, notes Forbes.

Dozens of Chinese companies have dropped plans to list in the mainland this year, owing to an opaque regulatory review that’s clouding what was touted as a banner year for new stock debuts, reports Reuters. In fact, there have been no new China listing applications published for the last eight weeks, it notes.

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Exits

DigitalPersona, a 17.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company that helps private and public companies manage their digital personas, including via biometrics, has been acquired by another biometric identity company, Cross Match, a Florida-based Francisco Partners portfolio company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Protenergy Natural Foods, a 10-year-old, Richmond Hill, Ontario-based private-label food maker, has been acquired for $154.3 million in cash by publicly traded TreeHouse Foods of Oakbrook, Il.

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People

Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, said yesterday that he had been fired and that the site is now “under the complete control” of two close allies of President Vladimir Putin. (You might recall that last month, Durov said he was quitting, then later said his resignation was an April Fool’s Day joke.) Buzzfeed has the latest here.

Foundry Group cofounder Brad Feld has moved to a new home and put his old home in El Dorado Springs, Co., on the market.

Serial entrepreneur Sean Parker is diving more deeply into politics, reports Politico, though his aspirations aren’t exactly clear yet. According to the outlet, Parker has met privately in recent months with some starkly different politicians, including both Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Parker is co-hosting a San Francisco fundraiser for state Attorney General Kamala Harris this week, along with Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Laurene Powell Jobs and investors Ron Conway, Marc Benioff and John Doerr. And Parker has hired Chris Garland, who recently stepped down as chief of staff to California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, to work in a political director role. More here.

Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, the well-funded open source code platform, is out the door in the wake of the company’s investigation into allegations of gender-based harassment by Julie Ann Horvath, a former software designer and developer at GitHub who tied her very public resignation to the behavior of both Preston-Werner and his wife, who is not an employee of GitHub. The company said it found no evidence of harassment by either but “evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment.” In his own post, Preston-Werner wrote that “I’ve made mistakes, and I am deeply sorry to anyone who was hurt by those mistakes.” He added that he wanted to be “very clear about one thing: neither my wife, Theresa, nor I have ever engaged in gender-based harassment or discrimination. The results of GitHub’s independent investigation unequivocally confirm this and we are prepared to fight any further false claims on this matter to the full extent of the law.”

If you liked “The Social Network,” you’re going to love “Crocodile in the Yangtze: The Alibaba Story,” a new film directed and produced by former Alibaba insider Porter Erisman and slated to be released worldwide on May 28. The story follows China’s first Internet entrepreneur and onetime English teacher Jack Ma as he grows Alibaba from an apartment startup into an Internet giant, challenging and beating eBay in China along the way. Investors Business Daily has more here on the award-winning documentary.

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Job Listings

Want to spend the summer in Israel? Intel Capital is looking to hire a student to support its investment managers in Israel and Europe.

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Essential Reads

AT&T, the nation’s second largest broadband provider and wireless company, is getting into the streaming business with a $500 million joint venture created to acquire, invest in and launch a Netflix-style video streaming service, reports GigaOm. The deal reportedly marks the first time a big U.S. ISP has decided to go over the top with a TV service.

Apple has been interviewing senior payments industry executives to push ahead on a plan to build an electronic payments business, according to Re/code sources.

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Detours

Actor Robin Williams is trying to sell his Napa Valley estate for $29.9 million. If you’re in the market for a 20,000-square-foot Tuscan villa on 650 acres, you can check it out here.

Nine tricks that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other top execs use to run meetings.

How to make your cat an Internet celebrity. (Related: cats wearing sunglasses. We find this last clip to be ridiculously funny, though admittedly, we’re very tired at the moment.)

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Retail Therapy

The Cherner Task Chair is back.

What BMW has in mind for its future 7-series sedan.

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It’s Monday and StrictlyVC is alone with the children’s Easter candy at last. I’m just kidding! (I’m not kidding.) Have a great morning, everyone, and welcome back.

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Top News in the A.M.

Wal-Mart is launching a money-transfer service this week that will allow customers to transfer money to and from more than 4,000 stores around the globe. The company has suggested it’s not trying to compete with other online payments providers (for now).

Nearly two-thirds of New York City apartments recently listed on Airbnbwere being offered in violation of the law, a new analysis by state authorities has found. More, says the study, middlemen are now very much part of the picture, with more than 200 of the offerings coming from just five “hosts.”

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Same Companies, Different Impressions

Venture capitalists are a lucky lot. Their work is prestigious, the pay can be exceptional, and they’re educated daily by smart entrepreneurs.

One job hazard, however, is missed opportunities. For example, many in Silicon Valley passed on Uber, one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet. (To his credit, Uber’s hard-charging CEO, Travis Kalanick, appears to have talked to everyone before the company raised its first round.)

You might wonder now how so savvy investors missed Uber’s potential, but the reality is that finding the Next New Thing is a lot harder than it looks. Indeed, last week at the “demo day” of the incubator program AngelPad in San Francisco, one could find many skilled investors making radically different calculations about the same companies.

PeopleGoal, a New York-based startup whose performance management software aims to wring the best out of employees, captured the attention of Josh Breinlinger, a venture partner at Sigma West who was among the earliest employees of the freelance marketplace ODesk. “That’s one of two that really stood out to me,” he said after the companies’ presentations.

Hiveary, an infrastructure monitoring platform, and TapFwd, a big data mobile ad platform, were more interesting to Niko Bonatsos, a principal at General Catalyst Partners who said he liked the technology behind both, as well as that both seemed like they were addressing “real problems in hot markets.” Of Hiveary, in particular, Bonatsos said, “If you talk to enterprise [software developers and IT departments who collaborate to speed the deployment of new applications and services], they will describe that they need a solution for this problem.”

Meanwhile, Paintzen, a marketplace for home and office painting, stood out the most to Manu Kumar, the founder of the seed-stage venture firm K9 Ventures, one of the earliest investors in the ride-share service Lyft. “It just feels like an industry that’s ripe for disruption,” said Kumar, who especially liked the team’s argument that it can eventually expand into other verticals, including flooring, cabinets, and windows. “If they can go after those other areas, they can scale,” said Kumar.

Breinlinger made the same point separately. “If Paintzen can do the same thing they’ve done for painting for other home services, I think it becomes really interesting,” he said.

But Bonatsos was less impressed with Paintzen. “It sounds interesting. They make [arranging a paint job] very easy. I don’t know how big the market is, though. It’s one and done; it’s not frequency. How often do you paint your house?”

Asked about the other verticals that Paintzen wants to pursue, Bonatsos said that “to me, that’s not a good sign” that Paintzen is pursuing a big-enough market from the get-go. “The numbers [the founders] gave out – [a] $10 billion [market] for painting in the top metro areas. Well, let’s say they capture $1 billion out of the $10 billion, and their piece is 30 percent. It’s a $300 million market for them. That’s interesting,” said Bonatsos, “But it’s not like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

(For a full tearsheet of AngelPad’s newest batch of startups, click here.)

New Fundings

AdRoll, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based ad retargeting company, has raised $70 million in new funding led by earlier investor Foundation Capital. New investors Institutional Venture Partners, Northgate Capital, Performance Equity and Glenmede also participated in the round, alongside earlier investors Merus Capital, Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. The company has raised $89 million to date.

Advanced Cardiac Therapeutics, a 6.5-year-old, Laguna Beach, Ca.-based medical device company that makes advanced irrigated cardiac ablation systems, has raised a new round of financing led by New Enterprise Associates and earlier investor NBGI Ventures, which led a $5 million Series B or the company in 2010. The size of the newest round isn’t being disclosed publicly, but as VentureWire notes, a recent filingshows the company was targeting $8 million.

Airbnb, the 5.5-year-old, San Francisco-based short-term home rentals marketplace, has raised $450 million in fresh capital in a deal that values Airbnb at $10 billion, says the WSJ. The private equity firm TPG, along with Dragoneer Investment Group, are expected to invest roughly $75 million apiece in the company, according to the report. Meanwhile, earlier investor Sequoia Capital is expected to invest about $85 million. More here.

Arrail Dental Clinic, a 16-year-old Beijing-based dental care company, has received $70 million series C financing led by the Chinese private equity fund New Horizon Capital. Prometheus Capital, Common Fund, Elite Capital and earlier investors GL Capital, KPCB China and Qiming Ventures also participated in the round. Arrail Dental had previously raised roughly $40 million in funding. It plans to use its new funding to open more clinics and make acquisitions.

Beckon, a 2.5-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based marketing analytics software company, has raised $8 million in Series A funding from Canaan Partners and earlier investor August Capital. The company has raised $10 million altogether. (StrictlyVC talked with Beckon founder Jenny Zeszut for a column last week.)

Birchbox, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based startup that sells curated monthly boxes of beauty samples for $10 each, has raised $60 million in Series B funding led by Viking Global Investors, with participation from First Round Capital, Accel Partners, Aspect Partners, and Consigliere Brand Capital. To date, shows Crunchbase, the company has raised about $72 million altogether.

Enplug, a 1.5-year-old, Culver City, Ca.-based company that sells its digital, customizable, interactive signs to business customers like restaurants to help them better engage with their customers, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. The money comes from a long list of individual investors, including Oaktree Capital co-founder Larry Keele and Idealab founder Bill Gross.

FloDesign Sonics, a four-year-old, Wilbraham, Ma.-based company whose acoustic separation technology is being applied to improving the production of protein-based drugs but has potential applications in industries as wide ranging as oil and gas and food and beverage, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Bright Capital and included Ventry Industries, along with individual investors like Jonathan Fleming of Oxford Biosciences

Inbenta Technologies, a nine-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based company that specializes in artificial intelligence and natural-language processing, has raised $2 million in Series A funding led by Amérigo Chile Early Stage and Growth, an international network of venture capital funds.

LendingClub, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based, online peer-to-peer financing company, has raised a fresh $115 million in debt and equity to purchase Springstone Financial, which is in the very different business of providing loans to people seeking elective medical and dental procedures. LendingClub raised the money from T. Rowe Price, Wellington Management Company, BlackRock and Sands Capital. To meet Springstone’s asking price of $140 million, LendingClub chipped in $25 million in stock. LendingClub has raised $285 million in equity to date, shows Crunchbase. Its earliest investors include Amidzad Partners, Canaan Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Morgenthaler Ventures.

M87, a 1.5-year-old, Austin-based company whose software helps smartphones secure the best available voice and data service, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Qualcomm Ventures and 21Vianet Group, the largest Internet data center services provider in China.

Nervana Systems, a months-old, San Diego-based company that develops custom hardware for machine learning algorithms, has raised $600,000 in seed financing from angel investors including Ali and Hadi Partovi, Sam Altman, Scott Banister, Owen Van Natta, Ruchi Sanghviand SV Angels.

Nora Therapeutics, a 3.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that’s developing a drug designed to improve pregnancy outcomes, has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Novo A/S. Earlier investors also participated in the round, including Burrill & Company, Prospect Venture Partners, Rho Ventures, and Vivo Capital.

Preact, an 18-month-old, San Francisco-based company, cloud-based service that aims to help subscription software companies reduce churn and acquire new customers, has raised $4.6 million in Series A funding led by Trinity Ventures. Earlier investors Atlas Ventures, Karlin Ventures,Bee Partners and Lion Wells Capital also participated in the new funding.

PumpUp, a two-year-old, Kitchener, Canada-based fitness-oriented mobile app that incorporates virtual training and social networking, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Toronto-based Innovation Grade Ventures.

TaxiForSure, a three-year-old, Bangalore-based online taxi services aggregator, is in the final stages of raising a $10 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, says the Economic Times. TaxiForSure has raised a total of about $14 million to date, including from Accel Partners, Helion Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures.

Urgent.ly, a year-old, Washington, D.C.-area startup whose service connects users with available roadside assistance, has received $510,000 in funding from the Center for Innovative Technology’s CIT GAP Funds. Tech Cocktail DC has more here.

Vidapp, a months-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based video-looping app (a ala Vine) has raised $1.2 million in seed funding, including from DBO Capital, Orrick Venture Fund, Storm Ventures, Tenex Capital Fund and individual investors.

Work4 Labs, a 3.5-year-old company that has offices in San Francisco and Paris and helps employers reach and recruit prospective hires via social networks, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by Serena Capital led the round. Earlier investor Matrix Partners also participated in the round.

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New Funds

Fuel Capital, a year-old, San Francisco-based, early-stage venture capital firm, has raised a debut fund of $25.5 million, judging by an SEC filing. Fuel Capital has been actively investing since at least March of last year, with bets that include Homejoy, an online platform that connects customers with cleaning services; the cosmetics brand Julep; and Secret, the suddenly popular app that lets users upload anonymous posts. Fuel Capital was cofounded by Chris Howard, who led the seed-stage investment program at Ignition Partners, and Brad Silverberg, who cofounded Ignition.

Matrix Partners, the 37-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based venture capital firm, announced its new, $350 million, Matrix Partners China III on Friday. The fund is the same size as Matrix Partners China II, closed in 2011. Matrix Partners China was founded in 2008. Among its most recent investments is Kuailexue, a China-based startup that’s building a mobile-first Q&A platform for students around smartphones. China-based firms are once again very attractive LPs, according to Dow Jones VentureSource data; they raised $1.07 billion in the first quarter of this — a 35 percent increase over the same period last year.

Spectrum Equity, the 20-year-old growth equity firm with offices in Boston and Menlo Park, is looking to raise $800 million for its newest fund and may collect closer to $1 billion, according to VentureWire sources. The firm, which prefers to write checks of between $25 million to $100 million, closed its last fund in 2010 with $680 million. Spectrum’s portfolio includes the newly public food ordering service GrubHub and the online learning company Lynda.com, among the many other “information economy” startups on which Spectrum solely focuses. More here.

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IPOs

ContraFect, a 5.5-year-old, Yonkers, N.Y-based biotechnology company that’s developing products to fight life-threatening, drug-resistant infectious diseases, has filed the paperwork to raise up to $23 million in an IPO. Among its biggest shareholders are Alpha Spring Limited, which owns 13.3 percent of the company’s shares; Liberty Charitable Remainder Trust, which owns 9.3 percent; and River Charitable Remainder Trust, which owns 5.2 percent.

Zafgen, an 8.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma-based biopharmaceutical maker developing a twice-weekly injection to treat obesity, is looking to raise $86.3 million in an IPO, shows an SEC filing. Among the company’s biggest shareholders are Atlas Venture, which owns 35.6 percent of the company; Third Rock Ventures, which owns 35.4 percent; Alta Partners, which owns 7.4 percent; and Fidelity Investments, which owns 6 percent.

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Exits

Campus Special, a nine-year-old, Atlanta-based student deal platform, has been acquired by the textbook rental site Chegg for $17 million in cash and stock and will be rebranded Chegg Campus Deals. Chegg, which went public last November with its stock priced at $12.50 per share, has lost more than half its value since, with its stock trading at $5.50 per share as of the market’s close on Friday.

Classbadges, a 21-month-old, Oakland, Ca.-based company whose online tool helps teachers award students for accomplishments, has been acquired by the bootsrapped, two-year-old, Kirkland, Wa.-based ed tech startup EdStart for an undisclosed sum. Per the terms of the acquisition, Classbadges co-founder and CEO, Esther Wojcicki (mother to Susan Wojcicki of YouTube fame and Anne Wojcicki of 23andme), will join the board of EdStart. EdStart acquired another company, the student response system ExitTicket, just last month.

Dropbox, the 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online storage company, has acquired a pair of startups: the photo-sharing company Loom and the document-sharing startup Hackpad, reports the WSJ. Loom will shut down its service and be folded into Dropbox’s recently released cloud-based storage service Carousel. (It had raised $1.4 million in backing from investors including Google Ventures, Tencent Holdings, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Overbrook Entertainment and individuals.) HackPad had passed through Y Combinator in 2012 and raised money from some individual investors, including Shana Fisher, managing partner of High Line Venture Partners.

Kite.io, a 15-month-old, San Francisco-based company, has been acquired by the mobile app search engine Quixey, for an undisclosed amount, though TechCrunch portrays it as a more of an acqui-hire. Kite.io doesn’t appear to have raised venture capital. Four-and-a-half-year-old Quixey, on the other hand, has raised roughly $75 million from investors, including Alibaba, Innovation Endeavors, and Translink Capital.

Nautical Technologies, a parking and transportation technology company that’s a division of Toronto-based Apps Network Appliances, has been acquired by QuickPay — which is rebranding the combined company as LocoMobi Inc. More here.

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People

The Guardian looks at the technology industry’s highest profile executives and what they take home.

President Obama will hit the Mountain View headquarters of Y Combinator, the hot technology startup funder and incubator, as part of a May 8 fundraiser that will now be co-hosted by the company’s president, Sam Altman, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, says the SF Chronicle. (Mayer was planning to host the event at her Palo Alto home, but the venue has been changed to accommodate demand for tickets.)

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Job Listings

LinkedIn is looking for a business development manager to help it grow and managing its strategic partnerships. The job is in Mountain View, Ca.

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Happenings

Come see smart people argue over the future of mobile on Wednesday evening in San Francisco.

The Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit kicks off Thursday morning at the Bowery Hotel in New York. Learn more here.

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Data

Pitchbook has taken a look at 2007 vintage U.S. venture funds with software investments in their portfolios. Out of 118 funds, the top performers of the bunch are Avalon Ventures VIII, Emergence Capital Partners Fund II, Flagship Ventures Fund 2007, and Foundry Venture Capital 2007. Collectively, the funds have a median IRR of 9.28 percent; the top quartile “hurdle rate” is 16.28 percent.

And here, a ranking of the leading 25 syndicates on AngelList.

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Essential Reads

Facebook will take the wraps off its plans for a mobile ad network at its “F8″ developer conference in San Francisco at the end of the month, reports Re/code.

According to the Finnish outlet After Dawn, Google is working on a $100 Nexus smartphone for budget-conscious consumers.

Mutual funds are moonlighting more and more as venture capitalists. And little wonder: Henry Ellengoben, who oversees T. Rowe Price’s New Horizons Fund, managed his way to a 49.1 percent return last year; the S&P 500 returned 32.4 percent.

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Detours

Twenty-six animals that need to stop being so darn cute.

Help with folding a pocket square, tying a windsor knot, and distinguishing between herringbone and glen plaid.

Watch a baby-faced Sergey Brin pretend not to know much about search technology on national television, circa 2000.

How Americans die. (Sorry.)

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Retail Therapy

The latest custom Porsche from Singer Design.

Pizza Cake. Because, you know what? There are a lot of game changers in this world but too few pizza game changers.

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It’s Thursday! We love Thursdays almost as much as we love Fridays. (Almost.)

Speaking of Friday, please note that StrictlyVC won’t be publishing tomorrow, Good Friday. We’ll have some good stuff awaiting you next week, though, including a look at Trusted Insight, the social network for LPs, and a deep dive into Mithril Capital Management, the two-year-old, late-stage investment firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, which StrictlyVC visited this week.

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Top News in the A.M.

The market’s recent downturn—despite a modest rally this week—has changed the tone in Silicon Valley and has some company directors recalibrating their expectations, renowned venture capitalist Jim Breyer tells the WSJ.

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It’s Demo Day for AngelPad, the Anti Y Combinator

Today, AngelPad, the San Francisco-based incubator, is hosting an invitation-only “demo day” for 150 to 200 angels and VCs, and you can bet these investors are going to bring their checkbooks.

In four years’ time, AngelPad has become one of the most reliable hit machines in Silicon Valley. And it’s done it largely by operating as a kind of anti-Y Combinator, even while the famed incubator was its inspiration.

There’s the cosmetic difference, for starters. While Y Combinator is located in sunny Mountain View, Ca., AngelPad, which also has offices in New York, is situated on a gritty block of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. (It’s a little too gritty for its demo day; AngelPad is hosting its event today at an upscale restaurant roughly a mile away.)

AngelPad isn’t as widely known as Y Combinator, and intentionally so. Founder Thomas Korte, who spent seven years as an international product manager at Google, likes to keep things intimate, stressing the importance of community to the startups that pass through AngelPad as well as the network of investors with which he works. (Even the press who can attend its demo day is tightly restricted.)

In another departure from Y Combinator’s mode, AngelPad tends to focus on enterprise companies, typically admitting just one or two consumer-facing startups into each of its “cohorts.” For Y Combinator, working with startups that cater to businesses is a much newer development.

Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is that while Y Combinator looks to grow even bigger, adding ever more partners to work with its startups, AngelPad is, in a sense, shrinking. Korte once relied heavily on former Google colleagues to help mentor startups at AngelPad. Today, he and his wife and AngelPad partner, Carine Magescas, coach all of the startups themselves.

(Korte does make one notable exception. He still arranges for each startup passing through the program to meet once with one of his trusted advisors — friends like Wesley Chan, currently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures. It’s a kind of “reality check. You need outside input once in a while,” says Korte.)

Clearly, AngelPad’s approach is working. AngelPad startups in the news include Storefront ($7.3 million Series A led by Spark Capital), Crittercism ($30 million Series C), and Boxbee ($2.3 million seed round), and Korte tells me that another AngelPad company, the mobile advertising startup MoPub – acquired by Twitter for $350 million in stock last fall — will be worth roughly one billion dollars when Twitter’s lock-up expires in the next couple of weeks.

So how does the AngelPad process work? Twice a year, Korte and Magescas stage an open application process that usually attracts about 2,000 applicants who are asked to submit a two-minute video, along with an essay, about their company. The couple then whittles the list down to between 100 and 200 of the most promising teams, interviews each for 25 minutes over a two- to three-month period, then chooses a dozen of them to coach over the following 10 to 12 weeks.

Each team receives $60,000 in exchange for 6 to 7 percent of their company. (AngelPad uses capped convertible notes.) At the end of the program, a demo day is staged, and Korte and Magescas then spend the next six weeks or so working with the startups to secure seed funding.

Most of the money is coming from the couple’s bank account. (Korte was among the first couple of hundred of Google employees.) Korte says “several individuals also participate in each cohort,” and that AngelPad also raised a $7 million fund last year to help fund its startups.

As for what he’s looking for, he mentions numerous things, including “mobile-enhanced” businesses that do things in a way that we’ve always done them but in a more efficient way. (He points to the delivery service PostMates, another AngelPad startup that has gone on to raise significant funding.)

Korte says he doesn’t rule out applicants that are entering well-covered terrain, either, a lesson he learned at Google. “Apart from self-driving cars, Google has almost never been the first in anything, honestly,” he notes. “What they’ve done is be significantly better at every single one of those,” he adds.

Seemingly, the same could be said for AngelPad itself.

New Fundings

AppsBuilder, a four-year-old, Milan, Italy-based cross-platform tool to create, edit and distribute mobile apps that are compatible with all major mobile devices, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from United Ventures. The investment brings the company’s funding total to $3.5 million. Previous investors included Annapurna Ventures and Zernike Meta Ventures.

Campaign Monitor, a 10-year-old, Sydney, Australia-based company that makes software for email-marketing pitches, has raised a whopping $250 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners in the first outside funding that Campaign Monitor has raised. The WSJ has more here.

Citymapper, a three-year-old, London-based urban transportation app, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital. Other participants in the round included Connect Ventures, Index Ventures, and Greylock Partners, along with numerous unnamed angels.

Consumer United, a 6.5-year-old, Boston-based startup whose online tools allow consumers to compare rates on auto and home insurance, has raised $14 million in new funding co-led by Spark Capital and Thayer Street Partners. Other participants in the round included Village Ventures and Five Elms. The company has raised roughly $70 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Convergent Dental, a three-year-old, Natick, Ma.-based dental device and technology company that makes a computer-aided, FDA-cleared laser system for both hard and soft tissue indications, has raised $8 million in funding led by Long River Ventures, which was joined by individual investors. Convergent has raised $23 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Epirus Biopharmaceuticals, a two-year-old, Boston-based company that aims to develop follow-on versions of drugs that are facing patent expiration, has merged with Zalicus, a publicly traded company. It has also raised $36 million in Series B funding to fuel its development of these “biosimilars.” The round was led by the China-based company Livzon Mabpharm. Other participants in this round included Adage Capital,Greenwoods Investment, Gibralt US, Monashee Capital Partners, and Mousse Partners, along with earlier investors TPG Biotech, Montreux Equity Partners, and 5AM Ventures.

FireHost, a 4.5-year-old Richardson, Tx.-based secure cloud hosting service, has raised $25 million in funding from The Stephens Group, a family office that has provided earlier funding to the company. FireHost has now raised $60 million to date.

ForSight Vision5, three-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based company that’s developing non-invasive products to replace eye drops and provide sustained therapy for major anterior segment eye diseases including glaucoma and dry eye, has raised $15 million in Series C funding led by H.I.G. BioVentures of Miami, Fla. Earlier investors Morgenthaler Ventures, Versant Ventures, Technology Partners, and Delphi Ventures also participated in the round.

Kinetic Social, a four-year-old, New York-based social data and marketing technology company, has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor Blue Chip Venture Company. The company has raised $26 million across its A and B rounds, shows Crunchbase.

Miret Surgical, a four-year-old, Chicago-based medical device startup focused on non-invasive laparoscopy surgery, has raised $644,750 in Series A funding from 17 (undisclosed) angels and VCs. Miret spun out of Stanford Biodesign.

Nexvet, a four-year-old, Melbourne, Australia-based company developing biologic drugs for cats, dogs and horses, has raised $31.5 million in Series B funding from Farallon Capital Management, Adage Capital Partners,Foresite Capital, and Boxer Capital, along with existing shareholders. The company has raised $40 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

OxThera, an 8.5-year-old, Stockholm-based biopharmaceutical company that develops products for metabolic disorders, has raised $10.6 million in new funding led by Kurma Partners. Other participants in the round included IdInvest Partners and Mayo Clinic. The company has raised roughly $53 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Provista Diagnostics, a 6.5-year-old, Scottsdale, Az.-based molecular diagnostics company developing and commercializing blood-based diagnostic, prognostic and predictive tests for cancers affecting women, has raised a $6 million Series B financing from existing (undisclosed) investors. The company has raised $19.5 million to date.

ReadyPulse, a 3.5-year-old, San Carlos, CA-based enterprise content commerce company, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from Divergent Ventures, Harmony Capital, Moxie Software, and angel investors. ReadyPulse has raised $3 million altogether.

RealtyShares, a year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based online real estate platform that enables accredited investors to pool money and buy shares of investment properties, has raised $1.9 million in funding led by General Catalyst Partners. (This space is white-hot; last month, two other startups making it easy for accredited investors to acquire stakes in commercial buildings also raised venture capital: RealtyMogul and RealCrowd.)

Talkwheel, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based unifies for its customers what’s being said about them on social media, as well as allows them to engage with fans, has raised $1.2 million in funding. About.com CEO Peter Horan participated in the round. So did former Yahoo vice presidentRandy Haykin, Informix founder Roger Sippl and others, says TechCrunch.

Wilson Therapeutics, a two-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based biopharmaceutical company that’s developing a de-coppering agent as a new treatment for a rare genetic disorder that prevents the body from regulating copper (which can lead to serious liver and brain damage), has raised $40 million in Series B financing co-led by new investors, Abingworth and MVM Life Science Partners. The company’s founding investor, HealthCap, also participated in the round.

Yatra, an eight-year-old, Gurgaon, India-based company that provides an airline reservation booking service online, has raised $23 million led by IDG Ventures and Vertex Venture Management, the VC investment arm of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek. Existing investors including seed investor Norwest Venture Partners also participated in the round, which brings Yatra’s total funding $45 million altogether.

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New Funds

GSV Capital Corp., a three-year-old, publicly traded fund that invests half of its money in startups directly and the other half through private shares it buys on the secondary market, is raising a new, $20 million fund, according to an SEC filing. As of April 11, the first official sale had yet to occur.

MHS Capital, the San Francisco-based, early-stage venture firm, is nearing a $75 million final close on its second fund, says Fortune. MHS is led by Mark Sugarman, a longtime angel investor who previously held roles at Nutrisystem, VerticalNet and Internet Capital Group. The young firm closed its first fund with $34 million. Two of its better-known portfolio companies include the teaching marketplace Udemy and the crowdsourcing platform Indiegogo.

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Moelis & Co., the boutique investment bank, saw its shares close yesterday at 4.6 percent above their slightly reduced offer priced. (The bank opted to price its shares at $25, a dollar lower than expectations, on Tuesday night.) Dealbook has more here.

Vital Therapies, a biotherapeutic company, announced the pricing of its initial public offering 4.5 million common shares of stock at $12 per share, well below initial estimates. It begins trading on Nasdaq today.

Weibo Corp will be valued at a lower-than-expected $3.46 billion when it goes public today on Nasdaq amid concerns about the China-based microblogging service’s slowing user growth, as well as the country’s highly censored media environment. Reuters has more here.

Zoosk, the 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online dating platform, filed plans yesterday to raise up to $100 million in an IPO. Zoosk, which was launched in 2007, has more than 26 million members, including about 650,000 subscribers in 80 countries, according to the filing. The company has raised roughly $62 million to date; its biggest shareholders are Canaan Partners, which owns 32.4 percent of the company; ATA Ventures, which owns 17 percent; and Bessemer Venture Partners, which owns 16.3.

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People

While Moore’s Law has been holding true since 1965 — accurately describing the ever-growing capabilities of microchips — it won’t last forever, renowned venture capitalist John Doerr tells Forbes. “It will run out at some point . . .I give it about six years, and then we will hit the limit.”

Carter’s Grove, a historic plantation near Williamsburg that CNet cofounderHalsey Minor purchased in 2007 for $15.3 million, is going on the auction block on May 21, reports the Washington Post. The 400-acre plantation was once a Colonial Williamsburg attraction; it fell into a state of disrepair after Minor stopped making payments in the summer of 2010. The foundation says it is still owed nearly $8 million.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about ephemeral apps and anonymity with the New York Times: “I do think more private communication is a bigger space than people realize. . .Anonymity is different. I’m not going to say it can’t work, because I think that is too extreme. But I tend to think some of these interactions are better rooted in some sense of building relationships. There are different forms of identity you can use to form a relationship. You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people. That’s core to how we think about the world. So anonymity is not the first thing that we’ll go do.”

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Job Postings

IAC is still looking for a new associate director/director who will be responsible for “leading all or part of the assessment and the execution of potential transactions.” The job is in New York.

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Happenings

Yesterday, the WSJ announced that its first post-Kara-Swisher-era technology conference, WSJDLive, will be held October 27-29 at the Montage in Laguna Beach, Calif. The speaker line-up includes Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, and Palantir Technologies’s Alex Karp, among others. You can apply for an invite here.

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Essential Reads

The founders guide to pitching Sequoia Capital (part two).

YouTube stars are about to get their own promotional TV spots and premium-priced ad rates as part of an effort to package online video stars like they’re traditional TV celebrities.

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Detours

Babies may not be crying at night for the reasons we assume. In a new study published in the journal Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig suggests babies cry to delay the birth of another sibling.

What’s considered moral depends on where you live.

Remove your shirt with one hand.

Can’t we allow cows a modicum of dignity?

A reply-allpocalypse at Condé Nast.

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Retail Therapy

Map necklaces.

What could be the best Easter gag gift ever.

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