Hi, everyone, hope your Thursday is off to a great start.

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Top News in the A.M.

Apple has removed the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet from its App Store.

The New York Police Department is testing out Google Glass.

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Another Niche E-Commerce Company, Jack Erwin, Takes Off

VCs must be hearing a lot of pitches from companies that want to be the next Warby Parker, the chic discount online eyeglass vendor, whether it be high-tech wine gadgets, fitted shirts, or dress shoes for men.

If the market is getting saturated with these new brands, you wouldn’t know it. In fact, this morning, another new shoe company called Jack Erwin is announcing that it has raised $2 million in Series A funding led by Crosslink Capital, with participation by Shasta Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Yesterday, to learn more, I reached Lane Gerson, one of the founders of the six-person company, at the startup’s Brooklyn-based offices. Our chat has been edited for length.

You’ve worked as a CFO and a controller. Did you know anything about retail? And why shoes?

My friend and cofounder [Ariel Nelson] was shopping for shoes for a wedding and just wanted dress shoes, and they were all either too [fussy] or too expensive. We wondered if we could find someone to help us make a pair of shoes for $100 that we could then sell for $200, and we spent three months talking with everyone we knew, and each was a dead end. As it happens, Ariel went to a two-seat barber and wound up sitting next to a [product manager of footwear] at Ralph Lauren, who was dealing with buyers and suppliers. We all went for drinks a few weeks later. That was August 2012; he just came on full-time in January.

You have five core shoes in a few different colors. Where are they being made?

In Portugal, at a third-generation factory. We’d talked with factories in Brazil and Portugal and received a bunch of samples and this one had the best quality leather shoes. So we worked with a designer, they sent us samples, we corrected them, and we placed our first [purchase order] in May 2013.

You make it sound so easy. Where are the shoes shipped?

They’re warehoused in a third-party logistics center in Brooklyn, less than three miles from our office.

What’s your return policy?

Free shipping, free returns. We want people to try them on and then hopefully they’ll enjoy and keep them.

What percentage of your customers return the shoes?

About 25 percent, but the data is inconclusive right now. We launched the company publicly in October and we’ve had tremendous demand — so much so that we’ve sold through or initial order and are left with broken sizes. So people are buying sizes that aren’t the right size, and they want exchanges that we don’t have. We raised the [venture] money almost purely to buy inventory.

Is that supply-demand balance hard to manage? What’s been the biggest surprise so far?

It’s all been really positive actually. We’ve learned there’s an appetite for people to buy new product and I think people like a new story and are wiling to give us a try. And if you can give them a product that meets their expectations and you’re responsive to them, you meet great people. We’re discovering that just being nice goes a long way.

New Fundings

Allovue, a year-old, Baltimore, Md.-based company whose financial software helps district officials and administrators track and analyze the impact of school spending on educational outcomes, has raised $800,000from the Maryland Technology Center, Baltimore Angels and Shulman Ventures. It has raised $900,000 altogether.

Apportable, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based platform that allows iOS applications to run on Android devices automatically, has raised $5 million in funding from Google Ventures and individual investors, including Paul Buchheit, Jerry Yang, and Alexis Ohanian. Apportable has raised $7.4 million altogether, including from Salesforce.com and Betaworks.

AtVenu, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose software was designed to handle live event merchandise sales, has raised $1.1 million in funding led by Real Ventures of Montreal.

Celery, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose “pre-commerce” platform makes it easier to e-tailers to accept pre-orders, has raised $2 million in seed funding. Y Combinator, SV Angel, and Max Levchin, among others, participated in the round. (Cofounder and CEOChris Tsai tells me that pre-orders are just the starting point for the company and that ultimately, it plans to become a full storefront platform.)

Citelighter, a three-year-old, New York-based software platform that helps students save, organize and cite information while writing their papers, has raised $1.52 million in seed funding, including from New York Angels, Blu Venture Investors, John Cammack, managing partner of Cammack Associates, and Frank Bonsal, founder of venture-capital firms New Enterprise Associates and Red Abbey Venture Partners. The company has raised $2.45 million to date.

DataMentors, a 16-year-old, Wesley Chapel, Fla.-based business intelligence company, has received an undisclosed amount of funding fromBrook Venture Partners, Bay Capital and Pride’s Crossing Capital.

Docurated, a two-year-old, New York-based document management platform company, has raised $3.75 million Series A funding led byRogers Venture Partners. The company has raised $5.35 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Domo, a 2.5-year-old, Lindon, Ut.-based business intelligence startup launched by Omniture co-founder Josh James, has raised $125 million in Series C financing led by TPG Growth. Dragoneer Investment Group,Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley, Salesforce.com, T. Rowe Priceand Viking Global Investors also participated alongside earlier investorsGGV Capital, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, andMercato Partners. (If you have a couple of minutes, Fortune’s Jessi Hempel has a remarkable piece on how James landed the funding from a hospital bed.) Domo has raised more than $250 million to date.

Experiment.com, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based crowdfunding platform designed to fund science projects from chemistry to medicine, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Y Combinator, Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The Journal has much more hereabout the platform, which launched yesterday.

Fantex, the 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based trading exchange for investors to buy and sell interests in professional athletes, has raised $20 million, shows a new SEC filing. Former football start John Elway is listed as a non-executive director, along with Bruce Dunlevie, a longtime general partner with Benchmark Capital. (Former Benchmark general partner David Beirne is Fantex’s co-founder and chairman.)

Magic Leap, a three-year-old, Hollywood, Fla.-based maker of human computing interfaces and software, has raised more than $50 million across its seed and Series A rounds, the company announced yesterday,without disclosing its investors.

Motilo, a two-year-old, London-based social fashion platform that invites fashionistas to bounce ideas of one another, has raised a second tranche of post-seed funding from private investors. The startup raised $3.3 million during 2013; it has since raised another $2.5 million from the same group of undisclosed, U.K.-based investors.

OneFold, an eight-month-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based mobile and wearable-data-focused analytics and visualization platform, has raised $400,000 in seed funding from Studio 9+ and a pool of angel investors.

Sialix, a seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotechnology company developing products to treat and prevent cancers, has raised $1.2 million in a second tranche of seed funding. The investors included Boston Harbor Angels, Mass Medic Angels, Launchpad Angels, Maine Angels, Beacon Angels and Desert Angels. The company has raised $4.2 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Totango, a nearly 4-year-old, Mountain View. Ca.-based customer engagement platform, has raised $15.5 million in Series B financing led by new investors Canvas Venture Fund and InterWest Partners. Earlier investors Pitango Venture Capital and Gemini Israel Ventures also participated.

UXPin, a 2.5-year-old, Gdynia, Poland-based freemium SaaS design service, has raised $1.6 million in funding led by Freestyle Capital, which was joined by earlier investors Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Ventures, and a long line of individuals. The company had previously raised $700,000.

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New Funds

A new brand is emerging in Silicon Valley: Aspect Ventures, founded by veteran VCs Jennifer Fonstad, a managing director Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Theresia Gouw, a longtime managing partner at Accel Partners. The two met 25 years ago at Bain & Co., their first job out of college, and decided last fall to team up. For now, they’re funding the venture themselves, with plans to invest between $500,000 and $3 million in between 12 to 24 mobile investments. Patricia Sellers has much more here.

Purdue Research Foundation and Cook Medical have created a $12 million evergreen investment fund to financially support life science startup companies tied to Purdue University. Called The Foundry Investment Fund, it will be used to match outside donations to fund companies based on Purdue technology or expertise in the fields of human and animal health and plant sciences.

Weathergage Capital, a 6.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based venture firm fund of funds, has begun raising capital for its third fund and it’s targeting $200 million, shows an SEC filing. The outfit, formed by former Knightsbridge Advisors execs, raised its last, $200 million, fund four years ago; its first fund closed with $250 million in commitments in 2007.

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IPOs

Alibaba Group’s estimated valuation rose to an average of $153 billion after the Chinese e-commerce company — said to be headed for the biggest IPO since Facebook‘s — reported surging sales. Bloomberg hasmore here.

The Rubicon Project, the 6.5-year-old, L.A.-based automated advertising platform, has filed to raise up to $100 million in an IPO. Rubicon Project’s services are used by about 96 percent of Internet users in the U.S. and more than 550 million users globally, the company says in its filing. Rubicon has raised just north of $50 million from investors, includingClearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, Stanford University, andPeacock Equity.

Twitter after the IPO: Five numbers to know from yesterday’s earnings report.

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Exits

Betterfly, a three-year-old, New York-based company “talent” marketplace, has been acquired by TakeLessons, an online marketplace for qualified and vetted teachers. No financial terms were disclosed. Betterfly has raised $2.5 million from Lightbank.

Double Helix Games, a six-year-old, Irvine, Ca.-based gaming studio, has been acquired by Amazon for undisclosed financial terms. Techcrunch looks at what it means.

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People

SF Luxe has just published its third annual “Bay Area Billionaires” list for 2014, which it devises using data from Forbes, Bloomberg, the Hurun Global Rich List, along with stock quotes. Among the new names in this year’s line-up: Twitter and Medium co-founder Evan Williams (Twitter IPO); Benchmark general partner Peter Fenton (Twitter IPO); Robert Pera, CEO of wireless equipment maker Ubiquiti Networks (which went public in October and now has a $3.4 billion market cap), Nicholas Woodman, founder of the action camera company GoPro (which was valued at $2.25 billion as of December 2012, when FoxConn bought a 9 percent stake in the company for $200 million), and Facebook COOSheryl Sandberg.

Speaking of big money, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen keeps making it. On Friday, the Facebook director sold 1,274,869 shares of the stock at an average price of $61.23, for a total of roughly $78 million. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC.

Eric Darwin, who was most recently responsible for Salesforce.com’s corporate venture program, has just joined Draper Fisher Jurvetson as a growth-stage investor. Before joining Salesforce, Darwin spent several years as an analyst at several investment banks, including Perella Weinberg Partners, Barclays Capital, and BCC Capital Partners.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Greylock Partners had some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs at a conference earlier this week, telling them to seek out mentors — discreetly. “It’s a little bit like going up to somebody at a cocktail party and saying, ‘You know, I’m looking to settle down. If you did that, they would say, ‘OK, please step a little further backwards.’”

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Job Listings

TPG Capital is looking for a fund operations associate in Dallas.

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Data

Pitchbook looks at the 40 vintage 2006 U.S. venture funds in the $100 million to $250 million range, finding their median IRR to date is 3.42 percent. The top performing forms as of today: 5AM Ventures II,Azure Capital Partners II, and Sterling Venture Partners II.

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Essential Reads

The ironic thing about DFJ ditching cleantech: It had some of the biggest IPOs.

The tech industry is flexing its muscle in a California race.

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Detours

The inefficiency of long hours.

Pet rats photographed with miniature teddy bears. (We had to do it.)

Wowsa, Vanity Fair has published one juicy cover story about Wendi Deng Murdoch and former British prime minister Tony Blair. “The passionate note surfaced amid the flotsam of a shipwrecked marriage. It was written in broken English by a woman to herself, pouring out her love for a man called Tony. ‘Oh, shit, oh, shit,’ she wrote. ‘Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs . . . ‘”

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Retail Therapy

Van Cleef & Arpels will soon offer a limited-edition, 369-part miniature planetarium watch that will show you how long it takes Mercury to orbit the sun but not, alas, what time it is. Cost: a quarter of a million dollars. (This one is for you, Tom Perkins.)

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Good Wednesday morning! Quick weekly reminder: You can reach me anytime at connie[at]strictlyvc.com or on Twitter.

Top News in the A.M.

Longtime Google Ads exec Susan Wojcicki is YouTube’s new boss.

Google has reached a settlement to end the European Union’s three-year antitrust probe, after offering to display results from rival search services

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Ajay Chopra of Trinity Ventures: Mine Your Portfolio Companies

ike a lot of venture capitalists, General Partner Ajay Chopra of Trinity Ventures has a number of ways to “turn down the noise” of a clamorous startup ecosystem without, hopefully, tuning out the next billion-dollar opportunity.

Chopra — who joined Trinity in 2006 after selling the company he’d cofounded, Pinnacle Systems, to Avid Technology for roughly $460 million — talked with me yesterday about some of the tactics he uses.

You recently wrote about why it’s important to turn down entrepreneurs the right way. Why spell it out?

The point was that because we turn down 99 percent of the people we meet, it makes sense to be prompt about [a no] — which many VCs are guilty of not doing — give them feedback, and be helpful to them by just pointing them in a couple of right directions. It doesn’t take that long and it really does leave a lasting impression.

How much effort can you put into the process, practically speaking?

Well, first, I think the VC business is about how do you separate the signal from the noise. VCs do it in a variety of ways. For example, if I’m only investing in digital media, I’m not looking at clean tech or healthcare deals. If I’m only looking at Series A and B deals, I’m not looking at growth-stage companies. Even still, you could spend a lot of time focusing on the wrong things, so we focus a lot of building relationships, including mining our portfolio.

Meaning what, exactly?

We talk to employees at the VP level, the director level, even the product manager level while [they’re employed by a startup we’re backing]. We get to know the management teams and we ask, “Who are your best guys?” because we want them to have a relationship with us.

That doesn’t threaten your CEOs?

Not if you do it with the CEOs’ consent. I think most CEOs who are confident company builders don’t have any issues with it. Companies with hidden agendas from their board members might, but then they usually have other issues to worry about.

I do think it’s good for product managers to be meeting with venture capitalists. And I think it’s a good retention tool for CEOs. In fact, I often get an invitation from a CEO, saying, “Hey, this person did a great job. Can you reach out to them or have coffee with them or send them an email?” Everyone knows there’s a board, and there’s a light level of touch whether you like it or not. The best CEOs use it to their advantage and to benefit their employees.

Do you take product managers out for lunch? How does it work?

We invite people in specific areas to events, like marketing people or product management people or infrastructure people or VPs of operations — people who are sometimes underserved and not recognized. We have a speaker usually, and we let the CEOs pick three top people to [send to one of these events to] award them. Recently, for example, we had [Zulily founder] Mark Vadon talk with a group about his background and career development and how to handle conflict. Hopefully, it left a subliminal impression about Trinity, so that three or five or six years from now, when these employees’ current ventures have proven successful and they’re ready to step out, they’ll think, “Let’s call Ajay; I feel comfortable with him.”

Interesting that you think these employees might themselves become founders. So you don’t subscribe to the theory that entrepreneurs are born, not made?

Not at all. Entrepreneurship isn’t about being able to hack or code or build the best [user interface] as a teenager. It’s about passion and the determination to fulfill a vision. The overwhelming indicator of the best entrepreneurs is that they’re passionate and driven by the idea that they’re chasing. I might hate the idea. I might think it’s crazy. I’ll tell someone that, too. But if they say they’re going to chase it anyway, that they aren’t going to give up, well, that’s a good entrepreneur.

New Fundings

Adar IT, a 16-year-old, Lincolnwood, Il.-based cloud IT services company that’s focused on small to medium-size businesses, has raised $2.4 million in funding from MK Capital.

Confide, a months-old, New York-based confidential messaging app designed for professionals, has raised $1.9 million in seed funding led byWGI Group. Other investors to participate in the round include Google Ventures, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures,CrunchFund, Lakestar, Marker, David Tisch’s BoxGroup, Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman, Entourage creator Doug Ellin, and Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.

Datadog, a four-year-old, New York-based company behind a SaaS monitoring and data analytics platform, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by OpenView Venture Partners. Earlier investors Index Ventures, RTP Ventures, Amplify Partners, IA Ventures and Contour Ventures also participated in the round. The company has raised roughly $21 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

DataRank, a three-year-old, Bentonville, Ar.-based company that helps companies track online conversations about their brands and perform other competitive analysis, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by New Road Ventures, with participation from FundersClub and other angel investors. The company had earlier raised money from Y Combinator.

Dataxu, a 3.5-year-old, Boston-based media management platform for digital ad campaigns, has raised roughly $10 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing. The funding brings the capital raised by the company to roughly about $55 million. Previous investors includeThomvest Ventures, Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners, andMenlo Ventures.

Elementum, a 2.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based mobile supply chain software provider, has raised $44 million in Series B funding fromLightspeed Venture Partners and Flextronics.

Foodpanda, a two-year-old, Berlin-based Rocket Internet-incubated take-out ordering service, has raised fresh $20 million in funding led byPhenomen Ventures. The company and its affiliate, Hellofood, have now raised nearly $50 million, including from Kinnevik of Stockholm and iMena Holdings, which partnered with Rocket Internet last fall to expand Hellofood’s Middle Eastern operations.

Foursquare, the five-year-old, New York-based mobile app company, had received a $15 million investment from Microsoft last year as part of a funding round that valued the company at more than $600 million, says a new Bloomberg report. Microsoft, said the report, is adding features to its Windows Phone software in an effort to compete with Apple iPhone and Google’s Android software.

Jivox, a 6.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based multiscreen ad tech platform, has raised $5.8 million in Series C funding led by Fortisure Ventures. New investor Shah Capital also participated in the round alongside earlier investors Diaz Nesamoney, Opus Capital and Helion Advisors. The company has raised just north of $31 million to date.

Lumos Pharma, an Austin-based, early-stage biopharmaceutical company that’s aiming to treat autistic behavior and other medical problems, has raised $14 million in Series A funding co-led by Sante Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Dow Jones has much more on the company here.

Noom, a three-year-old, New York-based company behind a popular health and wellness app, has received $7 million in Series A financing led by RRE Ventures.

OnShift, a 5.5-year-old, Cleveland, Oh.-based company that makes staff scheduling and shift management software, has raised $7 million in Series C funding led by HLM Venture Partners and earlier investors, Draper Triangle Ventures, Early Stage Partners, Fifth Third Capital, Glengary LLC, and West Capital Advisors. The company has raised $13.8 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Primus Power, a 4.5-year-old, Hayward, Ca.-based energy-storage company, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Anglo American Platinum. The company has now raised around $31 altogether, including from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Chrysalix Energy.

REGEN Energy, an 8.5-year-old, Toronto-based startup that’s turning thousands of rooftop AC units into smart, networked building and grid-responsive energy assets, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by an unnamed “international energy company.” Earlier investors also participated in the round, including BDC Venture Capital and NGEN Partners. REGEN has raised about $15 million altogether, its CEO tells Greentech Media.

Tapingo, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile shopping platform, has raised $10.5 million in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investor Carmel Ventures. The company has raised $14 million to date.

Unitas Global, a four-year-old, L.A. based company that offers enterprise cloud service to organizations, has raised $5.7M in funding, shows an SEC filing. No non-executive directors are listed.

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New Funds

Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the 29-year-old, Sand Hill Road firm, announced in a blog post yesterday that it has closed its newest early-stage venture fund, DFJ Venture XI, with $325 million. In the post, the team noted that founding members Tim Draper and John Fisher will not be investing partners in the new effort, though both “will remain on DFJ’s management committee and will be significant personal investors in our fund…” The fund is slightly smaller that its immediate predecessor, DFJ’s $350 million Fund X, closed in 2008. According to peHUB, one of its biggest LPs is the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System, which committed $25 million to the effort.

Drive Capital, the two-year-old, Columbus, Oh.-based early-stage firm of former Sequoia Capital partners Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen, has closed its inaugural fund with $250 million. Reuters has more on the vehicle, which will invest in tech, healthcare, and consumer businesses. In November, StrictlyVC had reported on a bit of controversy surrounding Drive Capital’s fundraising efforts.

Expa Capital, a months-old, San Francisco-based investment vehicle founded by serial entrepreneur Garrett Camp, is raising up to $75 million, according to an SEC filing first flagged by TechCrunch. Camp disclosed his plans for Expa last May, telling TechCrunch that it will be structured like a holding company, as with Obvious, Betaworks, and Science, among others outfits that help to build companies simultaneously. Camp famously founded the online discovery service StumbleUpon; Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has also credited Camp with dreaming up Uber, which Camp cofounded.

Luminari Capital, a year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based firm focused on digital media, is raising $40 million for its first fund, according to an SEC filing. Luminari was founded by Daniel Leff, who’d previously spent more than five years as an investor with Globespan Capital Partners. A source tells StrictlyVC that the fund has already held a first close and that its LPs include British Sky Broadcasting Group, which is also an investor in the TV streaming platform Roku, on whose board Leff sits.

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Exits

BlueKite, a two-year-old, Miami, Fla.-based company that helps facilitate cross-border payments, has been acquired by the publicly traded digital money transfer company Xoom Corp. for approximately $15 million in cash and equity. BlueKite had raised $1.5 million in seed funding from the Miami-based investment firm PeopleFund.

Crescendo Bioscience, a 14-year-old, South San Francisco, Ca.-based company, has been acquired by Myriad Genetics, a Salt Lake City, Ut.-based diagnostics company. The price tag is $270 million in cash, minus a $25 million loan Myriad made to Crescendo in 2011, reports Xconomy. Crescendo makes a molecular diagnostic test that measures the level of disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. It has raised roughly $100 million over the years, including from Aeris Capital AG, Skyline Ventures, Safeguard Scientific, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

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People

Ethan Beard, who ran developer relations and product marketing for Facebook’s platform, has joined Greylock Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Beard, who left Facebook after its May 2012 IPO, tells Bloomberg that his “goal it start a company. This gives me the ability to have a pulse on what Greylock is seeing, to step back and have a broader perspective.”

Dan Clancy, a longtime Google executive and former NASA Ames research director, has joined the local social networking startup Nextdooras its VP of engineering. Re/code has more here.

Kent Goldman, a VC who has spent the last five years at the early-stage venture firm First Round Capital (and several years at Yahoo before that), is launching his own investment fund. Goldman isn’t sharing many details yet, including the name of his new venture, but in a blog post yesterday, First Round founder Josh Kopelman said he plans to “make a significant personal investment” in Goldman’s new fund.

Roy J.E.M. Raymann, a sleep research expert, has been hired away from Philips Research by Apple in a move believed tied to Apple’s highly anticipated iWatch. The outfit 9to5mac has the story.

Ted Schlein, the veteran managing partner of Kleiner Perkins, spoke about cyber attacks during a Wall Street Journal conference yesterday. Said Schlein, “I have been in the security business for three decades and it only gets worse. I don’t think it is a battle you win. You hope to get to a draw, so [the attacks] move on to someone else.”

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has lots of new reasons to celebrate, observes USA Today. In a new filing, Google disclosed that it’s awarding Schmidt stock valued at $100 million, plus a discretionary cash bonus of $6 million. The company characterized the windfall as “recognition of (Schmidt’s) contributions to Google’s performance in the last fiscal year.” Forbes pegged Schmidt’s wealth at around $8.3 billion last year. Google shares closed at $1,138.16 yesterday.

Brian Wilcove has joined the East Palo Alto, Ca.-based venture firm Artiman Ventures as a managing director. Wilcove was previously a VC at Sofinnova Ventures and TeleSoft Partners; before becoming an investor, he cofounded Virtela, a networking company that was acquired by NTT. Artiman focuses on “startups with no identifiable competitors” says Silicon Valley Business Journal.

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Job Listings

Newly public Care.com is looking for a VP of corporate development in Waltham, Mass. Apply here.

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Happenings

Registration for the MIT Technology Review Digital Summit, held on June 9 and 10 in San Francisco, is now open. More here.

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Data

Last year saw 206 percent more $10 million+ size Series A deals than 2009, reports CB Insights. Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partnershave led the most outsize Series A rounds over the past five years; here’s a quick look at their co-conspirators.

Separately: Using data collected from the 1996 to 2013 proxy seasons, the law firm Fenwick & West has tracked the number of women serving on boards and executive management teams of companies in the Silicon Valley 150 index, and its findings suggest the Valley is trailing behind its broader corporate peers when it comes to gender.

Among Fenwick’s findings: that last year, 56 percent of Silicon Valley 150 companies (which average 8,500 employees) had at least female director. Comparatively, 98 percent of companies in the S&P 100 (which average 170,000 employees each) had at least one female director.

In related news, Zendesk, the 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of cloud-based customer service software that’s expected to go public this year, announced three new board members yesterday, all of whom happen to be women: Caryn Marooney, vice president of technology communications at Facebook; Betsey Nelson, former CFO of Macromedia; and former Amazon general counsel Michelle Wilson.

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Essential Reads

srael is a cybersecurity powerhouse, and that’s partly thanks to investor-entrepreneur Shlomo Kramer. “He is my first call in terms of bouncing ideas and brainstorming in terms of security,” Greylock‘s Asheem Chandna tells Bloomberg.

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Detours

Son, it’s time we talk about where startups come from.

Hilarious journalist tweets from Sochi: “For those of you asking, when there’s no lobby in your hotel, you go to the owner’s bedroom to check in.”

Looking to buy a sprawling, unfinished getaway in Bel Air with your IPO riches? You may be in luck. Private equity tycoon Tom Gores is selling hissemi-completed 29,000-square-foot mega mansion for $50 million. (On the upside, that’s less than he spent to acquire it in 2009).

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Retail Therapy

The Mariachi Ski Suit. We wants one. We needs one. (Why should Mexican Olympian Hubertus von Hohenlohe have all the fun?)

Sometimes it’s better not to execute on a particular idea.

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Hi, everyone, StrictlyVC ran out of time to write a column this a.m, but there’s lots of useful intel below, as well as some good stuff around the corner. Quick reminder, too, that to sign up for the email, you can click on this link right over here. Happy Tuesday!

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Top News in the A.M.

Microsoft has a new CEO: Satya Nadella.

A new pair of bills have been introduced to the Senate and House to protect net neutrality after a circuit court ruling struck down the FCC’s previous rules earlier this month.

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New Fundings

AccuVein, a seven-year-old, Huntington, N.Y-based company whose hardware-and-software scanning device helps medical practitioners locate veins, has secured an $8 million loan from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation. In 2011, the company had raised $22.5 million from MVM Life Science Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Flashnotes, a four-year-old, Boston-based ed tech startup, has raised $3.6 million in Series A funding led by Stage 1 Ventures, with Runa Capital, SoftBank Capital and Atlas Venture also participating in the round. Flashnotes’ platform enables college students to buy and sell course-specific study materials, such as their notes, flashcards and study guides. It has raised $6.9 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Mojn, a four-year-old, Copenhagen, Denmark-based startup whose email product is designed for e-commerce marketers, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Northzone, Notion Capital, and Zoar Invest.

NanoPharmaceuticals, a months-old, Rensselaer, N.Y.-based startup that appears to be a spin-out of the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, has raised $2.6 million from investors, according to anew SEC filing. The Form D doesn’t list any non-executive directors.

Newgen Software, a 21-year-old, New Delhi, India-based company that sells business process management software and enterprise content management software, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding fromIDG Ventures India and Ascent Capital. In 2008, the company had raised $7.65 million from HSBC Private Equity and SAP Ventures.

PillPack, a year-old, Manchester, N.H.-based online pharmacy that aims to simplify medication management, has raised $4 million from Atlas Venture and Founder Collective. The company had previously raised $300,000 from Techstars.

Ravel Law, an 18-month-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that uses visualizations, analytics and collaboration tools to aid in legal research, has raised $8.1 million in funding led by early investors New Enterprise Associates and North Bridge Venture Partners, with participation fromThe Experiment Fund and Work-Bench. The company has raised $9.2 million to date.

Red Zebra Analytics, a 2.5-year-old, London-based loyalty start-up, has raised a seven-figure investment from the fin-tech venture firm SBT Venture Capital, whose principal backer is the Russian banking giantSberbank.

Remind101, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online communication platform that gives teachers a way to text students and stay in touch with parents, has raised $15 million in Series B financing led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, which was joined by The Social+Capital Partnership and First Round Capital. Kleiner’s John Doerr has joined the board. The company has raised $18.5 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Spiceworks, an eight-year-old, Austin, Tx.-based social business network for IT managers, has raised $57 million round of funding that it expects to be its last before an IPO. The round was led by Goldman Sachs, which was joined by earlier investors. The company has raised $111 million altogether, including from Adams Street Partners, Austin Ventures,Institutional Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

Sqor, a year-old, San Francisco-based sports content platform and social media company that connects fans directly to more than 1,200 professional and amateur athletes, has raised $4.4 million from investors, shows an SEC filing that suggests the company is targeting $13.5 million. Among those listed on the Form D are legendary Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, who became a board member last year, andJohn Durham, CEO of the San Francisco-based marketing consultancyCatalyst SF.

TrackMaven, an 18-month-old, Washington, D.C.-based company that helps big brands benchmark, track, and improve their digital marketing, has raised $6.5 million in funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from earlier investors including Bowery Capital andAcceleprise Ventures. The company has now raised roughly $7.8 million altogether.

Zenput, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based startup formerly known as NextPunch, has raised $1.5 million for its mobile data collection for businesses with field employees, shows an SEC filing. MHS Capital, a small, San Francisco-based venture fund, appears to be the lead investor.

New Funds

More evidence that VCs are gravitating to AngelList: Several new SECfilings show Assure Equity Partners, a venture firm in Salt Lake City, is raising money to participate in, if not lead, some deals in the platform.

Nano Ventures, a new, Williamston, N.C.-based seed-stage venture firm, has raised $2.8 million of an expected $7.5 million round, an SEC filing shows. Peter Geiger, one of the directors listed, is currently a VP of finance at DSM, a Dutch-based multinational life sciences company.

Greenpoint Global Mittelstand Fund, a new, Madison, Wi.-based early-stage venture fund looking to back Midwest startups has raised $1.5 million, according to an SEC filing that shows it is targeting up to $30 million. Interesting/alarming backstory here: The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reports that until recently, the fund’s founders oversaw a fund called Wisconsin Funeral Trust that managed the money of customers who prepay their funeral costs. But it was placed into court-ordered receivership in September after state officials disclosed it had a shortfall of tens of millions of dollars. (Where do we sign up?)

In (geographically) related news: a venture capital fund that prominent Milwaukee-area investors Tim Keane and Trevor D’Souza had been trying to pull together since 2012 isn’t going to come together, Xconomy has learned. More here.

Tribeca Ventures Partners, the 2.5-year-old, New York-based seed and early-stage investment firm, has raised it second fund, closing on $10 million, shows an SEC filing. The firm’s managing partners are Brian Hirsch and Charles Meakem. Hirsch was previously a managing partner at GSA Venture Partners. Meakem was a managing director with Kodiak Venture Partners.Their newest publicly disclosed investment was made in the textbook publishing business Flat World Knowledge, which announced a $9 million round last week.

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IPOs

Brazil’s Investimentos e Participações em Infra-Estrutura SA will delay its IPO until the second quarter, a source tells Reuters. Invepar, which operates toll roads and a subway road, among other things, is hoping to raise around $833 million. But it would face a highly tumultuous market right now. “Rising borrowing costs, weak growth, a presidential election, and the withdrawal of monetary stimulus in the United States have left investors skittish,” notes Reuters. Over the last 13 months, Brazil’s Bovespa stock index has fallen 23 percent, and investors have withdrawn roughly $12.6 billion from domestic financial markets, adds its report.

Zalando, a five-year-old, Berlin-based online clothing retailer, has lined up three banks to advise it on what is expected to be Europe’s biggest Internet IPO. The company, incubated by the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet, has raised more than $200 million in equity and debt. Its investors include Investment AB Kinnevik, DST Global, JPMorgan Chase, and Quadrant Capital. As of last June, the company’s implied valuation was roughly 2.9 billion euros.

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People

Scott Belsky, founder of Behance — a platform to showcase and discover photography, graphic design, illustration, and fashion that Adobe acquired for $150 million in 2012 — has joined the Founder Collective as a “founder partner.” Belsky is also keeping his day job at Adobe, where he has been vice president of products and community since Behance’s sale. Fortune’s Erin Griffith has more here.

Ben Horowitz participated in a “fireside chat” with fellow VC Mark Susterlast night, and shared some of the questions Andreessen Horowitz asks entrepreneurs during a pitch meeting. He also said of the firm name: “It had to be Andreessen Horowitz and Andreessen had to come first. Marc had all the name recognition. He was Beyonce and I was Kelly Rowland.”

Y Combinator‘s Jessica Livingston says the popular incubator has just funded its most diverse class ever — and that she may have director David Fincher to thank. “We honestly saw an increase in applications after the movie ‘The Social Network’ came out,” Livingston tells Forbes. “It sounds so silly, but just having parents see doing a startup as an option for their kid makes it more normal. When we first got started we had parents who were like, ‘Wait, you got into Stanford grad school. You’re not doing this thing called Y Combinator!’ But now starting a startup is becoming more mainstream, so we’re seeing different types of people doing it.”

Neill Occhiogrosso has joined the two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based, early-stage venture firm Costanoa Venture Capital as its second partner. In a statement, firm founder Greg Sands said that it “felt like the right time to double down…” Occhiogrosso joins Costanoa from an evergreen fund called Investor Growth Capital (IGC). Before joining IGC, he spent four years at Highland Capital Partners, focused on enterprise investments.

Ben Veghte is the new vice president of communications for the National Venture Capital Association. Veghte was previously a longtime director of strategic communcations at The Glover Park Group in Washington, D.C.

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Job Listings

Greylock Partners is looking for an associate or senior associate to join the firm’s enterprise software team. Apply here (quickly).

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Happenings

500 Startups is hosting an invite-only Demo Day in Mountain View, Ca., tomorrow for the startups in its current accelerator batch. You can learn more here.

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Essential Reads

Last month, Google last month launched a free catamaran service to carry Googlers back and forth between San Francisco and the South Bay. Next week, the company will test out a new route, ferrying workers from Alameda, Ca., to Redwood City.

Speaking of Google, it has to move its mystery barge from an island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay because the permits aren’t in order, a state official said Monday. He added that the company can resolve the issue by moving the barge to a fully permitted, nearby construction facility.

How much equity should a chief marketing officer get? You might be surprised.

In corporate America, there’s no question over whether economic inequality is deepening. Businesses that appeal to the middle class are shrinking as the top tier pulls even further away.

Looks like teens are using Facebook after all. At least, according to new findings by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of Americans ages 12 to 17 are on the platform, compared with 57 percent of all U.S. adults (the majority of whom visit Facebook daily).

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Detours

What $2,800 a month in rent will get you in New York City.

Reflections on a culture that rejects boys’ need for privacy.

Robert Frost: Real estate addict.

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Retail Therapy

The game “Clue” now comes in a luxury edition that features “exquisitely furnished” Victorian rooms in a stately wooden cabinet. Can you think of a better way to spend $200? (Oh, you can? Hundreds of better ways, you say? Okay, then. )

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Good Monday morning!

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Top News in the A.M.

Super Bowl ads: a retrospective.

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Lunch with Mr. Marketplace

Josh Breinlinger could have easily been a hardware investor. One of his first assignments out of M.I.T., where he graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, was working for a management consulting company, where he was tasked with dreaming up better fryolators for Burger King and helping design armor for army helicopter pilots.

But a college friend convinced Breinlinger to become the fourth employee of the online staffing company oDesk in 2004 (which merged with archrival Elance last year), and he became completely hooked on marketplaces.

In fact, since entering the world of venture capital a few years ago as a venture partner at Sigma West, Breinlinger has made it his mission to seek out the next big marketplace, leading investments in OfferUp, a Seattle-based mobile marketplace that’s trying to take on Craiglist; and Contently, a New York startup that’s helping companies produce articles that appear on their own websites, in native ad placements, and across social media. (OfferUp will be disclosing the details of a new funding round soon; Contently has raised $12 million, including a $9 million newly closed Series B led by Sigma West.)

Last week, I asked Breinlinger to tell me more about his ideal deal over lunch near Sigma West’s San Francisco office, and he offered up both the obvious and unexpected.

For example, like every other VC on the planet, Breinlinger looks for high recurring usage. (“It’s why Uber is so phenomenal,” said Breinlinger, tucking into his lemon grass beef dish. “I use it all the freaking time.”)

Also appealing to him: any marketplace that sees irregular usage and that can lock users into a subscription as a result. “Most people want housecleaners to come on a very regular basis and they have a relationship with that provider,” he noted. “On the other hand, when it comes to babysitters, it’s probably more irregular and as a result, you’re never going to have someone on demand, whenever you want.”

Breinlinger highlighted the success of Care.com, an online service for hiring nannies and other at-home caregivers that went public a couple of weeks ago. It shares were priced at $17 a piece; today they’re trading at $28.

Breinlinger’s time at Odesk also helped form some other specific views on what makes marketplaces click. He might not have funded the freelance labor force TaskRabbit, for example, primarily because the “best marketplaces lower costs, and TaskRabbit doesn’t meet that criteria for me because I used to be able to pick up my groceries for free [and paying for someone to pick up those items for you] is an added cost.”

Breinlinger cares about a startup’s Net Promoter Score, a customer satisfaction metric that centers on the question, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you be to refer X to a friend or colleague?”

And he’s exceedingly interested in the value that marketplaces add to relationships after they’ve made a match between a buyer and a service provider or product. As he told me, “The test we always used at oDesk was, ‘Could we find a buyer and a freelancer who have an existing relationship and get them to move their work to the Odesk platform because it would be easier and better for both of them?’”

Breinlinger said he thinks more marketplaces need to focus on internal feedback systems and a lot less on the “normal” starred feedback systems that are commonplace but wildly imbalanced, in his experience. “There’s no incentive for someone to rate someone a one, unless they’re really mad for some reason,” he noted. Meanwhile “everyone else gets a five.”

To learn who is actually good at their job and who isn’t, more startups should be building in a lot of internal reviews that include private, anonymous feedback.

“That’s how you improve the product. And when you build the system correctly, you can grow as fast as you want.”

New Fundings

Boombotix, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that make s a line of “intelligent” speakers, has raised $4 million from new investors Social+Capital Partnership, Baseline Ventures, Red Hills, Great Oaks Venture Capital and Grishin Robotics. Earlier investors Walden Venture Capital and David Dolby also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to just more than $5 million.

GetYourGuide, has added $4.5 million to the $14 million Series A round that it closed last year. Its new investors include Kees Koolen, former CEO of online hotel reservation agency Booking.com; Fritz Demopoulos, founder and former CEO of Chinese-based Qunar.com, and Sunstone Capital, a Nordic venture firm.

Nanomix, a 16-year-old, Emeryville, Calif.-based nanotech company focused on next-generation diagnostic tests, has raised $12 million in fresh funding from an unnamed strategic corporate partner and existing investors.

Vinted, a four-year-old, Vilnius, Lithuania-based social, mobile marketplace for second-hand clothes, has raised $27 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Accel Partners. The company has raised $33.6 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

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New Funds

Amadeus Capital, a 16-year-old, U.K.-based early-stage venture fund,has raised $44.7 million for Amadeus IV Early Stage Fund, a pool that will be used to back enterprise-focused startups in the U.K. Amadeus’ biggest LP is British Business Bank. The firm’s founder is Austrian entrepreneur Hermann Hauser. Amadeus’ last fund was a $13.5 million seed fund.

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IPOs

Castlight Health, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that provides employees with personalized shopping tools for healthcare benefits, has confidentially filed paperwork with the SEC for an initial public offering, according to Fortune’s Dan Primack. The company was founded by Todd Park, an Athenahealth co-founder who has since become the country’s U.S. chief technology officer. Much more here.

Coupons.com, the 16-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based network for online and printable coupons, just filed its S-1. The company, valued at a billion dollars when it closed its most recent, $200 million, round of financing in 2011, has raised $277 million altogether, including fromPassport Capital, which owns 22.6 percent of the company. Others of its principal shareholders include T. Rowe Price, which owns 11.66 percent of the company; entities affiliated with Warren Spieker, Jr., which own 8.41 percent; Abu Dhabi Investment Council, which owns 5.82 percent; and American Funds Smallcap World Fund, which owns 5.25 percent.

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Exits

CollabNet, a 14-year-old, Brisbane, Ca.-based agile development platform, has been acquired by the tech-focused private equity firm Vector Capital from its existing venture investors and other stakeholders, including Benchmark, Norwest Venture Partners, and Intel Capital. CollabNet had raised roughly $31 million in equity and $2.5 million in debt. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed but concurrent with the buyout, Vector has also made a growth equity investment in the 300-person company, including to accelerate its product development and enable add-on acquisitions.

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People

Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey hasn’t tweeted since January 7. This is reportedly causing some a bit of a panic.

Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, tells CNBC where he sees the next big trend in tech. “I predict in 10 years, 10 percent of people connected to the Web are wearing some kind of visual wearable [such as Google Glass],” says Gordon. “These things that measure the quantified self are addictive, fun, useful, and social.”

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham has announced a change in the way his outfit invests in the startups that pass through the program. Specifically, to minimize signaling risk, YC Partners will no longer participate in the first $500,000 unless it’s at least three weeks past startups’ “Demo Day.” Graham says too many investors had begun to follow YC Partners’ lead, backing what they back and avoiding those startups it didn’t.

Investor Peter Thiel talks to the Globe and Mail about how he chooses which dreamers to back. His simple calculation, he says: “How many leaps are required for your solution to work? Having to invent one or two major things, that’s doable. More? Doubtful.”

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Jobs Listings

Attorney readers, take note: One Kings Lane, the very well-funded home decor company, is looking for an associate general counsel in San Francisco. Apply here.

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Happenings

500 Startups is hosting an invite-only Demo Day in Mountain View, Ca., this Wednesday for the startups in its current accelerator batch. You canlearn more here.

The Innovation Forum is launching its first Innovation Leaders Conference at Cambridge University on February 27th and 28th. The conference aims to promote the translation of cutting edge research into commercial products and services. More details here.

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Data

This morning, Cambridge Associates and the National Venture Capital Association released new performance numbers through last September 30, and they show continued improvement, but VCs are still getting bested by the DJIA, Nasdaq, and the S&P 500 over the one-year, three-year, and five-year period. Things flip at the 10-year mark, where VC returns have hit 8.6 percent, outpacing public indices slightly. You can see the numbers right here.

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Essential Reads

Batteries, long the “poor cousin to computer chips in research-obsessed Silicon Valley, are now the rage,” says the New York Times in a report that suggests our smartphones could eventually pull energy from the air or power themselves through TV, cellular or Wi-Fi signals.

According to Yale University, Johnson & Johnson is providing the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) project access to its clinical trial information vault, meaning researchers across the globe will be able to use the company’s data in their clinical trials.

The Economist has put together a 16-page report on the rise of technology startups around the world. It’s well worth reading, as TechCrunch notes.

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Detours

Inside “Billionaires Row”: a look at nearly $500 million worth of rotting, derelict mansions in London.

Social psychologists say it takes 36 days after a tragedy before jokes about it become funny. The New Republic on the science of humor.

The operating system played by Scarlett Johansson in “Her” has far more emotional intelligence than Siri does today. Can Siri catch up? Maybe, butdon’t hold your breath, says Siri’s cofounder.

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Retail Therapy

Magic wallets. Cheap, functional, and fun. Available at J.Crew or here.

Ah, yes, our kind of tent.

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To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

It’s Friday, good people. Hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week.

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Top News in the A.M.

Ouch. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners came out with its latest numbers on mobile market share in the United States yesterday and found that BlackBerry devices accounted for zero percent of all smartphone activations in the fourth quarter of last year.

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An Invite-Only Social Network Turns to Crowdfunding

You may remember Erik Wachtmeister from his days at ASmallWorld, the exclusive, invitation-only social network community that he founded with his wife in 2004. The son of an ambassador and a countess, the aristocratic Wachtmeister disappeared from view after selling a majority stake in the business to movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who elbowed Wachtmeister aside, tanked the business, and later sold it to a Nestlé heir, who has recently run into troubles of his own.

Now Wachtmeister is back and taking another shot at the genre with his newest venture, Best of All Worlds, an 18-month-old, invitation-only social network that’s even harder to join. It features a new wrinkle, though: starting next week, accredited investors will be able to buy their way into the platform via a crowdfunding campaign. “It’s a way for us to widen our base of investors, stakeholders and global ambassadors of the brand,” says Wachtmeister. We spoke yesterday morning; our conversation has been lightly edited for length.

We talked about Best of All Worlds in July 2012, when it was set to launch. What’s been happening since?

It’s been in private beta. We launched it with 35,000 people, a relatively small group in global terms. And we’ve since been evaluating how people use it, what features they most like, whether the user interface is intuitive or not and making adjustments.

Why did you decide to form another invitation-only social network?

Not so much to keep it exclusive but to maintain an intimate space where people can network more openly. You can’t just walk up to someone at an airport, but if you’re in a private venue, the social rules are different; it’s more acceptable to walk up to someone.

How does the admittance process work?

It’s very democratic. Members decide who can be invited, but not everyone gets invitation rights, so there’s an algorithm that [decides how many invitations are allotted those with invitation privileges]. It’s to prime it and hopefully ensure that it grows in the right direction. We don’t want an overwhelming amount of students, for example. We want a good mix geographically, professionally, age-wise.

Some might interpret this as yet another way for the “1 percent” to avoid everyone else.

Not at all. It’s very simple. All we’re doing is creating what exists in real life online. People don’t necessarily want to pass out their business cards at Grand Central Station; that’s not normal.

We want to grow our community in an orderly fashion, where you’re starting with people who have a lot of affinity for each other and know the same people and have similar appreciations for what’s around them. Our goal is to have an eclectic mix of people from all over the world, from all kinds of backgrounds, but there should be a certain commonality of interest.

You’re turning to crowd-funding. Will these investors who may well be strangers to your other members be able to access the site?

Anyone who invests will of course be able to become a member. At a very minimum, investors should be able to able to find their way around the site.

Why do it?

We see it as complementing our fundraising strategy with giving our members and other accredited investors the opportunity to “take a bet” on a private company.

Which crowdfunding platform are you using and what’s the minimum investment?

London-based crowdcube.com is doing the deal. The minimum size is $1,000, but we’re limiting the number of investors to 200. Our goal is to raise around $500,000.

Are you also talking to VCs?

We’re very open to it, though VCs tend to want to see that hockey stick [growth] being realized already – they want huge traction – and we’re not quite there yet.

What makes you think you can compete with Facebook?

I think people are sick of Facebook. They use it like a directory, to look up people, and if they’re bored, they’ll look to see what people did yesterday. It’s for vanity and self-expression. We’re more a utility.

Once we have critical mass, for example, we’ll create verticals for groups of people who share the same passions. Facebook Groups are great if you’re organizing something like a bachelor party but not if you want to hook up with people with a strong passion or knowledge in a given area. Facebook has several million of these groups, with an average size of 20 members; our goal is to have a few dozen “worlds” with tens of thousands of people in each world. It’s a completely different concept.

New Fundings

BlueCava, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based company that sells online audience management and measurement services, has raised $13 million in funding from S3 Ventures, Performance Edge Partners and Zeitgeist Capital. The company has raised $36 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Bow & Drape, a two-year-old, New York-based fashion technology startup, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by VegasTechFund. Other participants in the round included Great Oaks Venture Capital,Triple Point Capital, and StubHub co-founder Jeff Fluhr. The Journal takes a look at what the company is doing exactly here.

Cleverbug, a nearly three-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based “social gifting” company that produces online photo cards and other gifts, has raised $6 million in financing led by Delta Partners. To date, the company has raised $8 million.

Enigma, a year-old, New York-based search and discovery platform for public data, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Comcast Ventures, with participation from American Express Ventures, Crosslink Capital and the New York Times Company.

Moontoast, a four-year-old, Boston-based ad platform that helps brands get the most out of Facebook, has raised a $4.5 million extension to its Series B funding, secured early last year. The new investment was made by the Martin Companies, an early-stage firm based in Nashville that also led a $5 million round in Moontoast last year. The company has has raised $15.5 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

One Kings Lane, the 4.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online home decor retailer, has raised $112 million in new funding led by Mousse Partners, with Fidelity and one other (unnamed) large institutional firm participating alongside earlier investors. The investment gives the company a $912 million post-money valuation. One Kings Lane has raised $229 million altogether, including from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners and Tiger Global Management.

Practically Green, a 3.5-year-old, Boston-based company whose online tools help companies manage their sustainability programs, has raised $3 million in Series A funding. The round included CommonAngels, Pan Asia Solar, Clean Energy Venture Group and Launchpad Venture Group. The company has raised $4.75 million so far.

Qordoba, a two-year-old, Dubai-based company that provides localization services for companies like Google and LinkedIn, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Silicon Oasis Investments and MENA Venture Investments.

Zopa, an 8.5-year-old, London-based peer-to-peer lending platform, has raised $25 million in funding from Arrowgrass Capital Partners, a European-focused investment firm headquartered in London. Zopa, whose earlier backers include Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners,Augmentum Capital and Wellington Partners, has now raised roughly $56 million altogether.

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New Funds

CrunchFund, 2.5-year-old, San Carlos, Ca.-based early-stage venture firm cofounded by Michael Arrington, is in the market for a second fund, according to an SEC filing that shows a target of $40 million. Fortune’s Dan Primack reports that CrunchFund already has held around a $25 million first close for the new fund, which includes a new commitment from founding investor AOL. CrunchFund has made more than 115 investments, including in Airbnb, Uber, and Yammer, acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. Among its most recent investments is the video-sharing app Mindie.

Jerusalem Venture Partners is raising a new, $120 million cyber security fund, and Cisco plans to invest tens of millions of dollars in it, reports Haaretz.

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IPOs

JD.com, one of China’s biggest e-commerce companies, has filed with the SEC to raise $1.5 billion in a U.S. IPO. Formerly known as 360buy.com, the company is the second biggest e-commerce company in China and a rival to the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Dealbook has much more here.

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Exits

Incredible Labs, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that had developed a mobile personal assistant app called Donna, has beenacquired by Yahoo, which is shutting down Donna and bringing five of Incredible Labs’s seven employees onboard. Other terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Incredible Labs had raised $2.5 million from investors, including Khosla Ventures, Betaworks, Webb Investment Network, CrunchFund, and Ashton Kutcher, among other angel investors.

LoopFuse, a six-year-old, Atlanta-based social analytics platform, has been acquired by marketing automation platform Salesfusion for an undisclosed amount. Two weeks ago, Salesfusion, also based in Atlanta, had raised $8.25 million in Series B funding, including from Noro-Moseley Partners, Hallett Capital and BLH Venture Partners; it has raised roughly $10 million altogether. LoopFuse, meanwhile, had raised $1.4 million from True Ventures in 2009.

NaturalMotion, a 13-year-old games company with offices in Oxford, England and San Francisco, has been acquired by Zynga for $527 million in cash and stock. Among other things, NaturalMotion makes a popular app called “Clumsy Ninja” that was released late last year. Alongside news of the acquisition, Zynga also announced it was laying off 314 employees, representing 15 percent of its staff, as part of a cost reduction plan designed to save the money up to $35 million.

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People

Salesforce founder Marc Benioff tells the Journal how to address tensions in San Francisco: “I think these [Google, Facebook, and other tech company] buses — which if you hang out in the Mission, [they come] every five minutes — they’ve got to be massively regulated, we have toget them off our streets.”

The New York-based early-stage venture firm ff Venture Capital has promoted three employees: Ryan Armbrust, who joined the firm in 2012 from the technology transfer office of Columbia University, has been promoted from associate to director; Katie Frankel, who joined the firm in 2010, has been promoted from associate to director of community management; and Paul Bianco, who joined the firm from insurer AXA Equitable a year ago, has been promoted from analyst to associate.

Jason Kilar, former head of Hulu is back with a new stealth startup called The Fremont Project, and according to Re/code, its app will offer a mix of magazine and newspaper content and videos videos from which readers will pick and choose.

Bill Krause, the cofounder of 3Com, is Andreessen Horowitz‘s newest special advisor, the firm revealed in an interview with Krause yesterday. Krause is also affiliated with the powerful buyout firm The Carlyle Group, where his title is “operating executive” to Carlyle’s technology and business services group.

Josh Miller is taking on a part-time role as a venture partner atBetaworks in New York, the outfit announced yesterday. Miller founded Branch Media, acquired by Facebook this month for a reported $15 million. Betaworks was an investor and Miller and his team worked out of Betaworks’s offices for roughly nine months. Miller and his New York-based team are now forming a new “Conversations” group inside of Facebook to help users connect around their interests.

Could the long wait soon be over? According to Bloomberg’s sources,Microsoft‘s board is on the verge of annointing Satya Nadella, the company’s enterprise and cloud chief, as its newest CEO. More here.

Each new year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chooses a new goal for himself. One year the goal was to learn Mandarin; another year, it was to only eat meat that he’d killed himself. In 2014, his goal is to write a thank-you note every day.

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Job Listings

Speaking of promotions at ff Venture Capital in New York, the firm is looking for a new analyst. Apply here.

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Data

It’s the Super Bowl this weekend, which means it’s also time for the Super VC Bowl, brought to you by PitchBook. Witness its fun look at the 2013 venture activity of the competing teams’ home states. Go Washington! Wait, go Colorado! Oh, forget it. We can’t muster any real enthusiasm for this one. (Sorry.)

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Essential Reads

Nest‘s team is becoming Google‘s core hardware group, reports TechCrunch.

Amazon is planning to offer a checkout system to retail stores later this year. But Amazon’s bricks-and-mortar ambitions may go far beyond payments.

There are very few things the public sector can do to encourage entrepreneurship, argues a new Kauffman Foundation study.

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Detours

A new paper looks at alcohol consumption and voting patterns from 1952 to 2010, finding that as states become more liberal politically, beer and spirit consumption increases.

Forgotify: The tool for discovering Spotify’s four million unheard (like, zero-play) tracks.

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Retail Therapy (Super Bowl Edition)

Maple Bacon Coffee Porter. Serve it to fans of the opposing team and have the last laugh!

Best Buds App, to help you locate the good stuff in Denver. (This announcement constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.)

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Hi, Happy Thursday, everyone!

—-

Top News in the A.M.

The PC may be dying, but tablet growth is slowing, too, as saturation sets in.

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Swell, a Pandora for News Radio

It’s hard to find an overlooked niche, but Palo Alto-based Concept.io may have found one with Swell, a seven-month-old smartphone app focused on streaming personalized news radio.

Unlike competitors whose users choose what they want to hear, Swell is a discovery service that learns users’ listening preferences over time and pushes them content they’re liable to enjoy. Don’t like what’s steaming? Swipe, it’s on to the next story.

The app is easy, even delightful, particularly for fans of NPR, the BBC or Comedy Channel — just three of Swell’s growing number of content partners.

The question is whether young app users will embrace it in large enough numbers. Pew Research Center’s recent surveys find that while nearly 60 percent of Baby Boomers say they enjoy following the news “a lot,” the number drops to 45 percent of Gen Xers and just 29 percent of Millennials, a generational difference that has remained virtually unchanged over years of surveys. (When it comes to news radio, specifically, 38 percent of Gen-Xers and 27 percent of Millennials tell Pew they’ve consumed news radio as recently as “yesterday.”)

To learn more about who’s using the app and when and what’s next, I caught up with Concept.io founder and CEO Ram Ramkumar, whose last company, SnapTell, sold to Amazon in 2009. Our chat has been edited for length.

How did the idea of Swell come about?

We really wanted to build a product that people would use every day and that would really engage users and make use of their time when they’re driving or exercising – time that’s underutilized, generally.

Much of product’s allure is that you just turn it on, like the music discovery service Pandora. Broadly speaking, how does the personalization technology work?

It’s complicated. Let’s say you’re interested in startups, and perhaps you love long content in the afternoon and shorter content in the morning. Well, we have to manage the freshness of the content, which is unique to the spoken word. If you think about it, music is relatively evergreen, but with news or stories, you don’t want to hear something that’s stale, so it’s a difficult problem. We’re shifting through thousands of individual tracks and finding the ones that you most want.

Are there any humans involved?

We have an audio curator who comes from the radio world and curates the content that goes into Swell at a program level. After that, an algorithm kicks in your preferences, so someone who loves the “Freakanomics Radio” show might like an Economist podcast. Then, the most powerful element comes into play, which is the community network effect, where what Swell’s hundreds of thousands of users love gets automatically promoted — and what they don’t love is less likely to show up in your queue.

So Swell has hundreds of thousands of users?

Yes, hundreds of thousands and not millions yet, but it’s growing gradually. And we have really strong engagement. We see more than 40 minutes of listening per day and over four hours of listening per week. There’s a big uptick in the morning and also in the afternoon, when people are commuting.

And eventually, you’ll insert ads into the stream, a la Pandora?

Right. Ads and subscriptions are the way to go, though there are also special things you can do, like offering users access to their entire listening histories so they can search through what they’ve listened to in the past. So we can do premium features along with advertising as it gets to critical mass. What we’re working on next is adding identity and a social layer to the product, so you can sign into Swell and see what your friends are listening to and share.

You raised $5.5 million from Google Ventures and others last summer. Is that expected to last you a couple of years? Are you interested in raising more yet?

We’ve had interest and continue to have interest. Our A round was preemptive – someone called and wanted to invest — and there’s a possibility that that will happen again. But we’re not looking to raise money.

New Fundings

Blue Bottle Coffee, the 12-year-old, Oakland, Ca.-based specialty roaster, has raised $25.75 million from a “range of high-profile Internet players” and numerous clients of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, reports Re/code. The company has now raised roughly $45 million altogether, including from Google Ventures, Index Ventures, True Ventures, Kevin Systrom, Evan Williams, Chris Sacca and skateboarding star Tony Hawk.

Daily Secret, a three-year-old, New York-based digital media startup, has raised Series B funding led by PanAfrican Investment Co., founded byRichard Parsons and Ronald Lauder. Return backers Greycroft Partners and e.Ventures also participated in the round. The company isn’t reporting the amount, but StrictlyVC had flagged a filing for this round in early December that showed $1.25 million in new funding. Daily Secret, which emails users a daily “best kept secret” about their favorite cities, has raised $3.1 million altogether.

Flat World Education, a 6.5-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based education content and software startup, has raised $9.5 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Earlier investors Valhalla Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, Penguin Random House Holdings and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, also participated in the funding.

Guardly, a 3.5-year-old, Toronto-based company whose mobile safety apps are designed to help schools, corporations, healthcare organizations, transit systems and municipalities, communicate more effectively during emergency situations, has raised $1.45 million in seed funding led by Freestyle Capital. Golden Venture Partners and MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund also participated in the round.

Origami Logic, a 2.5-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based company that’s developing a visual, self-service analytics platform specifically for marketers, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Jafco Ventures. Earlier investors Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round, which brings Origami’s total funding to date to roughly $24 million.

Versa, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based company that designs interactive media experiences for advertisers — including sponsored products that run in major papers like the Houston Chronicle, has finished raising a $2 million seed round led by the Omidyar Network. Others to participate in the round included the James L. Knight Foundation and Quotidian Ventures. The company’s earlier investors include Digital News Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Liberty City Ventures and Gabriel Investments.

ZappRx, a two-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based platform for electronic prescriptions, has raised $1 million in seed funding led by earlier investorAtlas Venture. The funding also included SR One, and individual investorsTerry Meguid, David Hamamoto, Sean Trigony and James Glimm. The company has raised $2.2 million altogether so far.

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New Funds

China-focused venture firm Banyan Capital has closed on $206 for its first venture capital fund, according to China Money Network. The fund will focus on technology, media and telecommunications startups. The firm’s founders were previously with IDG Capital Partners in China.

A new startup accelerator, Boomtown, is launching in Boulder, Co. to help nurture new Internet, mobile and software startups. Atlanta-based venture capital firm Farmore Capital Group is the lead investor.

Anil Joshi, who previously headed Mumbai Angels network, is raising a$25 million fund designed to make pre-Series A investments. Called Dev Venture Fund, the vehicle will back 15 to 20 companies with checks in the range of $300,000 to $2 million. Joshi became the president of the angel investors network two years ago. He held a number of operating roles earlier in his career, including as a marketing officer at the Mumbai-based rayon filament yarn producer Century Rayon.

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IPOs

Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical, a 3.5-year-old, Novato, Ca.-based rare drug developer, has increased its IPO offering price to $19 to $20 per share, up from $14 to $17 per shape. It’s hoping to raise as much as $98 million from the sale of 4.8 million shares this week. The company’s biggest backers are TPG, which owns 13.2 percent, Beacon Bioventures, which owns 13.2 percent, HealthCap, which owns 11.7 percent, Adage Capital Partners, which owns 7.4, Capital Research Global Investors, which owns 6.4, and A.M. Pappas Life Science Ventures, which owns 5.9 percent.

FierceBiotech takes a look at the rest of the expected deluge of first-quarter biotech IPO filings.

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Exits

Digitalsmiths, a 16-year-old, Durham, N.C.-based video technology company, has been acquired for $135 million in cash by publicly tradedTiVo. Digitalsmiths, whose “seamless discovery” technology reportedlymakes it easier to find video content on a wide variety of screens, had raised $31.5 million over the years, including from Aurora Funds,Chrysalis Ventures, Cisco, and .406 Ventures.

Dijit Media, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based social TV startup whose offerings included a personalized programming guide, has been acquired by competitor Viggle, which offers rewards for checking into TV shows and listening to music through its app. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.More here. Dijit had raised money from individual investors, including Alan Braverman, a former Geni.com exec who went on to work for Yammer and Fwix.

DVS Sciences, a 10-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based company that had developed a single-cell protein analysis platform, has been acquired by publicly traded Fluidigm for $207.5 million in cash and stock. DVS had raised $14.6 million from investors, including 5AM Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Pfizer Venture Investments.

HowAboutWe.com, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based company, announced yesterday that it has acquired the lifestyle and dating site Nerve.com. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. HowAboutWe has raised roughly $22 million from investors, including fromFounder Collective, ff Venture Capital, High Line Venture Partners,RRE Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

The Kernel, a two-year-old, London-based news site about online culture, has been acquired by Austin-based Daily Dot Media, which oversees a pop and tech culture site. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. The Kernel had raised seed funding from BERLIN42 and angel investors. Its founder and editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, will be “pursuing new projects,” he said in a statement.

Lenovo is buying the Motorola handset business from Google at the bargain-basement price of $2.91 billion in cash, stock, and a three-year promissory note. Google, which paid $12.5 billion for Motorola in the spring of 2012, will retain most of Motorola’s patent holdings, reports Re/code, while Lenovo gains access to 2,000 patents, the Motorola brand, and its product portfolio.

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People

Chris Girgenti, a managing partner at Chicago’s Pritzker Group Venture Capital, says the firm is making a stronger push into New York as it broadens its investment strategy. “Eventually, we’ll open an office [here],” he tells Crain’s New York Business.

John Hershey, the senior investment officer in charge of the alternatives portfolio at Oregon State Treasury, is moving into a new, expanded role, effective February 1, reports Chris Witkowsky, who says Hershey’s new role includes managing the outfit’s private equity portfolio.

Kristin Richards and Elisa Schreiber have joined Greylock Partners, the firm announced yesterday. Richards, the firm’s new VP of Talent, comes to the firm from Spencer Stuart; before joining Spencer Stuart, she spent four years as director of executive recruiting at Accel-KKR. Schreiber joins as VP of Marketing from Hulu, where she served as its head of communications for several years.

Paul Sagan, the former CEO of Akamai Technologies, has joined General Catalyst Partners as a partner. Dealbook has more here.

Joerg Sievert has left SAP Ventures European Advisors, where he was a managing director. In an email sent to his contacts yesterday, Sievert, who has spent the last years with SAP Ventures, said he’d accepted a job as a managing director of a “global fund.”

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Job Listings

Pinterest is looking for a head of mobile business development in San Francisco.

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Essential Reads

Facebook wants to be a newspaper. And it wants you to be writing some of its best stories.

A U.S. terrorism defendant who was spied on by the NSA filed a challenge to the constitutionality of the surveillance yesterday, in a case likely to be litigated all the way to the Supreme Court.

Shares of Vringo jumped as much as 37 yesterday morning, after a judge increased the royalty rate Google must pay for violating its patents related to Google’s AdWords business.

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Detours

Facebook is 10 years old. How much time have you wasted of your own life on the platform? Find out using this upsetting app.

What is that thing? A gravity-defying home, on Sunset Boulevard.

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Retail Therapy

Nothing says, “Let’s get this deal done,” like a power pair of dog-faced cufflinks. (Are we right or are we right?)

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Hi, good morning, everyone!

—–

Top News in the A.M.

President Obama made a push for an expanded high-tech manufacturing base in the U.S. during his State of the Union address last night, proposing the creation of six new high-tech manufacturing hubs this year.

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A Silicon Valley Firm for Startups That are Eyeing Europe

Most Bay Area venture firms don’t pay much attention to Europe. That’s just fine with Next World Capital, a four-year-old, expansion-stage firm backed by the European clients of Next World Group, an affiliated investment advisory firm with offices in Paris and Brussels.

Though Next World’s cofounder Craig Hanson tells me these ties are a small part of the firm’s value to entrepreneurs, he admits that it’s a point of intrigue for at least 80 percent of the startups he meets with – a much higher percentage than he’d anticipated when endeavoring to start the firm. We talked recently in the firm’s airy office building in San Francisco (atop which sits one exceedingly nice roof deck). Our conversation has been edited for length.

You’ve kept your profile somewhat low until recently. Why?

We’ve been building the organization; we wanted to establish a reputation with entrepreneurs first. Now, we’re hiring and staffing up, and we’re in a good place to tell the story of who we are for the first time.

You’ve been investing a $200 million debut fund, writing initial checks of between $7 million and $12 million. How many companies have you funded so far, and have you had any early exits?

We’ve funded 10 companies and had two fantastic exits so far. We invested in [the private cloud management software company] DynamicOps [which sold in 2012 to VMWare for an undisclosed amount, after raising $16.3 million]. A year later, NexGen Storage, a flash storage system company that we’d gotten involved with [leading its Series B round] was approached by Fusio.io. [It acquired NexGen, which had raised $10 million from investors, for roughly $120 million.]

How did you break into deals as a new fund in the Valley?

We did it by going directly to companies rather than rely on investor relationships. Once we had the meeting with the CEO…we were able to have in-depth conversations right off the bat. It wasn’t, “Give us your PowerPoint.” We’d say, “We’ve talked with 20 vendors, experts, and customers in the space and we’d love to trade notes.” At that first meeting, we were having second- or third-meeting [types] of conversations.

How strongly do you pitch CEOs on your European ties, including a Paris-based partner? Is your ability to help abroad a big or small selling point?

We thought it’d be useful in niche cases. We found instead that it’s a core, strategic priority for most companies, and that it’s happening much faster in their development than it used to. Particularly for cloud-based, SaaS companies, and mobile companies, they’re getting pulled to expand internationally much faster than companies used to.

What are early considerations these CEOs need to make as they look to Europe?

Well, among other things, you need to consider when to enter the European market, where specifically you go, and how you orient your positioning around the product, which, in a lot of cases, is slightly different than how you’d approach the U.S. market.

If you had to generalize, what are some of the distinctions between regions that U.S. entrepreneurs should know?

Germany is a very large and sophisticated market, for example, so you have to have credibility there, either by investing in employees and resources there, and/or having strong partnerships with credible local firms. If you’re trying to sell a sophisticated infrastructure software product or enterprise app into that market, trying to do that by just flying people out occasionally from a London hub isn’t going to be as effective. There’s a similar dynamic in France.

The Benelux countries or Nordic countries are more open and used to vendors not having a specific office in their country; they’re used to looking at vendors and relationships and partners across Europe.

It’s interesting. We tend to hear so much about the importance of expanding into Asia Pacific.

There’s more cultural and business familiarity in working with European markets. They’re very large economies, and in term of enterprise IT spend, it’s the next largest market to go after [following the U.S.].

New Fundings

BrightFarms, a three-year-old, New York-based company that designs, finances, builds and operates hydroponic greenhouse farms at, or near, supermarkets, has raised $4.9 million in Series B funding from a group of investors, including NGEN Partners, Emil Capital Partners, BrightFarms founder Ted Caplow. The company has raised $9.2 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

CloudLock, a seven-year-old, Waltham, Mass.-based cloud data security company, has raised $16.5 million in Series C funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Cedar Fund and Ascent Venture Partners participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to around $28 million.

Cotap, a year-old, San Francisco-based enterprise mobile messaging service, has raised $10 million in Series B financing led by Emergence Capital Partners. Earlier backer Charles River Ventures also participated in the fundraising, which brings the company’s total funding to $15.5 million. Cotap’s founders are former Yammer execs Jim Patterson and Zack Parker. (I’d written a short profile about the company last year.)

Ensighten, a four-year-old, Cupertino, Ca.-based tags management company that helps sites track data for third party services, has raised $40 million in Series B funding from Insight Venture Partners. The round brings the company’s total funding to $55 million. Previous investors include Volition Capital, Lead Edge Capital, Floodgate, The Halo Fund, and Eastern Advisors Private Fund.

Health Catalyst, a 5.5-year-old, Salt Lake City, Ut.-based data warehousing and analytics company, has raised $41 million in Series C funding existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. The company has raised nearly $100 million to date.

Fitbay, an eight-month-old, Copenhagen-based social network for clothes shopers, has raised $400,000 in seed funding from entrepreneur-investorJesper Buch and the Nordic venture capital firm Creandum.

GoCardless, a three-year-old, London-based service that enables smaller merchants to more easily set up interbank transfers for customers, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by Balderton Capital. Others of the company’s backers include Accel Partners and Passion Capital. The company has raised $11.8 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

GutCheck, a four-year-old, Denver-based company whose tools facilitate one-to-one dialogue between businesses and their target customers, has raised $4 million in funding led by Icon Venture Partners and existing investors. The money comes on the heels of a $4 million Series B round announced last May. GutCheck has raised $10 million altogether, including from Grotech Ventures, Highway 12 Ventures, Village Ventures, andCrawley Ventures.

Madison Reed, a year-old, San Francisco-based e-commerce company focused on delivering salon-quality hair care products to consumers’ front doors, has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, which was joined in the round by True Ventures and Maveron. Madison Reed had raised $3.9 million in Series A funding from True and Maveron last April. The company’s CEO and cofounder is Amy Errett, who spent several years as a partner at Maveron beginning in 2008 and who was previously CEO of the lifestyle company Olivia.

Medium, the 18-month-old, San Francisco-based collaborative publishing startup cofounded by Twitter cofounders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, has raised $25 million led by Greylock Partners, which was joined in the funding by a long list of investors, including: Google Ventures,Betaworks, Code Advisors, CAA Ventures, Science, Ron Conway,Chris Sacca, Peter Chernin, Tim O’Reilly, Michael Ovitz, and Gary Vaynerchuk. The round marks the company’s first outside funding, reports Re/code.

Mercatus, a four-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company whose analysis and decision-making platform is designed for solar energy investors, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding led by Trepp, an information, analytics and technology company. Other investors in the round include Vision Ridge Partners, Augment Ventures and Shah Capital.

PowerVision, a 12-year-old, Belmont, Ca.-based company thats developing an intraocular lens, has raised $20 million in Series D funding from earlier investors Venrock, Johnson & Johnson Development Corp., Medtronic, Advanced Technology Ventures, Lexington Capitaland Frazier Healthcare Ventures. PowerVision plans on raising an additional $10 million as part of the Series D funding round. To date, the company has raised around $77 million.

Rocketmiles, a 14-month-old, Chicago-based travel booking site that offers customers incentives, has raised a $6.5 million Series A round led by August Capital, with participation from Peterson Ventures, Link Ventures, Atlas Venture, Chicago Ventures and entrepreneur-investor Sam Yagan.

Simple Energy, a three-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based company whose software platform aims to engage customers and drive energy savings through social game mechanics, has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by the Westly Group. The company has raised just less than $9 million to date, including from Techstars, Vision Ridge Partners, Green Tree Equity, Jove Equity Partners, and Valero Capital.

Yiftee, a three-year-old, Menlo Park, Calif.-based service for sending local gifts to friends, has raised $2.1 million in Series A funding fromTransPacific Ventures; Intuit co-founder Scott Cook; Burt Sugarman and his wife, TV personality Mary Hart; Asset Management Company; Broad Strategy Fund; and Michael Levinthal. The company previously raised $1 million in seed funding in 2012.

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New Funds

Hearst Corp., owner of Cosmopolitan magazine and part owner of ESPN, is making a bigger push into healthcare by creating a new division calledHearst Health, a division that reportedly consists of five healthcare-information companies, an innovation lab and a $75 million venture fund to back early-stage providers of health-care information products.

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IPOs

Another day, another company that’s eyeing the public markets. This time, it’s seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based online marketing company HubSpot. As the company told the Journal‘s Lizette Chapman, it saw $77 million in revenue last year, a 50 percent annual jump. The company has raised $100 million from investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital, Charles River Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Google Ventures.

Fantex, a start-up looking to sell stocks tied to athletes’ future earnings, is “getting back in the game after taking a couple of hits,” reports Dealbook. The company said yesterday that it’s moving forward with a planned IPO linked to San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis.

Trevena, a six-year-old, King of Prussia, Pa.-based venture-backed biotech that’s developin treatments for pain and acute heart failure,lowered its proposed deal size for its IPO today, saying it planned to raise $60 million by offering 8.5 million shares at $7 per share, rather than its original plan to sell 5.8 million shares at a range of $12 to $14.

—–

People

Wesley Chan, a general partner at Google Ventures since 2009 (and a Google project manager before that), has taken a role as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the organization, reports Fortune‘s Dan Primack. At the moment, Chan isn’t discussing what drove the move, saying instead to “stay tuned.”

Steven Chu, the former Secretary of Energy, just joined the board ofAmprius, a Stanford spinoff that’s developing high energy and high capacity lithium-ion batteries. (The company had announced a $30 million round of funding a couple of weeks ago.)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke yesterday to an audience of engineers in San Jose, and his stated goals, says the New York Times, “paint a picture of someone who wants to do more than just be the king of social media. He wants to change the high-tech business, all the way to the guts of the data center. And he thinks he’s on his way to doing it.” (Illuminating, and short, piece.)

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Job Listings

Orbimed Advisors, the New York-based, life sciences focused investment firm, is in the market for a senior associate, a job designed to last two to three years. In early November, Orbimed raised $735 million for its largest venture capital partnership to date.

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Data

In the third quarter of last year, VCs invested a record $1.12 billion across 150 U.S.-based mobile and telecom deals. CB Insights takes a look at where it all went.

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Essential Reads

Airbnb will soon start adding new services to its home-rental business, said CEO Brian Chesky in an interview in Davos. He also said Airbnb won’t be going public any time soon. “We are not going public this year. We will do it at a time when it benefits the company. When we have a good reason.”

Here come the Google Glass videogames.

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Detours

The cities where people own the fewest cars.

The “homeless billionaire” settles down.

In the spring of 2015, Alex Bellini will fly to Greenland, jump on an iceberg, and live there until it melts. (We fear this will not end well.)

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Retail Therapy

Authentic, vintage gear from the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. Just in time for your big Olympics-themed party next month. Get some before it’s gone.

—–

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Happy Tuesday, everyone!

—–

Top News in the A.M.

Indiegogo, the six-year-old, San Francisco-based, popular crowdfunding platform, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Institutional Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (More in “New Fundings.”)

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Futurist Paul Saffo: This Backlash is Just Beginning

In October 2011, I wrote a story featuring renowned futurist Paul Saffo, who voiced concern about the widening economic gulf between Silicon Valley and the rest of the U.S. — as well as the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the Bay Area itself.

“All my instincts as a forecaster tell me this has the feel of something very big happening,” he’d said. “I’m standing on the beach and noticing the water heading back out toward the horizon.”

At the time, everyone was having too much fun to pay much attention to some gloomy forecaster. Unfortunately, Saffo was right to be worried. San Francisco County and its neighboring counties, Marin and San Mateo, are now home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the state thanks to the tech industry. The more troubling outcomes we’re seeing as a result of this wealth generation – the displacement of earlier residents, anxiety, and, now, protests – are just the tip of the iceberg, too, says Saffo, who I spoke with again yesterday. Our conversation has been edited for length.

There are so many dimensions to what we’re seeing right now. Where to start?

There are really three dimensions. One is that living in the Bay Area is more expensive than ever. Another is that post-Internet-bubble wealth is very different than the old money. In the ‘80s, the motto was “Show no chrome.” I can remember [Intel cofounder] Gordon Moore driving a beat-up station wagon forever. Though there’ve always been a couple of flashy types, if you had a lot of money, you didn’t flash your wealth.

The income gap wasn’t so great in the past, either. If you worked for Apple, you had a comfortable life, but you still owned a rancher in Cupertino. Now, money is going much further down into some of these workforces. An engineer at Google might be getting paid $5 million. So the wealth differential is greater; more people are wealthy, and because they’re coming into this money at a younger age, they don’t have the good sense to keep their mouth shut.

So what happens next?

In the short term, people who can afford it are going to continue to buy houses in San Francisco, and people who can’t will go elsewhere in the Bay Area.

That means that everyone will have longer commutes, including schoolteachers who can’t afford to live in San Francisco on their salaries. That means civil servants who’ve lived in San Francisco their entire professional lives.

Eventually, that could also mean Facebook and Google employees [who are less wealthy than their peers], as well as contractors who don’t have stock. This inequality has a certain unpredictable whimsy to it. It’s not just the haves and have-nots but the lucky and the unlucky.

How can we shift the momentum here, practically speaking?

There’s no one answer, but the big local companies really need to engage locally. There needs to be transportation for everyone; even you aren’t using public transportation, it’s in everyone’s interest to have it. They need to step up and do things that build strong community, including mixed communities of different wealth levels. You don’t want your schoolteachers or your police force living 50 miles away. I’d bet 70 percent of San Francisco’s firefighters already live in the East Bay. You do not want that in an earthquake.

Do you really think companies will go down that path?

I’m genuinely optimistic. I think Silicon Valley companies will eventually get very engaged in this issue at a corporate level and that their employees will get engaged, too. [Their employees] are basically decent people who haven’t considered themselves privileged or special. But all this attention is leading to self-reflection, and I think that will drive social entrepreneurship within these companies. Frankly, I think if these companies applied just a tiny fraction of the vision they apply to their business mission to social issues, we’d see dramatic results.

In the meantime?

Well, in the very long run, we’re going to have to have a national conversation about wealth redistribution. I’m not a Marxist but [Oxfam] just reported that the world’s 85 richest people own as much as half the world’s population. I’m a forecaster, and I know when something isn’t sustainable.

New Fundings

AutoGrid Systems, a three -year-old, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based analytics company focused on the energy industry, has raised $12.75 million in Series C financing led by a consortium of investors, including the European utility E.ON, along with existing investors Foundation Capital, Voyager Capital and others. The company has raised $21.8 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

AMCS Group, a decade-old, Limerick, Ireland-based software company that sells to the recycling and waste management industry, has raised $32.1 million in funding from Highland Capital Partners Europe.

CDI, a 33-year-old, Markham, Ontario-based company that refurbishes and sells IT equipment to schools, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from H.I.G. Growth Partners, an affiliate of the private equity firm H.I.G. Capital.

Igenica, a 5.5-year-old, Burlingame, Calif.-based company that’s developing cancer treatment therapies, has raised $14 million in Series C extension funding. All major existing investors participated in the funding round, including The Column Group, 5AM Ventures, OrbiMed Advisors and Third Rock Ventures. The company has raised slightly more than $70 million altogether.

Indiegogo, the six-year-old, San Francisco-based, popular crowdfunding platform, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Institutional Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Earlier investors Insight Venture Partners, MHS Capital, Metamorphic Ventures and ff Venture Capital also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $56.5 million.

Mixamo, a 5.5-year-old, San Francisco-based game animation technology developer, has raised $3.2 million in a mix of equity, options, and other securities, according to an SEC filing that shows a target of $3.7 million. The company had previously raised $8.7 million in mostly equity, including from Granite Ventures and Keynote Ventures.

MyActivityPal, a months-old, Seattle-based company whose mobile messaging and social networking app is slated to launch in April, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Sameer Gehlaut, the chairman and co-founder of Indiabulls, an Indian business conglomerate headquartered in Gurgaon.

PricePanda, a two-year-old, Berlin-based price comparison site that addresses a number of South Asian markets, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, has raised $3 million in funding from the German retail company Tengelmann Corp., reports TechCrunch. The company reportedly has close ties to Rocket Internet, the Samwerbrothers’ investing vehicle, though it has never official disclosed any funding from them.

Shockwave Medical, a five-year-old, Bellevue, Wa.-based maker of intravascular devices for patients with calcified cardiovascular disease, has raised $12.5 million in Series A funding led by Sofinnova Partners.

ToutApp, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based sales lead software company, has raised $3.35 million in Series A funding led by Sigma West. Earlier investors, including Founder Collective, 500 Startups,Launch Fund and angel investors like Esther Dyson, Eric Ries andScott Banister, also participated.

Upstart, a 20-month-old, Palo Alto-based funding platform that pairs investors with people who’ve finished college and are looking for relatively small amounts of money, is raising $2.5 million in debt, shows an SEC filing. Upstart, founded by former Google executive Dave Girouard, has raised $7.65 million in equity to date, including fromKleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates, First Round Capital, and Google Ventures.

Yoyocard, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s operating in stealth mode, has raised $960,000, according to an SEC filing that lists its target as $1.9 million. The form lists Christopher Gottschalk of Blumberg Capital and Joyce Kim of Freestyle Capital. Its CEO, Sean Safahi, has a background in payments industry marketing and product development. Yoyocard’s site says the service will debut this year.

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New Funds

500 Luchadores, a Mountain View, Calif.-based seed fund focused on Mexico-based startups, has raised $2 million, according to an SEC filingthat shows the fund is targeting $5 million. The fund’s managing member is Dave McClure, the founder of the technology incubator and investment program 500 Startups.

Draper Triangle Ventures, a 14-year-old, Pittsburgh-based early-stage venture firm that backs both IT and healthcare companies, is opening two offices in Michigan, as it looks to establish a wider footprint in the Midwest; the firm is currently investing its third fund, a $75 million pool to which it hopes to add another $25 million. (The firm’s second fund closed on another $72.5 million.) Crain’s Detroit Business has more.

A “high” tech startup boom could grow around the pot plant, andEmerald Ocean Capital, an eight-month-old, Newport Beach, Calif.-based firm is aiming to help fund it. It just needs $25 million to get started.

We told you about the new fund of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Gen Isayama last Monday; now, BusinessWeek takes a closer look at Isayama’s plans.

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IPOs

LendingClub, the six-year-old, San Francisco-based peer-to-peer lending platform is planning to go public this spring, its CEO tells the WSJ. The company was valued at $2.3 billion when it last raised a round of capital last October, a $57 million secondary deal involving DST Global and Coatue Management. LendingClub has raised roughly $220 million altogether, including from its earliest investor, Amidzad Partners. Other investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan Partners,Foundation Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Union Square Ventures,Google Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

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Exits

Yahoo is in talks to acquire the 18-month-old, San Francisco-based business app developer Tomfoolery for about $16 million, say WSJ sources, who peg the price at $16 million. Tomfoolery has raised about $1.7 million from a long line of investors, including former Twitter engineer Sam Pullara and Andreessen Horowitz. The Journal suggests the hire would primarily be a talent grab. The company’s CEO is Kakul Srivastava, a seven-year veteran of Yahoo who helped manage photo-sharing site Flickr;

UserEvents, a two-year-old, Fredericton, Canada-based company whose flagship product, CxEngage, aggregates and processes customer feedback from different channels like social, web, mobile, and voice calls, has been acquired by LiveOps, the contact center and customer service company. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Yesterday, LiveOps announced it had raised a fresh $30 million in debt funding. You can read more about the deal here.

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People

Paul Palmieri has joined New Enterprise Associates as a venture advisor, the firm announced yesterday. Palmieri is the founder and former chairman and CEO of the Baltimore-based ad tech companyMillennial Media, founded in 2006. Palmieri announced his resignation from the company yesterday. Michael Barrett, a former Yahoo executive, replaced him. Millennial went public in March 2012, its shares priced at $13; after a promising debut, they began slipping and trade at $7.36 as of this writing.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers cofounder Tom Perkins talked yesterday with BloombergTV about his comparing the Bay Area’s simmering class tensions to Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews. Among other things, Perkins reiterated his feeling that the “creative 1 percent is threatened.” He also insisted that his firm co-founder Eugene Perkins would have agreed with his letter and its point.

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Job Listings

Disgruntled LP readers, take note: Toronto-based Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, which was managing close to $200 billion in assets as of last September, is looking for an associate.

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Data

China’s market is heating up. Venture capital firms invested in 106 deals in the third quarter of 2013, marking the busiest period of the year, according to DJX VentureSource. Deal flow in the fourth quarter was also 66 percent higher than in the same period a year earlier. More here.

Pitchbook tracks the 30 funds that raised between $100 million and $250 million in 2007 and finds that the median IRR is 12 percent and the top quartile IRR “hurdle rate” is 24.9 percent. The top performers, as of today, are: Avalon Ventures VIII, Emergence Capital Partners Fund II,Flagship Ventures Fund 2007 and Foundry Venture Capital 2007.

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Essential Reads

Apple paid out $2 billion to developers in the first fiscal quarter of 2014. That’s three to four times the amount Apple paid developers during the same period last year, notes TechCrunch.

Re/code takes a much deeper look at DeepMind, Google’s newest acquisition.

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Detours

Angry Birds and Dreamy Smurfs are watching you. (Yes, you.)

A school in New Zealand lets its students do whatever they want during playtime. Are American parents ready to endorse a similar policy here?

New York’s first $100 million apartment is coming soon, but it’s only been in the last decade or so that prices have reached anywhere near that price, observes Departures magazine.

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Retail Therapy

Neat. Nearly 200 dog breeds in a single chart. (H/T: Maria Popova.)

Luxury car makers evidently want to strengthen their relationship with you. We showed you Bugatti’s $84,000 belt buckle a couple of weeks ago. Now, Bentley is getting into the home furnishings business, in partnership with the upholstered furniture company Club House Italia. Hey, as long as everyone’s throwing money around anyway, right? (We do kind of love this nearly $10,000 armchair from the collection.)

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Hi, and good morning, everyone! Hope you had a nice weekend.

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Top News in the A.M.

The Supreme Court has taken up six patent cases this term that, collectively, may have the patent troll business on the line.

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VCs and Twitter: A Simple Relationship Turns Complicated

Over the weekend, New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham wrote of Twitter that it “seems to have reached a turning point, a phase in which its contributors have stopped trying to make the service as useful as possible for the crowd, and are instead trying to distinguish themselves from one another.”

If Wortham is becoming disillusioned with the platform, she’s hardly alone. Even venture capitalists – among Twitter’s savviest and earliest users –no longer view Twitter with the same zeal they once did, with a growing number turning away from the service for longer periods of time, if not logging off altogether.

Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz talked with investor-entrepreneur Semil Shah last November about why he no longer tweets as actively as he once did. “I actually think Twitter has changed,” said Dixon, whose tweet count is nearing 15,000. “Part of it is Twitter just got more popular…For me, the golden days of Twitter were 2010 maybe, 2011, where it was a bunch of early adopter/startup people…now, everyone realizes that if you say something wrong, it’s going to be excerpted and put on Business Insider…”

On New Year’s Day, another power user, Shervin Pishevar of Sherpa Foundry, announced that after an astonishing 34,777 tweets dating back to 2007, he’d decided to “take a break” – for all of 2014. It was time to “disconnect from this overtly present present and live in the moment more,” Pishevar wrote on Medium (the newest platform from Twitter’s cofounders).

In a more recent renouncement of the platform, Paul Lee, a general partner at Chicago-based Lightbank, tweeted last Wednesday that he was “Going to be taking a break on twitter for a while (at least trying).”

When afterward, I asked Lee why, he explained that Twitter “ended up taking a lot of mindshare and creating a lot of noise in my head.” Though Lee consumes more than he publishes (over the last six years, he has sent 2,342 tweets), he finds Twitter just as distracting as someone who more actively participates in conversations.

“Imagine you’re in a meeting and you have eight people sitting on your shoulders,” he said. After logging on, even for brief periods, “It kind of felt like that. My mind was going 100 miles per hour.”

Plenty of VCs still actively use Twitter, of course. Homebrew cofounder Hunter Walk says that among the ways it helps him as an investor is his ability to share his thoughts, meet new people, and “lazyweb” questions about who is working on what.

Walker, who says he spends “toooo much” time on the platform (he has composed more than 18,000 tweets), says it doesn’t exhaust him primarily because he tries to use it “as a human being who also happens to be a VC.”

Josh Felser, a cofounder of Freestyle Capital, similarly says that his approach is not to overthink things but rather “say mostly whatever I want.” Felser (12,600 tweets) also notes that Twitter is “helpful in building my business brand” particularly given that “most entrepreneurs are on it.”

Lee acknowledges the value in Twitter that Felser sees. In fact, he says Lightbank has funded two startups that it sourced through Twitter. “So from a branding perspective – meaning branding of [Lightbank] and self-branding – it’s been really effective.”

Lee says he’s still prepared to avoid it for now. “It’s only been a few days,” he told me Friday morning. He said he was already feeling “less tied to it, less compelled to check it.” But he was also quick to call it “an experiment. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”

In the meantime, the Twitter-fatigued might pay special attention to Marc Andreessen, someone known for the shrewd way in which he has marketed his venture firm. A big fan of “counterprogramming,” Andreessen has taken to Twitter with great relish over just the last month.

In the six years prior, he sent out two tweets.

New Fundings

Aduro BioTech, a 14-year-old, Berkeley, Calif.-based company that has developed a vaccine to treat pancreatic cancer, is raising a Series C round from Morningside Ventures and others, says VentureWire. Morningside also participated in its $19.25 million Sereis B round in 2011. The company has raised more than $33 million altogether, says Crunchbase.

LiveOps, the 13-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based cloud contact center and customer service company, has raised $30 million in debt funding that comes “almost entirely” from Comerica Bank, reports Techcrunch. It’s the largest round yet for the company, which has raised $81 million to date, including from Menlo Ventures, Benchmark, and IronPort Systems co-founder Scott Banister.

Matter.io, an 11-month-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company that’s making it possible to customize 3D products in your browser, then have them shipped to your door, has raised $400,000 in seed funding, says VentureWire. The money largely comes from individuals with ties to theMIT Media Lab.

Redmart, a 2.5-year-old, Singapore-based online grocery service has raised a $5.4 million bridge round leading up to a larger Series B, the company tells VentureBeat. The company has raised $10 million to date; it says its biggest investor is Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who moved to Singapore in 2009.

SoundCloud, a six-year-old, Berlin-based streaming audio company, has raised more than $60 million in Series D funding at a valuation of roughly $700 million, reports the WSJ. The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners with participation from the Chernin Group, the investment firm founded by former News Corp. president Peter Chernin.

TigerText, a four-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based enterprise messaging service, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by Shasta Ventures, with OrbiMed Advisors, TELUS, and Reed Elsevier Venturesparticipating. TigerText has raised roughly $31 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

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New Funds

Union Square Ventures, the 10-year-old, New York-based venture firm, has raised roughly $340 million, according to several new SEC filings. USV has raised $166 million in fresh capital for its fourth early-stage fund, and $166 million for its second “opportunities” fund, which the firm will use to provide bigger slugs of capital to those breakout companies that need it. The firm has also raised an $8.3 million side LP fund.

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IPOs

Achaogen, a 14-year-old, South San Francisco-based company that’s developing antibacterials to treat multi-drug resistant infections, filed an S-1on Friday to raise up to $75 million in a IPO. Its biggest shareholders include Domain Partners, which owns 18.8 percent of the company;Venrock, which owns 16.2 percent; the Wellcome Trust, which owns 14.6 percent; ARCH Venture Fund, which owns 13.2 percent; Versant Venture Capital, which owns 11.9 percent; Omega Fund, which owns 8.22 percent; and 5AM Ventures, which owns 5.6 percent.

Shares of Care.com were up 43 percent by the close of trading Friday, from their IPO price of $17. The company also joined the estimated three percent of companies that have gone public between 1996 and last year with a female CEO at the helm.

Pre-IPO stock listings are coming, it seems. Marketwatch reports that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has quietly approved a market for “private growth companies” that will be run jointly by Nasdaq andSharesPost. Nasdaq still needs to get approval from the SEC to launch the market, to be called Nasdaq Private Market.

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Exits

Cloud Party, a 2.5-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based gaming company specializing in virtual worlds, has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. The company’s CEO said the service would be shut down next month. Cloud Party had never reported any outside funding.

DeepMind, a three-year-old, London-based artificial intelligence company that’s operating in stealth mode, has been acquired by Google, reports Re/code. The company was founded by neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, who is described in online bios as child prodigy in chess. (He also seemspretty skilled at poker.) Sources tell Re/code the company had raised funding from Founders Fund and Horizons Ventures, among others. The Information says that as a result of the acquisition, Google is establishing an ethics committee, one designed “to ensure the artificial intelligence technology isn’t abused.” The Information pegs DeepMind’s purchase price at “more than $500 million.”

LinkTech Navi, a 13-year-old, Beijing-based company behind a mapping service, is being acquired by the Chinese Internet giant Tencent for $9.92 million, according to TechNode.

The assets of Tutorspree, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based company that married students with private tutors, have been acquired by the company’s much better-funded competitor, WyzAnt, based in Chicago. Tutorspree had raised $1.8 million from Sequoia Capital, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, and SV Angel, among others, but the company was shutteredlast year, reports Techcrunch, its remaining capital returned to investors. WyzAnt, meanwhile, raised $21.5 million from Accel Partners in December.

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People

Over the weekend, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Tom Perkins, cofounder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, compared the “progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich’” to Nazi Germany’s war on the Jews. Hours later, Kleiner wrote from its Twitter account: “Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years. We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree.” It’s doubtful Kleiner was “shocked”; Perkins routinely courts attention to suit his ends. Still, KP’s partners probably wouldn’t mind if Perkins were to travel very far away on his luxurious submarine, out of the reach of the media, forever.

Sony Pictures has acquired the rights to Lean In, the best-selling book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. The studio has given the assignment of writing the script — which will be a “narrative film” on the themes contained in the book, says Deadline Hollywood — to veteran TV writer Nell Scovell, who helped Sandberg write the book. Scovell’s past credits include “The Simpsons,” “Murphy Brown,” and “Sabrina, The Teenage Witch.” Sandberg, who reportedly became a billionaire last week, will donate her proceeds from the project to her foundation.

Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel on why his company remains firmly rooted in L.A.: I often talk with people about the conflicts between technology companies and content companies – I’ve found that one of the biggest issues is that frequently technology companies view movies, music, and television as information. Directors, producers, musicians, and actors view them as feelings, as expression. Not to be searched, sorted, and viewed – but experienced.”

Uber‘s staff has been intentionally wasting the time and resources of much smaller competitor, Gett, including by ordering cars from the service, then abruptly canceling them. Altogether, reports Valleywag, at least 13 employees, including the general manager of Uber’s New York office,regularly participated in the scheme.

Alisher Usmanov, Russia’s richest tycoon, has increased his control over Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte, after its founder Pavel Durovsold his 12 stake in the company to an ally of Usmanov. Learn more here.

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Job Listings

OpenView Venture Partners, the Boston-based, expansion-stage venture capital fund, is looking to hire a growth strategist who will develop, manage and create content and marketing programs that raise OpenView’s profile, among other things.

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Data

CB Insights has published a list of the top most active U.S. healthcare investors of 2013. In descending order, they are: Versant Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Domain Associates, Polaris Partners, OrbiMed Advisors, SV Life Sciences, MPM Capital, Arch Venture Partners,Kleiner Perkins, and InterWest Partners. To see who tends to partner with whom — “the BFFs of healthcare VC,” as CB Insights puts it — read on.

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Essential Reads

According to the WSJ, Apple is laying the groundwork for an expanded mobile-payments service.

Good news, bad news: According to Nielsen, online advertising grew 32 percent last year, but that’s still just 4.5 percent of advertisers’ overall spend; the bulk of it — 57.6 percent — is still going to TV.

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Detours

“Mitt,” Al Gore, and our identification with presidential losers.

Highly educated, highly indebted: The lives of today’s 27-year-olds, in charts.

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Retail Therapy

A theater, for your face. Coming soon, maybe.

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