Good Wednesday morning! We have some good stuff coming up later this week so stay tuned. Also, a quick reminder that you can reach out anytime; I’m at connie@strictlyvc.com or @cookie.

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Top News in the A.M.

About 60,000 Silicon Valley workers have won court clearance to pursue a lawsuit that accuses Apple, Google, and other tech giants of conspiring to drive down pay by not poaching each other’s staff.

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For This Startup, The Hunt Is On

The hunt for new funding is on for community-driven shopping startup The Hunt, whose users seek out items like clothing with the help of other users.

The concept was inspired by the personal experience of founder and CEO Tim Weingarten, a former venture capitalist with Worldview Technology Partners. As Weingarten tells it, a few years ago, while surfing around Tumblr, he “happened to see pictures of a bunch of guys at a wedding wearing a really slick tux with a narrow cut and peaked lapels. I wanted one, but if you start looking for a tux, a billion options come up. It struck me that there was no good way to solve this problem.”

Investors apparently agreed it was a pain point in the market. In November, the now 17-person company closed on $5.5 million in funding from Javelin Partners, along with Ashton Kutcher, Tyra Banks, and other celebrity investors. Now, as Weingarten resumes talks with VCs — he says the company has “plenty of cash,” citing its “momentum” as a reason to reengage with investors – the question is whether The Hunt is growing fast enough.

Weingarten says that one million people have registered since the service launched last January and that 300,000 of them – 90 percent of them women between the ages of 15 and 30—actively use it.

Unlike platforms such as Pinterest, users’ “hunts” also demonstrate a stronger intent to purchase, says Weingarten, who compares the conversion rates to those of Google’s search results. “We don’t have to worry about proxies or guessing your intent based on what pages you’ve visited; we know what you want to buy, which puts us in a strong position.”

Indeed, Weingarten says the startup has already been approached by a number of brands looking to pay for greater visibility, with some, including clothiers Lulu’s and 22Singer.com, already actively jumping in to answer users’ searches. (Says Weingarten, “We encourage brands to solve hunts, though I let them know not to spam our users. I don’t want them posting 10 products in response to a user who’s looking for a certain kind of dress with stripes.”)

Naturally, the Hunt has plenty of challenges, including competition from other question-and-answer platforms. Just last week, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone launched a social search app called Jelly that invites users to ask their friends for help in finding information. The Hunt’s young demographic, while attractive to brands and advertisers, also tends to be fickle.

Perhaps most importantly, it still hasn’t established the kind of critical mass that is, in itself, a kind of defensibility.

Still, attempting from the outset to build a bridge between photo sharing and e-commerce is likely refreshing to some VCs. Knowing that a former investor is at the helm may also hold special appeal.

I ask Weingarten whether The Hunt is spending on marketing, for example, and he tells me that it’s “much more interesting to have less growth and for that growth to be purely organic. As an investor,” he adds, “if I thought that a startup was buying a bunch of ads, I’d look at it differently.”

New Fundings

BankBazaar.com, a five-year-old, Chennai, India-based loan processing and information platform, has raised more than $13 million (Rs 80 crore) in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital, reports theTimes of India. Previous investor Walden International, which provided the company with $6 million in early 2011, also participated in the funding.

Eyefreight, a six-year-old, Netherlands-based company that makes transportation management software, has raised €9 million (US$11.8 million) in a funding round led by existing investors De Hoge Dennen Capital and Global Cleantech Capital.

FarmLogs, a two-year-old, Ann Arbor, Mi.-based startup that helps farmers digitally manage their farm to increase yield and profitability, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Drive Capital. Existing investors, who’d earlier given the company $1 million in seed funding, also participated in the round, including Huron River Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners and Hyde Park Angels.

First Opinion, a year-old, San Francisco-based startup whose app makes it easy to text doctors, as well as track milestones and health concerns, has raised $1.2 million in funding from Greylock Partners,Yuri Milner, Felicis Ventures, and 500 Startups. TechCrunch hasmore here.

GetOne Rewards, a three-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based company that automates the marketing, relationship, and management programs of its enterprise customers, has raised more than $2.5 million in Series B funding. The round was co-led by Fulcrum Growth Fund andMilestone Venture Partners, with participation from Atlanta Technology Angels and other investors. Silicon Valley Bankmeanwhile provided the company with a growth capital term loan.

Juno Therapeutics, a new Seattle-based startup that’s trying to eliminate cancer from the human body and last month closed on $120 million in Series A funding, has added $25 million to the round from two prominent investors, reports GeekWire. Bezos Expeditions, the investment arm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now a backer, as is Venrock.

Main Street Hub, a three-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based company manages social media communications for small to medium-sized businesses in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Hong Kong, has raised $14 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with previous investors, including Harrison Metal Capital, participating in the round. The company has raised $20 million to date.

Media Gobbler, a three-year-old, L.A.-based company that backs up, transfers and organizes high-bandwidth media files like music, videos and photos, has raised $3.3 million as part of a $5 million fundraise, according to an SEC filing. The company had previously raised just north of $3 million. Its investors include ff Venture Capital, Black Ocean Group, and a long line of prominent individual investors, including Sky Dayton, Aber Whitcomb, Dan Rose, Jeremy Wenokur,Mike Jones and Matt Coffin.

Nextbit, a new, San Francisco-based startup operating in stealth mode, has raised $18 million in funding from Accel Partners and Google Ventures, reports TechCrunch. The startup’s founders were both formerly entrepreneurs-in-residence at Accel; one sold his last company to Motorola Mobility, later acquired by Google. You can learn more about the team here.

OpenSesame, a 2.5-year-old, Portland, Ore.-based online training company that’s trying to simplify the process of buying and selling eLearning content, has raised $8 million led by Partech Ventures. The company has raised $10 million to date.

Quench, a King of Prussia, Pa.-based outfit that’s among the country’s largest bottleless, filtered drinking water companies, has raised $38.5 million in equity and debt financing from new investor T. Rowe Priceand previous investors Element Partners, Virgin Green Fund, Douglas Brown, ORIX Ventures, Advent-Morro Equity Partners, Potomac Energy Fund and The Pohlad Companies. Quench has raised roughly $108 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

SiteMinder, an eight-year-old, Sydney, Australia-based company that helps major hotel chains book and record guest stays, has raised $30 million from Technology Crossover Ventures. The company, whose customers include Marriott, Hyatt, and Best Western, had previously raised $5 million in Series A funding in May 2012, reports the outlet Tnooz.

SuVolta, a seven-year-old, Los Gatos, Calif.-based semiconductor company focused on producing low-power chips, has raised $10.6 million in Series F funding from Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd., Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Northgate Capital and DAG Ventures. SuVolta has raised about $73 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Visual.ly, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based infographic platform company, has raised $8.1 million in Series A financing. Crosslink Ventures led the round with participation from Correlation Ventures,SoftTechVC, 500 Startups, Giza Ventures, Quest Ventures andKapor Capital.

WP Engine, a three-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based hosting company that specializes in running WordPress sites, has raised $15 million in funding from North Bridge Growth Equity. The company’s CEO, Heather Brunner, tells TechCrunch that the round brings the company’s total funding to $18.2 million. (Silverton Partners and a long line of individuals, including Eric Ries, are among is earlier investors.)

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New Funds

Mayfield Fund has raised $86 million for its second Indian fund, Mayfield India II, according to a new SEC filing. The Sand Hill Road firm began marketing the fund one year ago. It closed its first India-focused fund, a $111 million pool called Mayfield India I, in 2008. Four partners are listed on the regulatory filing: James Beck, Navin Chaddha,Couldiplall Lala, and Zoubeir Khatib. Last month, StrictlyVC interviewed Nikhil Khattau, a venture partner who cofounded Mayfield India in Mumbai, about where the firm is seeing the most opportunity.

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People

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla sends a scathing letter to the producers of “60 Minutes” in the wake of its grim report on cleantech, which featured Khosla along with one of his struggling portfolio companies. Writes Khosla, “The pontificators at 60 Minutes, with their agenda-driven bastardization of news reporting, failed to do the most elementary fact checking and source qualification, as was the case with your Benghazi reporting. No wonder one major media outlet wrote that you have been ‘widely criticized for leaving out crucial information about the state of the clean tech sector.’ Is this the new CBS standard?”

New York magazine has dinner with Ken and Ben Lerer in the West Village, where father and son share how they came to run their increasingly high-profile venture firm together. Says the elder Lerer: “I was at the Huffington Post, and I was doing investment for the family. Then Foursquare raised money. I called Benjamin, and I was like, ‘This sucks, I wish I had known about this.’ He said, ‘You’re an idiot, I know those guys, why didn’t you call me?’”

Summit Partners announced a heap of promotions late last week that we’d missed. In case you did, too: Leonard Ferrington, who joined Summit’s West Coast office in 2006 as an associate, has just been promoted from principal to managing director. Meanwhile, Andrew Collins, Matthew Hamilton and Jay Pauley were promoted to principal. Collins joined Summit’s West Coast office as an associate in 2008, and became a VP in 2011; Pauley was joined Summit’s Boston office in 2010 as a VP and moved to Menlo Park last year; Hamilton joined Summit’s Boston office in 2005 as an associate and had served as a VP since 2009.

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IPOs

The re-opening of China’s mainland IPO market is off to a bad start, with five Chinese companies announcing they will halt their IPOs in the wake of an unexpected announcement from the China Securities Regulatory Commission on Sunday. THE CSRC had promised a more hands-off approach to IPOs after resuming them earlier this month; it has since announced it will make random inspections on the procedures of book-building and roadshows.

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Exits

MyEdu, a four-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based company whose online platform helps students to create a personalized graduation plan, as well as find job and internship opportunities, has been acquired by the education software giant Blackboard. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. MyEdu had raised $18.7 million, including from Bain Capital Ventures and the Baylor Angel Network.

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Jobs

Apple is looking for a corporate development analyst to join its corp dev group in Santa Clara, Calif., a team that’s responsible for evaluating and executing Apple’s acquisitions, as well as for conducting other complex financial analysis. To apply, you’ll need at least two years of experience in investment banking, venture capital or management consulting.

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Data

Venture funding in the healthcare IT sector almost doubled in 2013, growing to $2.2 billion across 571 deals, from $1.2 billion across 163 deals in 2012, says the research and consultancy Mercom Capital Group.

Israeli venture capital funds raised 28 percent less capital in 2013 than in 2012, says a new report from the IVC Research Center and KPMG Somekh Chaiken Israel. Specifically, 13 funds raising $526 million in 2013, compared with the $725 million raised by 14 funds in 2012. IVC attributes the drop to the creation of more micro VC funds, noting that only two funds last year raised more than $100 million. You can learn more here.

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Essential Reads

Some ideas about what we should do about net neutrality, now that a federal appeals court has rejected equal access rules for Internet providers.

Quartz on why Nest will be even bigger for Google than Android.

As the world turns: Fast-growing Practice Fusion is taking over San Francisco office space from fast-shrinking Zynga, reports Xconomy.

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Detours

A pair of Stanford students has developed an attractive, functional, and affordable brace that can help cure club foot for $20.

From the New Yorker: “There is, I think, a trace of shame in the veryenterprise of tweeting, a certain low-level ignominy to asking a question that receives no response, to offering up a witticism that fails to make its way in the world, that never receives the blessing of being retweeted or favorited.”

Living the dream: Ah, the life of a senior search engine marketing specialist.

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Retail Therapy

The Dark Motorcycle Helmet, made for the “not-quite-average guy.” (Shark-Repellent Bat Spray and grappling gun sold separately.)

No. Sorry. Nope.

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Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

Happy Tuesday!

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Top News in the A.M.

Shooting for the moon: A quick look at just a handful of Google’s recent acquisitions and what they mean.

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For Nest Investor Shasta Ventures, Persistence Pays

Google’s plans to acquire the smart home appliance maker Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash should translate into a tidy return for the half dozen firms that invested $80 million in the three-year-old company. Kleiner Perkins may have the most reason to kick up its heels, having led Nest’s $4 million Series A round in early 2011. (The deal, rumored to give Kleiner a 20x gross return, might well convince its limited partners that Kleiner has recovered its mojo.)

But the deal is also a personal victory for venture capitalist Rob Coneybeer of 10-year-old Shasta Ventures, who was introduced to Nest founder Tony Fadell eight years ago by fellow VC Stewart Alsop. (“He thought we’d like each other,” explains Coneybeer, who is a mechanical engineer by training and shares Fadell’s love of gadgets.)

Once acquainted with Fadell, Coneybeer spent as much time with him as he could in the hope that one day they could work together. Last night, I talked with a clearly elated Coneybeer about his relationship with Fadell and his subsequent investment in Nest; what follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Where does your story with Fadell start?

I’ve been interested in mobile and hardware and investing in the Internet of things for a while, and when Tony left Apple, I kept in touch with him as he was investigating different ideas, including devices that use batteries to get recharged and what happens to those devices if you connect them to the Internet. So he’d been thinking about things, and we’d get together every two to four weeks to talk.

When did it turn into more than that?

Tony had gotten to know myself and some of my partners, and he’d developed relationships with a couple of different firms … When Tony became difficult to reach, I realized he might be starting something, and I basically pursued him and said, “I’d love to find out what you’re up to,” and I offered to sign an NDA. And he said, “You’d do that?” And I said, “Yeah, I never sign NDAs, but to learn what you’re up to, I would, absolutely.” A week or two later, he walked me through what he was up to, and I met the core team he’d pulled together.

He went with us and with Kleiner [for Nest’s A round]. He’d known [Kleiner partner] Randy [Komisar] for a long time, and Randy has great experience in bringing consumer electronics to market [including as a founding director at Tivo].

What was Shasta’s value-add to the company?

It was a good personal fit. And having built [Shasta] around consumer and expertise around hardware companies, we were able to make great introductions, including to Best Buy and Lowe’s and other channel partners. We also helped with recruiting, in closing key candidates. Beyond that, it’s hard to provide a laundry list; Nest has such an accomplished team.

Kleiner led the Series A round, but you say Shasta was a “significant participant.” Can you talk about what kind of return you’ll see from Nest’s sale? TechCrunch sources say it will return “almost all” of your second, $250 million fund, closed in 2008.

I can only tell you that [the return will be] very, very, significant. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific, but you can write “very” three times.

Is Nest your biggest exit personally? I recall that before Shasta, as a partner at New Enterprise Associates, you led an investment in the fiber optic switching company Xros, acquired by Nortel.

That was $3.25 billion, so this is my second three-billion-dollar outcome. It does feel really good to build something from scratch [Shasta] and work really hard for 10 years to build a brand and to [be a part of] a product and outcome that people are really excited about. It feels like things are finally coming together.

Are you even a teeny bit disappointed? I know you thought Nest could become a formidable standalone hardware business.

I’ll just say that Google is acquiring the best hardware team on the planet. In terms of designing high-quality, durable, consumer hardware, you can’t name a better team.

New Fundings

Certain, a 20-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of event management software, has raised $17.8 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. The company previously raised $11 million, in 2011, says VentureBeat.

ChargeBee, a three-year-old, Chennai, India-based startup that helps companies manage their subscription billings, has raised roughly $800,000 in a Series A funding from Accel Partners. The company has raised $1.17 million altogether, including a $ 370,000 seed round closed in 2012.

Chrome River Technologies, a six-year-old, L.A.-based company that makes expense management and supplier invoice processing software, has raised $17 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and included existing investors First Analysis and Argentum. The company has now raised $20 million to date.

Elastifile, a young, Herzliya, Israel-based solid-stage storage company, has raised $8 million in Series A funding from Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. (GigaOm notes that Elastifile’s cofounder Shahar Frank was cofounder of XtremIO, a solid-state storage player purchased by EMC in 2012 for $430 million.)

Evaneos, a four-year-old, Paris-based online platform that helps design their travel and book their trips, has closed $6 million in funding led by XAnge Private Equity, with participation from ISAI. The company had previous raised $1 million in funding from ISAI.

Iceotope, a two-year-old, Yorkshire, England-based IT cooling specialist, has raised more than $10 million in Series A financing, the company disclosed yesterday. Aster Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in clean tech, led the round, along with the high-tech investment firm Ombu Group in the U.K.

Invoca, a six-year-old, Santa Barbara, Calif.-based call marketing company formerly known as RingRevenue, has raised $20 million in Series C funding from Accel Partners, Upfront Ventures and Rincon Venture Partners. The company has now raised more than $30 million.

Ivantis, a six-year-old, Irvine, Calif.-base maker of stents that are used to lower eye pressure for glaucoma patients, has added $14 million to its Series B round, which now totals $46.5 million. Investors include Vertex Ventures, GBS Ventures, Ascension Ventures,EDBI, MemorialCare Innovation Fund, New Enterprise Associates and Delphi Ventures. The company has raised more than $63 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Kontagent, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm that caters to game developers, has raised a fresh $4.8 million in funding, shows an SEC filing. The company has now raised roughly $17 million to date, including from Maverick Capital, Battery Ventures, and Altos Ventures.

Madison Vaccines, a 1.5-year-old, Madison, Wisconsin-based clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on treating prostate cancer, has raised $8 million in Series A financing from Madison-based Venture Investors, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, Madison-based Venture Management and others.

Nutanix, a four-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based converged infrastructure market player, has raised $101 million in financing co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures. Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Greenspring Associates also participated in the round, alongside existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners,Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $172.2 million.

Oyster, a two-year-old, New York-based company that provides customers access to more than 100,000 books for $10 a month, has raised $14 million in a new round of financing led by Highland Capital Partners. Existing investor Founders Fund also participated in the financing, which brings Oyster’s total funding to $17 million. The New York Times has more on the company here.

Sonian, a six-year-old, Newton, Mass.-based that manages a hosted information archive program, has raised $8 million in Series C funding from existing investors OpenView Venture Partners, Summerhill Venture Partners and Prism Venture Partners. The round brings Sonian’s total funding to $21.6 million.

Turn, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based advertising platform company, has raised $80 million in Series E funding led byBlackRock and Fidelity Investments, reports TechCrunch. Other investors in the deal included new backers ClearBridge Investments,Firsthand Technology Value Fund, Northport Investments, andPine River Capital Management and previous investors Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, Shasta Ventures, and Focus Ventures. The company has raised a grand total of more than $135 million.

uTest, a six-year-old, Framingham, Mass.-based mobile app testing service, has raised $43 million in Series E round of funding led by Goldman Sachs. Previous investors also participated, includingQuestMark Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, Mass Ventures, Egan-Managed Capital and Mesco Ltd. The company has now raised 80 million to date.

Volusion, a 14-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based company that helps merchants create e-commerce stores online, has raised $35 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, says TechCrunch. It’s the company’s first outside funding.

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New Funds

Good morning, hope you had a fun weekend! To sign up for the newsletter, click here.

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Top News in the A.M.

Taxi drivers, up in arms over the Uber car service, have grown violent in Paris, with Uber confirming at least a dozen incidents in Paris and Lyon this morning, including “flat tires, eggs, broken windows.” As Rude Baguette reports, one of the first victims today was Eventbrite CTO Renaud Visage, who was being driven from the Paris airport. The Uber in which he was riding was “attacked by multiple assailants, who allegedly, after smashing one window and slashing two tires[…]as well as defacing one side of the car with glue, attempted to enter the vehicle.” Visage’s companion in the car told the outlet that their Uber driver maneuvered the two out of the situation, then dropped them on the shoulder of the freeway.

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Why It’s ‘Eyes on the Enterprise’ at Index Ventures

Hello, Friday! Have a great weekend, everyone. See you back here next week with some good stuff, including more with Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi (below), who shares how decisions are made at Index, whether the firm believes in price “sensitivity,” and what he makes of Bitcoin mania.

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Top News in the A.M.

Remember when Target let us know that up to 40 million customers’ personal information might have been stolen? Scratch that; the company now believes as many as 70 million customers were impacted by the data breach.

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Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi on the Pitfalls of VC Marketing

Index Ventures is widely perceived to be amid the best venture firms by other VCs. Among its active investments are Sonos, the wireless music system company; Dropbox, the popular online storage service; and Hortonworks, a commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop.

The goal for Index now is to raise its profile with U.S. entrepreneurs, many of whom still consider the firm — which launched in Geneva in 1996 and opened a London office in 2001 — to be a European venture fund.

Step one involved opening an office in San Francisco in late 2011, where general partners Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi have been sewing up deals left and right. The second part of Index’s evolution involves giving the press a (slightly) better look into its thought processes. Indeed, I sat down with Volpi at Index’s sunny offices yesterday morning, where we talked about how the historically quiet firm plans to more visibly plant its flag in the U.S. and the Bay Area in particular.

We’ve been sitting here talking about the professionalization of venture marketing. What is Index’s philosophy when it comes to selling itself?

Venture capital is changing. It’s different. And being good at marketing is an important asset today, when it just wasn’t 10 years ago.

Index certainly isn’t as ‘out there’ as some firms. Will that change?

There’s an inherent conflict that exists in doing a lot of marketing for one’s own firm, because in one dimension, being out there helps attract people to you. In theory, saying, “So and so is backed by X Venture Capital” helps the company.

But one of our key cultural tenets is that we’re supporting the entrepreneur and we want the entrepreneur to be the story, not us. So we’re not trying to take the light away from the entrepreneur. Inherently, we see a little bit of a cultural conflict. Who is in front of the parade? Is it the VC or the entrepreneur? I think if the VC firm gets too far ahead of the parade, the smart entrepreneurs might get uncomfortable with that, so we try to strike a balance.”

How exactly?

Presumably, over time, [things will take their] natural course if we do our job properly But we don’t want to put steroids on [our marketing strategy]; we don’t want to bang on every journalist’s door, saying, “Pay attention to us.”

If you’re an entrepreneur, you want your own signature on the project you’re working on and you don’t want to be overshadowed. If you don’t have a signature to speak of, then you rely on somebody else’s. It’s a gray zone for sure, but I think it’s an important line to draw.

New Fundings

Aethon, a 13-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based maker of autonomous mobile robots for hospitals and health systems, has raised $3 million from Mitsui & Co., which had invested a separate, $4 million round in Aethon in April 2012. Aethon has raised more than $20 million altogether, according to SEC filings.

Atara Biotherapeutics, a 1.5-year-old, Brisbane, Calif.-based drug development company focused on treating end-stage renal disease among others, has raised $52 million in Series B financing. Investors included Alexandria Venture Investments, Amgen Ventures, The Baupost Group, Celgene Corp., DAG Ventures, Domain Associates, EcoR1 Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

CAN Capital, a 16-year-old, New York-based, non-bank alternative capital provider to small businesses in the U.S. and Latin America, has raised $33 million in funding led by Meritech Capital Partners. Previous investor Accel Partners also participated in the round, along with new investors Ribbit Capital and QED Investors. CAN has now raised roughly $63 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Clementia Pharmaceuticals, a three-year-old, Quebec-based company that’s developing a drug for a genetic condition called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, has raised a $22.5 million in Series A financing led by OrbiMed Advisors, with participation by existing investor BDC Venture Capital.

FIRE1, a new, Dublin, Ireland-based company, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Covidien, Lightstone Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates. FIRE1 was launched byThe Foundry, a Dublin-based medical device incubator; the company will be focusing on developing novel therapeutic devices.

Glooko, a three-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that enables smartphone users to easily collect and view the information needed to control their blood glucose levels, has raised $7 million in Series A-1 funding from Samsung Ventures and Lifeforce Ventures. Previous investors Social + Capital Partnership and individual investors also participated. Glooko has raised $11.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

MN&C Supply Links Retail, a 1.5-year-old, Mumbai-based company that operates an online supermarket called LocalBanya.com, has raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Karmvir Avant Group, a real estate developer in Mumbai.

Proterra, a 10-year-old, Greenville, S.C.-based maker of zero-emission-battery electric buses, has closed the second round of its Series C funding, raising more than $10 million, which brings the total round to rougly $34 million. The funding was led by new backer Tao Invest (the family firm of Nick and Joby Pritzker). Previous investorsEdison Energy, Constellation, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,GM Ventures, Mitsui & Co., Vision Ridge Partners, Hennessey Capital and 88 Green Ventures also participated. Proterra has raised more than $120 million to date.

Radius Intelligence, a young San Francisco-based firm, has raised $13 million in funding from Formation8 Partners, says VentureWire. Radius collects and analyzes information on small businesses in an effort to compete with incumbents like the small business information provider Dun & Bradstreet.

Volta Industries, a four-year-old, Toronto-based maker of advertising-supported electronic vehicle charging stations, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from EPIC Ventures and existing investor Blue Startups. Volta has raised $1.9 million to date, including from 500 Startups.

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New Funds

Good morning! Hope your Thursday is off to a promising start. We have some good stuff coming up in the next few days, so stay tuned!

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Top News in the A.M.

Apple and Samsung have agreed to attend a mediation session to be held on or before February 19, as they prepare to clash in court in March over smartphone patents.

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Pricing in Deception

Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that a 2.5-year-old Boston-based social shopping startup, Kickscout, is being acquired by another shopping app, Mobee, for an undisclosed “combination of cash and stock.” TechCrunch wrote that as part of the arrangement, Kickscout’s founder (and sole employee), Michael Sheeley, is joining Mobee as its chief product officer.

Most likely, the story would have gone unnoticed, but Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner tweeted soon after the piece was published, “Sorry, TechCrunch, this story is actually: Boston-based Mobee hired a smart guy whose startup didn’t take off.” Kirsner continued on Twitter, “If your app is being shut down and you are going to work for someone else’s company, that means you got HIRED, not ACQUIRED.” Kirsner – who seems to have a healthy sense of humor — then added, “Deal was a ‘combination of cash & stock’ – yeah, like [taxi] fare to Mobee’s office and some stock options.”

Assuming that Kirsner is right – that Sheeley was just plucked from a bad situation – it’s easy to understand his aggravation. Silicon Valley’s compulsively sunny, rah-rah spirit can be nauseating. Talk to an entrepreneur or VC, and everything is proceeding as planned.

Still, it’s hard to see the downside in allowing someone to save face in this situation or the many others we’ve seen in recent years, where struggling founders have been swooped up by another company that’s looking to lock in their talent for a while. I like that a person who has tried and failed can receive a fresh set of cards instead of shutting down their business with nothing but debt (which, by the way, still happens with the vast majority of startups).

As for the argument that it’s unhealthy to portray face-saving maneuvers as successes, I’d argue that by now, we’re all acclimated to the culture of spin in which we live. We’ve basically been in an arms race of good news since TechCrunch was founded in 2005.

Anyone following the industry is already pricing in some deception, so why bother getting upset about it?

New Fundings

Aereo, a two-year-old, New York-based company whose customers access live broadcast TV on Internet-connected devices via its remote integrated antenna/DVR technology, has raised $34 million in Series C financing. Previous investors IAC, Highland Capital Partners, andFirstMark Capital were joined by new investors Himalaya Capital Management and Gordon Crawford, long the chief media stockpicker for the L.A-based money-management firm Capital Research & Management Co. Aereo has now raised nearly $100 million altogether.

Chromatin, a 13-year-old, Chicago-based agricultural technology company, has held a first close on its Series E financing round, which is expected to total $36 million. Wood Creek Capital Management led the round, joined by GE Capital. Previous investors BP Alternative Energy, IllinoisVentures, the State of Wisconsin Investment Boardand Adventures IV also participated. With the Series E round, Chromatin has raised more than $70 million, says the company.

Compliance Science, a 10-year-old, New York-based company that sells online regulatory compliance technology and services, has raised $8.25 million in Series A funding from Edison Ventures. It’s the first outside capital that Compliance Science has received.

FlatFrog Laboratories AB, a seven-year-old, Lund, Sweden-based maker of a patented in-glass touch technology, has raised $10 million in Series C funding from Invus, Sunstone Capital and Intel Capital, all of whom participated in the company’s Series B round. FlatFrog has raised $53.4 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

Forus Health, a three-year-old, Bangalore-based medical device company that focuses on the ophthalmology space, has raised $8 million from Asian Healthcare Fund and its existing investors Accel Partnersand IDG Ventures. Forus is looking to develop affordable technology that can be used by minimally trained technicians. It has raised $13 million to date.

Immedia Semiconductor, a five-year-old, Andover, Mass.-based company that develops semiconductor-based ISP and video compression technology for consumer electronics applications, has raised $11.9 million, shows an SEC filing. Listed on the form are David Aronoff of Flybridge Capital Partners and Louis Toth of Comcast Ventures.

Intellinote, a year-old, Reston, Va.-based note taking app that incorporates social collaboration, project management, and e-mail integration, has raised $4.3 million in Series A led by Grotech Venturesand Boulder Ventures.

Lumiata, a year-old, San Mateo, Calif.-based healthcare IT startup that applies big data to patient data to optimize health care interactions, has raised $4 million from Khosla Ventures.

Maverix Biomics, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Calif.-based software company focused on analysis of next-generation genomic sequencing data, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Asset Management Ventures, Andreas Bechtolsheim and Andrew Yang, among others.

MobStac, a Bangalore-based startup that helps publishers build and manage their mobile websites and apps, has raised $2 million in Series B funding from Accel Partners and Cisco. The round brings MobStac’s total venture financing to $3.1 million.

Mswipe, a three-year-old, Mumbai-based maker of mobile, point-of-sale technologies, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding from Matrix Partners and Axis Bank, both of which have provided Mswipe with (an also undisclosed amount of) funding previously.

QingCloud, a two-year-old, Beijing-based company that operates an on-demand real-time cloud computing platform, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed China Partners with participation from Matrix Partners China. BlueRun Ventures, QingCloud’s Series A investor, also participated in the round.

Renrendai, a 3.5-year-old, Beijing-based Internet banking service platform where borrowers can get credit ratings on all loans, has raised $130 million in Series A funding from Trustbridge Partners andHonghe Venture Capital.

Yotpo, a three-year-old, Israel-based company that enables e-commerce sites to add a social layer for product reviews, has raised $10.7 million led by Blumberg Capital. Participating in the round were prior investors Rhodium, Gandyr Group, Oliver Jung, 2B Angels,Magna Capital Partners, Plus Ventures, Zohar Gilon and other investors. The company has raised $13 million to date.

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New Funds

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Asha Jadeja, who founded the small venture firm Dot Edu Ventures in 2000, has reportedly “set aside” a fund of “around $8 million” that she intends to invest specifically in India across a period of six years, says the Business Standard.

Jadeja, who was born in Ahmedabad, has already invested about $100,000 in regional companies, including GridAnts in Ahmedabad, which makes a location-based application, and Gaatha in Gujurat, an e-commerce site that sells handcrafted goods. Indeed, she tells Business Standard that she’s seeing a “lot of start-ups emerging out of Gujarat and India” that can become a “powerful force in social impact.”

Jadeja had earlier founded and run iScale, a networking company. She was also married to Raveej Motwani, the famed computer science professor at Stanford who was among Google’s earliest advisors. Motwani passed away in 2009.

Prashant Shah, who spent nearly a decade at the San Francisco-based venture firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, is now managing TiE LaunchPad, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based accelerator for enterprise-focused startups. Shah has raised $4.8 million to invest seed funding in those companies, too, shows an SEC filing. For more details, click here.

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People

Square’s CFO, Sarah Friar, has joined the board of New Relic, an application performance management company that’s eyeing an IPO. Before joining Square in 2012, Friar worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and as a senior VP of finance and strategy at Salesforce.com.

David Nosal, a former Korn/Ferry executive who infiltrated his former employer’s computer system after leaving to form his own firm, has been sentenced to one year and one day in prison.

Elliott Sigal has joined NEA as a venture partner and senior advisor. Sigal is a former EVP and director for Bristol-Myers Squibb. He served as the company’s chief scientific officer and president of R&D from 2004 to 2013.

Paul Sloan, most recently editor in chief at CNET, has joinedCoupons.com as head of communications, reports the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Coupons.com — which has raised approximately $230 million over its 16-year history — is valued at more than $1 billion and is widely expected to go public this year.

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IPOs

Flexion Therapeutics, a seven-year-old, Burlington, Ma.-based company that’s developing injectable pain therapies for osteoarthritis, plans to raise up to $86 million in an IPO, shows an SEC filing. Pricing terms weren’t disclosed. The company has raised at least $62 million over the years. Versant Venture Capital owns 29.7 percent of the company; Sofinnova Capital owns 19.3 percent; Pfizer owns 17.3 percent; 5AM Ventures owns 15.5 percent; and Novo A/S owns 11.2 percent.

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Job Listings

Facebook is looking to hire a manager of corporate development in Menlo Park, Calif. The job requires four to six years of experience, with two to three years of experience in venture capital, banking, consulting, or corporate development at a top consumer Internet company.

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Data

Pitchbook has some new data on the funnel effect we’re seeing in startup financings. According to its findings, the Bay Area saw a 10.6 percent drop in deal flow last year, with 1,225 rounds completed compared with 1,370 financings closed in 2012. Meanwhile, investors pumped more money into that smaller pool of Bay Area companies, committing $13.4 billion last year up from $12.5 billion in 2012. More on the trend here.

Israel is apparently booming. According to a report about the high tech sector released this week by IVC Research, the combined value of Israeli high-tech start-ups that were sold in 2013 reached $6.64 billion last year, a 10-year high. Here’s more on the report.

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Essential Reads

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group said yesterday it won’t allow the sale of Bitcoins on its platform, “in the interest of consumer protection,” a spokeswoman told the New York Times.

Reddit’s Ask Me Anything format: How a weird Internet thing became a mainstream delight.

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Detours

Of the saying that children grow up too fast, Jerry Seinfeld tells fellow dad Louis C.K, “I feel like I can only take one year of each year. [It’s like] ‘No more of you as a nine-year-old. I’ve had it.’”

Improv Everywhere’s “No-Pants Subway Ride” is planning its 12th installment in New York this Sunday. Plan accordingly.

Floor plan porn: The Swigs of 740 Park Avenue.

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Retail Therapy

This Chronos safe is constructed of “true military-grade ballistic armor plate.” Because you want to know that while you’re tweeting from CES, some lousy crumb isn’t getting into your cherished collection of Swiss timepieces.

You love your new(ish) iPad Air. Treat it right by carrying it inside thissupple leather case constructed from two solid pieces of vegetable-tanned English bridle. (Disclaimer: This simple piece that’s truly “ready for years of wear,” has no padding. Dropping it to the ground from a standing position may cause horrified gasps, followed by sickness and nausea.)

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Please feel free to send us any and all story suggestions (anonymous or otherwise) by clicking here. If you’re interested in advertising in our email newsletter, please click here. To sign up for this newsletter, please click here.

Happy Tuesday! A quick reminder that you can always reach out to me about anything at connie@strictlyvc.com or on Twitter. If you’re looking to sign up for the newsletter, you can click right here.

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Top News in the A.M.

Apple has just announced that app store sales topped a whopping $10 billion in 2013. More here.

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Nick Hanauer on Why VCs Should Fight for a Higher Minimum Wage

For at least the last six months, Seattle-based venture capitalist Nick Hanauer has been arguing for a higher minimum wage and citing stats that underscore the myriad ways that growing income inequality will bring everyone down.

Hanauer was one of Amazon’s first investors and cofounded the ad tech company aQuantive, which sold to Microsoft for $6.4 billion in 2007. He’s also the chairman of Pacific Coast Feather Company, a privately held family business that produces down pillows and bedding for clients such as Sealy and Eddie Bauer.

Although Hanauer clearly isn’t living paycheck to paycheck, he has turned his sights on raising the minimum wage to $15 and is pointedly criticizing Bay Area venture capitalists for their inaction, noting that if they don’t start doing more to stem the “rising inequality in our society,” they are “idiots.”

“VCs have a huge stake in a thriving middle class,” Hanauer told me over the phone yesterday afternoon. “If workers don’t have enough money, they can’t buy from our companies.” Leading the charge for higher wages is an “easy lift” for technology companies and VCs “because we get none of the pain and all of the benefit. If you’re running or funding a venture-backed company, you aren’t paying anyone a minimum wage. On the other hand, you’re hoping to sell your products to everybody.”

I raise the oft-cited argument that many Bay Area companies are making it easier and cheaper to do things, and I can practically see Hanauer rolling his eyes. “There’s this Valley-based libertarian idea that as long as we’re businesspeople, we’re doing enough for our community — which is self-aggrandizing and just utter horseshit,” he says.

Asked for concrete advice on how VCs can take part in the minimum wage debate, Hanauer suggests that the Bay Area look north. In November, voters in the city of SeaTac, Washington, narrowly approved a labor-backed measure that would require a $15 minimum wage for approximately 6,300 workers in the airport, hotel, and rental car industries. Hanauer is himself now part of a working group organized by incoming Seattle mayor Ed Murray to implement a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, and “I think it will happen,” Hanauer says.

In California, Hanauer says more investors should throw their support behind Ron Unz, publisher of the libertarian-leaning magazine The American Conservative, who has poured his own money into a ballot measure to increase the minimum wage in California to $10 an hour in 2015 and $12 in 2016. The initiative, which will be voted on in November, would make California’s minimum wage the highest in the nation. (California’s current minimum wage is $8.)

“There are a lot of fine people in Silicon Valley,” says Hanauer, “but there’s this really creepy thing happening down there where people are making stratospheric amounts of money and leaving everyone else behind. We need to ensure the economy enfranchises as many people as possible, and we need more civic leadership coming out of the venture community.”

If it takes seeing low-wage workers as potential customers, so be it. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” he says.

New Fundings

LegalZoom, the 14-year-old, Glendale, Calif.-based provider of online legal documents and services, has a new, partial owner. European private equity firm Permira has acquired $200 million of LegalZoom’s existing equity in a secondary transaction that will provide liquidity to existing investors, and to a lesser degree management and employees,reports PandoDaily.

Mashable, the nine-year-old, New York-based independent news outlet, has raised $13.3 million in its first outside funding round. The financing was led by Updata Partners, reports CNN, which has much more here.

Plated, a two-year-old, New York-based company that sends recipes and the fresh ingredients needed to prepare them to its subscribers, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by ff Venture Capital. Other participants in the round included Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective,Great Oaks Venture Capital and various angel investors. The company had previously raised $1.4 million in seed funding.

Remitly, a 2.5-year-old, Seattle-based mobile payments service that enables consumers to make person-to-person international money transfers from the U.S., has raised $5.5 million led by QED. Other investors in the round included Trilogy Partnership, Founders Co-Op,TomorrowVentures, Bezos Expeditions, and individual investors. The company has raised $10.5 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

Soft Tissue Regeneration, a six-year-old, New Haven, Conn.-based maker of regenerative orthopedic devices for tendon and ligament repair, has raised $5 million in financing. Existing backers Connecticut Innovations and Launch Capital led the round with participation fromThe Vertical Group. The company had previously raised around $11 million in equity and debt, according to Crunchbase.

View, an eight-year-old, Milpitas, Calif.-based company that makes dynamic glass that’s capable of intelligently adjusting to external conditions and users preferences, has raised $100 million in funding from Madrone Capital Partners. Madrone, in Silicon Valley, specializes in growth capital investments.

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New Funds

Launch Angels, a new Boston-based investment platform that plans to invest in startup deals sourced from equity crowdfunding sites, says it has raised “nearly $1 million” for its first venture fund, named Where Angels Fund. The pool’s LPs are associates from the mobile technology company Where, bought by PayPal for $135 million in 2011. The outfit will focus on early-stage companies with an emphasis on mobile and consumer Internet startups; it intends to back between eight and 12 companies over the course of one year. Launch Angels is also right now gathering commitments for a second and third fund, called the Early Traction Fund and Women-Led Fund, respectively.

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People

Happy Friday! This is StrictlyVC’s last email until early January. Before signing off, a note of thanks for all the kind words you’ve offered since this product’s launch. All of it, and each of you, is very much appreciated. (Corny sounding, yes, but true!)

If you should see any friends in the industry over the break and want to recommend they sign up for StrictlyVC, that would also be a nice gift (wink). Happy holidays!

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Top News in the A.M.

The University of California is under no obligation to obtain and disclose information about the investment performance of venture capital funds in its portfolio, a California court ruled yesterday.

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Zuora: The Hottest Company You Don’t Know

Zuora isn’t a household name, but the six-year-old is becoming kind of a big deal as private companies go. Its high-touch subscription-billing platform already counts as customers dozens of established corporate giants (HP, Dell, News Corp), newer corporate giants (Box, Docusign, ZenDesk), and up-and-comers (Dollar Shave Club) for whom its technology handles everything from pricing to order management.

Unsurprisingly, investors love the 300-person company. Zuora has raised $128 million to date, including from Benchmark, Index Ventures, Vulcan Ventures, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, where Zuora’s cofounder and CEO, Tien Tzuo, was employee number 10.

Still, Zuora isn’t planning to go public any time soon, say Tzuo. We talked about why earlier this week.

You’ve said that you’d like at least another year or two before tapping the public markets, but it seems like you’d get a warm reception right now.

The private markets are assigning valuations that are as strong if not stronger than pubic markets; there isn’t a lot of inherent value right now to going public. Staying private also allows us to work more on ourselves and to make big bets.

Do you mean acquisitions?

We haven’t made any acquisitions but our private valuation is getting to the size now where it’s starting [to make sense]. I suspect [we’d look at] more adjacent areas, as technology tuck-ins. It’s not a strategy of ours, but staying private gives us more flexibility.

So what kind of big bets are you making?

We’re kind of in a land grab [having recently opened offices in London and Australia, with plans to move into Asia-Pacific]. If we can raise money and focus on [expanding], then it just makes more sense to do that. Our big challenge is evangelizing the shift from a product to a subscription-based economy.

Meaning the renting versus buying economy?

Right. Eighty or 90 percent of companies getting funded now have a subscription model because of [cloud-based servers and other things]. Medical device companies that [used to spend a fortune on equipment] now use services hosted at Amazon and pay as they go for processing power.

Everyone will wake up across the world and realize their business is a subscription-based model. Product-driven society, where you ship as many cars, pens, and computers, is no longer sustainable.

Assuming that’s true, you’re probably as aware as anyone of the types of subscription-based companies that VCs are funding. What are you seeing?

I’m seeing massive niches. Take GoodMouth, which sells toothbrushes. It’s kind of a no-brainer. You’re supposed to change your toothbrush every month or two; GoodMouth sends them to you. With the Internet, you can pick something that has traditionally been too small and scale it to the whole country.

Another example is point-of-sale systems. It might seem like Square has the point-of-sale market locked up, but that’s not so. There are half a dozen companies focused on point-of-sale systems: there’s one that’s focused on grocery stores, another focused on dry cleaners. Very specific vendors can scale to a very large size today, unlike five to ten years ago, and smart VCs know it. Peter Fenton [of Benchmark, who sits on Zuora’s board], has a company in his portfolio called Revinate. It does hotel management systems. That can’t be further afield from the masses, but it’s a multibillion-dollar vertical.

New Fundings

Cyanogen, a four-year-old, Seattle-based custom Android software developer, has raised $23 million in Series B funding led byAndreessen Horowitz. Benchmark and Redpoint Ventures, which provided the company with $7 million in Series A funding just three months ago, also participated in the round, along with the Chinese company Tencent. Cyanogen has built an open-source operating system that reportedly gives Android owners a more customizable and faster experience than they’d get out of the box with an Android phone.

Floored, an 18-month-old, New York-baed technology company whose 3D capture & visualization software sells to the real estate, architecture, interior design and furniture industries, has raised $5.26 million in Series A funding. RRE Ventures led the round. New investorGreycroft Partners and existing investors Two Sigma Ventures,Lerer Ventures and Felicis Ventures, also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total capital raised to date to $6.3 million.

Foursquare, the four-year-old, New York-based social location service, has raised $35 million in Series D funding led by DFJ Growth and the Capital Group’s Smallcap World Fund. AllThingsD reports that the round was completed at a valuation slightly north of Foursquare’s last valuation of $600 million. Read more about it here. The company has now raised $106 million in equity, and another $41 million in debt, according to Crunchbase.

Freshdesk, a three-year-old, Walnut, Calif.-based maker of customer support software, has raised $7 million in Series C funding. Existing investors Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management participated in the round. The company has raised roughly $14 million to date.

Folloze, a months-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, has raised $1.97 million, according to an SEC filing that doesn’t list any investors but shows the round’s target is $3.5 million. The company is still operating in stealth mode but says its mission is to “democratize content contribution and distribution in the enterprise” through a “new approach for enterprise content that empowers individuals to outperform in their day-to-day job.” (We know, not so helpful, but there you have it.)

Hightower, a months-old, New York-based company whose mobile technology allows landlords and brokers to collaborate on deals in real time, as well as track important documents and information, has raised $2.12 million in seed funding. Bessemer Venture Partners and Thrive Capital led the round, which also included participation from RRE Ventures, Red Swan, and a gaggle of individual investors. David Tisch, Aaron Levie, Joe Lonsdale, Jason Tan, Chris Howard, Brad Silverberg, Brandon Shorenstein, Lee Linden, and Gary Vaynerchuck, were among them.

Kurtosys, a nine-year-old, London-based company whose financial technology software targets asset managers, has raised $8 million in Series C financing from Triangle Peak Partners and existing investorTrue Ventures. The company has raised $21.7 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

MyOwnMed, a year-old, Chevy Chase, Md.-based company whose mobile health app captures between-visit health data, has raised $1.3 million in funding, shows an SEC filing. No investors are listed on the form.

ResolutionTube, a months-old, Seattle-based augmented reality collaboration platform for the customer service industry, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from numerous individual investors, including David Cohen, Rudy Gadre, Owen Van Natta, and Vijay Vashee.Acceleprise Ventures also participated in the round.

Robinhood, a two-year-old, Redwood City, Calif.-based company whose free mobile application allows users to read stock news, rate companies, and trade stocks, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures. Tim Draper, Rothenberg Ventures, andAndreessen Horowitz also participated in the financing, among others.

TaxiBeat, a nearly three-year-old, Athens, Greece-based company whose mobile app allows passengers to call a specific, nearby taxi based on distance, user ratings, and car model, has raised $4 million. The money comes from Hummingbird Ventures in London; the company, which is expanding into several European cities and Latin America, has raised $7 million altogether, reports TechCrunch.

Vensun Pharmaceuticals, a 2.5-year-old, Yardley, Pa.-based generic pharmaceutical company, has raised $15.8 million in Series B funding. The round was led by JW Asset Management, which also led Vensun’s 2012 Series A financing. Additional investors in the financing included entities affiliated with Allen Chao, the co-founder of Watson Pharmaceuticals, now Actavis.

Warby Parker, the three-year-old, New York-based online eyeyglasses company, has raised $60 million in new funding led by existing investorTiger Global Management, reports Fortune. Other previous investors to join in the round include General Catalyst Partners, Spark Capital,Thrive Capital, and First Round Capital. The giant round brings the company’s total financing to date to $116 million.

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New Funds

Boulder Ventures, an 18-year-old, Boulder, Colo.-based venture firm that backs early-stage tech and life sciences companies in Colorado and the Mid-Atlantic region, is in the process of raising its sixth fund, shows a new SEC filing. The target listed is $100 million. The filing, which says the first sale has yet to occur, lists three partners: Kyle Lefkoff, Jonathan Perl, and Peter Roshko. One of the firm’s biggest hits in recent years was Rally Software, a Boulder-based company that makes project management software and which held a successful public offering in 2010 after raising around $70 million. (The company’s market cap today is $425 million; SEC filings show that Boulder Ventures owned 10 percent of the company.)

Flywheel Ventures, an 11-year-old, Santa Fe, N.M.-based seed and early-stage venture firm focused on tech and physical sciences ventures in the Southwest/Rockies region, has raised $8.74 million for its second fund, an SEC filing shows. The total offering amount for the vehicle is listed as indefinite. Flywheel’s sole GP is Trevor Loy; among the firm’s most recent investments is ByteLight, a Boston- based retail indoor location company, which raised $3 million in Series A funding earlier this fall, including from Motorola Solutions, the eCoast Angel Network, Sand Hill Angels and Google evangelist Don Dodge.

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People

Yesterday, we noted that venture capitalist John Doerr was having a good week, having offloaded Google shares for more than $4 million. But that haul pales in comparison to the $91 million that Facebook board member Marc Andreessen will reportedly see from the sale of 1.65 million class A shares of Facebook in the company’s secondary offering, announced yesterday.

Venture capitalist and Illinois Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner has reportedly “been working overtime to cast himself to voters as a man who picked himself up by his bootstraps, worked for everything he earned and remained humble even as he acquired the wealth and success that earned him a spot as an adviser and confidant to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.” StrictlyVC doesn’t have a horse in this race, but Rauner’s ads are certainly interesting.

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IPOs

Congratulations, America: 2013 was the best year for the U.S. IPO market since 2000. Renaissance Capital breaks down the year here.

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Exits

Inspirato, a three-year-old, Denver-based, private club that provides its members exclusive access to luxury homes and hotels, along with adventure travel experiences, has combined with competitor Portico Club. The new company is being called, unfortunately, Inspirato with American Express. Inspirato has raised nearly $50 million in funding, including from DAG Ventures, Millennium Technology Value Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Access Venture Partners and Crunchfund. TechCrunch has an interesting look at the deal, and its backstory, here.

Storyful, a 3.5-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based company that finds news on social media, has been acquired for $25 million by News Corp, which says it will operate Storyful as a standalone business. Storyful had raised one round of funding, in December 2011, from theAIB Start-Up Accelerator Fund, which is managed by ACT Venture Capital. The amount wasn’t disclosed publicly.

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Job Listings

Microsoft is looking for a corporate development manager in Seattle. This person will help lead small and medium-size deals, as well as help evaluate larger transactions, meaning there’s plenty of deal structuring, negotiating of terms sheets, etc. Microsoft’s corporate development managers also interface with the investment banking, venture capital, and startup communities and conduct special projects that make it easier to identify new business opportunities.

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Data

CB Insights has published a list of the top early-stage VCs in Midwest tech startups, based on follow-on investment rates. In descending order, the top five are: Detroit Venture Partners, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Apex Venture Partners, Chicago Ventures, and Illinois Ventures. You can read more here.

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Essential Reads

“On the day [Steve] Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast. ‘Holy crap,’ he said to one of his colleagues in the car. ‘I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.’”

A professor of robotics discusses the “robot smog” that could pollute cities of the future.

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Detours

Minutes from the Dunley Family Emergency Christmas Celebration Planning Committee Meeting.

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Retail Therapy

On Indiegogo, you can now buy a $65 mind-reading dog translator thatjust might work. We’re just kidding. You might as hold the money out a moving car window and let it go.

You work hard. Sometimes. You deserve a comb that’s made from high-grade titanium, has a black titanium finish, and comes in a custom Italian leather sleeve. You deserve a comb that has the muscular name of Octovo Ti. Did we mention that this comb costs $150? Wait, why are you taking out your plastic comb? It is not “just fine.” Did we mention that quantities are limited. Hello?

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Please feel free to send us any and all story suggestions (anonymous or otherwise) by clicking here. If you’re interested in advertising in our email newsletter, please click here. To sign up for this newsletter, please click here.

Good morning! On deck tomorrow: a brilliant (mystery!) founder who has raised $130 million for his pre-IPO startup, including a $50 million round this fall. If you haven’t signed off already for the holidays, stay tuned!

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Top News in the A.M.

Oops. Target is saying this morning that up to 40 million customer credit and debit card records may have been breached over the two-week period ending December 15.

With its share price up, Facebook is planning a secondary sale that will see Mark Zuckerberg among others sell some holdings. Wall Street’s reaction: We’re selling, too.

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Investing in Two Indias

Nikhil Khattau has spent most of his career both building and investing in India-based companies. In fact, in 2007, soon after selling a mutual fund he’d founded to a financial group, Khattau co-founded Mayfield India in Mumbai, where he continues to help the firm.

It isn’t always easy, given that India’s 1.2 billion residents remain very much separated both culturally and economically. “You have to divide India into the country [that wants to be a great global power] and ‘Bharat’ … which is rural India, where 70 percent of people live,” says Khattau.

Khattau tends to invest in non-tech companies that cater to the latter — outfits like Geodesic Techniques, a specialty construction company that creates buildings out of steel and glass. (“Most were made of concrete prior,” says Khattau.) But earlier this week, during a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed India’s metropolitan centers, too. Here’s part of that conversation, edited for length.

I recently read an article positing that given the amount of gold held by people in India, there must be a way to unlock its value, possibly by renting it out. That struck me as an interesting proposition. Would it ever be possible culturally?

Well, gold is used to show whether you’re wealthy or not. But women have also traditionally been given gold jewelry, so if ever they need money, they can pawn or sell their jewelry and have access to liquid cash. When a woman is married off, she’s given a lot of jewelry by her parents as her backstop, really. She then saves it to pass along to the next generation. So looking at gold and gold jewelry in that light, the sharing just doesn’t work.

Still, I think in urban India, it could be interesting. We’re seeing [a lot of behaviors] that are more akin to what you’re seeing out West: young people living away from home, earning their own money, wanting to go out and dress up and not necessarily wanting to invest in the hot asset that gold is. It would be complicated, but it’s a non-trivial market. The four biggest metropolitan centers have 10 to 15 million people; the next four have between 5 million and 10 million people. Altogether, city populations [add up to] 350 million.

Is this younger, urban demographic interested in shared transportation other than buses, or is that also premature?

The public transportation system isn’t great. And not everybody can afford their own private transportation, so there’s a unique phenomenon in India where companies provide transportation – sort of like shared taxis. If you look at Google or Amazon or Infosy, for example, they’ll commission thousands of private taxis each month. The taxis are fairly sophisticated, too; they feature GPS systems, and employees have their own codes, all of which enable their employers to know where a cab is and how many people are in it and whether or not it’s running late. It’s sort of like an Uber system, but it’s enterprise-geared.

Why are you focused exclusively on low-tech or no-tech business opportunities?

India is so many generations behind that we’re seeing white spaces where you [in the U.S.] have had developed structures for 30, 50, even 100 years. We’re also able to realize venture-style returns without taking venture-style risk, because the model has been proven time and again. For example, we recently exited from a portfolio company called Fourcee Logistics, which transports liquids [from fatty acids to crude palm oil to molasses] in multi-modal containers. These containers have been around in the rest of the world since the 1950s; Fourcee was first to bring them here.

It really seems that India is developing at two speeds.

Absolutely. The twenty and thirtysomethings are looking for bleeding-edge technologies; they want free, perfect, and now. Then there’s the rest of the country.

New Fundings

Blacklane, a two-year-old, Berlin-based portal for chauffeur services, has raised roughly $14 million from Daimler AG, which is looking to expand its business beyond car production. According to the WSJ, Blacklane customers can book limousines in 130 cities including New York, Hong Kong and Paris via a website, app or phone. The company doesn’t provide the chauffeur services itself but passes bookings on to local limousine operators.

Hatchbuck, a two-year-old, St. Louis, Mo.-based company that makes sales and marketing software for small businesses, has raised $1.25 million led by Cultivation Capital, and joined by Holekamp Ventures.

Moovit, a two-year-old, Israel-based company whose mobile app makes it easier for users to “ride public transit smarter,” has raised $28 million led by Sequoia Capital. The company had previously raised $3.5 million from BRM Group and Israel Ventures, both of which participated in the new round.

Respira, a three-year-old, Albuquerque, N.M.-based company that’s designing a new inhaler to help with respiratory diseases, disclosed yesterday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sun Mountain Capital and Cottonwood Technology Fund.

Rheonix, a six-year-old, Ithaca, N.Y.-based developer of an automated molecular testing technology, has raised $14 million in combination of debt and equity to finish a manufacturing build-out and launch its first commercial product. The round was led by existing investors Cayuga Venture Fund and Rand Capital SBIC, a subsidiary of Rand Capital Corp.

Telly, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose on-demand film and video content service has socially discovery elements, has raised $8 million in Series B funding from new investors Cinemagicand Lumia Capital, along with early investors Azure Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Felicis Ventures, and Georges Harik. The company, formerly known as Twitvid, is also announcing that it has acquired the Dubai-based company Sha-Sha Entertainment to bring Hollywood and Arabic movies and TV shows to 22 countries in the Arab world. Terms of the acquisition aren’t being disclosed. Telly has raised $21 million to date.

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