Uber has partnered with car makers and financing providers to reduce the cost of new car ownership for Uber drivers in six of its fastest-growing markets.

Henry Blodget and his venture backers are looking to sell Business Insider for $100 million “in cash,” says media columnist Michael Wolff.

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Betaworks Closes on a New, $20 Million Round

Betaworks, the six-year-old, New York City-based holding company that has collectively created and invested in more than a dozen startups focused on the “real time Web,” has raised $20 million in new funding, says cofounder John Borthwick, who tweeted in the wee hours of Friday morning: “Excited to bring a few new investors into betaworks. Approx. 20m total capital. The first time in 3 yrs+ that we have have done a raise.”

A new SEC filing shows a partial list of the firms to participate in Betaworks’s newest round, including Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures and White Star Capital in the U.K., all of which are existing investors.

Also listed on the Form D are John Drzik, president and CEO of the management consulting company Oliver Wyman; Michael Buckley, a longtime managing director at Intel Capital who is now the head of finance and strategy at Nike Digital; and Paul Cappuccio, the chief legal officer at Time Warner.

RRE Ventures, Lerer Ventures and White Star Capital were among the first firms to provide Betaworks with its first, $7.5 million round, announced in early 2008.

Two years later, in 2010, Betaworks closed on a $20 million Series B round that was led by RRE Ventures and then-new investor Intel Capital, and which included DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY, and Founder Collective.

Betaworks both invests in, acquires, and helps create real-time media startups. One of its first big wins was with Summize, a search engine that Twitter acquired in a mostly stock deal in 2008. Betaworks is also the company behind the link-tracking analytics company bit.ly, the Web site monitoring service Chartbeat, and numerous other products.

Recently, the company has made a big push into social reading, including acquiring Digg, which it nabbed at a fire-sale price last year, and  purchasing the bookmarking tool Instapaper for an undisclosed amount in April. Betaworks has since relaunched both products.

Reached for comment on Saturday, Borthwick (nicely) declined to comment further, saying only that money was raised “recently.”

Earlier this month, Betaworks hired former Huffington Post Media Group publisher Janet Balis as its very first chief revenue officer, a sign that it’s looking for more ways to earn money off its portfolio. As Borthwick told AllThingsD of Balis’s appointment: “Phase one of Betaworks was building great companies. ” Phase two is “really building Betaworks as an operating media company.”

 

New Fundings

Active Mind Technology, a San Francisco-based company, has raised $7.8 million in equity, according to an SEC filing that shows former Palm CEO Ed Colligan is among its board members. Active Mind is a wearable technology outfit that was founded in Galway, Ireland but moved to San Francisco in 2011. Its first hardware and software product, Game Golf, designed with the help of famed designer Yves Behar, enables users to track their own golf games, as well as use the stats to compete online against friends and pros.

Coursera, an 18-month-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based education company that partners with universities to offer their courses online, has raised $20 million, adding to a $43 million Series B round the firm disclosed in summer. AllThingsD has the scoop. Coursera isn’t naming three universities that contributed to the fresh, $20 million, but the company told AllThingsD that the round also included the participation of previous investors GSV Capital and Learn Capital. Coursera has now raised around $85 million altogether, including from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates.

Kensho Technologies, a year-old, Cambridge, Mass.-based company behind financial modeling and analysis software that some of Wall Street’s biggest institutions have been testing out, has raised $6.13 million in debt, shows an SEC filing. According to the Form D, the outfit plans to raise up to $8 million.

NGame, a two-year-old, Dallas-based startup whose software helps its customers track their own customers’ social media to better sell to them, has raised $680,000, according to an SEC filing.

See Me Group, a two-year-old, Long Island City, N.Y.-based online community of artists who share, Pinterest-style, what they love, has raised $1 million as part of a $2 million equity round, shows an SEC filing. O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor, as is Founder Collective, along with New York-based angel investor Josh Stylman. Founder William Etundi was featured in the New York Times several years ago, as an artist and street activist who for years hosted popular warehouse parties in Brooklyn.

Sitari Pharmaceuticals, a new, San Diego-based company that’s working on treatments for celiac disease (a condition that damages the lining of the small intestine and prevents it from absorbing important parts of food) has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The money comes from Avalon Ventures and GlaxoSmithKline, which formed the company through a new collaboration designed to fund and launch up to 10 early-stage life sciences companies in San Diego.

TapCommerce, a two-year-old, New York-based mobile retargeting company, has raised $10.5 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and RRE Ventures, along with participation from Nielsen Ventures. Previous investors Metamorphic Ventures, Eniac Ventures, and Nextview Ventures, also contributed to the round, which brings the company’s total capital raised to date to $11.7 million.

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New Funds

Jerusalem Venture Partners, the 20 year-old, Tel Aviv-based firm, has filed to raise $60 million for a fund branded JVP VII Cyber Strategic Partners, according to an SEC filing first spotted by Alt Assets. It isn’t clear if the fund is part of or separate from JVP II, a fund that is targeting $120 million. (JVP filed for the first late last month.) Asked about the two filings by Alt Assets, a spokeswoman for the firm declined to comment on them.

Cyber security has long been one of JVP’s biggest focus areas. In fact, earlier this year, JVP partner Gadi Tirosh talked with me about a cyber security incubator that the firm is in the process of establishing. The idea is for the firm to help create a dozen startups around different themes, including, as Tirosh had said, the “concept of the honeypot,” or creating fake machines to attract hackers; anomaly detection (monitoring data and discovering discrepancies); and software that defends mobile devices from attacks.

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People

Billionaire Paul Allen appears to have acquired a $27 million mega mansion in tony Atherton, Calif., just a few miles from the new offices of his venture investment firm, Vulcan Ventures, in Palo Alto, Calif. The Real Estalker has all the luscious details about the 22,000-square-foot, 6-bedroom, 10-bathroom spread.

An attendee of last week’s Dreamforce conference, hosted by Salesforce.com, has since shredded Salesforce founder CEO Marc Benioff on Valleywag. (Comparing Benioff to the “Ron Burgundy of tech” is one of the author’s nicer observations.)

David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners chats with the WSJ about cyber security investing and Healthcare.gov in particular, saying: “When you think you need to put up a system to serve 100 million, the idea that you could plan in advance and one day launch it and it works, that is delusional. Nobody in the tech world would ever expect that would happen. It’s a delusional idea, and the fact the public expects it is because the public doesn’t understand, but Washington promised. Nobody puts up an app that serves 100 million and works on day one.”

Kristian Tear, the COO of Blackberry, and Frank Coulben, its CMO, have just been ousted from the company, after just one year in their respective roles. Chief Financial Officer Brian Bidulka has also lost his position, and will be leaving the Blackberry shortly. Engadget has the scoop.

Last week, Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said in a legal filing that it terminated former partner Ellen Pao for “longstanding performance issues” and not in retaliation for the lawsuit that Pao filed against the firm in May 2012. The response comes on the heels of Pao’s amended complaint, filed on October 16, which cites retaliation as cause for her termination from Kleiner in the fall of 2012. In Kleiner’s newest filing, its attorney, Lynne Hermle, writes that Pao was fired because she “was ‘not viewed as a good team player’ or trusted partner by others.” Pao’s attorney, unsurprisingly, said he strongly disagrees with that assessment. Deborah Gage has the story.

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IPOs

In recent weeks, several Chinese outfits have debuted on U.S. markets, raising the most capital that China-based companies on U.S. exchanges have raised since May 2011, observes Bloomberg. Among other signs of demand for Chinese IPOs, shares of 500.com, the online sports lottery service, surged 54 percent on Friday, their first day of trading. Meanwhile, shares of Sungy Mobile, which makes Android applications and also debuted on Friday, closed up 19 percent.

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Exits

PrimeSense, an eight-year-old, Tel Aviv-based maker of motion-tracking 3D sensors used in Microsoft’s Kinect game console, has officially been acquired by Apple. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but sources have told numerous outlets that the price was somewhere between $300 million and $350 million. According to the Israeli news outlet Globes, PrimeSense has raised $84.5 million over the years, including from Silver Lake Partners, Gemini Israel Ventures, Genesis Partners, Canaan Partners, and Microsoft.

Qubecell, a two-year-old, Mumbai-based mobile payment startup, has been acquired by a bigger, global, competitor, the mobile payment company Boku. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Earlier this year, Qubecell raised a seed round led by angel investor Kae Capital, with participation from Mumbai Angels, Blume Ventures and TA Venture. Four-year-old Boku, meanwhile, which has offices in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America, has raised more than $70 million, including from Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, Benchmark, and Andreessen Horowitz.

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Data

Venture capitalists love Ireland, apparently. According to data compiled by Dow Jones VentureSource, Ireland attracted four times as much venture-capital funding per capita as the European average, and 650 times as much per capital as poor Bulgaria, ranked last. After Ireland, the next nine biggest European centers for VC investment are: Sweden, the U.K., Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Germany and Switzerland.

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Job Listings

AOL is looking for a corporate development analyst in either New York or its Dulles, Va., headquarters. According to AOL, this role is involved in “domestic and international mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures and special projects” and requires “creative and critical analysis of strategic issues most important to the company.” To apply, you need a BS of BA degree in accounting, finance, economics, or business administration and at least one year of experience at an investment bank, private equity firm, or corporate development organization.

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Essential Reads

Eek. Revenge porn is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cyber-domestic abuse.

Venture-backed Judicata is part of a constellation of young startups trying to modernize the practice of law, notes Law.com in a solid overview of the company and some of its peers.

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Detours

Got a gut feeling about something? There’s growing evidence that gut bacteria really might influence our minds.

In an interview, singer R. Kelly is asked to turn absurd phrases, including “sex dolphin” and “Italian hero sandwich of love,” into love songs. He does it, easily, and with a straight face.

Dogs slipping on wood floors. (We watched more of this than we’d care to admit.)

Meet James Bernthal, five-year-old realtor.

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Retail Therapy

Everyone loves beautifully packaged products, but this is ridiculous.

Tor, a privacy tool used by activists, criminals, and U.S. intelligence to obscure traces of their online activities, has been repackaged for the mass market and will only set you back $49. Not that you have anything to hide, of course! Heh, heh, ahem.

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Tech companies are hiring more women, though they still represent half of all new hires in the industry.

If you were being attacked by snakes on a plane, could you call your loved ones to let them know? This Q&A on new and proposed FCC rules answers all of your burning questions.

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PR Pro to PE Investors: Time to Follow the Lead of VCs

Donna Sokolsky Burke has enjoyed a storied career in Silicon Valley. Having spun out of Netscape 20 years ago to form her own public relations firm, Sparkpr, Burke is probably as familiar with the inner workings of startups as venture capitalists (many of whom have also been Burke’s clients over the years). 

Yesterday, as we chatted about how venture investors promote their portfolio companies, as well as their own firms, I asked Burke who in the startup ecosystem needed help in burnishing their brand. Her immediate answer: “The private equity sector.” 

You say you wonder why PE pros aren’t more open about promoting their portfolio companies as well as themselves, but PE firms have always operated under the radar. Why you think this situation is rife for change?

PE firms aren’t communicating their value proposition or helping their portfolio companies to reinvent their own brands. If I were an institutional investor pouring billions into that asset class, I might wonder why.

What are their most obvious, missed opportunities?

You read the wrap-ups; you learn who did the big deal and spent billions of dollars [to acquire a stake in a company], then you don’t hear anything more about it. That’s very different from venture, where the deal is announced, and then there’s an onslaught of coverage about how a company is innovating within its industry, what incumbents it’s going after, [etc.]. With many of these PE deals, you have this huge inflection point and sometimes a new corporate structure, and it’s a great time to have a [public] discussion about how a portfolio company is reengaging customers and reinvigorating its brand, but it isn’t happening.

What’s the solution?

VCs blog and tweet and use LinkedIn and Quora. A lot people would benefit from authentic observations coming out of the PE industry, too.

As the tech industry has matured, it has produced a large number of mature, growth companies that aren’t necessarily on the verge of going public. And while entrepreneurs are very well-versed on what venture does, it gets more ambiguous what happens after that. Entrepreneurs are very clear on Series B and C and D rounds, but I think a lot of them struggle to understand their options beyond that point.

I’d love to see more PE firms take a stand on areas that they’re passionate about. Why they don’t baffles me.

New Fundings

Alpine Data Labs, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that provides big data and Hadoop analytics to its enterprise customers, has raised $16 million in funding from Sierra Ventures, Mission Ventures, UMC Capital, and Robert Bosch Venture Capital. The company has raised $23.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

CoachUp, an 18-month-old, Boston-based online platform that athletes are using to find private coaches in every sport, nationwide, has raised $6.7 million in Series A funding led by Point Judith Capital and General Catalyst Partners. Other investors in the round included Data Point Capital, Suffolk Equity Partners, and individual investors. CoachUp had raised a $2.2 million seed fund last year.

Colingo, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based online English school that offers users live video classes, has raised $2.4 million round of funding led by Atlas Venture. Other participants in the round included 500 Startups, Morado Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Havoc Capital, Social Leverage and numerous angel investors. TechCrunch has more here.

iSTAR Medical, a three-year-old, Belgium-based company whose ophthalmic implants aim to treat glaucoma, has raised $5.4 million in Series A financing led by Capricorn Health-Tech Fund NV and SRIW, with participation from INVESTSUD Group and Namur Invest. iSTAR spun out of the Seattle-based biomaterials company Healionics in 2010.

Rest Devices, a nearly three-year-old, Boston-based company that makes a wearable infant monitor that tracks temperature, among other things, has raised $1.3 million in seed funding, led by The Experiment Fund and joined by Boston area angel investors. The round brings the company’s total funding to $1.8 million. Lora Kolodny has the story here.

Spotify AB, the seven-year-old, Stockholm-based, music-streaming company has raised nearly $250 million in new financing led by Technology Crossover Ventures, reports the WSJ, whose sources say the round values Spotify at roughly $4 billion. Last year, Spotify raised more than $100 million from investors at a valuation of around $3 billion.

Wevorce, a two-year-old, San Mateo-based online platform focused on helping divorcing couples, including by reducing the associated costs, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding led by Foundation Capital and Loopt cofounder Sam Altman. The company, a Y Combinator, graduate, has raised $2 million to date.

Xenex Disinfection Services, a four-year-old, San Antonio, Tex.-based company whose room disinfection system eliminates infection-causing bacteria, viruses and spores at healthcare facilities, has raised $11.3 million in funding. The funding comes from new investors Battery Ventures, and Targeted Technology Fund II and previous investors, including RK Ventures.

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New Funds

Union Square Ventures, the 10-year-old, New York-based early-stage venture firm, is raising two, separate, $150 million funds that it expects to close in roughly one month’s time, according to documents viewed by Dow Jones. According to its report, one fund will be designated for early-stage investments; the other will be used to provide follow-on funding to companies in the firm’s portfolio that are breaking away from the pack and need growth financing.

As Dow Jones noted in its report yesterday, USV previously raised $200 million for its third early-stage fund, USV 2012 , and $165 million for its first late-stage pool. Interestingly, the firm says in its documents that it’s seeking smaller funds this time around because it’s of the opinion that both early- and late-stage deals require less investment than they have in recent years.

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People

Shana Fisher, who runs her own early-stage venture firm, High Line Venture Partners, in New York, is joining Andreessen Horowitz as a board partner, a role that will see her representing the firm on some of its portfolio companies’ boards without being in its full-time employ. Fisher’s bets include Pinterest, Stripe, Makerbot, Vine, FiftyThree, and Refinery29.

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IPOs

Care.com, a Waltham, Mass.-based online service for hiring nannies and other at-home caregivers, has filed confidential paperwork with the SEC to hold an IPO next year, sources tell the Journal’s Doug MacMillan.

The New York-based online retailer Gilt Groupe is also eyeing a 2014 IPO — for real, this time, sources tell AllThingsD.

Is the IPO window shutting on biotech? Yesterday, TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals pulled its IPO, just a day after Trevena, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that focuses on acute decompensated heart failure, ditched its own plans to go public right now. TetraLogic produces a drug that’s being tested for treating colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, and blood cancers.

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Exits

Realtidbits, a 2.5-year-old, San Diego-based company that makes comments, forums, and analytics apps (among other things) for publishers and media companies, has been acquired by the commenting platform Livefyre. Realtidbits never announced venture funding; four-year-old, San Francisco-based Livefyre has raised roughly $20 million over the years, shows Crunchbase. Its backers include Greycroft Partners, ff Venture Capital, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, among others.

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Data

CB Insights has published some data on which firms have been most actively seed-funding Silicon Valley startups since 2009. The top 10 in descending order, says research firm, are: 500 Startups, SV Angel, True Ventures, First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Founder Collective, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Floodgate and Harrison Metal. You can learn more here.

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Job Listings

PayPal is looking for a director of corporate development in San Jose. To apply, you’ll need seven-plus years of experience in corporate development, or else two to four years in private equity, venture capital, and investment — plus five years in biz dev, product marketing, or product management. You’ll also need an MBA from a “top-rated” school.

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Essential Reads

Amazon Web Services may be worth $50 billion in two years’ time, and even that estimate may be conservative, says this analyst.

It’s looking like a judge may let the Autonomy suit proceed against Hewlett Packard and its CEO, Meg Whitman.

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Detours

Artist Kumi Yamashita dazzles by using nothing but nails and a single continuous thread.

These two, self-possessed kids are pretty dazzling, too.

The Bay Area’s real estate bubble, from both sides.

This guy committed a bunch of crimes while wearing an ankle monitor.

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Retail Therapy

Heading to Paris in the near future? You might want to check out Coolhunting’s newest list of bars and restaurants to visit.

This little device turns your iPad into a 3D printer.

Design your own ugly sweater this holiday season.

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A gift from Steve Jobs returns home.

Bitcoin is now accepted at a university in Cyprus. (Naturally.)

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AngelList’s Naval Ravikant on His Syndicates Program, Two Months In

Entrepreneurs Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi have already done much to reshape the startup investing landscape with AngelList, their now four-year-old networking site that has largely replaced coffee meetings with Internet-based matchmaking.

In September, AngelList introduced another game-changer — its Syndicates program, which allows angel investors to syndicate investments themselves, work for which they receive carry. (An angel who syndicates a deal earns 15 percent of any upside, while AngelList collects 5 percent.)

Though Syndicates is still nascent, I caught up with Ravikant yesterday afternoon to see who has begun using it and how it’s doing generally. Our chat has been edited for length.

Can you give us a sense of the activity you’re seeing on Syndicates?

I’d estimate that something like $5 million has moved through the platform already, with several million more dollars [committed but not yet closed]. About 24 deals have closed, and others are in various stages of closing.

Do the deals involve many of the same people or are you seeing fairly disparate groups?

A bit of both. Some people are using it more promiscuously to diversify their portfolio. Others are doing deals because the know the lead backer well and it’s a trust relationship. For example, you see [Path CEO and former Facebook exec] Dave Morin and other Facebook alums co-investing together and backing each other.

Is anyone using the platform who you didn’t anticipate would?

The biggest surprise has been VC interest. The response has been the highest from angels, but we’re in advanced stages of talking about how to do syndicates with four firms, and numerous others are using the platform as a way to scout out deals. As with their scout programs, they’re backing their portfolio CEOs when those CEOs go and find and fund great companies.

Will we see a day when a person can raise $20 million via Syndicates to invest across numerous startups?

The way it’s set up right now, you can [invest] deal by deal…So we’ll hold funds in escrow for one deal. What we’re not doing is [managing a] 10-year commitment. If [Google Ventures partner] Kevin Rose has $2 million in backing, that’s $2 million [for one] deal. But he can drop people, or they can drop out of the syndicate, any time.

Has Kevin Rose made an investment through the platform yet? 

There are three Google Ventures partners who have a lot of syndicate backing but haven’t done a deal yet.

This whole thing seems like a great financial proposition for everyone but you. Is that true?

The idea isn’t to make money in the short term. But yes, today, it’s a money loser. We take 5 percent of [any upside] so if a lead invests $100,000 personally in a company, then raises another $1 million off Syndicates, we get carry off that $1 million, or $50,000 [if the company sells for $10 million]. But most Syndicates are in the $250,000 or $300,000 to $750,000, so at the lower end, that’s about $10,000 for us. Meanwhile, our out-of-pocket fees – to set up the funds, handle customer accounting [and so forth] are $12,000. So we’re basically paying $12,000 for $10,000 in future profit.

Why do it then?

Because longer term, we think we can bring LLC costs down to $5,000. And as syndicate sizes grow, it starts to become marginally profitable.

In the meantime, are you quietly investing a fund for anyone right now? At one point, you were talking about doing that after you’d invested a $20 million angel fund, Hit Forge.

I’ve been offered to raise another; [Hit Forge included stakes in] Uber, Twitter and Stack Overflow. But investing is [just a side hobby] now, and I’m making all my investments through Syndicates. I get to follow my best friends into deals, and I don’t mind paying them for carry if it means I don’t have [as many] coffee meetings.

New Fundings

Apprenda, a six-year-old, Clyfton Park, N.Y.-based company whose software platform makes it easiser for its enterprise customers to deploy cloud applications, has raised $16 million in a Series C round led by Safeguard Scientifics. Previous investors Ignition Partners and New Enterprise Associates also participated in the funding, which brings the company’s total haul to date to $32 million.

Centzy, a New York-based local search engine which provides informations about nearby businesses, has $4.3 million in funding led by Matrix Partners, with participation from previous investors Cowboy Ventures and ff Venture Capital. The company, which has also just changed its brand from Locality, has raised more than $6 million to date, according to TechCrunch.

Lifecake, a two-year-old, London-based company behind a photo-sharing app meant for families, has raised $1.1 million led by Balderton Capital. The company had previously raised $300,000 in angel funding, including from Techtopia, and EC1 Capital.

Lytro, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based camera technology startup, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners. Existing investors also joined the round, including Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Greylock Partners. According to Crunchbase, Lytro has raised $90 million altogether so far.

Plain Vanilla, a three-year-old online game studio with offices in San Francisco and Reykjavik, Iceland, has raised $2 million in fresh funding from Sequoia Capital and e.ventures. The company’s signature game is QuizUp; according to VentureBeat, Plain Vanilla has raised $5.6 million altogether, including from CrunchFund, BOLDstart Ventures, Red Globe, Bootfish, The BAM Trust, Cap-Meridian Ventures, Greycroft Partners, IDG Ventures, Tencent, and MESA+.

Shake, a year-old, New York-based startup that allows users to sign and send legally binding agreements from their phones, has raised a $3 million Series A round led by SoftBank Capital, which was joined by BoxGroup, ENIAC Ventures, Mesa+, WGI Group and investor Patrick Keane. Previous investor RRE Ventures also participated in the round, which brings Shake’s total funding to $4 million.

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New Funds

Origin Ventures, a 14-year-old, Northbrook, Ill.-based, early-stage venture firm, has closed its third fund with $47 million, it announced yesterday. The fund is focusing on providing Series A financing to software, e-commerce, digital media and ad technology startups. Origin began fundraising for its newest vehicle in January and has made a handful of new investments since, including Aisle50, a startup that makes it easier to save at the grocery store, and DoggyLoot, a daily deals service for dog owners. One of Origin’s higher-profile investments is the online food ordering service GrubHub Seamless, which has been said to be prepping for an IPO.

As Crain’s Chicago Business notes, Origin is one of several other Chicago venture firms to raise new funds recently. Chicago Ventures closed a $40 million fund in June; and Hyde Park Venture Partners closed a $25 million fund, also in June.

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People

Entertainer Kanye West may soon have as many enemies as friends in the startup community. Last month, West set Las Vegas abuzz when he was spotted walking around the city’s downtown with Zappos CEO (and active startup investor) Tony Hsieh. But speaking in a podcast with writer Bret Easton Ellis, West told Ellis of that meeting, ”I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he’s trying to tell me what I need to focus on. Meanwhile, he sells all this s**t product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling s**t product.” (West is also suing YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley for filming his recent wedding engagement and posting it online.)

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson weighs in on how to provide employees equity on an ongoing basis.

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IPOs

A group of U.S. mutual funds led by Fidelity Investments holds a combined stake of nearly $250 million in Dropbox, positioning them for a big payoff if the cloud storage company can pull off a stock market debut like that of Twitter, reports Reuters. More here.

Investor-entrepreneur Om Malik writes about Twitter, Chegg and Zulily — and why all tech IPOs are not created equal.

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Exits

Sources tell Valleywag that Blackjet, an app that promised to marry wealthy travelers with seats on private jets in ten seconds(!), is “out of cash, unable to raise funds, and ‘basically over.’ Another source said: ‘They are f*#ked.’” The company raised between $2 million and $3 million from a wide variety of individual investors, as you can see by scanning this almost comically long list at Crunchbase.

Legacy Locker, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based service that enables users to store an encrypted page of passwords and important documents to be accessed upon their death, has been acquired by two-year-old, San Francisco-based PasswordBox, a password management startup. The terms for the deal aren’t being disclosed, but all information from Legacy Locker accounts will be deleted, reports AllThingD. If its customers want to stick with the service, they’ll have to reregister for it as part of PasswordBox.

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Happenings

We neglected to alert you to the Belgrade Venture Forum 2013 conference, which wrapped up yesterday. (Sorry.) But in news you can perhaps use: Serbian Economy Minister Sasa Radulovic announced at the event’s outset that the government is willing to co-invest up to 4 billion Serbian dinars (or about $47 million) in regional startups beginning in January.

Goldman Sachs‘s super-secret Private Internet Company Conference rolls into its second day in Las Vegas today. Who will leak what today from the event? Stay tuned!

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Data

So far this year, 60 U.S.-based financial software companies have attracted venture backing, according to the PitchBook Platform. The five that have garnered the most are: Clinkle, which raised $25 million; Bill.com, which raised $38 million; Aria Systems, which raised $40 million; Credorax, which raised $40 million, and, in the biggest related funding so far this year, Zuora, which raised $50 million in September. Zuora is a six-year-old, Foster City, Calif.-based company whose platform aims to help tech companies shift to a subscription-based model by helping to automate payments. Its investors include Benchmark, Shasta Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Index Ventures. The company has raised about $130 million to date.

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Job Listings

eBay is looking for a senior director, corporate development to help source, evaluate, and integrate the company’s many strategic acquisitions. (Over the last five years, the company has acquired more 30 companies, spending more than $6 billion for them altogether.) The company says the idea candidate should have an MBA or JD and more than 12 years of M&A or corporate development experience. It also wants to see a track record of leading complex M&A transactions, either through experience at an investment bank, venture capital firm, or a legal or consulting firm.

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Essential Reads

Business Insider digs up videotaped depositions that suggest Snapchat cofounders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy may owe a former frat brother “something” after all for his role in the earliest days of the now high-flying company.

Box, the eight-year-old, enterprise cloud file storage firm, is raising a fresh $100 million in Series E capital at a valuation of $2 billion, according to TechCrunch sources. Last year, Box raised $125 million at a valuation of a reported $1 billion. The new funding would push the total amount that Box has raised to date — from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners, US Venture Partners, among many others — past $400 million.

What’s he really like? Check the Lulu app. (“One of the comments was, ‘laughing at his jokes may take some effort,’ which I certainly thought was subjective,” comedy writer Neel Shah tells the New York Times of his own Lulu profile. “I feel like if you’re using an app like Lulu, you’re probably not interested in nuanced analysis.”)

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Detours

Imagining the post-antibiotics future.

Finding a luxurious home away from home.

Which cheap, terrible beer tastes the best? A group of friends endures a blind taste test so that you won’t have to.

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Retail Therapy

The Dutch brand Vlieger & Vandam pushes the boundaries with its brightly colored Guardian Angel handbags. If you relish opportunities to speak with law enforcement officials, this is the must-have accessory of the season. (H/T: Very Short List.)

Regardless of what you think of vaporizers, you have to admit that this one is pretty amazing. (From a design standpoint!)

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Carriers flatly reject the notion of installing antitheft software onto phones, a move that would allow customers to deactivate their phones immediately when stolen. San Francisco’s district attorney, George Gascón, telling the New York Times the obvious, says he thinks the carriers are loath to give up the profits they make off insurance programs that consumers purchase to cover lost or stolen phones. Legislators are still trying to determine what action to take.

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Turning Bain Capital Ventures Into a West Coast Player

Salil Deshpande, who spent seven years as a venture investor with Bay Partners, joined Bain Capital Ventures in March of this year, and he’s been working hard ever since. Deshpande is hoping to replicate his successful track record, with hits that include early investments in Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce.com last year for $689 million) and the peer-to-peer lender LendingClub (now valued at more than $1.5 billion). Working alongside Bain’s one other West Coast managing director, Ajay Agarwal, in the firm’s Palo Alto office, Deshpande also wants to help Bain establish a stronger presence on the West Coast venture capital scene. I met recently with Deshpande to see how it’s going. Our conversation has been edited for length.

How active is Bain Capital Ventures, and what size bets are you making?

We’ve been very prolific; we’ve closed five deals in the last three months that haven’t been announced. We’ve announced a dozen others, including Aria Systems, a company that lets companies do recurring revenue management. We just led a $40 million round in the company.

As for range, our smallest investment has been $250,000 and our largest has been $55 million in one company.

How much are you investing, and how many partners does Bain Capital Ventures have altogether?

We’re currently investing out of a $660 million fund raised in 2012. We raise a new fund every two-and-a-half years or so, so the pace of investing is high. We have nine managing directors: two here, six in Boston, and one in New York.

Do the nine of you have to agree on every deal?

First, we classify deals as early or growth. With growth deals, everyone who wants to come and do the work is invited. When it comes to early-stage deals, there are just five managing directors [who decide whether or not to move forward]. And the managing director who is sponsoring the deal decides on who the four other people will be.

Don’t partners then choose only those individuals who they think will support a deal?

Not necessarily. I always pick partners who will be critical and have the most knowledge and understanding about the deal. I don’t want to do bad deals. And these are some of the smartest guys I’ve worked with.

Is it hard, trying to establish Bain as a venture entity in this crowded, West Coast market? 

There are pros and cons. Bain is a very strong, positive brand. It stands for private equity, large deals, buyouts. It stands for discipline, thoroughness, thoughtfulness, [and] being data-driven. We’re also known for philanthropy work in the Boston community.

The challenge is that the brand stands for something that doesn’t correspond exactly with what we’re trying to do [out] here, where you have to be a little faster [and] a little more responsive to the market. But the nice thing is that things are really working out here, so the brand will catch up.

Do local entrepreneurs understand that Bain Capital Ventures is a venture firm and not a unit of Bain Capital?

This market hasn’t been educated on a couple of things. First, that we exist. [Laughs.] Second, what is Bain Capital trying to accomplish? Sometimes it takes a conversation or two to let people know that we’re just like any other venture fund. We have carry and comp that’s just like other firms. We’re independent – our investment committee is just the nine of us. We have an overlap of limited partners with other Bain Capital funds, but some people incorrectly assume that we’re an evergreen fund with big Bain Capital as a solo LP. We’re like a lot of our peers, except that we happen to be part of a really big franchise.

You’ve said the firm is very data driven. How is that impacting your investing style?

There’s a value placed on being thorough and smart, which isn’t the case in all firms. They look at more metrics. Some [investors] are more intuitive and gunslinging. In the past I’ve relied on domain knowledge and intuition. So I think it’s been a very good education for me to be less intuitive and more thorough. When doing due diligence, I used to talk to a few customers. Now I talk to a dozen.

New Fundings

Aria Systems, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based company that offers its clients cloud-based recurring revenue management, announced today that it has raised $40 million in its fourth round of funding. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and included existing investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Interwest Partners, Tugboat Ventures, and Venrock as well as VMware, bringing the total funds raised to date to $83 million.

BTC China, a two-year-old, Shanghai-based bitcoin trading platform, has raised $5 million Series A from Lightspeed China Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, reports TechCrunch. Until now, the company has been bootstrapped by founders Bobby Lee, Linke Yang, and Xiaoyu Huang. You can learn more here.

Collective IP, a two-year-old, Boulder, Colo.-based repository of tech transfer data, has raised $2.4 million from Tango/High Country Venture among others, according to an SEC filing. The company had previously raised a $1.05 million seed round last year.

HipLogiq, a year-old, Dallas-based, Twitter data mining startup, has raised $7 million in Series B funding from Hadron Global Partners. The company has raised $12 million altogether.

Index, a months-old, San Francisco-based retail software company, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Innovation Endeavors, Khosla Ventures, AIMCo and 819 Capital. The company was founded by former Google Wallet executives Marc Freed-Finnegan and Jonathan Wall.

Kabbee, a 2.5-year-old, London-based price comparison service for London’s minicabs, has raised $5.76 million led by Octopus Investments. In fall of last year, the company raised its first funding, $3.25 million, from Samos Investments, Pentland Group, and Redbus Group, among others.

LeCab, a year-old, Paris-based company that competes with Uber in Europe, has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding. The company isn’t disclosing who its investors are, but its CEO, Benjamin Cardoso, tells TechCrunch not to worry about such details, explaining that they are “fortysomething French entrepreneurs who created their startups around 10 years ago.” So French! The company has previously raised $4.1 million.

LightSail, an 18-month-old, New York-based education technology startup, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding, according to VentureWire. The company, which aims to improve students’ literacy in elementary and secondary schools, raised the money from a long list of individual investors, including Ricardo Sagrera of Viceroy Ventures; Joel Greenblatt of Gotham Capital; Chuck Strauch, former chairman and CEO of PairGain Technologies; and Seamless.com co-founder Paul Appelbaum.

Mojave Networks, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Calif.-based company whose cloud-based software is used by enterprises to block malware or other threats from employee mobile devices, has raised $5 million. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Sequoia Capital, which previously invested more than $1 million in seed funding in the company, also participated in the round.

SimpliVity, a four-year-old, Westborough, Mass.-based company, has raised $58 million led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. New investors Meritech Capital Partners and Swisscom AG also joined the round, along with previous investors Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures. SimpliVity has now raised more than $101 million for its OmniCube appliance, which can reportedly handle the work of multiple appliances — from server virtualization to networking to WAN optimization — and for less cost.

TriVascular, a 15-year-old, Santa Rosa, Calif.-based company that makes stent grafts for treating abdominal aortic aneurysms, has raised $40 million in Series E financing. Investors in the round included New Enterprise Associates, Delphi Ventures, MPM Capital, Kearny Venture Partners, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, the Redmile Group, Deerfield Management, Rock Springs Capital and Permal Asset Management. The company has raised about $255 million over the years, according to Crunchbase.

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New Funds

Crosslink Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital and growth equity firm, is officially in the market for its seventh fund, according to an SEC filing first flagged by peHUB. The filing doesn’t list a target and it states that the first sale has yet to occur. Crosslink had closed its sixth, $200 million fund in September 2011 after two years of fundraising. That pool was slightly smaller than the firm’s fourth and fifth funds, which both exceeded $225 million. Though the firm invests in both young and more mature businesses, it typically aims to invest between $10 million and $30 million into each of its portfolio companies.

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People

Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, tells the San Jose Mercury News that his well-funded company has no plans to IPO anytime soon. “We’re never going to rule out going public, because there can be good reasons to go public. We just don’t feel like we have those reasons,” he says.

Shirish Sathaye, who joined Khosla Ventures as a GP three years ago, has left the firm, says Fortune’s Dan Primack. A spokeswoman for the firm confirmed that Sathaye’s last day was Friday. You can learn a bit more here. Prior to joining Khosla, Sathaye spent nearly a decade with Matrix Partners. Before jumping into venture capital, Sathaye spent four years as the VP of engineering at Alteon Websystems.

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Happenings

USB‘s annual, three-day Global Technology and Services Conference gets underway today at scenic Cavallo Point, a stone’s throw from the Golden Gate Bridge in Sausalito, Calif. The event provides investors the chance to hear from global tech giants; you can find the agenda here.

It’s also day two of Salesforce.com‘s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

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Data

According to Pitchbook, 35 funds raised between $250 million and $500 million in 2007. Their median IRR as of this writing: 4.02 percent. The top performers include ARCH Venture Fund VII, Shasta Ventures II, Technology Partners Fund II, and Tenaya Capital V.

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Job Listings

Capital One, the giant U.S. bank, has launched a new digital venture Investing group, and it is looking for a senior associate to evaluate and help lead strategic venture investments in “digital startups” on its behalf. To apply, you need at least three years of experience in management consulting or investment banking and an undergraduate degree. Preferred qualifications include some consumer financial services experience and a willingness to travel up to 30 percent of the time.

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Essential Reads

Dropbox is in the market for a fresh $250 million, sources tell Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance, and it plans to raise the money at a valuation of more than $8 billion.

Finland’s technology startups have long viewed Silicon Valley as a gateway to funding and global recognition. But now, they’ve found an alternative closer by: Russia, whose venture firms are snapping up Web, software, and nanomaterials stakes.

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Detours

Ruh roh. Most of the world’s solar panels are facing the wrong direction.

There’s an iceberg roughly the size of Chicago floating around out there, and no one knows quite where it’s headed.

Pictures of a toddler who naps with his two-month-old puppy every day. (We had to do it; it’s too cute.)

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Retail Therapy

Pop open this mobile workstation at an airline gate and watch the TSA swarm!

Would you ever dare, eat a Burt Reynolds éclair?

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The Department of Justice and the SEC tell a U.S. Senate committee that bitcoins are legitimate financial instruments, boosting prospects for their wider acceptance.

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VCs Want to Know: What’s Next?

It’s getting tough out there for entrepreneurs. No longer is it enough to create a sustainable, profitable, fast-growing product that’s beloved by customers.  These days, top VCs are placing a premium on what’s next.

Andreessen Horowitz is “generally willing to take more risk on a product that hasn’t yet been built,” Marc Andreessen told me last month.

“We want to be in the most extreme propositions — the sort of thing where it’s either a moonshot or a smoking crater in the ground,” he explained. Toward that end, he’d said, “We’re willing to impute value into [what’s coming next out of a startup] if we’re highly confident that the team can build it and that the market is really going to want it.”

Ranjith Kumaran has seen this focus on the future vision first-hand. Kumanran, who cofounded the file sharing and online data storage company YouSendIt (renamed Hightail last July), is CEO of PunchTab, a nearly three-year-old loyalty and engagement platform that helps customers like Arby’s Restaurant Group create instant loyalty programs.

PunchTab’s trajectory has been impressive. In addition to growing revenue five times over last year, it has expanded its enterprise customer base from 10 to more than 40. Nevertheless, Kumanran finds that the VCs with whom he meets care most about Punchtab’s “next-horizon solutions”; they want entrepreneurs to paint a picture.

“I believe that wasn’t the case before,” he observes. “Series B was about how fast you’re growing and how you get to next revenue [milestones].”

If VCs are no longer enamored of velocity alone, the shift likely owes to a number of factors, beginning with the fact that fewer venture firms have come to control greater amounts of capital and need bigger returns than ever to justify such pools.

“It’s a very different dynamic today,” says Brian O’Malley, a general partner at Battery Ventures. “The market has gone from venture people sitting in their office, waiting for whatever company to come and pitch them, to chasing the companies that everyone else wants to invest in. If you’re part of that inner crowd, life is very good and there’s lots of money being thrown at you.”

You just need some imagination to get there.

New Fundings

Aileron Therapeutics, an eight-year-old, Cambridge, Mass-based clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that is developing cancer drugs, has raised $30 million in Series E equity financing from existing investors, including Apple Tree Partners, Roche Venture Fund, Novartis Venture Funds, Lilly Ventures, SR One and Excel Venture Management. The company has raised more than $100 million since its founding, says Xconomy, which reports on the company and its new round here.

Catabasis Pharmaceuticals, a five-year-old, Cambridge, Mass.-based clinical-stage company that’s focused on treating inflammatory and metabolic diseases, has raised $32.4 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Lightstone Ventures; previous investors SV Life Sciences, Clarus Ventures, MedImmune Ventures, and Advanced Technology Ventures also participated in the round. The financing brings the total capital raised by Catabasis to roughly $100 million.

GenapSys, a three-year-old, Redwood City, Calif.-based gene sequency startup, has raised $37 million in Series B funding. Investors in the round included Decheng Capital, IPV Capital, Stanford’s StartX fund, and early Facebook investor Yuri Milner. The company has raised $45.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Knozen, a months-old, New York-based startup that’s currently in stealth mode but sounds a bit like a newer Tickle — the personality-focused quiz site that was acquired by Monster in 2004 — recently raised $2.25 million in seed funding, according to TechCrunch. The company’s investors include FirstMark Capital, Lerer Ventures and Greycroft Partners.

MovieLaLa, a year-old, San Francisco-based social network for movie fans looking to discuss upcoming movies, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding. Investors in the round included Wealthfront COO Adam Nash; former HBO executive Jim Moloshok; and Larry Braitman, who cofounded Flycast Communications in 1996.

Sittercity.com, a 12-year-old, Chicago-based source for in-home care, has raised $13 million in funding. Publicly traded Bright Horizons Family Solutions participated in the funding. (It now intends to work with Sittercity to help more families find child care.) Plenty of previous investors also joined in the round, including Apex Venture Partners, Baird Venture Capital, I2A Funds, Point Judith Capital, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, State of Wisconsin Investment Board and new debt provider Square 1 Bank. SIttercity has raised just north of $30 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Slyce, a two-year-old, Calgary-based company whose technology invites users to photograph a product with their phones, after which it presents them pricing, reviews and the ability to buy the product, has raised $2.2 million. Its investors weren’t named, but the Calgary Herald has a feature story on the company here if you want to learn more.

Station X, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose software helps scientists and clinicians store, analyze and visualize large-scale genomic data, has raised a fresh $8.6 million, shows an SEC filing that suggests the company is hoping to raise up to $20 million for the round. The company’s existing investors include Runa Capital and Genomic Health. Station X has raised about $15 million to date.

Talari Networks, a four-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based company that works with enterprises to ensure their network reliability, has raised $15 million led by new investor Four Rivers Group. Existing investors, including Menlo Ventures and Silver Creek Ventures, also participated. The company has raised roughly $33 million to date.

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New Funds

Mark Gorenberg, a managing director who joined the venture firm Hummer Winblad in 1990, is striking out on his own. According to a new SEC filing, Gorenberg is raising a $40 million fund under the new, San Francisco-based brand Zetta Venture Partners. The Form D shows the first sale has yet to occur; no one other than Gorenberg is listed on the filing. Before joining Hummer Winblad, Gorenberg was an executive at Sun Microsystems. Gorenberg most recently participated in the late October, $1.5 million seed funding of San Francisco-based Pixlee, which provides brands with a platform to create, manage and measure user-generated photo and short form video campaigns.

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IPOs

A European IPO revival is under way, and London is seeing the most activity, reports Reuters.

Share of Zulily, the four-year-old, Seattle-based flash deals site for mothers, soared 71 percent in trading on Friday. The WSJ has more here.

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Exits

Latista, a 12-year-old, Reston, Va.-based company that makes workflow and collaboration software for the construction industry, was acquired late last week for $35 million by Textura, a publicly traded competitor. Latista’s investors include Blu Venture Investors, a Vienna, Va., venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in the Mid-Atlantic region, and Berman Venture Capital, a Rockville, Md., firm.

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People

Jeremy Hammond, the Anonymous hacktivist who released millions of emails relating to the private intelligence firm Stratfor, was sentenced on Friday in a Manhattan federal court to 10 years in jail. He told the Guardian that he sees his sentence as a concerted attempt by U.S. authorities to put a chill on political hacking.

Business Insider founder Henry Blodget gets taken to lunch by the Financial Times and pitches his interviewer on the idea of combining enterprises. “We would actually be perfect for a merger. You can take that back [to the FT],” Blodget says.

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Happenings

Salesforce.com’s four-day Dreamforce conference gets underway today in San Francisco, with founder Marc Benioff in conversation with Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston in late afternoon. You can find out more here.

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Data

What happens in Vegas…sometimes draws venture funding. According to new data from Pitchbook, investment in the state is on the rise (surely with some thanks to the efforts of entrepreneur-investor Tony Hsieh). Since the beginning of 2009, 34 Nevada-based startups have attracted venture funding, and the amounts they’ve raised is growing by the year. Pitchbook says that the $32 million that local companies have raised so far in 2013 already surpasses that $30 million that Nevada startups raised in 2012.

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Job Listings

Fenox Venture Capital, a two-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based is looking to hire a venture partner to help the firm spot promising investment opportunities in the consumer Internet, retail and software sectors. A “distinguished educational and professional background, including executive management experience at well-regarded companies” is required. It’s a part-time position.

Dow Jones reported last month that Fenox had raised $20 million toward its third fund, which is targeting $60 million from large corporations, funds of funds, and family offices. Part of the firm’s mission, said Dow Jones, is “landing and expanding startups in Asia.”

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Essential Reads

Fighting an Internet risk that technology can’t fix: People.

The New Yorker takes a look at self-driving technologies and the details are fascinating. Among them: Volvo has a full-time forensics team and whenever a Volvo gets into an accident within a sixty-mile radius of its Swedish headquarters, the team races to the scene with local police to assess the wreckage (and add to four decades of such research). Meanwhile, Nissan, Toyota and Mercedes are probably closest to developing systems like Google’s self-driving cars but hesitate to introduce them for different reasons, including aesthetics. Ralf Herrtwich, Mercedes’s director of driver assistance and chassis systems, tells The New Yorker: “One of my designers said, ‘Ralf, if you ever suggest building [a laser turret atop] one of our cars, I’ll throw you out of this company.’ ”

Facebook addiction has given way to Facebook fatigue, among users, as well as developers, reports the New York Times.

The rise of the Twitter bots.

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Detours

Who gets into Stanford? In short, it’s complicated. “[O]ne year, being a tuba player might be really important. And another year, well, there are already these five even better tuba players and we don’t need another.”

Fascinated with the idea that two totally unrelated people can look like twins, photographer Francois Brunelle set out to take portraits of 200 doppelgangers. (This blew our mind.)

That clam in your chowder might be hundreds of years old.

Art on a plate.

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Retail Therapy

It’s almost Thanksgiving, a time for talking, a time for turkey, a time for, yes, says GQ, some new wool ties.

Brass ID bracelets for men are now considered fashionable. We have no idea how this happened, but unless you are a soldier or a male model, just keep moving.

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U.S. computer and software companies say sales to China have abruptly cooled off, and they blame growing government hostility toward the U.S.

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Battery Ventures on CPG: It’s Simple, Great Product Wins

Last week, I met up with Battery Ventures’ Brian O’Malley, who invests in a range of things but has been particularly successful leading some of the firm’s e-commerce investments. Among the related companies that O’Malley has championed at Battery are Skullcandy, the now public earphone maker; the fast-growing grooming products startup Dollar Shave Club; and high-end home furnishings company Serena & Lily. 

While e-commerce has been falling in and out of fashion on an almost yearly basis, O’Malley suggests that making smart retail bets, including on consumer packaged goods companies, isn’t that complicated. He starts with knowing what not to do, like focusing on the “things that are already done versus the things that are yet to come.” He elaborated during our sit-down. Our chat has been edited for length.

You seem to be a big fan of consumer packaged goods companies. But they have a spotty track record. What’s the appeal?

The good thing about CPG is high-frequency purchase rates. Take Dollar Shave Club. Guys shave every day, and once you get that staple, you [then sell] the toothpaste and hair gel and aftershave. There’s a whole list of products that you can add on afterwards. With CPG, you can very quickly get to hundreds of dollars of spend per customer.

Is the trick to avoid low-margin businesses?

Low margins are part of the challenge. CPG companies are also logistically complicated, they take a lot of money and time to scale, and there’s a big change [required] in behavior. So if I’m a Gillette customer, I might not like the idea of spending $20 for razor blades, but I don’t go to Google and type in “razor blades.” So companies typically have to spend a fair amount of money to gain visibility and change consumer thinking.

Is there a model way to invest in these types of companies then?

Well, if you need to raise big money to scale them over time — $25 million to $50 million rounds – you’re at the whim of what’s exciting to big money at that time. That’s the issue. So the types of things we’ve invested in on the consumer side have very quick payback periods on the unit economics. So you’re either paying back your advertising in three to four months because the advertising is cheap and the margins are good, or there’s more of this shared-risk model where you’re paying either a sales rep or an affiliate based on what’s actually sold. That way you’re always kind of marginally profitable.

You make it sound so easy. Where do you think some of the bigger-known names, like Beachmint and ShoeDazzle and Fab, have gone wrong?

Each one is different, but at the end of the day, the old adage that retail is detail is very true. It comes down to running a really tight ship. So you need to be very proficient at logistics, and with marketing and so forth. But when a lot of money was flowing at these companies, many of them became professional fundraisers as opposed to professional operators.

People grew enamored with the idea of changing a business model or selling online, when at the end of the day, great product wins. If you have a great product, it doesn’t matter if you have a flashy business model. People will tell other people to come back and buy it.

Does it matter what the product is?

I don’t really care what the product is. I’ve got companies that sell everything from custom men’s shirts to baby bedding to wine devices. The question is: how big is the opportunity, what’s the pain point, how do you tell people about what you’re doing, and then what’s the buying behavior from there. Is it viral? Will users tell more people about it?

New Fundings

Appia, a five-year-old, Durham, N.C.-based mobile ad network that’s focused on helping its customers acquire users (they pay Appia when one of their apps is downloaded), has raised $4.5 million. The money comes from the Portland, Me., venture firm North Atlantic Capital, and brings Appia’s total funding to date to roughly $35 million.

BrightTag, a four-year-old, Chicago-based online marketing company that allow companies to mine real-time data about their customers, has raised $27 million in funding led by Yahoo JAPAN. Previous investors Baird Capital, EPIC Ventures, I2A, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and TomorrowVentures also participated. BrightTag has now raised around $43 million.

CytoVale, a company that’s trying to pioneer a new class of biomarkers based on the mechanical properties of individual cells, has raised funding from Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs. CytoVale spun out of UCLA Engineering, helped by the school’s Institute for Technology Advanced Placement, early last year. Founded in November 2011, Breakout Labs now supports 16 companies in areas ranging from food science and biomedicine to clean energy.

Google  and KKR have agreed to acquire six solar farms being developed in California and Arizona in a deal worth $400 million. The companies are providing both equity and debt financing for the projects, which are expected to produce enough power for more than 17,000 homes.

Greenhouse, a two-year-old, New York-based maker of recruiting software, has raised $2.7 million led by The Social+Capital Partnership and Resolute.vc. Numerous angel investors also participated in the round in the round, including Thomas Lehrman of Gerson Lehrman Group and Bill Lohse, a general partner at Social Starts.

Kidaptive, a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based education app maker that’s focused on storytelling, has raised $10.1 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Formation 8, which was joined by Menlo Ventures, the Stanford-StartX Fund, NewSchools Venture Fund and Prana Studios.

Qloo, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based online recommendation engine, announced yesterday that it has now raised $3 million round of seed funding, including $1.6 million that it collected earlier this year. Among the many angel investors involved in the company is actor Danny Masterson.

TinyCo, a nearly four-year-old, San Francisco-based game maker, has raised $20 million in fresh funding from Pinnacle Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The company, whose games include “Tiny Monsters” and “Tiny Castle,” has raised nearly $40 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Yesware, a three-year-old, Boston-based company that produces email productivity software for salespeople, has added $1.2 million to its Series B round, says Dow Jones. The money brings the total financing for the round, raised this fall, to $14.7 million. Yesware is backed by Battery Ventures, Foundry Group, Golden Venture Partners, Google Ventures and IDG Ventures USA. The company has raised $19.7 million altogether.

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IPOs

Hong Kong is getting a boost from China‘s 14-month-long freeze on domestic IPOs. According to bankers who spoke with Bloomberg, more than $5 billion in deals originally slated for China have moved to Hong Kong since September 2012, from car dealers to apparel makers.

Relypsa, a six-year-old, Redwood CIty, Calif.-based pharmaceutical developer, has cut its expected IPO price range from $16-$19 per share to just $12 per share. The company still plans to sell 6.85 million shares when it debuts on Nasdaq. The company is majority owned by OrbiMed Advisors (it owns 44 percent), 5AM Ventures (22.6 percent), Delphi Ventures (11.4 percent), New Leaf Ventures (10.1 percent), Sprout Capital (9.4 percent) and Sibling Capital (6 percent).

Shares of Zulily, the four-year-old, Seattle-based flash deals site for mothers, begin trading today at $22, up from an originally expected per-share price of $16-$18. Yesterday, the company sold 6.3 million shares, worth about $140 million worth of stock, roughly a fourth of which came from insiders, who sold 5.1 million shares for $112 million.

Given demand for its shares, Zulily’s offering is expected to perform well, though the company has its skeptics. As Peter Fenton of Benchmark noted much earlier this year, companies like Zulily “are capital-intensive, face structural challenges to their margins, and if they do go public, they trade at low multiples.”

Zulily posted a profit of $155,000 on $438.7 million in revenue during the first nine months of the year. During the same period last year, it lost $13.6 million on $202.8 million in revenue. Zulily’s biggest shareholders are Maveron (it owns 23.5 percent of the company),  August Capital (it owns 7.4 percent), and Andreessen Horowitz (it owns 7.3 percent).

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Exits

Servio, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based company that focuses on content and search engine optimization, is being acquired by Swansea, Ill.-based CrowdSource, which outsources projects to online communities or workers with particular skills. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Servio had raised a little more than $9 million, including from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. CrowdSource is backed by Highland Capital Partners, which invested $12.5 million in the company last year.

MapMyFitness, a nearly seven-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based company whose technology enables users to map, record, and share their workouts, has been acquired by the publicly traded company Under Armour for $150 million. Under Armour, based in Baltimore, makes footwear and apparel for athletes and will operate MapMyFitness as a subsidiary. MapMyFitness had raised $23.5 million over the years, according to Crunchbase. Its investors include Austin Ventures, Square 1 Bank, and Milestone Venture Partners.

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People

Chi-Hua Chien, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is talking with prospective investors about launching his own venture capital fund, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack. Last month, Fortune reported on a management shake-up over at Kleiner Perkins, which is narrowing its early-stage roster to five managing directors; Chien is reportedly not among that group.

Jeremiah Daly and Alex Taussig were just promoted to partner at Highland Capital Partners. Daly, who joined Highland in 2012, was previously a principal at Accel Partners in London. Before Accel, Daly was an investor at Summit Partners and Gold Hill Capital and a banker at Silicon Valley Bank. Taussig joined Highland in 2009 straight out of M.I.T., where he nabbed an MS in materials engineering after graduating from Harvard College. Taussig also has an MBA from Harvard.

Another day, another bloodbath at Fab, and AllThingsD is on it. The outlet earlier reported that Fab was planning to notify up to 100 employees this week that they are being laid off; yesterday, it learned that among those leaving are its chief product officer, David Paltiel, its head of human resources, Allison Rutledge-Parisi; and merchandising execs Grace Glenny and Tracy Doree. Writes AllThingsD’s Jason Del Rey: “Most of these execs will have the option to stay on three more months, but will not have a job at Fab after that.”

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Happenings

Today is the last day of the Startup Phenomenon conference in Boulder. You might want to check it out if you’re in town.

It’s also day two of the Women 2.0 conference. Speaking today: Tina Sharkey of Sherpa Foundry, Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC, and Christine Tsai of 500 Startups, among others. Learn more about here.

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Data

According to Cambridge Associates, U.S. venture firms returned 4.3 percent in the second quarter, a 1.8 percent improvement of their first-quarter performance. (Worth noting, the Nasdaq returned 4.2 percent during the second quarter, though VCs bested other major indices.) Overall, venture performance still markedly trails that of the public markets over the last decade. After that, things flip pretty dramatically, as you can see in this chart.

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Job Listings

Yahoo is in the market for a Business Development Director, Yahoo Strategic Partnerships at its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters. Among other things, the role is “directly responsible for establishing, developing and executing key distribution, product, and monetization partnerships for Yahoo, with a focus on building and expanding Yahoo’s relationships with ISP and telecommunications companies in North America.” Minimum requirements include an undergraduate degree, though an MBA is preferred, and at least eight years of biz dev or equivalent experience.

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Essential Reads

The inside story behind the iPad’s iconic design.

The December issue of British Vogue features an apparently terrible story, titled “High Tech Heroines: The Silicon Valley Wives and Girlfriends,” (a lot into which Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is inexplicably thrown). Business Insider identifies just a few of the piece’s weakest points.

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Detours

Did you know? There’s a secret science to successful stock symbols.

Italians on average drink 13.6 gallons of wine a year, down from the 29 gallons a year that they drank in the ’70s. This is reportedly cause for concern.

StrictlyVC may just be overtired, but this Tumblr made us laugh.

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Retail Therapy

Sweater pants or swants, the latest trend in fashion nowhere (one hopes!).

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Corrections: On Wednesday, StrictlyVC featured what it thought was the perfect sweater for the rakishly handsome, Verbier skiing, European money launderer. Kyle, a VC, has since written into say that “no self-respecting international financier would be seen in such a sweater” but that we might find one wearing one of these, in red, “the color of the Swiss [mountain] guides, not blue, the color of the French guides.” We stand corrected.

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Google’s latest transparency report is out and it shows, unsurprisingly, that local, state, and federal governments have been asking for far more information. In the second half of 2009, U.S.-based data requests numbered 3,580. By the first half of this year, that number had risen to 10,918, a 205 percent increase.

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So Snapchat is Worth More than $3 Billion. Got It.

Yesterday, there was lots of back and forth about Snapchat, the fast-growing messaging service, and the $3 billion all-cash offer from Facebook that it recently spurned, according to the Wall Street Journal’s sources. (Apparently, three sources also confirmed this account to the New York Times.)

As the Journal reported, the “rebuff” came as Snapchat is “being wooed by other investors and potential acquirers. Chinese e-commerce giant Tencent Holdings had offered to lead an investment that would value two-year-old Snapchat at $4 billion.”

It isn’t that Snapchat’s young founders — Evan Spiegel, 23, and Bobby Murphy, 25 – are strictly opposed to being acquired, suggested the Journal.  But they think if they wait until the next year, they’ll fetch an even richer valuation.

If they do, they can thank the media for its help.

I’ve read the numerous reasons why this deal makes sense: Facebook is losing steam with the younger demographic. Its Snapchat competitor, Poke, fell flat. Snapchat’s users access the service via their mobile phones, where Facebook wants to reach more of its own users.

But there seem to be at least as many reasons why this Facebook deal doesn’t add up.

For starters, Facebook’s modus operandi is to create a social operating system for the masses. Snapchat’s stated purpose is to prevent sharing. Facebook grows squeamish at the prospect of lactating mothers. One of Snapchat’s more prominent use cases is sexting.

There’s also the size of the reported offer. With the exception of Facebook’s then $1 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of the photo-sharing service Instagram last spring – a deal that helped Facebook quash a growing threat on the verge of its IPO — Facebook isn’t in the habit of splashing out much on acquisitions.

Maybe it’s been waiting for a growth opportunity exactly like the one that Snapchat presents, but Facebook knows as well as any that it’s very hard to buy or create a “category killer.” Instagram has grown from 30 million monthly active users to 150 million monthly active users under Facebook, but it’s no YouTube; there are still plenty of competitors out there. The same is true of messaging services. SnapChat may be processing 350 million “snaps” per day, but it doesn’t own its space.

Which raises yet another point: This deal is expensive.  As far we know, Snapchat has no revenue or business model. We’re not even sure how many users it has. (It last reported 5 million users in April; according to the Guardian’s calculations, it probably has around 26 million U.S. users today.)

Even if Snapchat is worth top dollar, Facebook has current assets of $10.5 billion in cash. Paying $3 billion in cash would significantly deplete its balance sheet. Observers have likened the offer to Google’s reported bid to buy Groupon. But with Google’s many tens of billions of dollars in cash, Google could have easily afforded to gamble on Groupon; not so with Facebook and Snapchat.

As a reporter, I love acquisitions: they’re exciting, and they often involve very personal stories. Where the rubber meets the road, though, most acquisitions fail. This deal may have been in the cards at one point. But if I were Facebook, I might be happy it didn’t go through.

New Fundings

BBOXX, a three-year-old, London-based company that sells solar-powered battery boxes to people in developing countries, has raised $1.9 million in funding from the personal fund of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla — Khosla Impact — and Synergy Growth. The company aims to bring electricity to 20 million people by 2020.

docBeat, a three-year-old, Las Vegas- based company whose messaging app helps healthcare teams communicate efficiently in real time, has raised $1.1 million in funding. The money comes from unnamed accredited investors, says a release about the round.

CreativeLIVE, a three-year-old, online education platform whose operations are split between Seattle and San Francisco, has raised $21.5 million in Series B funding led by Social+Capital Partnership. Greylock Partners, an existing investor, also participated in the funding, which brings the company’s total funding to just less than $30 million. CreativeLIVE allows teachers to broadcast their classes live in HD video and to interact with thousands of students who are logged on to watch.

Ezoic, a three-year-old, Carlsbad, Calif.-based company that optimizes the layout of its customers’ websites to maximize their ad revenue, has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. Balderton Capital led the round and was joined by New Amsterdam Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and private investors.

HDmessaging, a two-year-old, Burlingame, Calif.-based company that builds and powers white-label messaging systems for mobile operators, has closed $3 million in funding led by GrandBanks Capital. IDG Ventures, Nexit Ventures and Lighthouse Capital Partners also participated in the round.

Househappy, a 2.5-year-old, Portland, Ore.-based real estate platform that invites users to post and search for properties around the world, has secured $1.5 million in seed funding from angel investors.

MdotLabs, a months-old, Madison, Wi.-based platform whose software monitors advertising impressions and click fraud, has raised $1.25 million in funding led by Chicago Ventures and Great Oaks Venture Capital.

Mustbin, a two-year-old, Waban, Mass.-based app for organizing, storing, and sharing personal information, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding led by DAG Ventures. General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Northgate Capital, and individual investors, including Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, also participated.

Quirky, a 4.5-year-old, New York-based app developer that makes it easier for its customers to access a range of connected devices from mobile devices, has raised $79 million in Series D financing. Much of the round — $30 million of it — comes from GE, which is taking a minority equity stake in Quirky. Filling out the round are Quirky’s previous investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Norwest Venture Partners, RRE and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Redfin, the nine-year-old, Seattle-based online real estate company, has raised $50 million led by Tiger Global Management. Tiger was joined by new investor T. Rowe Price and previous investors Greylock Partners, Globespan Capital Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital and The Hillman Company. The company, which is expected to go public, has now raised nearly $100 million.

TouchBistro, a three-year-old, Toronto-based company that makes a digital menu and restaurant management app, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Relay Ventures and included the participation of numerous angel investors.

Yapta, a six-year-old, Seattle-based travel site that allows users to track price changes, has raised an additional $2 million as part of its Series D round. (It had closed on $4.22 million in July). The funding comes from two travel industry companies: Amadeus and Concur. Yapta, meanwhile, has now raised $22.4 million in equity and another $1.45 million in debt, according to Crunchbase.

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New Funds

Founders Circle Management, an 18-month-old, Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm, has raised $38.9 million since March, according to an SEC filing that lists the fund’s total offering amount as “indefinite.” The firm, which describes itself as a technology growth-stage fund, invests in privately held companies by buying the shares of the companies’ founders, employees, and early investors. Two of Founders Circles’ cofounders — Mike Jung and Chris Albinson — worked at Panorama Capital prior; a third, Ken Loveless, was a longtime managing director at Silicon Valley Bank.

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IPOs

Chegg, the eight-year-old, Santa Clara, Calif.-based textbook rental company, went public yesterday and, well, things didn’t go quite as planned. The company’s shares, priced at $12.50, opened at $11 on the NYSE and proceeded to fall 23 percent. Chegg’s biggest venture shareholders include Foundation Capital (it owns 6.5 percent), Gabriel Ventures (it owns 10.3 percent), Insight Venture Partners (it owns 14.3 percent) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which owns 11.7 percent).

Zulily, the Seattle-based flash deals site for mothers, revealed in an SEC filing yesterday that it has increased its expected per-share price from $16-$18 to $18-$20. The company plans to go public on the Nasdaq on Friday. Among Zulily’s biggest shareholders are Maveron (it owns 23.5 percent of the company),  August Capital (it owns 7.4 percent), and Andreessen Horowitz (it owns 7.3 percent).

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Exits

TouristEye, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based mobile app for planning trips, has been acquired by Lonely Planet, reports TechCrunch. TouristEye had raised $500,000 from 500 Startups, Plug and Play Innovation Center and angel investors. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

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People

Dev Ittycheria has joined the Boston-based venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners as its third managing director. Ittycheria had joined Greylock Partners as a venture partner last year. Before coming to the firm, he was the president of BMC Software‘s enterprise service management division.

Marissa Mayer is spending too much time promoting herself and not enough time fixing Yahoo, argues Variety.

Alex Rainert, the 10th employee of Foursquare and its longtime product head, is leaving in the midst of a significant product rollout for the company, reports AllThingsD.

Three Tesla Motors employees were injured yesterday when a low-pressure aluminum casting press somehow failed. One employee was seriously hurt and two others suffered minor injuries when the machine (eek) spilled hot metal on them. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said in an email to Inside Bay Area. “(I) am going to visit them in the hospital later today and will personally ensure that they receive the best possible care.”

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Happenings

The L.A. Tech Summit happens today in Santa Monica. The one-day conference features Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures, Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Tinder founder Sean Rad and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. You can find out more here.

Going on in Las Vegas today and tomorrow: The Women 2.0 conference, featuring such heavy hitters as Google’s Megan Smith, Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, and investor and Zivity CEO Cyan Banister. Learn more about the agenda here.

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Data

VCs heart e-commerce —  especially when it comes to clothing and accessories businesses. According to new Pitchbook data, investors have funded 80 U.S.-headquartered apparel and accessories companies since the beginning of 2008. From 2008 to 2010, an average of 9 to 10 deals were closed each year. But VCs doubled their activity in 2011, then doubled their activity again in 2012 (to around 40 deals a year). Meanwhile, 2013 has already seen more capital invested in related companies than in any of the five years prior.

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Job Listings

KPMG is looking for an “account relationship director, venture capital,” in New York. The firm says the role develops and manages relationships with C-level execs, board members and alumni at assigned accounts (presumably to help KPMG sell its accounting services to VCs and their clients?) To apply, you need ten years of venture capital experience and a background with a Big 4 accounting firm.

—–

Essential Reads

Quartz writes that Apple and Samsung‘s smartwatches are going to be way too cheap to be lucrative for either company.

The U.S. government has weaponized the Internet. Here’s how they did it, in Wired.

—–

Detours

Video games, many of them military-themed, are becoming a way to keep young Iraqis indoors, and away from the chaos outside on their streets.

An Argentine car mechanic has created a device that could save a baby who gets stuck during birth.

The not-so-dark side of affluent Atherton, Calif., as seen through police blotter items.

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Retail Therapy

The Hövding invisible bike helmet is available for purchase. [Happy twirls.]

The Baxter Base Camp X Straight Razor. Looking at its fine, artisan-crafted blade, we think, eh, maybe it’s best you just let the beard grow.

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In terms of ad revenue, Google is now bigger than both the newspaper and magazine industries.

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I Listened to the Winklevii So You Don’t Have To

Yesterday, at the New York Times’ annual Dealbook conference, financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin sat down with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who long ago moved on from their battle with Facebook to become enthusiastic backers of the digital currency bitcoin.  

Little wonder: The twins began buying bitcoins at $9 apiece in the summer of 2012.  As of April, the value of bitcoins had shot to $120, making their investment worth $11 million. Fast forward to today, when bitcoins are trading at around $385 each, and you begin to appreciate the brothers’ fondness for this latest, financial phenomenon. Indeed, the twins – who hope securities regulators will let them move forward with an exchange-traded fund that would hold only bitcoins – say that they now believe bitcoins could enjoy up to a $500 billion market cap.

At the outset of yesterday’s interview, Sorkin offered that he’s still “perplexed” by bitcoin. Because a few of you might be, too, it seemed worth sharing some of the brothers’ insights.

* Speaking about the history of bitcoin, Cameron Winklevoss recalled the story of pseudonymous programmer Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2009 released the source code of bitcoin to the world. “Effectively, it [created] a digital currency with a fixed set of bitcoins at 21 million that’s divisible out to eight decimal points,” he said. In an effort to simplify his point, Winklevoss added that there’s no reason to be concerned by the apparently limited supply of bitcoin, as it’s “divisible out to a large, large amount.”

New Fundings

Clearleap, a six-year-old, Duluth, Ga.-based company whose software is designed to solve and simplify the logistics of managing large video libraries of content, then distributing them to any platform or device, has raised $20 million in funding led by Susquehanna Growth Equity. The round also included existing investors Trinity Ventures and Noro-Moseley. The round brings the company’s total amount raised to $36 million, it says.

Legend3D, a 12-year-old, Carlsbad, Calif.-based digital media and visual effects company, has raised $3 million in new funding, according to a new SEC filing. The funding appears to bring the company’s total $30 million. Previous investors include Augustus Ventures and Northwater Capital.

MAG Interactive, a three-year-old, Stockholm-based app maker behind a highly popular, word-finding game called Ruzzle, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Nokia Growth Partners.

Maxta, a four-year-old, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, has raised $10 million from Andreessen Horowitz to “simplify and redefine enterprise storage by eliminating the need for specialized physical storage arrays,” reports the Wall Street Journal, which does a deep dive of Maxta here.

PasswordBox, a  year-old, San Francisco-based password startup that allows users to manage all of their online credentials from a single point of service, has closed a $6 million Series A round led by Omers Ventures. Other participants in the round included BOKU chief executive Mark Britto, and Facebook’s head of e-commerce, Lee Linden.

Scoopshot, a three-year-old, Helsinki, Finland-based on-demand photography marketplace, has raised $3.9 million in Series A funding from Conor Venture Partners and Finnish Industry Investment. By GigaOm’s calculation, the new round of funding brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $11 million.

SmartThings, an 18-month-old, Washington, D.C.-based company that helps people control items in their homes through their smartphones, has raised $12.5 million in Series A funding from Greylock Partners and Highland Capital Partners. The company had raised $3 million in seed funding last December from a long line of investors, including First Round Capital, SV Angel, and A-Grade Investments. SmartThings had separately garnered $1.2 million from nearly 5,700 backers on Kickstarter in the summer of 2012.

Solarflare Communications, an eight-year-old, Irvine, Calif.-based company that develops networking software and hardware, has raised a fresh $5 million in debt, according to an SEC filing. The company has now raised at least $30 million in debt, and another $150 million in equity, according to Crunchbase. Some of its venture investors include Intel Capital, Anthem Venture Partners, and Oak Investment Partners.

Solicore, a 12-year-old, Lakeland, Fla.-based maker of lithium polymer batteries, has closed what it’s calling Preferred Series A-1 financing. The new funding was led by New Science Ventures, which committed $4 million in capital. Previous investors R.R. Donnelley, Rogers Corporation, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Braemar Energy Ventures, Firelake Capital, OPG Ventures and Hydro-Quebec CapiTech, also participated in the financing. Solicore has raised about $28 million in equity over the years and $5 million in debt, according to Crunchbase.

Visible Technologies, an eight-year-old, Bellevue, Wash.-based social media monitoring company, has raised $1.4 million in debt and other securities, according to an SEC filing. Visible has raised nearly $80 million from VCs over the years, including from In-Q-Tel and Ignition Partners.

Walkbase, a three-year-old Helsinki, Finland-based retail analytics company, has raised $3.86 in Series A funding from SBT Venture Capital and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, a former CEO of Nokia.

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New Funds

Five-year-old FirstMark Capital, the New York-based early stage venture firm, announced yesterday that it has closed its third fund with $225 million in commitments. The fund is exactly the same size as the firm’s second fund, which closed in late 2011. You can learn more about the new fund here. FirstMark’s highest-profile portfolio company right now is Pinterest. FirstMark participated in the company’s $500,000 seed round in early 2010, and it has participated in each of Pinterest’s five, subsequent funding rounds, including its whopping $225 million Series E round, which was led by Fidelity Investments last month. That new funding pegged Pinterest’s current valuation at $3.8 billion.

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IPOs

GeNO Healthcare, a seven-year-old Waltham, Mass.-based company that’s developing inhaled nitric oxide products to treat pulmonary and cardiac diseases, filed an S-1 yesterday to raise up to $50 million. Its biggest outside shareholder is the publicly traded biopharmaceutical company The Medicines Company, which owns 13.9 percent of its shares.

The eight-year-old, Santa Clara, Calif.-based textbook rental company Chegg goes public today on the New York Stock Exchange. Yesterday, the company priced its shares at $12.50; it’s expecting to raise around $180 million, at a valuation of roughly $1.1 billion. Chegg has raised nearly $200 million over the years. Its biggest shareholders include Foundation Capital (it owns 6.5 percent), Gabriel Ventures (it owns 10.3 percent), Insight Venture Partners (it owns 14.3 percent) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which owns 11.7 percent)

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People

Alan Dabbiere, the chairman of Airwatch, whose software helps companies securely manage their employees’ mobile devices, is interested in acquiring a similar business from BlackBerry, he told the Atlantic Journal-Constitution yesterday. He added that Airwatch hasn’t made a bid but that it’s been making “overtures” to Blackberry for nearly six months. In February of this year, 10-year-old Airwatch raised $200 million in funding in Series A funding from Insight Venture Partners.

Shane Smith, co-founder and CEO of VICE Media, tells Business Insider why going public may be the only exit for the fast-growing media company.

In Silicon Valley, there’s a new law firm in town. The Philadelphia firm Pepper Hamilton has just opened an outpost in Redwood City with three intellectual property litigators poached from Goodwin Proctor: Gregory Bishop, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and Andy Chan.

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Happenings

Tomorrow, the L.A. Tech Summit gets underway in Santa Monica. The one-day conference will feature Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures, Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Tinder founder Sean Rad and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. You can find out more here.

Meanwhile, today is the last day of Business Insider’s Ignition conference in New York. On the lineup this afternoon: Spark Capital’s Mo Koyfman, Samsung’s David Eun, and Gawker’s Nick Denton among others.

And yet another O’Reilly conference begins today. This time it’s Velocity, in London. You can find more details here.

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Data

CB Insights has published a bit of data around the increasing M&A interest that corporates like Cisco are showering on network virtualization startups. You can check out its findings here.

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Job Listings

Adams Street Partners is looking for a Chicago-based associate to join its direct investment team, which plugs between $5 million and $30 million into late-stage venture capital and growth equity companies in healthcare and tech. This particular role is for a  pre-MBA candidate who will be expected to head off to business school or to one of the firm’s portfolio companies after a couple of years. To apply, you need two to four years of experience in investment banking, tech consulting, or with a venture or private equity firm.

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Essential Reads

Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won.

Elon Musk’s new blue sky idea: electronic supersonic airplanes.

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Detours

John Cheever’s first short story, “Expelled.” (The story, written when Cheever was 18, fictionalizes his own expulsion from prep school.)

Washington, D.C. has the largest collection of “super zips” — neighborhoods that rank the highest on income and college education — in the U.S. “It’s a megalopolis of eggheads,” says a demographer.

Alexander Graham Bell’s first five phone calls.

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Retail Therapy

Cycling can be a pain in the you-know-what; this $195 vulcanized rubber bike seat designed by IDEO can help.

Are you a rakishly handsome European money launderer who skis in Verbier? We have the perfect sweater for you if so.

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* On how bitcoins are digitally “mined,” Cameron Winklevoss noted that while an individual could, theoretically, mine a bitcoin, there are “a lot of mining outfits that are building huge data centers and computers with applications that are specifically built toward trying to mint bitcoins.” (Put another way, he suggests leaving the mining to the professionals.)

* On how they got into bitcoin investing, Tyler Winkelvoss said the brothers were on vacation in Ibiza (of course), when a friend of a friend suggested they look into the digital currency. They followed up and soon realized it was a “pretty incredible invention.” (I was hoping for more from this anecdote, but there you have it.)

* On why bitcoin might be used to transfer money, rather than good old-fashioned dollars, Tyler Winklevoss compared the technology to email. “Bitcoin is a protocol, and just like [email protocols]…allow you to send an email free and instantly, you can now send money from [the U.S.] to anywhere for free, as opposed to wiring money through Western Union [and] paying a 10 percent clip, or going through banking systems that take maybe three to five days. The old legacy rails of the banking system…are slow, inefficient, and costly. So the promise of bitcoin is to bring technology to financial services like it did for email…”

* On regulation around bitcoin — or the lack thereof — Cameron Winklevoss said, “That’s the point. It’s based on your trust in math and cryptography. It’s not based on trust in an individual, or the back-room dealings of, let’s say, the Federal Reserve… This is an open-source code; everyone knows what’s going on. The rules are set in stone.”

* On whether bitcoin features an anti-government strain, Tyler Winklevoss acknowledged that there is “definitely a libertarian strain [of individuals] that gravitates toward this, [along with] certain economic schools of thought…But it’s more a response to a financial system that’s frankly very buggy. I don’t think it’s a bet against the dollar,” he said. “I think it’s a healthy check and balance that makes it better.”

* Asked about concerns that bitcoin isn’t traceable and therefore likely to be used for illicit purposes, both twins smiled. (They’d been waiting for this softball.) Tyler Winklevoss quickly noted that “you can’t track cash,” either.

* On what happens if U.S. regulators determine that bitcoin is too risky, Cameron Winklevoss suggested that the U.S. will be left behind if they do. China, he noted, “has implicitly given its blessing to bitcoin,” including by allowing Chinese search engine Baidu to accept it as a form of payment. He also noted that bitcoin has been declared “legal, private money” in Germany and that other countries, including Belgium, see “no problem with it. Said Winklevoss, “If there’s a scenario where bitcoin is regulated out of existence in the U.S., I think bitcoin continues to thrive in other places in the world.”

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee defends his relationship with local technology founders, which has been characterized by many as overly cozy.

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Diagnose What’s Wrong, With Your Smartphone

Last week, Slate reported on a brilliant UCLA professor who is “changing the field of medical testing by turning smartphones into portable laboratories.”  But there are a growing number of entrepreneurs finding ways to transform our phones into diagnostic tools. Among the latest is Walter de Brouwer, the founder of Scanadu, a three-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based company that just raised $10.5 million in Series A funding led by the firm Relay Ventures. (Tony Hsieh’s VegasTechFund, Jerry Yang’s Ame Cloud Ventures, and numerous angels also participated.) 

Right now, Scanadu makes a puck-shaped scanner that’s packed with sensors designed to read your vital signs — including heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and blood oxygen levels — and beam the information wirelessly to your iOS or Android smartphone. Next, the company plans to produce a disposable urine analysis testing platform to help determine, say, whether you’re developing heart-related kidney problems. 

Yesterday, I chatted with de Brouwer — a serial entrepreneur and former academic — about his company’s next steps.

What’s the big idea here?

We want to bring [to consumers] the complete diagnostic experience of a hospital. That consists of the emergency room, which basically measures the electromechanical information on the surface of the body; imaging, or what you see through the skin; and labs, where bodily fluids — blood, urine analysis, saliva — are examined.

One day, this will come together in a way that’s FDA approved, so that patients have accurate information that both they and their doctors accept and understand.

You don’t yet have FDA approval. How long do you anticipate it will take?

We’re starting our first clinical trials with [the] Scripps [Translational Science Institute] and will deliver a feasibility study to the FDA in March. Normally, [the turnaround takes] 100 days, though you can never predict, especially if there are more questions, and you have to do more trials. So our hope is to have the product out to consumers for the holidays in 2014, but our expectation is that [it will be available for sale] in 2015.

Will you try to sell to both Western and developing countries?

Because we’re small – we have 19 employees right now – we’re targeting the U.S. market for the moment.

Who will have access to your customers’ data?

Users will basically own their data, which they can send to their doctor to view, even in real time.

In summer, you raised a separate $1.6 million for Scandu in a record-breaking Indiegogo campaign, during which pre-order prices rose from $149 to $199. What are you planning to charge for your first product?

The app will be free. But $199 is what we found consumers are willing to pay [for the device]. Over time, they can expect to pay less. The first digital thermometers cost $950.

New Fundings

Bill.com, a seven-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based company whose online platform provides services for payables, receivables and cash management for small and mid-size business owners, has raised $38 million in financing led by new investor Scale Venture Partners. Other participants in the round included Bank of America, American Express, Fifth Third Bank, CheckFree founder Pete Kight, and Commerce Ventures, as well as all of Bill.com’s previous investors August Capital, Napier Park Global Capital, TTV Capital, Jafco Ventures, Emergence Capital and DCM.  The round brings Bill.com’s total funding to date to $80 million.

Bitcasa, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based, cloud storage service company, has raised $11 million led by Horizons Ventures, with participation from Pelion Venture Partners, Samsung Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and First Round Capital. The company, which installed a new CEO in September, has now raised $20 million.

CardioInsight Technologies, a seven-year-old, Cleveland, Oh.-based company that makes a non-invasive electrocardiographic mapping technology, has raised $15 million in new funding. In a release about the round, the company did not name its investors. According to Crunchbase, CardioInsight has now raised $26.5 million in equity and $1.65 million in debt altogether.

CustomInk, a 13-year-old, Tysons Corner, Va.-based custom-apparel company, has raised $40 million from Revolution Growth – its first institutional round of investment. TechCrunch has much more on the company here.

FoundationDB, a four-year-old, Vienna, Va.-based maker of a distributed database, has raised $17 million in Series A funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, reports TechCrunch.

Futurelytics, a two-year-old, Wilmington, Del.-based company that helps its clients understand what to do with their customer data, has raised $800,000 in seed financing led by Index Ventures and Credo Ventures. Kima Ventures and Rob Keve, former CEO of FizzBack, also participated in the round.

GAIN Fitness, a four-year-old, San Francisco based mobile fitness application developer, has raised more than $2.1 million in new funding led by previous investor InterWest Partners. The company has now raised about $2.9 million, including a seed round that was announced in December 2011.

itBit, an 18-month-old, Singapore-based bitcoin exchange, has raised $3.25 million from Canaan Partners, RRE Ventures and Liberty City Ventures. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to date to $5.5 million.

LendUp, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based online platform that offers an on-demand, “socially responsible” alternative to payday lenders, has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures. Data Collective and QED Investors are participated in the round.

Servergy, a four-year-old, McKinney, Tex.-based company that makes energy-efficient data servers, has raised $20 million in Series C funding raised by the accredited investors of The Williams Financial Group, an independent broker-dealer based in Texas.

ShapeUp, a seven-year-old, Providence, R.I.-based company whose online social-wellness platform encourages employees to engage through team workout challenges, has raised $7.5 million in debt and equity. Cue Ball Capital and Excel Venture Management, which have backed ShapeU previously, led the $5 million equity portion of the financing, while Silicon Valley Bank provided another $2.5 million in debt. The company has raised $10 million altogether.

Validic, a three-year-old, Durham, N.C-based company has raised $760,000 in seed money from Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, along with an array of angel investors. Validic helps wellness companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and health plans access and aggregate data from apps and devices that have open APIs, including Fitbit.

Written.com, a months-old, Austin, Tex.-based startup that works with marketers to find existing online content that’s supportive of their products and services, has raised $1 million in seed funding. The money comes from LiveOak Venture Partners, Floodgate, and various angel investors.

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New Funds

KPMG, the global consulting giant, has created a new, London-based corporate venture arm that aims to back big data and data analytics companies. Called KPMG Capital, the unit is launching with about $100 million, an amount that KPMG is reportedly prepared to increase if needed. Forbes has much more here.

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IPOs

Twitter‘s IPO created 1,600 millionaires, along with a $2.2 billion tax bill, says PrivCo.

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People

Fab.com is starting to remind StrictlyVC of Boo.com, a luxury e-tailer that that quickly raised $188 million to fuel its plans for world domination, only to abruptly implode in 2000. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Fab is losing its chief operating officer, Beth Ferreira, who joined Fab in 2011 from Etsy. The revelation comes less than two weeks after the departure of Fab cofounder Bradford Shellhammer. Two-year-old Fab has raised at least $325 million from investors. In an email to Fab’s board about Ferreira, CEO Jason Goldberg added that he plans to “downsize” the company even further.

John Pleasants is out the door at Disney, reports AllThingsD. Pleasants landed at Disney when it acquired Playdom, where he was CEO. Before joining Playdom, he was COO of Electronic Arts. Pleasants has also served as the president and CEO of Revolution Health and as CEO of Ticketmaster.

Before Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley spent an unhealthy amount of time scrutinizing another female executive, Kim Polese. Polese talks about that experience, telling the Guardian of the continuing challenges that women in tech face: “That we’ve gone backwards is still stunning to me.”

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Happenings

Business Insider‘s Ignition conference revs up for a second, star-studded day in New York.

Dealbook, meanwhile, kicks off its 2013 conference today in New York. Barry Diller will be there, as will the Winklevoss twins, ThirdPoint founder Daniel Loeb, and Sal Khan of Khan Academy, among others. You can watch a live stream of the event using this link.

O’Reilly also kicks off day two of its Strata conference in London today. You can learn more here.

It’s also day two of the Techonomy 2013 conference in Tucson, Ariz. Among the speakers today: Zappos CEO and VegasTechFund founder Tony Hsieh.

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Job Listings

Samsung is looking for a New York-based associate to search out investment opportunities for its Open Innovation Center (OIC) which is based in Silicon Valley but has an outpost in Chelsea. The OIC’s mission is to incubate and build software that’s better than Apple’s (essentially), but the center is also looking to bring in startups through acquisitions, to seed-fund startups, and to form partnerships with startups that don’t necessarily want to go to work inside of Samsung. To apply, you need an MBA and at least three years of experience at a tech company, plus two or more years of experience in venture capital, private equity, investment banking, or in business development.

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Essential Reads

More tech startups are spying new opportunities thanks the Affordable Care Act. (More on the trend in StrictlyVC later this week.)

Wild: Google is trying to patent an electronic tattoo with a microphone. The company says the tattoo could be used by security personnel in emergency situations (to start).

Tesla was just hit with a 40-page, securities class-action suit, after three of its cars burst into flames in recent months. The  suit seeks to sustain losses during the stock’s precipitous fall afterward.

Bad news: About 600,000 bats were killed by wind turbines last year.

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Detours

“I’m Josh Fletcher, and I’m the last employee at Blackberry…You want keyboards? You don’t want keyboards? You want it bigger? You want it smaller? Just tell us what you want. Just &$%ing tell us what you want.”

AshleyMadison, the site for adulterers, is being sued by a woman who says she was paid to create 1,000 fake female profiles to entice men to the platform. Her complaint? That all that typing hurt her wrists. (You cannot make this stuff up.)

China doesn’t think Jimmy Kimmel is so hilarious. During a regular skit in which Kimmel asks kids to debate contemporary political issues, he asked the children, during an October episode, how the U.S. might solve its debt problem with China. “Kill everyone in China? OK, that’s an interesting idea,” Mr. Kimmel said in response to one child’s suggestion. Growing protests over the skit have now led to demands by China’s Foreign Ministry that ABC fire Kimmel.

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Retail Therapy

Colorful chinos are in, friends. Give in and acquire a pair or two. Your jeans will still be waiting for you.

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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 the newsletter, visit strictlyvc.com.