Hi, everyone, happy Tuesday!

Great news: We’re hosting another INSIDER event for readers on September 29, a Thursday evening. It’s going to be pretty great, too. We’re working on the final agenda, but we’re super excited to announce that investor Marc Andreessen will be joining us for a fireside chat. We’ll also be talking with SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie, who’s going to catch us up on the company and share some fun election season survey results. In fact, we’ll all be meeting on the top floor of SurveyMonkey’s very cool building in Palo Alto (conveniently across the street from the Caltrain station). Space is limited and tickets will go fast, so grab your seat here.

Much thanks to our friends and partners in the evening: Bolt, the hardware-focused venture firm, and Ballou PR, another previous sponsor that has helped many a U.S. startup get established in Europe. If you’re interested in getting involved as a sponsor, too, please do let us know.

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Top News in the A.M.

In surprising news, SoftBank today announced the departure of President and COO Nikesh Arora; he’d been primed to take the top spot from SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son. More here.

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Spaceflight Industries Just Raised $25 Million, Led by Mithril

Spaceflight Industries, a startup whose overarching goal is providing affordable, high-resolution images of earth, just raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Mithril Capital Management.

Previous investors RRE Venture Capital, Vulcan Capital and Razor’s Edge Ventures also joined the round; it brings total funding for the seven-year-old, Seattle-based company to $53.5 million.

Spaceflight joins a small but growing number of outfits turning geospatial data culled from satellite imagery into actionable, and lucrative, insights. Ambitiously, it has a three-pronged business strategy, too.

First, working with companies like Planet Labs, Spire, and Planetary Resources, among others, Spaceflight helps organize these customers’ payloads, ensuring that their satellites get into space as seamlessly as possible. (It essentially arranges for ride-share launches for dozens of small satellites at a time.)

According to the company, it has already organized the launch of 81 satellites, including by buying excess capacity on SpaceX rockets, along with Soyuz, PSLV, Dnepr, and Antares rockets. And Spaceflight has another 135 satellites scheduled to take space flights through 2018 via partnerships with a wide range of companies, Virgin Galactic and Orbital ATK among them.

Spaceflight takes the business seriously enough that it purchased an entire SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and plans to expand its services beyond ride-share launches, beginning late next year.

But there’s more. In addition to getting other companies’ satellites into space, Spaceflight’s much bigger business — called BlackSky —  involves selling the satellite imagery of its customers to anyone willing to pay for it. A government might want to see whether an opposing army is beyond a hill, for example, or a humanitarian organization might want to measure the effects of deforestation. Unlike Orbital Insight, which uses machine learning to make sense of satellite imagery (then publishes its findings for customers), BlackSky largely wants to provide easy access to the images at unprecedented price points.

More here.

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(Other) New Fundings

Airobotics, a two-year-old, Israel-based maker of automated industrial drones, has raised $28.5 million in combined Series A and B funding, including from investors BlueRun Ventures, CRV, Israel Chief Scientists, UpWest Labs, and individual backers like Waze CEO Noam Bardin. TechCrunch has more here.

Blueprint Bio, a year-old, Newport Beach, Ca.-based biomarker discovery and licensing startup, has raised $7.5 million in funding from Forentis Partners. More here.

InVision, a 23-year-old, New York-based company that sells collaborative prototyping and design tool software and services, has raised $55 million in Series D funding led by Iconiq Capital, with participation from earlier backers Accel Partners and FirstMark Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Juniqe, a two-year-old, Berlin-based online marketplace for curated art, has raised €14 million ($15.8 million) in Series B funding led by Highland Europe, with participation from earlier backers Vorwerk Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Redalpine. TechCrunch has more here.

Number26, a three-year-old, Berlin, Germany-based retail bank without a brick-and-mortar presence, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Horizons Ventures. Battery Ventures, Robert Gentz, David Schneider and Rubin Ritter also participated in the round, along with earlier backers Valar Ventures, Earlybird Ventures and Redalpine Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Piper, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based Minecraft toolbox for budding engineers, has raised $2.1 million in funding from Princeton University, 500 Startups and others. TechCrunch has more here.

Zerto, a seven-year-old, Boston and Israel-based company that makes disaster recovery and data management software, has raised $20 million in Series E-1 funding led by CRV. Globes has more here.

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New Funds

Trae Vassallo, a longtime partner at Kleiner Perkins who left the firm in 2014, and Neil Sequeria, a longtime partner at General Catalyst Partners who left the firm last fall, have banded together to create a new early-stage venture firm called Defy.vc, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack. The firm is targeting $150 million for its debut fund, he says; its focus will be on connected software. Vassallo led Kleiner’s invesment in Dropcam; we’d talked with her about her passion for connected devices here. Meanwhile, Sequeria had told the WSJ in October that he’d be starting a new venture fund.

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Exits

Tencent Holdings and its partners are paying $8.6 billion to buy the Finnish maker of the “Clash of Clans” mobile game, a deal that will catapult the Chinese internet giant to the global top of the fast-growing mobile game industry. The deal for Finland’s Supercell Oy is Tencent’s biggest-ever acquisition. The WSJ has more here.

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People

Apple may be down on Donald Trump but that doesn’t extend to the rest of the Republican party. According to Politico, Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to host a fundraiser for House Speaker Paul Ryan later this month in Menlo Park.

Former Postmates COO Peter Hazlehurst is back with his own, seed-funded startup. We have more here.

David Morgenthaler, one of the industry’s earliest venture capitalists, passed away Friday in Cleveland, Oh., at age 96. Morgenthaler founded the firm Morgenthaler Ventures in 1968, well before venture capital could yet be considered an industry. More here.

A high-profile artificial intelligence research group backed by Elon Musk is developing an “off-the-shelf” robot that others can manufacture. The idea is to speed innovation without a financial motive. More here.

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Jobs

The venture capital arm of Sanofi, the global healthcare company, is looking for a senior director of investments. The job is in Cambridge, Ma.

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Essential Reads

Why Uber keeps raising billions.

The FAA just grounded delivery drones.

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Detours

When Trump meets Clinton, no TV record in America will be safe.

Legendary artist Christo’s newest project was nearly 50 years (and $17 million) in the making.

LeBron feeds entire city of Cleveland with loaves and fishes.

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Retail Therapy

Another beautiful San Francisco home comes on the market — at a $2 million discount to its earlier asking price.

Rocking Pacman bench. Neat design. (Not for sitting long, looks like.)

Hi, everyone, welcome back!

Juggling one too many things today (thus the very late send!). Back on track tomorrow, when we’ll also have some exciting news for you about our next SVC event.:)

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Top News in the A.M.

Francisco Partners and Elliott Management have agreed to acquire Dell’s software division. Elliott Management, Francisco Partners and Dell issued a joint press release confirming the acquisition this morning. More here.

Twitter has Periscope. Amazon has Twitch. Google has YouTube’s live streaming. And Facebook has Facebook Live. Now, Tumblr is getting into live video, too.

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New Funding

Condeco, an 11-year-old, London-based startup that makes meeting scheduling software, has raised €27 million ($30 million) in Series A funding led by Highland Europe. TechCrunch has more here.

Plaid, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup whose software allows a variety of financial-technology startups to access their customers’ bank account information, has raised $44 million in new funding led by Goldman Sachs.

Rocketrip, a three-year-old, New York-based startup that helps customers reduce travel spending by providing employees with gift cards for beating their budget, has raised $9 million in funding. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with participation from earlier backers Canaan Partners and Genacast Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

ShipBob, a two-year-old, Chicago-based startup that helps small businesses and sole proprietors with an outsourced packaging and shipping service, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

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New Funds

Kellogg’s is launching a venture arm called eighteen94 Capital to invest in startups developing new ingredients, foods, packaging, and enabling technology. It’s committing about $100 million to the unit, which plans to focus on early-stage deals. TechCrunch has much more here.

Industry Ventures, one of the largest buyers of secondary shares, has raised about $700 million to purchase more equity from VCs, hedge funds, startup employees and others. About $500 million is for the secondary fund, and $200 million is separated into a special opportunities fund. TechCrunch has more here.

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Exits

Twitter is acquiring Magic Pony Technology, a 1.5-year-old, London-based company that uses neural networks and machine learning to provide expanded data for images (to enhance a picture or video taken on a mobile phone, for example). TechCrunch sources say Twitter is paying $150 million for the company, which had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Entrepreneur First and Balderton Capital, among other possible investors. More here.

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People

Flybridge Capital Partners is ramping up its presence in New York City, bringing on WeWork Labs’ cofounder Jesse Middleton as a full-time general partner. More here.

Facebook today held its annual shareholder meeting, and the group approved the formation of a new class of voting shares that will keep CEO Mark Zuckerberg in control as long as he’s with the company. It also re-elected its board of directors, including investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. VentureBeat has more here.

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Jobs

Baxter Ventures, the venture arm of the drug and medical device giant Baxter, is looking for a senior manager. The job is in Deerfield, Il.

F50, a two-year-old syndication platform that tries to pair investors with vetted startups seeking funding, is looking for a principal. The job is in San Francisco.

Side note: A top event planner in SF who took a time-out for parenting is getting back in the game now that her children are entering kindergarten. Currently based in Los Altos, Ca., she’s a catch. Happy to put you in touch if you like.

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Data

Global M&A is down 20 percent from last year and 16 percent for U.S. targets specifically, according to new Thomson Reuters data cited by Fortune.

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Essential Reads

Apple has told Republican leaders it will not provide funding or other support for the party’s 2016 presidential convention, as it’s done in the past, citing Donald Trump’s controversial comments about women, immigrants and minorities. Politico has more here.

Good news for FanDuel and DraftKings. The burgeoning fantasy-sports industry got a lift from the New York legislature, which passed a bill early Saturday that explicitly would legalize and regulate the practice in the state. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo hasn’t indicated whether he will sign the bill. The WSJ has the story here.

A hacker on Friday siphoned more than $50 million of digital money away from an experimental virtual currency project that had been billed as the most successful crowdfunding venture ever. The New York Times has more here.

What’s next for artificial intelligence.

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Detours

The science of selflessness.

Where to invest $10,000 right now.

LeBron James, king of narrative.

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Retail Therapy

Unicorn floaty. Perfect for the startup investor’s pool.

Friday! Hope you have a fun weekend in store, and for those of you who are dads, we’re wishing you a very happy Father’s Day!

(Streamlined version today as we’re racing out the door to Palo Alto for some meetings.)

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Top News in the A.M.

And now we know; Salesforce was reportedly the other bidder for LinkedIn.

Uber says it’s now profitable in all the developed markets where it’s operating.

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Talking Kleiner 3.0 with Its New Consumer Investing Partner

Kleiner Perkins has been through the wringer since the go-go dot-com days of the late 1990s. After making a bundle on Google, the storied venture firm raised too much money from investors and grew too ambitious in scope before dramatically retrenching a few years ago — but not before being hit with one of the highest-profile lawsuits in venture industry. (It won the case, which centered on gender discrimination, but it took a beating in the process.)

To restore its former glory, the firm is largely transformed from the firm it was a dozen years ago. For starters, it has undergone some major casting changes. Only one of its five general partners — Ted Schlein, who leads Kleiner’s investments in security and some of its enterprise investments — has been with the firm throughout all the tumult, having joined the firm 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Beth Seidenberg, who focuses on everything from life science to digital health, joined Kleiner in 2005; Wen Hsieh, who focuses on enterprise and hardware deals, joined in 2006; Mike Abbott joined in 2011 to focus largely on enterprise deals; and Eric Feng, a former CTO for both Hulu and Flipboard, joined last October to lead the firm’s consumer investing.

Kleiner, which is currently raising $1.3 billion across two new funds, has also taken a page from the playbook of Benchmark and some other smaller partnerships, and its partners now enjoy equal partner economics. (Kleiner has also five associate partners, as well as a separate growth investing group.)

To get better insight into the firm and how it operates today — as well as where it’s shopping — we talked yesterday with Feng. Our chat has been edited for length.

More here.

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New Fundings

Beamery, a two-year-old, London-based company that makes employee recruitment software and was previously known as Seed.Jobs, has raised $2 million in seed funding from Edenred Capital Partners and Grupa Pracuj, a human resources tech firm. TechCrunch has more here.

ClearTax, a five-year-old, New Delhi, India-based online tax filing platform, has raised $12 million in Series A funding, including from Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Common, a year-old, Brooklyn-based startup that’s creating group living developments with the help of real estate developers, has raised $16 million in Series B funding led by 8VC, with participation from Circle Ventures, LeFrak, Solon Mack Capital, Ron Burkle’s Inevitable Ventures, Wolfswood Partners and return backers Maveron, Lowercase Capital, Slow Ventures and Pierre Lamond. Fortune has the story here.

Mark One, a 2.5-year-old San Francisco-based company that was cofounded by renowned designer Yves Behar and which right now makes a smart cup that tracks consumption, has raised $4 million in new funding from earlier backers, including Intel Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Tigera, a months-old San Francisco-based startup that’s trying to secure cloud-native applications, has raised $13 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Wing Venture Capital. More here.

Vrse, the 1.5-year-old, L.A.-based VR firm launched by video and commercial director Chris Milk and Google veteran Aaron Koblin, has raised $12.56 million in funding from syndicate that includes WME and Fox. The company is also renaming itself Within. The L.A. Times has the story here.

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IPOs

Business software company AppDynamics has hired investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters for an IPO that could come later this year, reports Reuters. Last November, the company raised $158 million at a $1.9 billion valuation. (One of the investors in that round was Goldman Sachs.) More here.

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People

Facebook has hired e-sports super-connector and former professional gamer Stephen “Snoopeh” Ellis to build out a new team at the company. More here.

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Essential Reads

A dispute between Apple and Chinese regulators broke into the open after Beijing’s intellectual property authority said the design of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus violated a patent held by a Chinese company. It wants Apple to stop selling both phones in the city. The WSJ has the story here.

Why Silicon Valley should be paying close attention to the Redstone-Viacom mess.

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Detours

Confessions of a performative dad.

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Retail Therapy

We would happily take fashion designer James Perse’s Malibu farmhouse (up for sale now).  H/T: Uncrate.

Thursday! [Karate kicks. Knife hand.]

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Top News in the A.M.

Michael Moritz, the chairman of Sequoia Capital, just slammed Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump in a Financial Times column titled “To the bright and the rich of Silicon Valley, Trump is a loser.” More here.

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Despite Troubled Online Lending Market, a Big Round for Payoff

Payoff, a 7.5-year-old Costa Mesa, Ca., startup that makes loans for people looking to pay off credit card debt, has just raised a bunch of money and it’s looking to raise even more. According to a new SEC filing, the company has raised $46.7 million as part of a round expected to close at $67.4 million.

The company had previously raised $38.4 million from investors, including FirstMark Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and Anthemis Group.

Payoff targets millennials seemingly, with 10-minute-long quizzes to help users understand their financial “personality,” understand what their overall financial picture looks like, and assess how much finance-related stress is impacting them.

The company got a lot of mileage particularly out of a recent study it conducted that showed 23 percent of 2,011 survey respondents were experiencing symptoms commonly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder related to their finances. Among millennials, said Payoff, the number is 36 percent.

Beyond its content, Payoff provides loan amounts of between $5,000 and $35,000, between two- and five-year-long terms, and for fixed rates of between 8 percent and 22 percent APR. Borrowers also are charged a one-time 2 percent to 5 percent fee when their loan is issued.

Payoff seems to be steering clear of subprime borrowers, the kind that firms like LendUp loan to at extravagant rates (though those rates fall with every loan that’s paid in full). It instead requires that applicants have a minimum credit score of 720, gross income of at least $25,000, and a minimum credit history of three years. Borrowers are limited to using the loans to pay off credit card debt, too.

More here.

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New Fundings

Airbnb, the nearly eight-year-old, San Francisco-based online housing marketplace, has secure $1 billion debt facility from some of the largest U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Bloomberg has more here.

Andela, a two-year-old, New York-based startup that’s helping to train more engineers in Africa to get tech jobs, has raised $24 million in Series B funding led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the social issues-minded fund of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Other participants in the round include GV, as well as earlier backers Spark Capital, Omidyar Network, Learn Capital and CRE Ventures. Forbes has more here.

Collokia, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based machine learning-based collaboration platform, has raised $1.3 million in seed funding co-led software company Globant and Fundo Pitanga, a Brazilian venture capital firm. More here.

CureJoy, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco- and Bangalore-based online community that connects users with alternative medicine experts, has raised $4.4 million in Series A funding led by its earlier backer Accel Partners India, with participation from unnamed angel investors. VCCircle has more here.

Eyeview, an 8.5-year-old, New York-based video marketing technology company, has raised $21.5 million led by Qumra Capital, with participation from earlier backers Marker LLC, Innovation Endeavors, Nauta Capital, Gemini Israel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. More here.

Elementum, a four-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based cloud supply chain platform, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Fontinalis Partners. More here.

Mersana Therapeutics, a 1.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotech that’s developing antibody drug conjugates, has raised $33 million in Series C funding led by Wellington Management, with participation from Cormorant Asset Management, Arrowpoint Partners, Takeda Pharmaceutical and earlier investors New Enterprise Associates and Rock Springs Capital. FierceBiotech has more here.

Overbond, a year-old, Toronto-based fintech platform for digital bond insurance, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding from Morrison Financial Services. More here.

Performance Horizon, a six-year-old, U.K.-basedcompany whose software aims to help advertisers manage their relationships with marketing partners, has raised $15.4 million in Series C funding from Greycroft Partners, Mithril and DN Capital. The company has now raised a total of $35 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Samba Tech, a 12-year-old, Belo Horizonte, Brazil-based distributor of online videos in Latin America, has raised $3 million in new funding from Brazilian billionaire José Augusto Schincariol. ITWorld has more here.

Vow To Be Chic, a three-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based bridesmaid dress rental company, has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Women’s Venture Capital Fund, with participation from Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Wavemaker Partners. FinSMEs has more here.

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Exits

Microsoft has announced yet another acquisition, this time in the area of natural language and artificial intelligence: the company has purchased Wand Labs, a startup that develops messaging apps.Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Wand Labs had raised less than $3 million in funding, according to CrunchBase. TechCrunch has more here.

Samsung is acquiring Joyent, a 12-year-old, San Francisco-based cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company that had raised $126 million from investors, according to CrunchBase. Financial terms aren’t being disclosed. The WSJ has more here.

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People

Stephen McIntyre, one of Twitter’s most senior executives outside the U.S., is leaving the company to join Dublin-based venture capital firm Frontline Ventures as a partner. Tech.eu has more here.

Streaming music service Spotify has hired Paul Vogel — a Wall Street veteran who most recently ran the internet and media research group at Barclays — as its first head of investor relations. The move strongly suggests the company is prepping to go public. Recode has the story here.

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Jobs

The Samsung Global Innovation Center is looking to hire a director of investments. The job is in Mountain View, Ca.

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Essential Reads

Beyond a new campus that Uber is building in San Francisco and a century-old building it recently purchased in Oakland, Ca., the ride-share juggernaut is now reportedly nearing a deal to lease a building in Palo Alto. The idea: to get closer to employees. Via The Information (subscription required).

China Life, Asia’s largest insurance firm, isn’t the only Uber investor to put money into its Chinese rival Didi Chuxing via its blockbuster $7.2 billion round announced this week. New York-based investment firm BlackRock also took part in the financing, a source close to the deal tells TechCrunch. More here.

For decades, the buyers in some of the largest deals had come in three forms: private equity firms, corporations and public market investors. But over the last few years, a new group of buyers has sprung up: sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and even private families have flexed their deal-making muscles. Dealbook takes a look here.

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Detours

“Starry Night,” in water.

Revisionist History. (More about it here.)

We’re still laughing about this one. (“What did I make there? Oh, we’ve gotta go.”)

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Retail Therapy

Are we the only ones baffled by the direction of the MINI?

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

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Top News in the A.M.

Didi Chuxing has raised $4.5 billion in a round of funding that values it at close to $28 billion, according to Bloomberg, giving China’s leading ride-sharing company more firepower to battle Uber. More here.

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Expect More M&A, Says Marc Andreessen

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen spoke at the Bloomberg Technology conference yesterday afternoon, and he said he expects far more M&A than the tech industry has seen in recent years.

The conversation stemmed in large part from questions about LinkedIn’s announced acquisition by Microsoft, which disclosed Monday that it is paying$26.2 billion in cash for the business networking platform.

Asked his opinion about the deal, Andreessen — who was interrupted by the clang of a falling tray (“I hope that was not a symbolic sound effect,” he joked) — said the deal “eliminates the guesswork about how much [a company is] worth when someone pays $26 billion in cash ” for it.

But he also said that, on a higher level, it conveys something about the industry right now. “We see more M&A happening in the pipeline – meaning companies in consideration or negotiation — than in the last four years.”

There are a few reasons for it, he suggested, saying that in recent years, a lot of “public companies sat back and watched the drama play out in the Valley . . . and the constant drumbeat of ‘bubble, bubble, bubble.’” Now, with many private company valuations down from their peaks last year, along with public companies that “now have to go shopping to fill in gaps in their portfolio,” Andreessen said to expect a “run of M&A the rest of this year and next year.”

The buyers won’t necessarily be Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, he noted. “A lot more nontraditional buyers — Fortune 500 companies outside [of tech are] going shopping, [including] the car industry, other consumer products companies, clothing companies.” (Andreessen didn’t say so, but private equity firms also plainly see an opportunity to do some shopping right now.)

In fact, Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is trying to prep its portfolio companies for an exit by establishing what he described as an IPO preparedness team that’s working with founders on what’s required to go public, from accounting and legal, to building a governance team, to selecting the right CFO.

More here.

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New Fundings

B2X, a nine-year-old, Munich, Germany-based startup behind a customer care platform for smartphones and IoT device makers, has raised €6 million ($6.7 million) from Harbert European Growth Capital. More here.

Fenqile, a three-year-old Shenzhen, China -based installment payment e-commerce platform targeting Chinese millennials, has raised $235 million in Series C funding from Huasheng Capital, the venture capital unit of local investment banking firm China Renaissance Partners; CoBuilder Partners; and an unnamed Chinese insurer. China Money Network has more here.

Huizuche, a two-year-old, Shanghai, China-based car rental startup that provides services for outbound Chinese tourists, has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by the Asia-focused private equity firm H&Q Asia Pacific. DealStreetAsia has more here.

Loggly, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based cloud-based log management company, has raised $11.5 million in new funding led by True Ventures, with participation from Matrix Partners, Cisco, Trinity Ventures, Harmony Partners and Data Collective. More here.

Lumus, a 16-year-old, Rehovot, Israel-based company that makes transparent near-to-eye displays for augmented reality and mixed reality, has raised $15 million in Series B funding from the investment firm Shanda Group and from Crystal-Optech, a Chinese optical imaging company. TechCrunch has more here.

Procured Health, a four-year-old, Chicago-based health IT business started with the goal of helping hospitals to reduce medical device purchasing costs, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Heritage Group, a venture-capital firm backed by some of the nation’s leading healthcare companies, with participation from Health Insight Capital, a subsidiary of HCA. MedCity News has more here.

Qloo, a four-year-old, New York-based cultural recommendation engine, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding from actor Leonardo DiCaprio; Starwood Hotels founder Barry Sternlicht; Pierre Lagrange of GLG Partners; and Adriaan Ligtenberg’s AllMobile Fund, along with other individual angel investors. TechCrunch has more here. TechCrunch has more here.

Rgenix, a six-year-old, New York-based cancer therapeutics company developing drugs that target novel cancer pathways, has raised $33 million in Series B funding led by Novo A/S and Sofinnova Partners, with participation from earlier backers, including Partnership Fund for New York City, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Conegliano Ventures.

Saavn, a nine-year-old, New York-based digital music service that TechCrunch has likened to India’s Spotify, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Guy Oseary, a high-profile entertainment industry executive who manages U2, Madonna, Alicia Keys, Britney Spears and other top music acts.More here.

Sapho, a two-year-old, San Bruno, Ca.-based startup that makes “micro apps”  that send notifications to employees and execs whenever data is updated or projects are completed, has raised $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Alsop Louie Partners, with participation from SoftTech VC, Caffeinated Capital, Morado Ventures, AME Cloud and Bloomberg Beta. More here.

Smarter Micro, a four-year-old Chinese semiconductor company, has raised $14 million in Series C funding led by China’s Tsing Capital, with participation from earlier backers GSR Ventures and Vertex Ventures. China Money Network has more here.

SoundCloud, the nine-year-old, Berlin-based music service, is raising a $100 million round, according to Recode, and Twitter has invested around $70 million in the company as part of that financing. Twitter had reportedly wanted to acquire SoundCloud in 2014. Much more here.

Uber, the seven-year-old, San Francisco-based ride-share juggernaut, is turning to the leveraged-loan market for the first time to raise as much as $2 billion, reports the WSJ. The outlet says Uber has hired Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs to get a deal done. More here.

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New Funds

Philadelphia-based 1315 Capital, a two-year-old expansion and growth equity firm that invests in commercial-stage specialty pharmaceutical, medical technology, and healthcare services companies, has announced the final closing of its $200 million inaugural fund. More here.

FirstMark Capital, an eight-year-old, New York-based investment firm, has raised $480 million across two new funds: one a $275 million early-stage fund (FirstMark’s fourth), and the other a $205 millionopportunity fund for FirstMark’s maturing investments (which is its second growth-stage fund). The firm now has $1.5 billion under management. TechCrunch has more here.

Did you see that game last night?! (Warriors fans, don’t dismay. FiveThirtyEight thinks they have an 80 percent chance of winning the title again. In the meantime, please let your long-suffering friends from Cleveland enjoy this moment.)

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Top News in the A.M.

High-speed internet service can be defined as a utility, a federal court ruled this morning in a decision that clears the way for more rigorous policing of broadband providers. The New York Times has more here.

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With LinkedIn Deal, Frank Quattrone Notches Another Win

While the tech industry digests the news that LinkedIn is becoming an independently run subsidiary of Microsoft in exchange for $26.2 billion in cash, one renowned figure in Silicon Valley is already publicly celebrating the deal: Frank Quattrone.

The legendary investment banker tweeted earlier today that Qatalyst, the boutique bank that he founded eight years ago, served as the lead advisor to LinkedIn on its sale, noting that it’s the “largest sale” of an internet company “ever,” and stating its acquisition price at $28.1 billion.

Maybe that was the price before Qatalyst and Allen & Co., which also advised the company, took their fees, along with Microsofts’s advisers — Morgan Stanley and law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. (We’re half-kidding. The fees were more likely in the tens of millions of dollars, though some top M&A firms charge upwards of 5 percent of a transaction’s value in fees. Qatalyst didn’t respond to our request for clarification.)

Either way, it’s a coup for Quattrone, who was the most prominent banker of the go-go ’90s tech boom and who helped take public Amazon, Cisco, Netscape and other high-fliers before coming under investigation by federal prosecutors. As longtime industry watchers will remember,  Quattrone was accused of obstructing an investigation into whether the equity salesmen were doling out hot IPO shares to favored clients in exchange for inflated commissions during the same period that Quattrone was head of CSFB’s tech banking business. Two trials and one overturned conviction later, Quattrone — who previously headed up Morgan Stanley’s technology group, as well as served as the CEO of Deutsche Bank’s technology group — reached a settlement with the government in which he admitted no wrongdoing. Soon after, he launched Qatalyst.

While LinkedIn is now the bank’s biggest win to date, it has been involved in a string of high-profile deals. Among them is OpenDNS’s sale to Cisco for $635 million last year; HomeAway’s sale to Expedia last year for $3.9 billion; and the sale of Ping Identity, a firm that manages employees’ digital identities, to the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. (Terms of the deal, which was announced just last week, aren’t being disclosed, though a report in TheInformation pegs the amount at $600 million.)

In a deal that Qatalyst might be less eager to advertise than others, it also advised Autonomy on its 2011 sale to Hewlett Packard for $11 billion.

More here.

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New Fundings

Alpine Immune Sciences, a 1.5-year-old, Seattle, Wa.-based immunotherapy startup that’s developing a recombinant protein-based therapeutic, has raised $48 million in Series A funding led by OrbiMed Advisors, with participation from Frazier Healthcare Partners and Alpine Bioventures, the investment vehicle that Alpine founder Mitch Gold started with own money after leaving his last company, Dendreon. Forbes has more here.

AVA, a months-old, Boston-based personalized, data-driven nutritional coaching app that’s currently in private beta, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by DCM Ventures, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, among others. More here.

Chronext, a three-year-old, Switzerland-based online luxury watch marketplace, has raised €11 million ($12.3 million) in Series C funding led byPartech Ventures, with participation from Octopus Ventures, Capnamic Ventures, NRW.BANK and InVenture Partners.

Jobandtalent, a seven-year-old, Madrid, Spain-based job matching platform, has raised $42 million in Series B funding led by Atomico, with participation from numerous individual investors. TechCrunch has more here.

League, a two-year-old, Toronto-based health insurance startup, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by OMERS Ventures, with participation from Royal Bank of Canada, Manulife Financial Corp., Power Financial Corp., and Mike Lazaridis’s Infinite Potential Technologies. Reuters hasmore here.

PromisePay, a three-year-old, Melbourne, Australia-based fintech startup that specializes in payments for online marketplaces, has raised $10 million in funding led by Australia’s Carsales, with participation from Australian venture funds Rampersand and Reinventure, and earlier investors Cultivation Capital and Mark Harbottle, who cofounded the logo marketplace 99Designs. TechCrunch has more here.

Roadie, a 1.5-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based “on-the-way” delivery network (its app rewards drivers for delivering items on trips they are already taking), has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, with participation from Stephens Inc. and TomorrowVentures. TechCrunch has more here.

Talkspace, a four-year-old, New York-based startup that offers therapy via an app, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. Other participants in the round include earlier backers Spark Capital, SoftBank, Metamorphic Ventures and TheTime. TechCrunch hasmore here.

Yotpo, a five-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based platform that lets companies solicit content from their users and customers in the form of reviews, Q&As, photos, and videos for use across different marketing channels, has raised $22 million in Series C funding. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with participation from earlier backers Innovation Endeavors, Marker LLC,Vintage Investment Partners, Blumberg Capital and Access Industries. The company has now raised $50 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

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New Funds

This morning, Revolution, the 11-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based venture firm founded by former AOL executives Steve Case, Donn Davis and Ted Leonsis, is taking the wraps off its newest growth fund, which has closed with $525 million. TechCrunch has more here.

—–

IPOs

Draper Esprit, the venture capital firm, is planning to list tomorrow on Aim, the London Stock Exchange’s junior market, and the Irish Stock Exchange.  The early-stage outfit said the move was key to it becoming a $1 billion (£700 million) source of “patient capital” for start-ups across Western Europe. The Telegraph has more here.

—–

Exits

Move Loot, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based platform designed to help users buy and sell used furniture, says it’s being acquired, though it has yet to disclose the buyer’s name, reports TechCrunch. In the meantime, the company — which has raised roughly $21 million from investors, including Index Ventures and First Round Capital — seems to be failing its current customers. More here.

Storehouse, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based app that makes it easy for users to lay out their content to create visually appealing stories, is shutting down. The company had raised $8.5 million from investors, including True Ventures, SV Angel, Sherpa Capital, Maven Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Designer Fund. TechCrunch has more here.

ThinkUp, a seven-year-old, New York-based platform that provided customers with insights into their activity on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, is shutting down. According to CrunchBase, the company had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Bloomberg Beta and Quotidian Ventures. Cofounder Anil Dash has more here.

—–

People

Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who is representing approximately 350,000 Uber drivers in California and Massachusetts, told a court she is cutting her proposed fees by $10 million as part of an arrangement to settle lawsuits that Uber misclassified the drivers as contractors not drivers. Some drivers objected to the commission she’d originally proposed. Fortune has the story here.

Zenefits today is laying off another 9 percent of its staff — or 106 additional people — and offering its existing employees a buyout offer. More here.

—–

Jobs

NextEV, a China-based electric car company poised to compete with Tesla, is looking for a corporate development associate. The job is in San Jose, Ca.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned video platform and community for gamers, is looking for a corporate development associate. The job is in San Francisco.

—–

Essential Reads

Everything you need to know from Apple‘s WWDC event yesterday.

If you were wondering about the generous premium that Microsoft is paying for LinkedIn, it may be tied to another bidder that was reportedly interested in acquiring the company. Bloomberg has (a little) more here.

Alibaba Group is trying to shore up investors’ confidence. Here’s how.

—–

Detours

Steps to turn off the nagging self-doubt in your head.

Experiments with guaranteed income have shown resoundingly positive results. So what’s stopping us?

Seven hacks for hiding secret stuff on your iPhone.

—–

Essential Reads

iPong. You’ll be all like so.

Welcome back, everyone. What a terribly sad weekend.

—–

Top News in the A.M.

Big news: Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. The software giant is offering $196 per share in an all-cash transaction that’s expected to close by the end of the year. (Nice premium: LinkedIn’s shares were trading at $131 as of Friday.) Microsoft says that LinkedIn, which claims 433 million members, will continue to operate as an independent company with Jeff Weiner remaining in his role as CEO. The New York Times has more here.

Walgreens is officially terminating its relationship with Theranos. TechCrunch has more here.

Starting at 10 a.m. PST, Apple will be offering a sneak peak at changes to its mobile IOS operating system, its Apple Watch and the Apple TV (and maybe more). You can tune in here to watch it live.

—–

Andreessen Horowitz Raises $1.5 Billion Again

In March, we told you that Andreessen Horowitz was targeting $1.5 billion for its fifth and newest fund. On Friday, the seven-year-old Sand Hill Road firm confirmed that it has closed on that amount, having secured the capital commitments from its previous investors.

The announcement comes a little more than two years after the firm closed its fourth, multi-stage venture capital fund with $1.5 billion.

The money also comes on the heels of a $200 million fund that the firm announced last November called the AH Bio Fund, a vehicle that’s being used to invest in mostly early-stage startups at the intersection of computer science and life sciences. (We wrote about its newest bet, Freenome, last week.)

Altogether, Andreessen Horowitz has now raised a somewhat stunning $6.2 billion. Managing partner Scott Kupor shared more about the fundraise and what’s changing (and not changing) in a chat Friday morning. Our conversation has been edited slightly for length and clarity.

How would you describe this fundraise?

It was a great raise. It took a relatively short period of time; we were oversubscribed. It’s consistent with our last funds in terms of size, based on the opportunity set we see in VR and artificial intelligence and core enterprise infrastructure, among other things.

Any changes to your mandate?

No, we’ll still do multistage investing in software companies, with about 70 percent of our bets going into early-stage stuff and the rest going into later-stage stuff.

What about seed-stage investing? Marc Andreessen had suggested a few years ago that the firm might dial back on this except for “fringe” technologies or products.

We’re still doing seed investing. Earlier on, we did a lot of small seed investments where we’d put in $50,000, but we realized that a better approach for us would be to take bigger positions and do fewer of them  . . . so a lot of our deals today range from $500,000 to $1.5 million where we’re not just part of a party round but a major investor and those companies become part of the full Andreessen Horowitz family, meaning they can [take advantage] of our [internal] service and networking groups.

You’d also kind of backed off of late-stage deals, the idea being that newer investors could mark up your deals. Has that changed or will it as those non-traditional investors back away? 

Yes, if there are greater opportunities or later-stage becomes more attractive. I’m not smart enough to know how to forecast it.

There has been some turnover at the firm. How many GPs do you have currently, and will that change with this new fund?

More here.

—–

New Fundings

Aunt Bertha, a six-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based startup that enables individuals to find and apply for government and charitable social service programs, has raised $5 million in funding led by Techstars Ventures. SiliconHills has more here.

Carro, a year-old, Singapore-based online marketplace for buying and selling cars, has raised $5.3 million in Series A funding led by Indonesia’s Venturra Capital, with participation from Singtel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures,Alpha JWC Ventures, Skystar Capital and GMO Venture Partners, among others. TechCrunch has more here.

Meta, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company that makes special glasses that are part-AR viewer and part-VR simulator, has raised $50 million in Series B funding, including from Horizons Ventures, Lenovo, Tencent Holdings, Banyan Capital, Comcast Ventures, and GQY. TechCrunch has more here.

—–

New Funds

Commerce Ventures, a San Francisco.-based venture capital firm, has held the first close of its second fund at $ 25.6 million. According to an SEC filing, the firm is targeting $40 million. More here.

Vivo Capital, 20-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based healthcare investment firm, has closed a new, early-stage fund, Vivo PANDA Fund, with more than $100 million in capital commitments from unnamed financial institutions, corporate entities and family offices. The firm plans to plug the money into healthcare companies across the industry spectrum, including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices, and diagnostics. More here.

—–

IPOs

Cloud communications software company Twilio plans to sell 10 million shares of its stock at a price of $10 to $12 per share. Priced in the middle of that range, the company would enjoy a market cap of $1.07 billion — slightly more than the valuation it was assigned during its last funding round. Fortune has more here.

—–

Exits

Axel Springer has agreed to buy market researcher eMarketer for roughly $250 million as the German publisher continues its push into digital businesses and English-speaking markets. Advertising Age has more here.

Just two weeks after filing papers for an IPO, BlueCoat Systems, the cybersecurity company, is accepting a $4.5 billion takeover offer instead from the antivirus software giant Symantec. TechCrunch has more here.

OneLogin, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes cloud identity and access management software, is acquiring Portadi, a two-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based startup that helps its users control access to cloud apps. OneLogin has raised roughly $42 million from investors, shows CrunchBase. Portadi had raised an undisclosed amount from Microsoft Accelerator, shows CrunchBase. TechCrunch has more here.

—–

People

The founders of Lyft talk Uber, Carl Icahn, and driverless cars.

Tom Rikert has been promoted from partner to general partner at Next World Capital, the San Francisco-based  early-revenue stage venture capital firm. Rikert joined Next World in 2014 from Andreessen Horowitz, where he was a partner on the investment team focused on enterprise startups.

—–

Data

Solar will become the cheapest source to produce power in many countries over the next 15 years, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Fortune has the numbers here.

—–

Essential Reads

Amazon is preparing to launch a standalone music streaming subscription service, placing it squarely in competition with rival offerings from Apple and Spotify, according to a Reuters report. More here.

Uber backer China Life Insurance has also decided to back Uber’s biggest rival in China, Didi Chuxing. The WSJ has more here.

AT&T and Verizon are still in contention for Yahoo, reports Reuters, which says a consortium led by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and backed by Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett will also be invited to submit another bid. More here.

Snapchat just positioned itself for a colossal expansion on the advertising front. AdWeek dives in here.

—–

Detours

Sweet story.

For two “Mindy Project” writers, plenty of plot twists.

—–

Retail Therapy

Boom!

 

 

Friday! Hope you have an outstanding weekend, everyone!

—–

Top New in the A.M.

Apple has quietly become an energy company, one looking to sell excess electricity into the grid and maybe more. 9to5Mac has the story here.

—–

Propeller, a New Venture Outfit, Tries a Different Fundraising Approach

There’s been no shortage of disruption in the venture industry over the last decade of so, yet someone is always trying to introduce a new way of doing things.

Among the latest is Propeller, a six-month-old outfit that’s hoping to entice family offices and sovereign wealth funds to invest in four new but distinct funds at once. One will focus on IoT investments; a second will focus on insurance-related investments; a third fund will focus on fin tech more broadly; and a fourth intends to invest in women-led businesses.

Each of the funds is a standalone entity in terms of their economics. Carried interest, or the fund managers’ share in future profits, will not be shared across the funds. Management fees will mostly accrue to each fund, too, though every fund manager will pay into parent company Propeller to cover their shared resources, including marketing and back office support.

None of the people leading the funds has extensive venture capital experience, though they do have relevant operational experience.

Propeller’s insurance fund, for example, is being managed by Antonio Derossi, who has spent time as a senior VP at Allianz Group and been COO of Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. Its IoT fund is headed up by Eitan Bienstock, who has worked in telecommunications, for a tech incubator in Australia, and briefly, for a corporate venture unit. The women-focused fund, called Shatter, is being led by Shelly Kapoor Collins, who’s long run her own boutique advisory firm in Silicon Valley and who served as vice chair of a public service project at the Wilson Center in Washington that had her advocating for STEM education and women’s entrepreneurship around the world.

Of Propeller’s structure, founder Cam Yuill says simply that the “data shows that funds that are highly specialized in sectors provide the best returns, and that underlines our thesis.”

Maybe. Specialized funds have certainly been an emerging trend over the last five to 10 years, with hundreds of so-called micro VC funds springing into existence. But many have had to specialize in order to attract capital as the field has grown crowded; the jury is still largely out regarding their performance.

As for why Propeller is raising four funds simultaneously instead of serially, Yuill — who worked briefly as a VC at the seed-stage fund Structure Capital, is an angel investor, and who has been an operator at a variety of tech companies since the late ‘90s – says to “think of it like a fund of funds, except that we aren’t charging [our limited partners] double the fees.”

More here.

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New Fundings

ABA English (American & British Academy), a nine-year-old, Barcelona, Spain-based startup whose video platform is designed to get students to mimic how English is spoken by native speakers, has raised €12 million ($13.5 million) in funding led by Kennet Partners. GeekTime has more here.

Liberty SBF, a five-year-old, New York-based commercial real estate lending company, has raised $75 million in Series B funding led by Exigent Capital and Mainline Investment Partners, among other, unnamed investors. The company also secured an expanded but undisclosed amount of credit from Capital One Bank. More here.

Lux, a year-old, San Francisco-based mobile shopping app for home décor, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from IDG Capital Partners and FREES Fund. More here.

ProGlove, a 1.5-year-old, Munich, Germany-based industrial IoT startup, has raised $2.2 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital, with participation from Gettylab and Bayern Kapital. GeekTime has more here.

Tonsser, a three-year-old, Copenhagen, Denmark-based social football platform for young players, has raised €1.8 million ($2 million) in seed funding from Wellington Partners, Seed Capital Denmark, and unnamed angel investors. More here.

—–

New Funds

Garrett Van Wagoner is back. Van Wagoner famously led an actively managed, emerging tech stock fund beginning in the early 1990s. (By 2008, it was the worst-performing actively managed fund over the preceding 10-year period, prompting him to step down.) Now, Van Wagoner is looking to raise up to $250 million for a socially responsible venture fund. He’ll start marketing it in the Bay Area next week. More here.

—–

IPOs

Two years after the first reports of an IPO emerged, Japan’s Line — the company behind the popular messaging app Line — has announced plans to go public on the NYSE in the U.S. and the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan. TechCrunch has more here.

—–

Exits

Science Exchange, a Cambridge, Ma.-based online marketplace for scientific research, has acquired OnDeckBiotech, a four-year-old, Cambridge-based community and marketplace that connects biopharma companies with contract service providers. Terms weren’t disclosed. OnDeckBiotech appears to have been bootstrapped. According to CrunchBase, Science Exchange has raised $30.5 million in funding, including from Maverick Capital, Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. More here.

—–

People

Turntable.fm founder Billy Chasen is back with a new app that’s kind of like Turntable.

She may not wind up being worth billions of dollars after all, but Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will reportedly see herself played by Jennifer Lawrence in an upcoming movie about her life and company. (That’s something, right? Not exactly?)

Longtime venture capitalist Tom Perkins, cofounder of the firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has passed away at age 84.

Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt wishes scientist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Elon Musk would stop freaking everyone out about artificial intelligence. Said Schmidt at a conference in Stockholm yesterday, ”In the case of Stephen Hawking, although a brilliant man, he’s not a computer scientist. Elon is also a brilliant man, though he too is a physicist, not a computer scientist.” Regarding computers so smart they might want to destroy us, Schmidt added, “Don’t you think the humans would notice this and start turning off the computers?”

Howard Sherman, the CEO of five-year-old Inventure Holdings, has just sold the house that he and actress wife Sela Ward own to super-performer Jennifer Lopez for $28 million. (We don’t care, but we thought you might find this interesting.)

—–

Essential Reads

Facebook now lets users comment with a video.

Tesla Motors is under scrutiny from federal regulators over suspension failures attributed to its biggest-selling model — along with reports that it had asked owners not to disclose the problem.

—–

Detours

How HBO’s “Silicon Valley” nails Silicon Valley.

Today’s significant digits.

—–

Retail Therapy

A $16 cup of coffee. Oof.

Happy Thursday, dear readers! And can we just say: LEBRON. (We love the Warriors but not quite as much as the Cavs.)

—–

Top News in the A.M.

Another day, another hack for users of popular social media sites to worry about. This time, malware may have used to collect more than 32 millionTwitter login credentials that are now being sold on the dark web. More here.

—–

Olly Has Built a Breakout Brand in a Crowded Market: Here’s How

Vitamins and venture capital might not seem like the most natural fit, but a number of related companies have attracted capital from tech investors in recent years, including SmartyPants, which makes a gummy vitamin, and Elysium Health, a supplements company that counts a former venture capitalist as a co-founder.

Still, competitors may have trouble catching up to two-year-old Olly, a 30-person company whose sweet vitamins, delivered in gummy form and packed in playful, eye-catching containers, are flying off a growing number of shelves. Indeed, the profitable startup, which began as an online subscription service, now derives just 3 percent of its revenue from online sales, with the rest coming from retail stores Target, CVS and GNC. (Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons will also feature Olly vitamins before the end of the year.)

To understand how Olly’s products have become so ubiquitous so quickly, we caught up with CEO Brad Harrington, who co-founded Olly with Eric Ryan, who’d previously cofounded cleaning-products company Method (acquired in late 2012). For anyone interested in creating a new brand, it’s worth a read.

The supplements market is an $82 billion market globally, says McKinsey. But it’s also crowded. What was the insight that made you and Eric think there was still room to compete?

Eric was interested in the category from a merchant perspective. He has spent a lot of time in mass merchants like Target, looking at different categories that might be ripe for disruption, and you could walk down aisles and be like, “Well, that’s obvious.” There aren’t a lot of brands, and most products are ingredient driven, so you didn’t know what to choose.

In fact, I was with Eric in Boulder, and we were standing in an aisle of a store, and strangers would just come up to us and ask how many milligrams of zinc they should take, and we were just as dumbfounded as they were. So we thought, let’s simplify this and make everything about the end benefit versus the individual ingredients.

Did you decide on gummy form right away?

More here.

—–

New Fundings

Aktana, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that provides decision support services to life sciences companies, has raised  $17.5 million in new funding led by Safeguard Scientifics, with participation from previous backer Starfish Ventures. More here.

Aquicore, a 3.5-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based startup that sells analytics to commercial real estate companies for the purpose of energy management, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Kiddar Capital, with participation from Navitas Capital. DCInno has more here.

Embotics, a 10-year-old, Ottawa, Ontario-based company that sellsvirtualization management and private cloud automation software to enterprises, has raised $12.1 million in funding from Arrowroot Capital. SDxCentral has more here.

ePatientFinder, a three-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based healthcare startup that connects physicians with clinical trials for their patients, has raised $8.2 million in Series B financing from a “strategic healthcare technology investor syndicate.” The company has now raised nearly $11 million altogether. More here.

Forge, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that enables gamers to find short clips of action and share them on different social networks (the company was founded by YouTube cofounder Jared Kim), has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding. True Ventures led the round with participation from Social Capital and previous investors Resolute Ventures and WME Ventures. The company has now raised $9 million altogether. More here.

Freenome, a year-old liquid biopsy diagnosis platform that detects the cell-free DNA sequencing of cancer, has landed $5.5 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Founders Fund, Data Collective, and Third Kind Venture Capital. We have much more here.

Hireology, a six-year-old, Chicago-based hiring platform that targets franchises and retail-automotive industries, has raised $12 million from Baird Capital. Crain’s Chicago Business has more here.

RetraceHealth, a 2.5-year-old, Minneapolis, Mn.-based company that delivers primary care through in-home and video visits, has raised $7 million in Series A funding from earlier investors McKesson Ventures, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, and HealthEast Care System. The Minneapolis/St.Paul Business Journal has more here.

StoreKing, a five-year-old, Bangalore, India-based rural e-commerce company, has raised $16 million in funding from Axiata Digital. YourStory has more here.

SundaySky, a 10-year-old, New York-based company whose platform creates personalized videos for brands, has raised $30 million in Series D funding led by Viola Private Equity, with participation from NTT DoCoMo and earlier investors Carmel Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Comcast Ventures. Globes has more here.

Tradeshift, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based startup whose platform helps companies simplify and improve their expensing systems with external contract partners, has raised $75 million in Series D funding led by Data Collective, with participation from HSBC, American Express Ventures, CreditEase and Pavilion Capital. Earlier backer Notion Capital also took part in the round The deal values the company at over $500 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. More here.

TravelPerk, a 1.5-year-old, Barcelona-based business travel booking platform, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Spark Capital. Additional investors including Sunstone Capital and existing backer LocalGlobe. TechCrunch has much more here.

When I Work, a six-year-old, Saint Paul, Mn.-based employee scheduling and communication app, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Drive Capital, with participation from Arthur Ventures and High Alpha. The company has now raised $24 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

—–

New Funds

Sherpa Capital, the venture firm that has backed companies including Uber, Hyperloop One and Munchery, has closed on $470 million in new capital, according to both Fortune and Recode, which say the capital will be deployed across two funds: Sherpa Ventures II, targeting early stage investments, and Sherpa Everest, focused on mid-stage companies. More here.

—–

Exits

Monster.com announced yesterday that it has acquired the San Francisco-based startup Jobr, which had been developing a job-finding app the company described as a Tinder for jobs. Deal terms weren’t disclosed, but Jobr had raised $2 million in seed funding. TechCrunch has more here.

Mobile advertising company Smaato is set to become the latest technology startup to be acquired by Chinese investors, after 11-year-old, San Francisco firm announced that Beijing-based Spearhead Integrated Marketing Communication Group, an offline marketing organization, is buying it for more than $148 million. Smaato had raised $47 million from investors, including Singapore Press Holdings. TechCrunch has more here.

—–

People

Richard Branson caught some poor employee asleep on the job, so he trolled him with this photo.

Arianna Huffington is building a new media startup backed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Bloomberg has more here.

Speaking at a conference in Berlin yesterday, Uber CEO Travis Kalanickshared what he tells investors who ask him when the company is going public: “[W]e are going to IPO as late as humanly possible. It’ll be one day before my employees and significant others come to my office with pitchforks and torches. We will IPO the day before that.”

Larry Page has been quietly working to build self-driving flying cars, too. Bloomberg has the story here.

Facebook just hired CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen to make its giant video business even bigger. Recode has the story here.

—–

Essential Reads

Starting next week, Apple will begin rolling out new incentives for developers in its App Store, including a new revenue-share model and the introduction of search ads in its iOS App Store. The Verge has the story here.

AngelPad, the bi-coastal accelerator program, hosted one of its twice yearly demo days earlier this week in San Francisco. Here are its 12 newest companies.

The site of beleagured Lending Club was down for a couple of hours last night, and it’s been down again for hours this morning. The apparent “data center outage” comes at an unfortunate time for the company.

—-

Detours

The environment you spend your early years in is a major contributing factor to how sweaty you are later in life.

A brave (Yale-bound) high school valedictorian just disclosed her undocumented status in her graduation speech.

—–

Retail Therapy

Black crow print. We hate crows, but you may feel differently about these terrifying scavengers.

Hi, happy Wednesday, all. Fun seeing a number of you at various events yesterday.:)

—–

Top News in the A.M.

Yahoo is reportedly lining up bids for about 3,000 patents. More here.

Short-term rental sites like Airbnb will have to play by a much tougher set of rules in San Francisco under legislation approved by its Board of Supervisors yesterday. More here.

—–

SoftTech VC Goes Big with Two New Funds Totaling $150 Million

Back in January, we told you that SoftTech VC, a San Francisco-based seed-stage fund founded 11 years ago by investor Jeff Clavier, had promoted two of its senior investors to full partners: Andy McLoughlin and Stephanie Palmeri. The move seemed geared to bolster the firm during a time when it was out seeking more capital from its own investors.

Fast forward to today, and SoftTech is announcing that it has raised $100 million for its fifth and newest seed-stage fund. The firm has also gathered up another $50 million in capital commitments for a “breakout” fund that it will use expressly to invest in between 12 to 15 deals involving its successful portfolio companies. (Palmeri notes that the firm will never lead these deals but rather join them as follow-on investors.)

The funds effectively double the amount of money that SoftTech has been actively managing. Its last fund closed with $85 million. Its second-to-last fund closed with $55 million.

That limited partners were willing to write the firm larger checks isn’t a big surprise. SoftTech saw its biggest exit ever when the wearable fitness company Fitbit went public a year ago. It was a seed and Series A investor in the company, alongside True Ventures, another early-stage San Francisco venture firm.

Others of SoftTech’s most recent exits include Gnip, a data company that was acquired by Twitter for $134 million in 2014; Brightroll, a video ad platform acquired by Yahoo for $640 million in 2014; and LiveRamp, a maker of data onboarding software that was acquired by data management firm Acxiom for $310 million in 2014.

In a call with Clavier and Palmeri yesterday, both suggested that little will change at SoftTech, despite that it’s managing more money than in past years. The firm will still aim to secure between 7 percent and 10 percent ownership of the companies it funds. Initial checks — of between $750,000 and $1 million — will remain unchanged in size, though the firm is likely to invest in a few more companies this time around.

More here.
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New Fundings

Amplitude, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based web and mobile analytics company, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Battery Ventures, with participation from Benchmark Capital. The company has now raised $26 million altogether. More here.

Blow, a 2.5-year-old, London-based startup that provides beauty services on demand, has raised £500,000 from Unilever Ventures, as well as via a crowdfunding campaign on the Seedrs platform. More here.

Building Robotics, a three-year-old, Oakland, Ca.-based company better known as Comfy, has raised $12 million in Series B funding for its automation software that helps companies save energy on office air conditioning. Emergence Capital led the investment, with participation from Microsoft Ventures and the real estate services company CBRE.

Buildium, a 12-year-old, Boston-based startup that sells software for rental property managers, has raised $65 million in funding from Sumeru Equity Partners. Fortune has the story here.

Celonis, a five-year-old, Munich-based business-to-business optimization software company, has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding led by Accel Partners and 83North. TechCrunch has more here.

Cylance, a four-year-old Irvine, Ca.-based cybersecurity company that leverages artificial intelligence and algorithmic science, has raised $100 million in Series D funding co-led by The Blackstone Group and Insight Venture Partners. Earlier backers DFJ Growth, KKR, Dell Ventures, Capital One Ventures and TenEleven Ventures also joined the round. VentureBeat hasmore here.

Ginko Bioworks, an eight-year-old, Boston-based biotech startup that launched out of Y Combinator in 2014 and makes all sorts of scents and flavors from microbugs, has raised $100 million in Series C funding, including from YC’s Continuity Fund, Senator Investment Group, Cascade Investment, Baillie Gifford, Viking Global Investors and Allen & Company. TechCrunch has more here.

Midokura, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based software network virtualization company, has raised $20.4 million in Series B funding from the Japanese fintech company Simplex, with participation from earlier backers Innovation Network Corporation of Japan and Allen Miner, who is a member of Midokura’s board of directors. The company has now raised more than $44 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

Nuxeo, a 16-year-old, New York-based open source content management platform for business applications, has raised $10 million in fresh capital from Kennet Partners. More here.

Omicia, a seven-year-old, Oakland, Ca.-based maker of clinical genome interpretation and reporting software, has raised $23 million in Series B funding from UPMC Enterprises, Roche Venture Fund, LDV Partners, and Ping An Ventures, along with earlier backers ARTIS Ventures, Acadia Woods Partners and Buchanan Investments. More here.

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New Funds

Longitude Capital, a life science investment firm targeting mostly mid- to late-stage companies, has held a first close on Longitude Venture Partners III, raising a total of $525 million, according to the company. MedCity News has more here.

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People

Y Combinator President Sam Altman was denied entry into the Ritz hotel in London yesterday because of his “sport shoes.” (Rulez.)

Nir Blumberger, a former corporate development executive at Facebook, has joined Accel’s London office as a venture partner. TechCrunch has more here.

Secret cofounder David Byttow is back with a new startup called Bold. More here.

Ousted Lending Club CEO and co-founder Renaud Laplanche has been speaking to private equity firms and banks about a potential buyout of the online lender, according to Reuters. More here.

Ellen Pao, the former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner who unsuccessfully sued the venture firm for gender discrimination, has just landed a book deal with Random House to write about the tech industry’s culture. Recode has more here.

A quick look at who’s voting for which U.S. presidential candidate in Silicon Valley.

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Essential Reads

The Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten is having to scale back its global ambitions.

For good or bad, Austin denizens have come up with their own way to fill the void left by Uber and Lyft.

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Detours

The best CEOs in the U.S., according to the people who work for them.

What Tesla just showed us about the future of car crashes.

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Essential Reads

Beard Bib. (No returns, obviously.)