It’s Friday, the most glorious weekday of all. Have a great weekend, everyone! (Web visitors, here’s an easier-to-read version of today’s newsletter.)

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Top News in the A.M.

Twitter‘s user base barely grew at all in the fourth quarter, the company revealed yesterday. But on a brighter note, its revenue nearly doubled to $479 million. The WSJ has more here.

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At StartX Demo Day, a Wide Variety of Startups

Little about the accelerator program StartX is conventional. On the one hand, the 5.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based outfit is a nonprofit that helps founders affiliated with Stanford University to build peer groups, as well as their confidence. Specifically, it provides companies with 10 weeks of free educational programming about everything from setting goals to launching products.

But StartX is also becoming a power player, owing largely to a deal it struck in September 2013 with Stanford University and Stanford Health Care, which asked it to manage a for-profit vehicle on their behalf — uncapped capital that StartX now uses to invest in up to 10 percent of its founders’ rounds.

You can actually see StartX’s growing influence. Not only does the 16-person outfit now operate out of 13,000 square feet of office space, but at a demo day yesterday, on the heels of one of StartX’s three yearly sessions, roughly 200 investors stood elbow-to-elbow in a nook of that space to hear 20 of its companies ask them for funding.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the companies were a tad unconventional, too.

One presenting company, Summer Technologies, a sustainable agriculture startup, is hoping to transform the cattle industry by bringing analytics to grazing management. Currently, says CEO Christine Su, farmers aren’t making the most of their land. They allow their cows to graze too long in one place, when moving them around more frequently would keep the grass and soil healthier. Summer’s software, currently being piloted at 30 ranches across five states, pulls in rain, soil and other data that can help those farmers boost their productivity.

Another company, Payjoy, aims to bring consumer finance to hundreds of millions of people in India and elsewhere by embedding technology in smartphones and TVs that allows them to pay for the products as they’re used, instead of in up-front cash. Striking the right relationships would seem to be a big hurdle for Payjoy, but founder Doug Ricket, a former Google engineer, has spent the last six years selling technologies into the developing world; presumably, he has a network to leverage.

Vouch, a third startup, also has an unusual approach to what’s an increasingly crowded space. It intends to use the creditworthiness of a borrower’s personal network, as well as their own individual data, to tailor personal loans for its users. Think friends, uncles, cousins. It sounds a little out there, but online lending is obviously a huge and growing market, and the team includes former alums of PayPal and Prosper, among other companies.

How far these companies will go is anyone’s guess. But the portfolio of StartX appears to hold promise. Since launching its fund with Stanford’s capital — it’s called the Stanford-StartX Fund — StartX has invested $31.4 million across 82 companies, 9.2 percent of which have already been acquired.

At least one company, six-year-old, San Francisco-based Life360, looks like a breakout success story, too. Right now, two million families are signing up for its family communication app each month — traction that investors have noticed. (The company has raised $76 million to date.)

Of course, the organization has also seen its flops. Though 88.5 percent of its companies are still up and running, StartX readily admits that another 11.4 percent have gone out of business.

If press reports are to be believed, one of its highest-profile portfolio companies – the payment startup Clinkle – may be headed in the same direction.

For a full list of the companies that presented yesterday/are looking for funding, click here.

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New Fundings

Airtame, a 1.5-year-old, Copenhagen-based startup whose wireless dongle allows users to broadcast their computer of phone screen to a TV or projector, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by the Danish firm SEED Capital, along with Tommy Andersen, founder of the wireless speaker company Libratone. The company had previously raised $1.3 million through the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.

Armetheon, a four-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based biopharmaceutical company at work on an anticoagulant, has raised $24.3 million in Series B funding from a syndicate including Hercules Bioventure Partners and Capital TEN II. The company has now raised $31.3 million altogether. FierceBiotech has more here.

Culture Machine, a two-year-old, Mumbai-based digital video startup that enables its users to create, promote and monetize their videos on YouTube, has raised $18 million in Series B funding from Tiger Global Management, along with earlier backers Zodius Capital and Times Internet Limited. The company has raised at least $21.5 million to date. DealCurry has more here.

Delivery Hero, a four-year-old, Berlin-based food delivery company, has raised $586 million from publicly traded Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based e-commerce group, which now holds a 30 percent stake in Delivery Hero’s business. Rocket’s earlier food delivery business, FoodPanda, has meanwhile snapped up stakes in six other rival sites across seven countries. The company is stuffing all the assets into a new subsidiary called its Global Online Takeaway Group.TechCrunch has much morehere.

FreeCharge, a 4.5-year-old, Mumbai, India-based mobile commerce platform that gives users coupons and other rewards when they pay their phone, TV, and utility bills, has raised $80 million in Series C funding from new investors Valiant Capital Management and Tybourne Capital Management. Earlier backers Sequoia Capital, RuNet, and Sofina also joined the round. The company has now raised $115 million altogether.

Greenlight Planet, a 6.5-year-old, Riverside, Il.-based company that designs and distributes solar-powered lanterns to villages in rural India and Africa, has raised $10 million in new funding led by Fidelity Growth Partners India. The company has raised $14 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Lineage Labs, a months-old, Boston-based company whose first product, Bevy, aims to make it easier to store, organize, and share digital photos and videos, has raised $4 million from Blade, The Kraft Group, CommonAngels Ventures, and Windspeed Ventures.

Newshunt, a six-year-old, Bangalore-based mobile news aggregation service, has raised $19.4 million in Series C funding led by the New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital. Earlier backers Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India and Omidyar Network also participated. The company has now raised $40.4 million altogether. The outlet e27 has more here.

Orig3n, an eight-month-old, Boston-based company that’s creating a bank of pluripotent stem cells that can be used to better understand genetic diseases, has raised $3.1 million from Harris & Harris Group, Hatteras Venture Partners, KTB, and Mountain Group Capital. BetaBoston has much more here.

Picsart, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile photo editing app and community that claims 60 million monthly users, has raised $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. The capital is the first outside funding the company has taken.

Sight Machine, a nearly four-year-old, San Francisco-based manufacturing analytics platform, has raised $5 million in new funding led by Mercury Fund, with participation from Michigan eLab, Huron River Ventures, Orfin Ventures and Funders Club. Earlier backers IA Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also joined the round, which brings the company’s funding to $11 million. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

TrialReach, a six-year-old, London-based company whose technology connects patients to clinical trials of new medical treatments, has raised $13.5 million in Series B funding led by new investor Smedvig Capital, with participation from earlier backers Amadeus Capital Partners and Octopus Investments. The company has raised $17.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

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IPOs

Wowo, a three-year-old, Beijing, China-based company that operates the Groupon-like, Chinese group-buying site 55tuan.com, set terms for its IPO yesterday, revealing plans to raise up to $66 million by selling 6 million shares at between $9 and $11 per share. The company, which filed paperwork to list its American Depository Shares on the Nasdaq las month, was originally seeking around $40 million.

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Exits

Fancy That, a 1.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based retail technology start-up, has been acquired by Palantir Technologies for undisclosed terms. Fancy That never publicly disclosed how much funding it had raised; it was part of the inaugural class at Pejman Mar Ventures’ Garage, a summer program that invites students to work out of the firm’s Palo Alto offices and meet with mentors. (StrictlyVC had swung by to meet with some of the startups last fall.)

The publicly traded ad network Marin Software has acquired SocialMoov, a nearly three-year-old, Paris-based Facebook marketing platform, for $18.75 million in cash and stock, with up to $2 million more in equity after the deal closes. According to Crunchbase, SocialMoov had raised less than $1 million in seed funding.

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People

This week, investor Chris Sacca, who owns “a bunch” of Uber stock, wrote about why he’d never want to compete with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, revealing in his post that among Kalanick’s other accomplishments, he was once quietly tied for 2nd place on the Wii Tennis global leaderboard. Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn took to Twitter afterward to suggest he’s not impressed.

Omid Kordestani, Google‘s 11th employee, was awarded $123 million in restricted stock last year after he replaced Nikesh Arora as the company’s chief business officer. Bloomberg has the story here.

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Happenings

We’re less than a week away from StrictlyVC’s first INSIDER event! Thanks to our generous sponsors Next World Capital, Ballou PR andStandish Management for making the whole thing possible. We’re looking forward to seeing our featured guests, including Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Strava CEO Mark Gainey, Sigma West cofounder Greg Gretsch, and Haystack founder Semil Shah. We’re super excited to see many of you, too. (The event is sold out, but we’re working on two events this spring, so stay tuned.)

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Data

Who are the biggest bitcoin backers, and what companies have they funded to date? CoinReport breaks it down here.

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Essential Reads

Why Google Glass broke.

Y Combinator is seeing so many hardware startups nowadays that it announced plans yesterday to partner with Bolt, an early-stage fund that profiled on Monday.)

Tesla Motors has hired at least 150 former Apple employees, more than from any other company, even carmakers.

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Detours

Nobody seems to be talking bout how difficult it is for men, in every day life, to not seem like creeps.”

Teaching in the age of Minecraft.

Ride the subway? Don’t read this.

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Retail Therapy

Mercedes motoring.

Hello, everyone, happy Thursday! (Web visitors, here’s an easier-to-read version of what you see below.)

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Top News in the A.M.

In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted. Bloomberg has more here.

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In the Venture Database Race, a Kerfuffle

Anand Sanwal, founder of the New York-based venture database company CB Insights, made an unpleasant discovery yesterday after his subscribers pointed him to a TechCrunch piece about Techlist, a new venture database business.

Techlist made the news because the outfit — a subsidiary of the Singapore-based media company Tech In Asia — was just admitted to the winter class of the prestigious accelerator program Y Combinator. The problem spied by Sanwal and his customers: Techlist has borrowed heavily from CB Insights’s design and user interface. The company clearly “crossed over from inspiration into plagiarism,” says Sanwal.

Whether Y Combinator agrees remains to be seen. But Sanwal – whose bootstrapped, 27-person company is competing against a growing number of new investor database companies — isn’t imagining things, seemingly. In recent months, 12 Techlist employees have seized on a 30-day trial period that CB Insights offers, including Tech In Asia’s CEO, Willis Wee, his head of product, and numerous product managers and developers.

Indeed, on Twitter yesterday, Wee acknowledged using CB Insights “as a reference to launch fast,” writing to Sanwal specifically, “Credits to you and we will be improving as we go along.”

Wee — whose company has previously raised venture funding from East Ventures and Simile Venture Partners — quickly added that Techlist is “very very different from any other venture database out there.”

StrictlyVC chatted with Sanwal yesterday about what happens next.

You just wrote a jokey post about “arriving” now that you have a “copycat.” Are you thinking of taking further action?

We’ve talked to our lawyers and are awaiting their guidance. Since Willis admitted on [Hacker News] and via Twitter [that] they copied, a lot of the gray area has been removed. But ultimately, this is a distraction, so [I’m] not sure what we’ll do. Plus, I love our lawyers, but they ain’t cheap.

Techlist plans to zero in on the Asian market. How big an area of focus is that for you?

We cover financing and exit data globally, including Asia, as our institutional clients expect that we’re comprehensive. Also, Asia is our second fastest-growing market in terms of clients, so we’re putting a lot of effort on the area.

Have you asked Y Combinator for comment?

We haven’t. For the record, we don’t think this is YC‘s fault. They have a lot of companies and cannot audit the UI/UX of their portfolio companies. I also don’t think [President] Sam [Altman] and the team condone this type of thing or think great companies are built by copying other companies. That said, I am curious to see what YC does.

Just yesterday, the WSJ published a piece about the advantages that venture-backed companies have over those that choose to bootstrap, including investor connections. How big a concern is this company and its investor ties?

It’s annoying, mainly because our team works hard, and I feel this is sort of crappy for them. But beyond that, we’re not concerned. Money buys you time, not the ability to execute. And we’ve seen lots of well-funded companies come into our space and all flame out.

You seem to be maintaining a sense of humor about this.

We’re a heads-down, low-drama group, so this made things interesting for us today. I realized that some drama from time to time is fun.

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New Fundings

AuraSense Therapeutics, a six-year-old, Skokie, Il.-based company focused on developing and commercializing spherical nucleic acid conjugates, has held a second closing of its Series C funding from undisclosed investors, bringing the round to more than $18 million. The company has now attracted more than $27 million altogether, including from AbbVie Biotech Ventures, Abbott Biotech Ventures, and Bill Gates.

Civitas Learning, a 3.5-year-old, Austin, Tx.-based company that makes a cloud-based, predictive analytics platform for educational settings, has raised $16 million in new funding led by Rethink Education, with participation from earlier backers, including Austin Ventures and Emergence Capital Partners. The company has now raised $32 million altogether.

ClusterHQ, a seven-year-old, Bristol, England-based company that “makes containers play nice with data,” has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Accel Partners London, with participation from Canaan Partners and earlier backers. The company has now raised $13 million altogether. GigaOm has more here.

Dering Hall, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based online home-design marketplace, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from earlier backers Hearst Magazines, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and SoftBank Capital. The company has now raised $3.9 million.

Eero, a year-old, San Francisco-based company behind a new Wi-Fi system for the home, has raised $5 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital, with participation from Stanford University, Menlo Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Homebrew Ventures, Alexis Ohanian, and Garry Tan. VentureBeat has more here.

EyeBrain, a 6.5-year-old, Ivry-sur-Seine, France-based company that develops markers of cerebral function for neurological and psychiatric disorders and diseases, has raised €1.3 million ($1.47 million) from previous backers Fonds Régional de Co-Investissement d’Ile-de-France and the Anaxago crowdfunding platform.

G1 Therapeutics, a 2.5-year-old, Durham, N.C.-based company developing small molecule therapies to treat various cancers and protect the bone marrow from the harmful effects of chemotherapy, has raised $33 million in Series B funding co-led by Eshelman Ventures and RA Capital Management, with participation from Lumira Capital and Boxer Capital. Earlier backers Hatteras Venture Partners, MedImmune Ventures, and Mountain Group Capital also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $45.5 million.

HomeLight, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based service that matches homebuyers and sellers with real estate agents, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Bullpen Capital, Crosslink Capital, Krillion Ventures, Montage Ventures, Western Technology Investment and 500 Startups. The company has raised $4.5 million altogether.

Ichuanyi, a 2.5-year-old, Shanghai-based e-commerce platform for women’s fashions, has raised $10 million in Series B financing from Chinese e-commerce platform JD.com, and Vertex Venture Holdings. China Money Network has more here.

Le Tote, a three-year-old, San Leandro, Ca.-based startup that rents out clothes and accessories to fashion-forward, budget-conscious women, has raised $8.8 million in Series A funding led by Azure Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Simon Venture Group, AITV, Epic Ventures, Arsenal Venture Partners and Funders Club. Le Tote had raised a undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2013.

Manthan Software Services, an 11-year-old, Bangalore-based business intelligence company, has raised $60 million in new funding led by Temasek Holdings, with participation from earlier backer Norwest Venture Partners. As part of the round, earlier backers IDG Ventures and Fidelity have partially exited their investments. VCCircle has more here.

Sauce Labs, a 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based website and mobile app testing service, has raised $15 million in Series D funding from earlier investor Toba Capital. The company has raised $36 million to date. VentureBeat has more here.

SteelBrick, a six-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based company that makes so-called configure, price, and quote applications for Salesforce.com customers, has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from earlier backer Emergence Capital and new investor Salesforce Ventures.

Velano Vascular, a 2.5-year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based stealth startup whose syringe-like device can draw blood from hospital patients without the discomfort associated with needles, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by First Round Capital. (The deal represents the venture firm’s first investment in a medical device company.) Kapor Capital, Safeguard Scientifics, White Owl Capital, Griffin Hospital, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and several angel investors also participated in the round.

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New Funds

Crosslink Capital, the 25-year-old, San Francisco-based cross-stage investment firm, has closed its seventh fund with $170 million, it announced yesterday. It closed its previous fund with $220 million in 2010. Crosslink made 20 investments last year, including in the e-commerce mattress company Casper, the recruitment service Hired.com, and in Visual.ly, a community platform for data visualization and infographics that connects designers with clients. Some of its biggest hits in recent years include the streaming music service Pandora and the sports blog Bleacher Report.

India Internet Group, a four-year-old, Bangalore-based early-stage investor, is planning to raise a second fund of about $15 million later this year to invest in mobile payments providers, mobile marketplaces and communication apps. Livemint has more here.

Signia Venture Partners, a 2.5-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based firm founded by Playdom founder Rick Thompson, is looking to raise up to $100 million for its second fund, shows an SEC filing. The firm’s debut fund reportedly closed with $20 million. Among the firm’s portfolio companies is Boxed, a New York-based company that delivers wholesale club-like purchases to consumers’ front doors; ApplePie Capital, a San Francisco-based online loan business focused on franchise financing; and Vida, a San Francisco-based company whose mobile app connects consumers with coaches and doctors to improve their health.

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Exits

Bluegiga Technologies, a 15-year-old, Espoo, Finland-based that makes Bluetooth and Wi-Fi modules for short-range wireless connectivity, has been acquired by the publicly traded company Silicon Labs for $61 million in cash.

Datalogix Holdings, a 14-year-old, Westminster, Co.-based marketing analytics startup, has been acquired by Oracle for $1.2 billion, according to VentureWire sources. Oracle announced plans to acquire Datalogix in December without disclosing its purchase price. The deal closed last month.

Sunrise, a two-year-old, New York-based free calendar app, has been acquired by Microsoft for $100 million, reports TechCrunch. The company had raised $8.2 million from investors, including NextView Ventures, Balderton Capital, Resolute.vc, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, SV Angel, and many others.

Under Armour, the publicly traded athletic apparel maker, has acquired Endomondo, a seven-year-old, Copenhagen-based social fitness network; and MyFitnessPal, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile app and site for people looking to improve their fitness. Endomondo, which had raised $8.2 million from undisclosed investors, was acquired for $85 million. MyFitnessPal, which had raised $18 million from Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, fetched $475 million.

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People

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told employees yesterday that Twitter has “sucked for years” at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and vowed that things are going to change. Said Costolo in his memo: “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.” The Verge has the story here.

Since being called out on Twitter by investor Jason Calacanis last year for some bizarre behavior, ousted Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam has been trolling Calacanis’s Twitter account and calling him — among his less-offensive choices — “fat.” Both tell the Observer that there’s no real animosity, though.

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Jobs

A Silicon Valley-based family office that says it manages more than $1 billion in assets is looking for an investment associate.

SK Telecom Ventures wants to hire an analyst. The job is in Sunnyvale, Ca.

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Data

A new Forrester report covered by TechCrunch features some eye-opening figures, including its estimate that online spending in China will reach one trillion dollars by 2019. Forrester thinks China’s online retail sales hit $440 billion last year — roughly 10 percent of the country’s retail sales — up from $307 billion in 2013.

According to the Bay Area recruiting firm Riviera Partners, salaries at startups with either seed or Series A funding remained steady between 2013 and 2014, but the same wasn’t true of later-stage companies. For example, between 2013 and 2014, software engineers at seed-funded companies received an average of $117,000, while at Series A funded companies, they made $125,000. But last year, the average software engineer at a Series B funded company made $142,000, up from $130,000 in 2013, and Series C funded companies paid software engineers $137,000 on average, up from $128,000 in 2013. The Silicon Valley Business Journal has all the data here.

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Essential Reads

Apple has repeatedly tried to crack the TV business. According to Recode, it’s poised to try again.

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Detours

Shark photos.

Dinner in New York.

A real estate agent in Greenwich gets creative.

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Retail Therapy

Socks with character.

Hi, everyone, happy Wednesday! No column today. (We were buried under an avalanche of funding and other news.)

Web visitors, you might want to read this version of this morning’s email; it’s easier on the eyes.

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Top news in the A.M.

Numerous minivans mounted with camera equipment have been spied in California, leading Apple watchers — who’ve traced the registration of one van to Apple — to wonder if Apple is working on its own Street View-like mapping system.

The FAA is beginning to regulate business on the moon. No joke. (“What do you think of that new restaurant on the moon? The food’s great, but it has no atmosphere!”)

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New Fundings

Brickell Biotech, a 6.5-year-old, Miami, Fla.-based pharmaceutical company focused on acquiring, developing, and commercializing therapies for skin diseases, has raised $10 million in Series C funding led by its chairman, Charlie Stiefel, former chair and CEO of Stiefel Laboratories. Other, unnamed investors and members of the management team participated. The company has raised at least $25.4 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

BucketFeet, a four-year-old, Chicago-based startup that sells canvas shoes featuring designs by artists from all over the world, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding from Jumpstart Ventures and Crate & Barrel founder Gordon Segal, among others. The company has collected $13.4 million altogether, including from Trunk Club CEO Brian Spaly and Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn.

Casetext, a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based social network and site for annotating legal documents, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. Other participants include Formation 8 and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, along with earlier backers SV Angel, A-Grade Investments and BoxGroup. The company has now raised $8.8 million all told.

Derby Games, a four-year-old, New York-based legal online gambling company, has raised $6.5 million in financing led by Bullpen Capital, with participation from angel investors Martin Lautman, partner at Muskateer Capital, and Bill Pescatello, a partner at LightBank. Earlier backers also participated, including Andlinger & Company and Alexis Ohanian. The company had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in March 2013.

DesignCrowd, an eight-year-old, Syndey, Australia-based marketplace that connects freelance designers with clients and potential projects, has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by the new Australia VC firm AirTree Ventures, with participation from earlier backer Starfish Ventures. The company has now raised $12.3 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Fixed, 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile app that scans users’ parking tickets for mistakes, then contests the tickets on their behalf (this is also not a joke — the company say it wins these cases between 20 and 30 percent of the time), has raised $650,000 in seed funding from investors, including Slow Ventures, Structure VC, Paul Buchheit and Queensbridge Venture Partners. Altogether, the company has raised $1.8 million to date.

Graylog, a five-year-old, Hamburg, Germany-based company whose platform helps users collect, index and analyze structured and unstructured data from IT infrastructures and applications, has raised $2.5 million in funding led by Mercury Fund, with participation from Crosslink Capital, Draper Associates, and High-Tech Gründerfonds. With its new funding, the company is planning to relocate to Houston.

HourlyNerd, a two-year-old, New York-based online marketplace for M.B.A. students looking for freelance consulting work, has raised $7.8 million in Series B funding led by return investor Highland Capital Partners, with participation from Greylock Partners, GE Ventures,Haystack, the Kraft family, and Intuit founder Scott Cook. The company has raised $12.6 million to date.

kCura, a 14-year-old, Chicago-based maker of e-discovery software, has raised $125 million in minority equity funding from ICONIQ Capital, the part wealth-management firm, part venture firm founded by Divesh Makan, who Forbes described last year as the consigliere to Silicon Valley’s brightest billionaires.

LabMinds, a 5.5-year-old, Boston, Ma. and Oxford, England-based maker of next-generation lab equipment, has raised $3.2 million in funding from the equity crowdfunding platform VentureFounders and Angel CoFund.

Liftoff, a 2.5-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based mobile market app and retargeting platform that helps companies retain users who actually spend money, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Baseline Ventures, with participation from Harrison Metal, Sage Venture Partners, Core Ventures Group, Tim Koogle (who was Yahoo’s CEO long ago) and Ilya Sukhar, who sold his mobile infrastructure company Parse to Facebook in 2013.

Lysosomal Therapeutics, a four-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company working on new treatment options for patients with severe neurological diseases, has raised $20 million in Series A funding from Atlas Venture, Hatteras Venture Partners, Lilly Ventures, Sanofi-Genzyme BioVentures, Roche Venture Fund, Partners Innovation Fund and several angel investors.

MightySignal, a seven-month-old, San Francisco-based company whose sales intelligence tool tells B2B SaaS sales teams who they should be selling to, has raised $1.2 million from investors, including Draper Associates, Vulcan Capital, Queensbridge Venture Partners, WTI, and numerous angels, including Techstars Seattle managing director Andy Sack. (The company passed through the TechStars Seattle program late last year.)

MiTú, a nearly three-year-old, Culver City, Ca.-based media company exclusively dedicated to Latino content, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from AMC Networks, Daher Capital, Northgate Ventures and other unnamed investors. The company has raised $23 million to date.

Molio, a months-old, Salt Lake City, Ut.-based video marketing and ad technology company that was spun out of Orabrush, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Greycroft Partners, with particpation from True Ventures, Subtraction Capital, Advancit Capital and Peak Ventures.

NeuCoin, a year-old, Isle of Man-based digital currency designed for micropayments (it describes itself as a user-friendly version of bitcoin), has raised $2.25 million of funding from a long list of angel investors, including Rob Goldman, the head of growth at Facebook, and Emil Michael, Uber’s SVP of business.

nToggle, a seven-month-old, Boston-based maker of programmatic advertising software, has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding co-led by Sigma Prime Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Qumulo, a three-year-old, Seattle-based stealth data storage startup whose appliance is made from commodity hardware, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Earlier backers Highland Capital, Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners, also participated in the round.

Revolution Medicines, a new, Redwood City, Ca.-based company that will be developing drugs derived from complex chemical compounds found in nature, has received $45 million in Series A funding from Third Rock Ventures, where it was incubated. San Francisco Business Times has more here.

Sera Prognostics, a seven-year-old, Salt Lake City, Ut.-based diagnostics company, has raised $5 million in new funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bringing the total size of its recent Series B funding to $25 million. Altogether, the company has raised roughly $75 million, including from Chione, Upstart Life Ventures, Catalyst Health & Technology Partners, InterWest Partners, and Domain Associates.

SketchDeck, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based company that enables businesses to outsource their presentations to professional designers, has raised $500,000 in funding from Y Combinator, HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah, Justin.tv cofounder Michael Siebel and other angel investors.

Skimlinks, a nine-year-old, London-based content-monetization service for digital publishers, has raised $16 million in Series C funding led by Frog Capital, with participation from earlier backers Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Greycroft Partners, Sussex Place Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The company has now raised $24 million in equity, it says.

SoFi, a nearly four-year-old, San Francisco-based peer-to-peer lender that specializes in student loans, has raised $200 million in funding at a $1.3 billion valuation. Third Point Ventures led the round, with participation from Wellington Management Company, Institutional Venture Partners, and existing investors.The company has now raised roughly $766 million across 10 rounds, shows Crunchbase.

Taboola, an eight-year-old, New York-based content recommendation platform, has raised $117 million in Series E funding led by Fidelity Investments. Other participants in the round include earlier backers Marker Financial Advisors and Steadfast Capital and new strategic investors, including Advance Publications; Comcast Ventures; Groupe Arnault, the controlling shareholder of French luxury-goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton; and Yahoo Japan. The company has now raised $157 million altogether. Venture Capital Dispatch hasmuch more here.

Tracx, a seven-year-old, New York-based social media management platform, has raised $18 million in Series C funding led by Edison Partners, with participation from earlier backers Flybridge Capital, Mousse Partners, Klingenstein, and Fields & Co. The company has now raised $25.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

YellowPepper, an 11-year-old, Miami, Fl.-based mobile virtual wallet startup aimed at the Latin American market, has raised $19 million in Series C funding round led by LIV Capital, a Mexican venture capital firm; Mexico Ventures, a program managed by Sun Mountain Capital; Fondo de Fondos; IFC/ World Bank Group; and other, strategic investors. The company has raised $39 million to date.

Zoom Video Communications, a four-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based software company centered around Web and video conferencing, has raised $30 million in Series C funding rom earlier investors Qualcomm Ventures, Horizons Ventures, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. The company has now raised $45.5 million altogether. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

—–

New Funds

Cultivation Capital, the St. Louis-based venture capital firm, has begun raising money for its second tech-focused fund, reports the St. Louis Business Journal. According to an SEC filing flagged by the outlet, Cultivation has raised $4.75 million toward a targeted $40 million. Among its investments: LockerDome, a six-year-old, St. Louis-based interest-based social media platform; and Adarza BioSystems, a six-year-old, St.Louis-based company whose immunoassay technology can identify proteins and genetic markers in medical samples like blood.

Walden Venture Capital, the 41-year-old, San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm, has closed on its eighth fund with $107 million. The firm began fundraising in August 2013 with a $100 million target. Walden was an early investor in the streaming music service Pandora, which went public in 2011.

—–

IPOs

Hootsuite Media is holding off on an initial public offering for at least 18 months, Bloomberg reports.

MaxPoint Interactive, a hyperlocal advertising startup, has filed to go public. Madrona Venture Group owns 23.6 percent of the company’s shares; Trinity Ventures owns 32.3 percent.

Three firms created by Third Rock Ventures went public last year, and they now have a combined value of more than $8 billion, their shares outpacing other life sciences stocks “by a great deal,” reports the Boston Globe. Much more here.

—–

Exits

Clarity.fm, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that connects entrepreneurs with mentors over the phone, has been acquired by the business crowdfunding platform Fundable for undisclosed terms. Clarity had raised $2.7 million from investors, including Baseline Ventures, Mark Cuban, Venture51, Howard Lindzon, Freestyle Capital, Real Ventures, and 500 Startups. TechCrunch has more here.

Disclipline.eu, a startup based in Italy that produces and sells furniture and other objects designed by independent studios, has been acquired by Hem, the Berlin-based home furnishings company that Jason Goldberg created out of the e-commerce portal Fab.com. TechCrunch has more here.

RoomHunt, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based service that aggregates apartment listings, has been acquired by RentLingo, a three-year-old apartment review and listing site. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Neither company has made public any financial backers. TechCrunch has more here.

Schoolwires, a 15-year-old, State College, Pa.-based company that develops and hosts K-12 school district websites, has been acquired by Blackboard for an undisclosed amount. Schoolwires had raised at least $12 million from Kennet Partners in a 2009 round. Blackboard, once public, is now owned by Providence Equity Partners.

—–

People

Alan Eustace, Google‘s SVP of Knowledge, is leaving the company 13 years after joining it, reports TechCrunch. Its sources say that Eustace is retiring, though one guesses that his retirement will not look like most.

Thirty-one-year-old Andrew McCollum, the forgotten member of Facebook‘s original team, is ready for the spotlight.

—–

Job Listings

Kaiser Permanente Ventures is looking to hire a senior director. The job is in Oakland, Ca.

—–

Data

As Silicon Valley’s economy chugs along, it’s leaving a stunning 30 percent of the population incapable of meeting their basic needs without public assistance, according to a new report Joint Venture Silicon Valley. The report shows the median income for the region’s high-skilled workers is $118,651, while the median wages for low-skilled workers is $28,847. The income gap between the sexes is also worse in Silicon Valley than elsewhere, with the median income for men a whopping 61 percent higher than women. (H/T: WSJ)

—–

Essential Reads

“He’s hit all the low-hanging fruit . . . but now he has to address all the long-term issues.” — Brad Silverberg, a former Microsoft executive-turned-venture capitalist, on why Satya Nadella‘s second year as Microsoft CEO will be far harder than his first.

Testosterone is the drug of the future, evidently.

—–

Detours

This man — a hero, some call him — has made 47,000 edits to Wikipedia since 2007, almost all to root out exactly one grammatical mistake.

Larry David’s new Broadway play about the ultimate nothing is pretty, pretty, pretty good, say fans.

—–

Retail Therapy

Tents schments.

If you own a Tesla, this looks like a must-have.

Happy Tuesday, everyone! Looks like we have a big, fat fight on our hands (see below); grab your popcorn.

—–

Top News in the A.M.

Google is preparing to offer its own ride-hailing service, reports Bloomberg. This is a Very Big Deal for numerous reasons, as many readers will know. First, Google Ventures is among the biggest investors in the popular ride-hailing service Uber, with Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, even sitting on Uber’s board. (Drummond wouldn’t be the first fox in the henhouse. Many are already drawing comparisons to Google chair Eric Schmidt sitting on the board of Apple — right up to the point when Google launched Apple’s biggest competitor, Android.)

Putting aside what the development means for Google Ventures (and its reputation with entrepreneurs), it looks to put Uber in a serious bind technologically. As Bloomberg notes, Uber’s smartphone app for drivers and riders is “based on Google Maps, which gives Google a fire hose of data about transportation patterns within cities. Uber would be crippled if it lost access to the industry-leading mapping application, and alternatives . . . are widely seen as inferior.”

Uber’s product chief, Jeff Holden, tells the WSJ that Uber has been working on its own mapping technology “for some time” and is now accelerating development.

A “person familiar with the matter” further tells the WSJ that the “news that Google is developing an app to rival Uber has been blown out of proportion,” that “a Google engineer has been testing an internal app that helps Google employees carpool to work,” and that the app “isn’t associated with the company’s driverless cars program.”

Just in case, Uber has quietly begun building a robotics research lab in Pittsburgh, Pa., home to Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, which Uber has “cleaned out,” says TechCrunch. To wit, Uber has reportedly hired more than 50 senior scientists from the university’s affiliated research entity and the university itself to spin up its own autonomous taxi fleet. Uber’s seeming message to Google, which is famously developing self-driving cars: Two can play this game.

—–

Bolt Heads West, with $25 Million to Spend on Hardware

Move over Bay Area hardware outfits. There’s a shiny new player in town called Bolt, and it has some creative ideas about how to win over hardware entrepreneurs and co-investors alike.

A new, $20 million machine shop on a pier along San Francisco’s eastern waterfront should help. So should a $25 million new venture fund, care of some powerful limited partners, including Cisco, Logitech, Autodesk, and the robotics-focused venture firm Grishin Robotics.

It’s a big step up from its start in Boston, where Bolt was founded two years ago with just $4 million — money it has stretched across 18 companies. Each has received an initial check of around $100,000, engineering and business help, and unfettered access to Bolt’s 10,000-square-foot downtown digs, replete with metal-working, plastics, electronics, wood-working and 3D printing equipment. In exchange, Bolt has taken stakes in the companies ranging from 8 to 15 percent in common stock.

Now, the firm is super-sizing the operation. For one thing, founder Ben Einstein – an amiable design engineer who’d previously run a design consultancy — says Bolt will begin writing initial checks in the neighborhood of $500,000.

Bolt, which is co-managed by former Atlas Venture partner Axel Bichara, is also hiring a team of 10 full-time engineers in San Francisco to work with the startups it funds. “In our [new] machine shop, you’ll find mechanical, electrical, embedded, prototyping, manufacturing – all types of engineers whose sole job is to help our portfolio companies,” says Einstein. “Bolt is a little like if IDEO [the industrial design company] and a venture firm had a baby,” he adds.

A third “special partner,” Scott Miller, who founded and runs Dragon Innovation, a Cambridge, Ma.-based manufacturing services firm, makes Bolt’s proposition all the more compelling. Dragon is the manufacturing partner of many young hardware companies, and any company that Bolt invests in receives automatic access to those same, well-oiled services.

Given so many bells and whistles, it’s easy to imagine why top co-investors might see Bolt as a useful syndicate partner. Now, the young firm just needs to build its track record.

It’ll happen through connected devices and, more specifically, the subscription businesses that come with them, says Einstein. Petnet, among Bolt’s portfolio companies, is a prime example of how. Though Petnet makes a pricey “intelligent dog feeder” that alerts pet owners when their pet has eaten, it also sends those customers fresh dog food via a monthly service plan.

Occasionally, companies create breakout brands without a subscription business, Einstein notes, but “those are incredibly rare, and you can typically only dominate a category for a year or 18 months.”

After that, he says, “companies with deeper pockets start to manufacture it faster, cheaper and better than you. Then you’re in trouble.”

—–

New Fundings

AnyPerk, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that provides employee perks like discounts on fitness, entertainment, and travel, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led by DCM Ventures, with participation from earlier backer Digital Garage. The company has now raised roughly $13 million altogether, it says.

CampusQuad, a two-year-old, San Carlos, Ca.-based mobile engagement platform designed to connect collect students with extracurricular activities and university services, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by ICG Ventures. The company has raised $6.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

FirstCry.com, a 4.5-year-old, Pune, India-based online shopping store offering a range of baby care products and toys, has raised $26 million in Series D funding led by Valiant Capital Partners, with earlier backers IDG Ventures India, Vertex Venture Holdings, and SAIF Partnersparticipating. The company has raised $55 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

FiscalNote, a two-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based company that uses artificial intelligence to predict the outcome of legislation, has raised $10 million in new funding led by the Chinese social network Renren. The funding comes just four months after the company announced $7 million in funding led by Visionnaire Ventures, with AME Cloud Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Winklevoss Capital, Enspire Capital, Green Visor Capital, Middleland Capital and individual investors participating. The company has raised now raised $18.2 million to date.

Guardant Health, a two-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company that makes a biopsy-free blood cancer screening test, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Formation 8 and earlier backers Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The company has now raised roughly $90 million altogether, including from investor Bobby Yazdani and Pejman Mar Ventures.

KnCMiner, a 1.5-year-old, Stockholm-based bitcoin mining company that’s being sued by some of its customers, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Accel Partners, with participation from CGP Bullhound, angel investor Martin Wattin, and earlier backer Creandum. The company has now raised $29 million altogether. Venture Capital Dispatch has much more here.

Pley, a two-year-old, San Jose, Ca., that rents Legos via monthly subscriptions (it then cleans the pieces between rentals), has raised $10 million in new funding led by Sozo Ventures. Earlier backers Floodgate, Correlation Ventures, Maven Ventures and Allegro Venture Partners also joined the round, which brings the company’s funding to $16.8 million.

Revinate, a 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose software-as-a-service platform helps hotels engage with guests and collect their feedback, has raised $15.3 million in Series B funding from new investors Industry Ventures, Northgate Capital, and Tenaya Capital, along with earlier backers Benchmark, Formation 8, Tao Capital Partners, and others. The company has now raised $30.5 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Wave Life Sciences, a two-year-old, Boston-based company that develops nucleic acid therapeutics, has raised $18 million Series A funding led by RA Capital Management and Kagoshima Shinsangyo Sosei Investment, with participation from earlier investor SNBL Ltd. Xconomy has more here.

Yumist, a three-month-old Gurgaon, India-based online food delivery startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Orios Venture Partners. The company was founded by Alok Jain, former CMO at Zomato. The Economic Times has more here.

Zhaosuliao, an eight-month-old, Guangzhou, China-based online platform that matches buyers and sellers of plastic, has raised $20 million in Series A funding from co-led by IDG Capital Partners and QiMing Venture Partners, with participation from Matrix Partners China and angel investor Li Zhujie. China Money Network has more here.

—–

New Funds

The streaming video company Netflix is planning to offer $1 billion in senior notes, proceeds from which it plans to use for “general corporate purposes” that may include content acquisitions. TechCrunch has more here.

OrbiMed Advisors, the 25-year-old, New York-based investment firm, has raised $924 million for a fund devoted to health-care royalty and credit investments, up from the $600 million the firm raised for its first royalties vehicle in 2011. The firm had raised a separate, $325 million, fund last fall to back health care companies in Asian nations. (That, too, was significantly bigger than its predecessor. OribMed’s debut Asia fund closed in 2008 with $182 million.)

—–

IPOs

Invitae, a 4.5-year-old, San Francisco-based genetic diagnostics company that registered to go public last month, has estimated it will sell 5.35 million shares at between $13 and $15 per share, raising roughly $75 million. At the midpoint of the estimated range, the company would be valued at about $417 million. Invitae has raised roughly $200 million from private investors. According to its S-1, its biggest institutional shareholders include Baker Brothers Life Sciences, which owns 20.6 percent of the company; BlackRock, which 17 percent; Thomas, McNerney & Partners, which owns 15.2 percent; and Genomic Health, which owns 9 percent.

—–

Exits

DataStax, the five-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based commercial face of the open source Apache Cassandra database, has acquired the open source graph database company Aurelius for undisclosed terms. DataStax has raised roughly $190 million from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, Next World Capital and investor Salil Deshpande, among others. Aurelius, launched in Oakland, Ca., last year, appears to have been bootstrapped.

—–

People

Jeff Diehl, head of investments at Adams Street Partners, has been promoted. Effective July 1, Diehl becomes the firm’s managing partner, with longtime CEO Bon French shifting into the role of company chairman. Diehl joined Adams Street in 2000. He’d previously worked as a principal at the Parthenon Group.

Harry Heymann, Foursquare‘s original chief technical officer has left the company after more than five years, reports The Verge. Heymann — who formerly worked with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at his last company, Dodgeball — joined Foursquare in 2009. He’s the latest in a string of top Foursquare executives to leave the company as it pivots from a location-based social network into a Yelp-like local search engine, notes The Verge.

Yoky Matsuoka, formerly Nest Labs’s VP of technology , announced yesterday in her very first tweet that she’s joining the “flock” at Twitter as its VP of technology and analytics. Matsuoka was long a professor (assistant, then adjunct) at Carnegie Mellon University. She also spent one year as Google’s Head of Innovation.

Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who is suing the venture capital firm for gender discrimination and retaliation, has asked for $16 million in damages, it emerged in a related hearing yesterday. Now Kleiner is trying to learn how much Pao stands to make from Reddit, her employer of the last two years, and whether that amount should offset any potential damages. Reddit has said it’s willing to provide Kleiner with Reddit’s private valuation but not the details of Pao’s pay package. Venture Capital Dispatch has the story here.

Yesterday, Pao’s camp was also granted permission to question former colleague Aileen Lee about a dinner at former Vice President Al Gore’s apartment that only male members of Kleiner attended. They’ve also been granted permission to ask about an instance in which Pao’s attorney claims Lee was not offered a partnership in one of the firm’s funds in 2012. Lee left the firm that same summer to found her own firm, Cowboy Ventures. Kleiner quickly signed on as an LP.

Alec Saunders has joined Microsoft Ventures as principal technical evangelist to work with startups in Canada. He was formerly VP of developer relations at BlackBerry.

—–

Essential Reads

Twitter is rolling out plans for a new revenue stream: Twitter ads that don’t appear on Twitter.

—–

Detours

A free diver rides an underwater ocean current.

Matt Malone, professional dumpster diver.

—–

Retail Therapy

Bluewire, to record conversations from your phone or apps like Skype.

Move over Bay Area hardware outfits. There’s a shiny new player in town called Bolt, and it has some creative ideas about how to win over hardware entrepreneurs and co-investors alike.

A new, $20 million machine shop on a pier along San Francisco’s eastern waterfront should help. So should a $25 million new venture fund, care of some powerful limited partners, including Cisco, Logitech, Autodesk, and the robotics-focused venture firm Grishin Robotics.

It’s a big step up from its start in Boston, where Bolt was founded two years ago with just $4 million — money it has stretched across 18 companies. Each has received an initial check of around $100,000, engineering and business help, and unfettered access to Bolt’s 10,000-square-foot downtown digs, replete with metal-working, plastics, electronics, wood-working and 3D printing equipment. In exchange, Bolt has taken stakes in the companies ranging from 8 to 15 percent in common stock.

Now, the firm is super-sizing the operation. For one thing, founder Ben Einstein – an amiable design engineer who’d previously run a design consultancy — says Bolt will begin writing initial checks in the neighborhood of $500,000.

Bolt, which is co-managed by former Atlas Venture partner Axel Bichara, is also hiring a team of 10 full-time engineers in San Francisco to work with the startups it funds. “In our [new] machine shop, you’ll find mechanical, electrical, embedded, prototyping, manufacturing – all types of engineers whose sole job is to help our portfolio companies,” says Einstein.

“Bolt is a little like if IDEO [the industrial design company] and a venture firm had a baby,” he adds.

A third “special partner,” Scott Miller, who founded and runs Dragon Innovation, a Cambridge, Ma.-based manufacturing services firm, makes Bolt’s proposition all the more compelling. Dragon is the manufacturing partner of many young hardware companies, and any company that Bolt invests in receives automatic access to those same, well-oiled services.

Given so many bells and whistles, it’s easy to imagine why top co-investors might see Bolt as a useful syndicate partner. Now, the young firm just needs to build its track record.

It’ll happen through connected devices and, more specifically, the subscription businesses that come with them, says Einstein. Petnet, among Bolt’s portfolio companies, is a prime example of how. Though Petnet makes a pricey “intelligent dog feeder” that alerts pet owners when their pet has eaten, it also sends those customers fresh dog food via a monthly service plan.

Occasionally, companies create breakout brands without a subscription business, Einstein notes, but “those are incredibly rare, and you can typically only dominate a category for a year or 18 months.”

After that, he says, “companies with deeper pockets start to manufacture it faster, cheaper and better than you. Then you’re in trouble.”

Hi, everyone, welcome back. What a game last night! What a terrible play! “Of course I can say now I wish we had done something different,” said Seahawks’s delated offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell afterward.

—–

Top News in the A.M.

President Obama will announce today that he wants U.S. companies to pay a 14 percent tax on the approximately $2 trillion of overseas earnings they’ve amassed, reports the WSJ. They could reinvest those funds in the U.S. without paying additional tax, says the piece. They would also face a 19 percent minimum tax on future foreign profits. Tech and pharmaceutical companies hold the greatest share of overseas cash, accounting for 30 percent of the total; Apple alone has roughly $160 billion in offshore cash.

—–

On the Bias Toward Writing About Bias

The last two years have seen countless articles about why there aren’t more successful women in tech. First, a story is published about the dearth of female entrepreneurs or female investors (or both), then people either applaud the piece or enumerate why its wrong-headed (or both). Finally, someone else is legitimately wronged by some knucklehead, and the cycle begins anew.

Much of the coverage has had a positive impact. By shining a light on age-old behaviors that were deemed acceptable for too long, more tech startups are instituting sensitivity training and diversity initiatives. Women who felt isolated in facing gender bias have learned that they’re far from alone.

The many reports about women in tech have also put a finer point on some differences between male and female entrepreneurs that are now being actively addressed.

For example, Mar Hershenson, a serial entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist, now advises some of the female entrepreneurs with whom she meets to “raise their voice – not be afraid to talk about the best-case scenario for their startups.” Talking up their work doesn’t always come as naturally to women, says Hershenson. But “venture firms look for big vision, nothing-is-going-to-stop-me type pitches,” and getting that memo beforehand is useful, she adds.

Still, some think much of the coverage around women in tech is becoming counterproductive.

Mada Seghete, cofounder of the deep-linking tech company Branch Metrics, says some of what she reads in the media rings true. For example, she observed more of a “risk-taking attitude, to some extent” by her male classmates at Stanford, where Seghete — who has two engineering degrees from Cornell — recently snagged her MBA.

Yet Seghete also notes that a higher percentage of her female classmates have seen their businesses take off since graduating, partly because “a lot of guys played with the ideas and took their time” while their female peers dove into things that are “less risky,” says Seghete.

Among those companies is The League, a dating startup cofounded by Seghete’s former classmate Amanda Bradford. It just closed on $2.1 million in funding last week.)

Seghete also seems to think the ongoing narrative of women as victims can have unintended consequences – namely, making women unnecessarily ill at ease.

“Even as a software developer, I don’t consider that I’m different, and maybe it’s because I don’t anticipate bias that I’m confident in a way that people don’t look at me differently,” says Seghete, whose own company — cofounded with classmates Alex Austin, Dmitri Gaskin, and Mike Molinet — has raised $3 million led by New Enterprise Associates.

“If I thought I’d be facing bias in a situation, then I might be more self-conscious. It would be a self-fulfilling process.”

—–

New Fundings

Apttus, an 8.5-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based company that helps customers manage the second half of their sales cycle, has raised $41 million in Series B funding led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from K1 Capital and Iconiq. All three were previous investors in the company, which has now raised $78 million altogether, says TechCrunch.

Coursmos, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that offers short “micro courses” for users via a web and mobile platform, has raised $600,000 in seed funding from Altera Capital Group, with participation from Imperious Group. The company has now raised $1.2 million altogether.

ERelevance, a 1.5-year-old, Austin, Tx.-based healthcare IT startup that makes patient-engagement software, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by Martin Ventures. The company had previously raised $1.3 million.

MileIQ, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose mobile app tracks mileage, has raised $11 million in funding led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from earlier backers CRV, SV Angel and Marc Benioff. The company has raised $14 million to date.

Pulsate, a 1.5-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based startup whose tech platform helps brands communicate with customers based on their location, context, interests and behavior, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from PayPal and the marketing research company Dunnhumby. TechCrunch has more here.

QASymphony, a nearly four-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based software company that sells testing services for testing organizations and quality-assurance teams, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Buckhead Investment Partners, Poplar Ventures, and KMS Technology.

Siva Power, an 8.5-year-old, San Diego, Ca.-based company that makes third-generation thin film PV technologies to increase solar cell efficiency, has closed on $10 million in Series D funding from earlier investors Trident Capital, DBL Investors, Medley Partners, and Acero Capital. The city of Wuxi, China, also participated as a new investor. The round includes $3 million in debt financing that Siva received last May. The company, which has now raised roughly $115 million altogether, was formerly called Solexant.

Skipta, a six-year-old, Lancaster, Pa.-based operator of online communities for health-care professionals, has raised $2.5 million in Series A financing from Mansa Capital.

Sportsman Tracker, a 3.5-year-old, Grand Rapids, Mi.-based company with a suite of mobile applications for hunters and anglers, has raised $950,000 in seed funding led by Huron River Ventures and Start Garden, with participation by Detroit Innovate, Muskegon Angels and Karis Capital Partners.

Zapproved, a 6.5-year-old, Portland, Or.-based company whose software platform helps companies comply with legal rules and regulations, has raised $15 million funding round led by K1 Investment Management. The company has now raised roughly $20 million altogether, including from numerous individual investors.

——

New Funds

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has created a $130 million fund called the Alibaba Hong Kong Young Entrepreneurs Foundation, with the aim of enticing founders to build up businesses through Alibaba’s platforms, including its main shopping sites Taobao Marketplace and Tmall. TechCrunch has much more here.

Aspect Ventures — cofounded by Theresia Gouw, formerly of Accel Partners, and Jennifer Fonstad, formerly of DFJ — is looking to raise its first outside fund, and it’s targeting $150 million for the effort, shows an SEC filing. The pair began investing their own money a year ago. Among their bets to date: Vida, a young, San Francisco-based company whose mobile app connects consumers with coaches and doctors to improve their health; BaubleBar, a four-year-old, New York-based e-commerce company focused on “on-trend” fashion jewelry; and Exabeam, a 1.5-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based big data security analytics startup.

August Capital has set out to raise a $450 million seventh fund, according to a new SEC filing. Interestingly, the fund size is moving in the opposite direction of many recents funds. August closed on $550 million for its sixth fund, down from the $650 million it had raised for its fifth fund. Among some of its newer bets: Open Garden, a nearly four-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile broadband network for Internet of Things devices; Avant Credit, a two-year-old, Chicago-based online consumer lender; and Quandl, a three-year-old, Toronto-based data management platform and marketplace where people can buy, sell, and download financial and economic data.

Blumberg Capital, the 24-year-old, San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm, is looking to raise up to $200 million for its fourth fund, according to an SEC filing. Blumberg had closed its third fund with $150 million in November 2013. Some of the firm’s newer bets include Kreditech, a three-year-old, Hamburg, Germany-based consumer finance startup that focuses on lending money to “unbanked” consumers with little or no credit rating; and Credorax, a six-year-old, Southborough, Ma.-based small startup that enables online payment processing for a range of online merchants.

Cendana Capital, the five-year-old, San Francisco-based firm that has made a name for itself by backing so-called micro funds, has added $40 million to its Cendana Co-Investment Fund, money it manages with capital from the University of Texas Investment Management Company. (UTIMCO had originally commited $60 million to the fund in July 2012.) You can find the SEC filing here.

Northern Light Venture Capital, a 10-year-old, Beijing-based early-stage venture fund, is looking to raise $365 million for its fourth fund, shows an SEC filing. It closed its last fund with $404 million, according to Thomson Reuters.

Victory Park Capital, the eight-year-old, Chicago-based alternative investments firm, is setting up a listed fund to invest in loans originating on sites like the peer-to-peer platforms Prosper and Funding Circle, reports the WSJ. The fund — VPC Specialty Lending Investments — plans to hold a £200 million ($224 million) IPO in London, says the report.

—–

Exits

SolarWinds, the publicly traded IT software company, has acquired the San Francisco-based analytics company Librato for $40 million in cash. According to Crunchbase, Librato had raised $5.1 million from investors, including Baseline Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and Harrison Metal.

Swyft Media, a three-year-old, New York-based digital marketing company that had raised $1 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors, has been acquired by publicly traded Monotype, a company specializing in typesetting and typeface design. Swyft Media is reportedly being paid $12 million up front and could see up to $15 million more in additional earn-outs.

Ticketea, a Madrid-based ticketing startup, has acquired TodayTickets, a two-year-old, Berlin-based last-minute ticket booking app, for undisclosed terms. TodayTickets had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding; Ticketea has raised $5.7 million from investors. TechCrunch has more here.

TripAdvisor, the travel planning and booking business, has acquired San Mateo, Ca.-based ZeTrip and its travel journal app app Rove, which provides a travelog of users’ movements based their GPS coordinates. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. ZeTrip had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2012 from Inspiration Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

—–

People

New Jersey state Treasury investigators found no wrongdoing in venture firm General Catalyst Partners‘ decision to not report a political contribution from one of its EIRs – now Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker – months before the pension committed millions to the firm. The outlet peHUB has more here.

On Friday, Nest Labs told employees that founding VP of technology Yoky Matsuoka and Greg Duffy, who’d joined Nest last summer when it acquired his connected-camera company, Dropcam, have left the company. The company didn’t provide employees insight into why Matsuoka was leaving but credited her with having a “tremendous impact” on the team. As for Duffy, they said he was “leaving to pursue other opportunities.” As we’d reported last November, the cultural fit between Dropcam and Nest was a poor one, with both Dropcam and earlier Nest employees describing a frustrating environment at Nest under Tony Fadell’s leadership.

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Job Listings

Cue Ball Capital, the Boston-based venture capital firm, is looking to hire an investment associate.

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Data

According to VentureSource, investors poured $15.5 billion into China-based deals last year, more than twice the previous record of $7.3 billion set in 2011. More here.

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Essential Reads

So-called zombie apps are on the rise.

Twitter hopes to display its value to new users through a feature called Instant Timeline that shows tweets to people who haven’t yet followed anyone.

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Detours

Vintage portraits of (modern) Hollywood celebrities.

Saturday Night Live takes on football commercials in this very funny parody.

The case of the next U.S. housing boom in eight charts.

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Retail Therapy

Srirachup. You can have it both ways.

Happy Friday, everyone. Hope you have a super weekend. (Web visitors, this version of today’s morning email is easier to read than what you see below.)

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Top News in the A.M.

AOL is cutting 150 employees. More details here.

Google‘s fourth quarter results missed the mark yesterday.

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Mike Rothenberg: Virtual Reality is Not a Sector, People

Late last year, three-year-old Rothenberg Ventures announced it would be launching a startup accelerator, River, that planned to provide $100,000 in seed funding to virtual reality companies expressly. To some, it might have seemed like a calculated, and possibly unwise, bit of counterprogramming. After all, by backing a variety of startups, most accelerator programs are able to hedge their bets and reduce the risk that a whole batch will fall out of fashion.

Yet the San Francisco firm argues that the the 13 companies it has selected, from roughly 200 applicants, is as diverse as any early Y Combinator class. An eye-mounted head-tracking display that helps the physically challenged with daily tasks? Check. Virtual reality technology that changes the way people experience news events? Check. “Everyone keeps calling it a ‘sector,’” says the firm’s founder, Mike Rothenberg. “But just as the Internet is ubiquitous, virtual reality will be ubiquitous in 10 or 20 years. This technology is really going to change everyone’s life.”

We talked about it yesterday.

You’re about to welcome 13 companies into your new accelerator program, which will run from February through May. What was the criteria for acceptance?

We were really looking for the most innovative applications across every industry. We also wanted a mix of hardware and software. We didn’t know what we’d get, but we have companies coming from Japan, South Africa, New Zealand France — companies building great companies in education, in pain management . . .

How far along are they?

They’re pretty mature companies for the most part. Some have been building their companies for eight to ten years. Fove, which makes an eye-tracking head mounted display that lets users navigate using their eye movements, has a complete product that works and is amazing.

Have these companies raised capital in the past?

Some of them have some capital. [Fove, for example, passed through Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in London last summer.] But in general, venture capital hasn’t been focused on virtual reality too much yet, so in some cases, the companies hadn’t raised anything prior. We have a South African company that bootstrapped and figured out a way to get customers to pay for VR from the beginning.

What size stake are you taking in exchange for your $100,000?

We aren’t disclosing that. We looked at Y Combinator and other accelerators and incubators and tried to learn [from what they do].

Just two companies you’ve accepted are hardware companies. Is that by design? Do you think most people will be creating virtual reality technology for platforms like Samsung Gear VR and the upcoming Oculus Rift?

We didn’t have set targets, but in my opinion, the big companies know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of good hardware being built by great tech companies with deeper pockets; smartphone use will become more common, too. So software and content companies might be a little more of a fit [for this program].

We also just saw so a lot of mind-blowing applications. We have a company, Psious, a smartphone-based tool that’s solving phobias by simulating heights and plane travel and spiders. Another, DeepStream, tackles pain management. Burn victims enter into a world of snow and it lessens their pain. A third company, Emblematic Group in L.A., is doing immersive journalism, showing reporters what it can feel like to be on the streets when a bomb goes off and hopefully making them more empathic in the process.

Why announce the companies now? Why not wait until they’re ready to meet with investors at a demo day you’re staging in May?

We want them to take advantage of their affiliation with River while they’re here in America. Some of them are already planning to move to San Francisco. Many of them are here for three months alone, and we want them to meet with the people they want to meet, including investors.

Those investors will invariably be conjuring up exit scenarios. Aside from Facebook and its subsidiary Oculus, which acquired two VR companies last month, do we know what companies are actively shopping for VR technologies?

The smartest companies. It’s the same for everything. Who’s going to buy the 360-degree action sports camera? Whoever is making cameras and wants to stay in business.

(For a full list of River’s companies, click here.)

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New Fundings

Anews, a two-year-old, Russia-based international news aggregation platform, has raised $2.7 million in venture backing, including from include TMT Investments, Run Capital, and 101Startup.

Aspire Bariatrics, a four-year-old, King of Prussia, Pa.-based company that’s commercializing a reversible, minimally invasive weight loss device for obesity, has closed on $12 million in venture debt financing from Hercules Technology Growth Capital. According to an SEC filing, the company had separately raised $5 million in equity last summer.

Atlas Genetics, a 10-year-old, U.K.-based company that makes molecular diagnostics tests for infectious diseases, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by RMI Partners, with participation from return backers Novartis Venture Funds, Consort Medical, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, BB Biotech Ventures and South West Ventures Fund.

Bench, a 2.5-year-old, Vanouver, B.C.-based online platform that pairs users with bookkeepers and bookkeeping software, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Altos Ventures with participation from Contour Venture Partners. The company has now raised $10 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

BioNano Genomics, a 12-year-old, New York-based company whose nanoscale imaging and analytic platforms are used to analyze DNA and other genome-related peptides and proteins, has raised $68.4 million in funding, according to an SEC filing — an amount that reportedly includes $53 million that BioNano raised in Series C funding last November. Legend Capital and Novartis Venture Fund co-led the round and were joined by Federated Kaufmann Fund and Monashee Investment Management. Earlier investors Domain Associates, Battelle Ventures, and Gund Investment Corporation also participated.

The 7.5-year-old parent company of CarDekho, a 6.5-year-old, Jaipur, India-based online marketplace for new and used cars, has raised $50 million from the Chinese investment firm Hillhouse Capital and the Hong Kong-based hedge fund Tybourne Capital. Earlier backer Sequoia Capital — which had provided the company with $15 million in Series A funding in 2013 — also participated. VCCircle has more here.

Cargomatic, a 1.5-year-old, Venice, Ca.-based company that enables users with shipping jobs to find truckers who are available to move their cargo, has raised $8 million led by Canaan Partners, with participation from Volvo Group Venture Capital, Morado Venture Partners, SV Angel, Sherpa Ventures, Structure Capital, and numerous angel investors. The company has now raised $10.6 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Cyanogen, a 5.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that distributes smartphone software based on Google’s Android mobile operating system, is raising a $70 million round of financing that values the company in the “high hundreds of millions,” and Microsoft is poised to be a minority investor in that round, reports the WSJ. (The Information had published a smart piece about Cyanogen back in October.)

D-Wave Systems, the 16-year-old, British Columbia-based quantum computing company, raised $29 million Canadian dollars ($23 million) late last year from an unnamed “large institutional investor,” reports Venture Capital Dispatch. According to Crunchbase, the company has now raised roughly $124 million from investors, including Business Development Bank of Canada, DFJ, and Goldman Sachs.

Depop, a two-year-old, U.K.-based mobile marketplace that enables individuals to buy and sell their items, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital and Holtzbrinck Ventures. The company has raised $10.3 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

FullContact, a five-year-old, Denver-based company that sells a suite of suite of cloud-based contact management solutions for businesses and individuals, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by earlier backer Foundry Group, with participation from earlier investors 500 Startups and Blue Note Ventures. The company has raised $16.2 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Giphy, a two-year-old platform that makes it easy to search and share GIFs, has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst Partners and earlier investors, including Lerer-Hippeau Ventures, betaworks, RRE Ventures, and CAA Ventures. Of the round, $225,000 has been set aside for accredited investors who might be interested in acquiring a stake in the company via the crowdfunding platform Alphaworks. The company had previously raised $2.5 million from investors.

The parent company of Grabhouse a two-year-old, Mumbai, India-based online rental accommodation site, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital and Sequoia Capital. LiveMint has more here.

Handpick, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose iOS app provides users access to more than 10 million socially shared food posts from Instagram, food blogs and recipe sites, has raised $3 million in funding led by ClearVue Partners, with participation from angel investors.

MaestroIQ, a 1.5-year-old, New York-based recommendation engine app used by marketers to help drive app engagement, has raised $1.75 million in seed funding from Foundation Capital, Deep Fork Capital, KEC Ventures, First Round Capital, Crosslink Capital, angel investor Jim Pallotta, and Eniac Ventures, where the company was incubated.

Ouya, a three-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based game-console maker, has raised $10 million from Alibaba, which has discussed incorporating Ouya’s software and library of more than 1,000 games into Alibaba’s set-top box, according to WSJ sources. Ouya had previously raised $15 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund, Shasta Ventures and chipmaker Nvidia; it had also famously raised $8.6 million on Kickstarter.

Spotify, the 8.5-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based music streaming service, is working with Goldman Sachs Group on a new round of private fundraising, potentially putting off an IPO for another year, reports the WSJ. The amount to be raised and the valuation are yet to be settled, says the story, but talks include T. Rowe Price.

Swipe, a new social networking app that combines aspects of Instagram, Tinder, and Snapchat, has raised $6.5 million from Sherpa Ventures, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital and Binary Capital at a $50 million pre-valuation. Just two months ago(!), the company had raised $1.7 million in seed funding at a $10 million valuation (we’re not sure if that’s pre- or post). TechCrunch has the story here.

Ttyongche, a year-old, Beijing-based carpool mobile app maker, has raised roughly $10 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital, which had provided it with $3 million in Series A funding last June, according to Chinese media reports.

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New Funds

Cyber London (CyLon), a new startup accelerator based in London, hopes to launch a new wave of cyber-security technology companies from across Europe, reports The Guardian. Its first 13-week program kicks off in April. More here.

Utah-based Kickstart Seed Fund has closed a $39 million fund to fund very-early-stage startups in the state. It’s the firm’s third, and largest, fund. TechCrunch has more here.

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IPOs

Spark Therapeutics, a company that’s developing a treatment for rare blindness, hit the pubic market this morning. We’ll tell you on Monday how things go.

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Exits

DMG Media, owner of DailyMail.com, is acquiring the U.S.-based news website Elite Daily for undisclosed terms. According to Crunchbase, the three-year-old, New York-based startup had raised $1.5 million in a convertible note from Social Starts, Red Sea Ventures, Vast Ventures, and Greycroft Partners. According to Daily Mail, Elite Daily now boasts 74 million monthly unique visitors, mostly between the ages of 18 and 34.

SnipSnap, a 3.5-year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based company that makes a mobile couponing app, has been acquired by Toronto-based Slyce for $6.5 million in cash and stock. SnipSnap had raised $2.8 million from mostly individual investors. Slyce, a visual product search platform, has raised $28.7 million from investors, shows Crunchbase. Its backers include Beacon Securities, Cormark Securities, Salman Partners, and Canaccord Genuity Corp.

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People

Chrys Bader, one of the co-founders of the anonymous messaging app Secret, is leaving the company a year after its launch. Bader “won’t go away empty handed,” reports the WSJ. He and cofounder David Byttow collected roughly $6 million as part of a $25 million funding round last year, says the outlet.

Bain Capital Ventures has lost Boston-based managing directors Todd MacLean and Jeff Crisan, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack; he says the pair plans to launch a new venture capital firm with Jim Quagliaroli, who has stepped down as a managing director with Spectrum Equity. More here.

Billionaire Jim Clark, who left the tech scene in Silicon Valley more than a decade ago to build condos in Miami, is on a new real estate buying spree. According to the New York Post, Clark and wife Kristy Hinze just paid $37 million for the 40-foot-wide, eight-bedroom, 11,000-square-foot Mellon mansion on New York’s Upper East Side. (That’s down from the original asking price of $46 million in 2013.) Clark also recently shelled out $27.5 million for the Westchester, N.Y., mansion of director Ron Howard, a 17,000-square-foot property with pool, horse barn, greenhouse and much more.

Former Yahoo COO Jeff Mallett is ready to make a deal, apparently. According to Realtor.com, in 1999, Mallet bought an estate in Napa, Ca., that includes a private, USGA-member nine-hole golf course, and he’s been trying to sell it since 2012. Mallett was originally asking for $17.5 million. With no one coming “even close to making par on the offer,” says the outlet (ha, ha), Mallet has slashed the price by $8 million, meaning you can now acquire his vast property for $9.5 million should you be so inclined. More here.

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Job Listings

PayPal is looking to hire a director into its growth and special operations team. The job is in San Jose, Ca.

SoftBank is reportedly looking to set up a five-member team in India. The firm is meeting with people now, says the Economic Times.

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Essential Reads

Rap superstar Jay-Z is about to take on Beats and Spotify. More here.

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Detours

Your shopping habits are one in a million — literally.

How Nick Hornby keeps his writing fresh.

The pursuit of beauty: Solving a pure math mystery.

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Retail Therapy

Measuring Paris wall sticker (great for the kids’ room).

Happy Thursday, everyone! No column today. We are way, way under the weather this week.

We also spent an inordinate amount of time last night reading over the explosive lawsuit filed Tuesday against entrepreneur-investor Joe Lonsdale by a former Stanford student and girlfriend who’s accusing him of gender violence and sexual assault.

It’s a major shocker. Lonsdale — a protégé of Peter Thiel who worked with Thiel at his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, before cofounding the big data company Palantir with Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings — has been described by Fortune as a “man in a hurry” given his hard-charging work ethic.

In addition to Palantir, Lonsdale also cofounded Addepar, whose software helps rich clients manage their wealth. The five-year-old company has raised $65 million from investors, including $50 million that poured in last spring. And Lonsdale cofounded four-year-old Backplane, a social network for people with “like-minded interests” that has raised roughly $14 million from investors.

More recently, Lonsdale has dived into the world of venture capital, co-founding Formation 8, a two-and-a-half-year-old firm that has already raised nearly $1 billion from investors across two funds. (Its first fund, the biggest debut fund raised since 1999, included an early bet on the virtual reality company Oculus VR, bought for $2 billion by Facebook last year.)

Despite his extensive network, Lonsdale is not a terribly public figure. He has tweeted 23 times in the last five years, almost exclusively to promote his business interests or those of his friends. Conference appearances are rare. On Quora, an anonymous poster characterizes working with him as “intense,” saying Lonsdale “tends to favor potential over experience, which results in a lot of personal and professional growth for the individuals he works with.”

Lonsdale won’t be battling this lawsuit quietly, though. Soon after the filing was leaked yesterday to the media, Lonsdale — who credits his start in the industry to his days “as a little kid at PayPal” — published a highly detailed, personal, and e-mail laden personal statement in a move meant to quickly quash questions raised by the suit.

Not only does he include love letters written to him by his accuser, Elise Clougherty, whom he dated for one year, but anyone curious can also find a two-page letter written to him by Clougherty’s mother, asking Lonsdale not to part ways with her daughter, and a somewhat excruciating email that Clougherty had written to Lonsdale about her history of mental health issues.

Lonsdale is also planning to file a defamation suit against Clougherty today. “I will counter these vindictive attacks at every turn,” he says in his statement. “I will not be bullied by lies and threats.”

According to Clougherty’s lawsuit, she and Lonsdale began a romantic relationship in February 2012 after becoming linked in a mentorship program at Stanford, where she was an undergraduate and Lonsdale, an alum of the school, was a volunteer. Lonsdale says in his statement that they’d first met the previous year, at a “meeting arranged by her mother in New York,” when Clougherty and her mother “sought me out through a mutual friend.”

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Top News in the A.M.

Microsoft’s Office for Android tablet apps arrive today.

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New Fundings

99.co, a 1.5-year-old, Singapore-based property rental and sales site that launched publicly late last year, has raised $1.6 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. The company had previously raised $650,000 in seed funding, including from 500 Startups.

Araxid, a 2.5-year-old, Mclean, Va.-based company whose software helps its customers link and privatize disparate identities stored in one or more databases, has raised $12.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital.

AutoBot, a year-old, Beijing-based startup that provides smartphone-using drivers with analytics about their speed, proximity to other cars and more, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Gobi Partners and ABC Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Business Insider, the 7.5-year-old, New York-based business news site, has raised $25 million in fresh funding from a syndicate of investors led by Axel Springer SE, with participation from earlier backers, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The WSJ has more here. Business Insider is the most-visited business news site in the U.S., according to analytics firm comScore. It has now raised $57 million altogether, says the WSJ.

Datadog, a five-year-old, New York-based monitoring platform for cloud applications, has raised $31 million in Series C funding led by earlier backer Index Ventures, with participation from RTP Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners, and Amplify Partners, among others. The company has now raised $53.4 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Deliveroo, a 2.5-year-old, London-based food delivery company that focuses on high-end restaurants in densely populated areas, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Accel Partners. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

Iterable, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company behind a marketing-automation platform for e-commerce companies, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Merus Capital, 645 Ventures, TEEC Angels, 500 Startups and individual investors.

Koru, a 1.5-year-old, Seattle-based talent marketplace that helps college grads find jobs at tech companies, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Maveron, with participation from City Light Capital, Trilogy Equity Partners and earlier backers Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. The company has now raised $12.6 million altogether.

Mashable, a 10-year-old, New York-based media site that covers tech, entertainment, and business news, has raised $17 million in new funding led by Time Warner Investments, reports the WSJ. The company has now raised $31 million altogether.

Meta, a two-year-old, Portola Valley, Ca.-based augmented reality headset maker, has raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Horizons Ventures, Tim Draper, BOE Optoelectronics and Y-Combinator partners Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian. Other participants in the round include Danhua Capital, Commodore Partners and Vegas Tech Fund. Venture Capital Dispatch has more here.

Tripda, a 10-month-old, New York-based long-distance carpooling platform, has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Rocket Internet AG and an unnamed New York venture firm.

Tune, a 5.5-year-old, Seattle-based company whose software helps marketers manage their performance advertising relationships, has raised $27 million in fresh funding led by Icon Ventures, with participation from Performance Equity Management and earlier backer Accel Partners. The company has now raised $36.4 million altogether. Recode has more here.

Whistle, the 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of dog activity trackers, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Nokia Growth Partners, with participation from Qualcomm, Melo7 Tech Partners, and QueensBridge Venture Partners. The company, which has now raised $25 million altogether, has also acquired a competitor, San Diego-based Tagg, for an undisclosed sum.

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New Funds

Recruit Holdings, a Tokyo-based human resources company, is launching a $20 million strategic corporate venture fund that will invest in human resource startups across various stages.

Techstars Ventures, which got its start nearly eight years ago in Boulder, Co., has closed a $150 million early-stage fund. Venture Capital Dispatch has much more here.

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Exits

Esker, which makes document process automation software and trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, has acquired TermSync, a Fitchburg, Wi.-based cloud-based accounts receivable platform, for undisclosed terms. TermSync had raised $2 million from individual investors.

Fingerprint, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based kid-focused learning and entertainment platform, has acquired two smaller children’s mobile education companies: Cognitive Kid and Scribble Press. Fingerprint has raised $20 million from investors, including Reed Elsevier Ventures, Corus Entertainment, and DreamWorks Animation. TechCrunch has more here.

Performant Financial Corp., whose software helps its customers reduce waste and recover lost assets, is acquiring Premier Healthcare Exchange for $108 million in cash and $22 million in Performant common stock. Premier had raised $4 million from the growth equity firm Edison Partners.

Slack, the enterprise collaboration service, has acquired Screenhero, a Y Combinator alum that competes against WebEx. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Screenhero had raised $1.8 million from investors, shows Crunchbase. TechCrunch has the story here.

Teespring, a Providence, R.I.-based custom apparel startup, has acquired London-based competitor Fabrily for undisclosed terms. Fabrily was bootstrapped. Teespring has raised $57 million from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator.

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People

Arsenal Venture Partners, a Winter Park, Fl.-based venture firm, has appointed two new partners, promoting principal Jennifer Dunham and hiring Ryan Waddington. Dunham joined the firm nearly 17 years ago. Waddington most recently cofounded Michigan-based Huron River Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm.

Bryan Hale has re-joined DFJ as an EIR, the firm announced earlier this week. Hale worked for DFJ before joining its portfolio company, Chef Software, in 2009. Before first coming to DFJ in 2007, Hale worked in corporate development at Salesforce and as an analyst at UBS.

TPG has sued its former spokesman, Adam Levine, claiming he took confidential documents from the private-equity firm and leaked them to the New York Times after he was denied a promotion and told that TPG was considering replacing him atop its public relations group. Levine’s camp unsurprisingly has a very different story, saying he had “alerted TPG senior management to serious issues of noncompliance and defrauding its investors of millions of dollars in fees and expenses,” and calls the suit a “blatant and shameful attempt to discredit a whistleblower.” Much more here.

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Happenings

StrictlyVC’s first INSIDER event takes place two weeks from today in San Francisco, featuring Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Strava cofounder Mark Gainey, Sigma West cofounder Greg Gretsch, and Haystack founder Semil Shah. Much thanks to our wonderful sponsors Ballou PR, Next World Capital and Standish Management for making the whole thing possible.

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Job Listings

Yahoo is looking to add an associate to its corporate development team. (We’d told you about this one a couple of weeks ago without a link; the company shot it to us yesterday.)

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Data

Facebook reported fourth quarter financial results yesterday that topped analysts’ estimates. Some of the interesting data points from its call: More than half a billion people access Facebook exclusively from their phones. Mobile now accounts for 69 percent of its ad business, up from 53 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013. And video on the platform is exploding, with daily video views hitting 3 billion in the fourth quarter, up from 1 billion last September.

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Essential Reads

Apple and Samsung are in a dead heat for smartphone dominance, according to new data from the research firm Strategy Analytics.

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Detours

The rich design history of the selfie stick.

Optical illusions using typography.

Writer and blogging pioneer Andrew Sullivan signs off.

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Retail Therapy

After eight years in the making, the Acura NSX is available for purchase.

Way to ruin meal time, Ronit Baranga.