Delving into Digital Marketing?: Funding Daily: Let’s get Sapphic

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Funding Daily: Let’s get Sapphic

Here are the day’s funding stories:

Vessel raises 475M

Jason Kilar, the well-regarded former chief exec of streaming TV service Hulu, has secured a fat $75 million round of funding for his new startup Vessel. News of Kilar’s new startup first popped up last year under the nickname the Fremont Project, as the company slowly hired several other former Hulu execs, including former CTO Richard Tom, former ad head Jean-Paul Colaco, former senior software dev Zachary Pinter, former VP of product Loon Lee, and others. And yesterday, Kilar released a brief statement on Vessel’s website with more details about the company — specifically, what the startup plans to do and who is cutting the checks.

Read more on VentureBeat: Former Hulu boss raises $75M for new video startup Vessel

mCube gets $37M

In its third round of institutional financing, mobile sensor-maker mCube has announced that it has raised $37 million. The company’s existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, MediaTek, iD Ventures America and DAG Ventures, all participated in the financing round. Additionally, new investors including Keytone Ventures, SK Telecom (China) Ventures and Korea Investment Partners joined the effort as well. “mCube is well positioned with the world’s smallest MEMS motion sensors to enable this high-growth new market we refer to as the Internet of Moving Things,” said Ben Lee, mCube president and CEO.

Meet You announces $35M

Meet You, a Chinese app for females to track their periods, announced yesterday $35 million in funding led by SIG. Matrix Partners China and China Renaissance K2 Ventures also participated. New funds will be injected in the construction of the team and its female community, the company said.

Read more on VentureBeat: Period tracker Meet You announces $35M in fresh funding

Fingerprint pulls in $11M

Fingerprint makes the type of apps parents love — and DreamWorks Animation is a big fan of them, too. Kids’ app developer Fingerprint has raised $10.85 million in new funding, the company announced today. Its press release declined to mention the investors by name, but DreamWorks led the round.

Sapho gets $3M

Investors have just bankrolled Sapho, a stealthy startup with mobile apps that aggregate alerts and basic functions from lots of enterprise software companies already use. With the new $3 million in seed funding, Sapho intends to bolster its development team and expand its range. One key objective: supporting more tools out there, including cloud-based software, Sapho co-founder and chief technology officer Peter Yared told VentureBeat in an interview. [Editor's note: In case you were wondering, as we did, why the company's name is a misspelling of ancient-Greek lesbian poet's name, Yared revealed, "It's named after a Dune reference --- sapho, the juice of mentats!" Hope that clears everything up.]

Parko gets $1M

Israeli startup Parko successfully raised $1.1 million in seed funding for its API, which uses crowdsourced data to help drivers find available parking spots in real time. SparkLabs, Global Ventures, OurCrowd, and European angel investors participated in the round. VoIP pioneer and Vonage co-founder Jeff Pulver also joined Parko’s board of advisors.