paidContent » trinity ventures

Social Ad Net RadiumOne Raises $21 Million For Acquisitions

David Kaplan — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 06:00:16 +0000

RadiumOne, an ad network that targets ads around users’ social graph, has closed a $21 million second round funding to support its international expansion plans and its acquisition strategy. The move comes amid a number of M&A and funding deals around targeting consumers based on their social connections.

The San Francisco company’s funding round led by Crosslink Capital. DFJ Esprit also participated in the round along with previous investors Adams Street Partners and Trinity Ventures, bringing total funding to $33.5 million.

As behavioral targeting still proves popular, but fraught with some risks from regulation and general imprecisions, more companies are positioning themselves to ride the wave of social networking.

In February, a similar company, online ad measurement and targeting firm Mindset, was bought by social content sharing and IM platform Meebo, which had raised a $25 million round last fall.

Just before the end of the year, Media6Degrees, which is one of the more established social media ad firms, raised a large $17 million funding, is also likely to begin making some acquisitions.

RadiumOne, which says it reached profitability in Q4, has mostly been looking overseas. It recently opened a UK office, and in the coming months, will be launching in continental Europe and Asia Pacific.

PlayFirst Raises $9.2 Million For Social Game Expansion

Joseph Tartakoff — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 23:06:22 +0000

Casual gaming firm PlayFirst has raised $9.2 million in its latest round of funding, which it will use to fund an expansion into mobile and social games. As part of the move, it has hired Eric Hartness, a former chief marketing officer at payment firm PlaySpan as its VP of social games. PlayFirst has historically been known for its downloadable games and online titles, although lately it has been launching games for Facebook and iOs. Chocolatier, for instance, which launched on Facebook over the last year, already has 800,000 monthly active users on the social network.

PlayFirst says $5.2 million of the round is new funding provided by the company’s existing investors, while the remainder is debt financing from Comerica Bank. The funding brings PlayFirst’s total backing to more than $35 million since the company was founded in late 2004. Previous backers include DCM, Mayfield Fund, Trinity Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners. Some more details in the release here.

Caregiver Search Site Care.com Raises $20 Million

Joseph Tartakoff — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:55:38 +0000

Care.com, a site that lets users find “caregivers,” like babysitters, nannies, and senior caregivers, has raised $20 million in a third round of funding. On the site, users pay a monthly fee to get access to detailed profiles, which include background checks and references, of caregivers who are looking for work; some limited information is also available for free. Care.com currently has listings in 33 U.S. cities.

The site is one of several betting that people will pay to access higher-quality, specialized reviews, despite the abundance of free ones online. In late September, Angie’s List, a site that charges its users a monthly membership fee to access information on local service professionals, like contractors, raised $22.5 million in a round of funding.

Care.com’s funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates and brings the company’s total funding to $36 million, according to a report in TechCrunch. Previous backers Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures also participated. There are some more details in the release here.

TubeMogul Raises $10 Million For Online Video Analytics

Joseph Tartakoff — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 23:51:42 +0000

TubeMogul, which provides online video analytics and other video tools to publishers and advertisers, has raised $10 million in its latest funding round. TubeMogul says its analytics services, which show metrics like stream quality, audience geography, and referring sites, are used by video platform Brightcove, along with “most of the top video sharing and social networking sites.” TubeMogul also has as a seven-month-old ad platform that to date has been used to run more than 200 campaigns.

Some of the new cash will be used to expand the ad platform, and Silicon Alley Insider quotes CEO Brett Wilson as saying that the company is “undergoing a shift” to focus on it. Revenue, according to a report in TechCrunch, will be $10 million this year, up from $2.6 million a year ago.

The new funding round, which brings TubeMogul’s total backing to $15 million, was led by Foundation Capital; existing backers Trinity Ventures and Knight’s Bridge Capital partners also participated. The company had last raised cash in March 2009, when it raised $3 million.

Some more details in the release.

Triangulate Gets Cash From Playdom Chairman, Others For Facebook Dating App

Joseph Tartakoff — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:00:04 +0000

Triangulate, a startup trying to build an online dating business on Facebook, has raised $750,000 from Trinity Ventures and Playdom Chairman Rick Thompson. Triangulate is the latest so-called “social dating” site to attract interest from investors; Zoosk, the most established player in the market, has raised more than $40 million, while SmartDate, raised $2.2 million in March.

Triangulate’s Facebook app, called Wings, uses data from a member’s Facebook profile, as well as from their accounts on Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Twitter and Foursquare, to automatically generate a basic dating profile for them, which includes topics they are interested in, where they like to hang out, and who their friends tend to be.

Users can edit the profiles, but by relying primarily on users’ online actions, instead of what members say about themselves, CEO Sunil Nagaraj says Wings can make better matches. The service is free to use, although members can use Facebook Credits to pay for additional options, like sending more messages to other members.

Wings launched “in earnest” in June, and so far has roughly 40,000 users. That isn’t quite enough to make it useful in some geographies. For instance, in Seattle, where I live, it only returned 10 possible matches even after I said I was interested in a very big range of possible partners. But Nagaraj tells us that the service currently has its biggest user base in California and is planning to use some of the cash it just raised to build up its user base via marketing.

Blog Platform Posterous Raises $4.4 Million More

Joseph Tartakoff — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:01:46 +0000

Posterous, the popular quick blogging platform, has raised $4.4 million in additional funding, CEO Sachin Agarwal tells us. The site — which is likely best known for letting users blog simply by e-mailing text, photos, or files to a default Posterous account — has grand ambitions for its service; it says it “wants to become synonymous with ‘posting,’ just like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is synonymous with ‘search.’”

The startup had previously raised two angel rounds, including $725,000 in December 2008, from investors including former Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj (now a Redpoint partner) and former Netscape CEO Eric Hahn. Last June, it purchased Slinkset, a startup which makes it easy for users to set up Digg-like social news sites.

The new cash comes from Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital, XG Ventures among others. The cash — which brings the company’s total funding on par with that of arch-rival Tumblr — will be used to fund expansion.

Crowdsourcing Startup CrowdFlower Raises $5 Million

Joseph Tartakoff — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:26 +0000

CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing startup that recruits thousands of people online to complete repetitive tasks for big companies, has raised $5 million in a first round of funding co-led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. CrowdFlower matches companies with big groups of workers, who complete basic tasks like verifying that business listings match certain phone numbers or flagging inappropriate images on user-generated sites; CrowdFlower then uses machine learning algorithms to check the quality of the work.

Earlier this fall, CrowdFlower also launched an iPhone app so that iPhone owners could verify the work of some of its workers who live in Kenyan refugee camps (Read our profile of that initiative here).

In conjunction with the funding news, CrowdFlower is also laying out some stats, which it says point to its success: CrowdFlower completed more than eight million tasks for its clients in 2009. More than 125,000 people participated. And the volume of labor the company has facilitated is up 760 percent over the last year.

The company says the funding will be used to “expand its range of client solutions and bring on-demand labor to clients around the world.” With the new cash, CrowdFlower will have raised $6.2 million since its start in late 2007.

TargetCast Buys Out-of-Home Digital Network Ripple TV

Tameka Kee — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:39:09 +0000

More consolidation in the out-of-home digital ad space … TargetCast Networks (TCN) has acquired Ripple TV, a retail digital ad network based in El Segundo, Calif. Financial terms were not disclosed. Ripple TV, which raised $4 million (pdf) in funding from DFJ and Trinity Ventures in March, runs its network of ads and content in SoCal stores like The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and Gelson’s. Together, the combined companies say they will now garner 3.9 million weekly views across over 3,400 screens.

San Ramon, Calif.-based TCN, which will rebrand Ripple TV’s screens under its own logo, is backed by Claremont Creek Ventures. The deal comes roughly two months after Danoo bought rival out-of-home digital network IdeaCast; the companies have since rebranded as Reach Media Group. Release.

Avaak Raises $7M First Round For Wireless Video Networking

Amanda Natividad — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:03:19 +0000

Avaak, a provider of wireless video network technology, has closed its first round of funding of $7 million. Trinity Ventures led the round with participation from InterWest Partners as well as Leapfrog Ventures. The San Diego, CA-based company will use the funds to support product development, marketing and sales of its new product, scheduled for an early 2009 release. Its technology aims to apply imaging apps where video and snapshots can be viewed, captured and shared without the use of wiring cameras or downloading software. Avaak was first developed in 2004 with seed funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Office of Naval Research (ONR) for use in security applications and was recently awarded an additional $3 million contract by the ONR. Release.

Ex-Yahoo’s UpTake Gets $10 Million Second Round For Travel Search

Joseph Weisenthal — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:16:25 +0000

UpTake, a travel search startup, has raised a $10 million second round led by Trinity Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The Palo Alto, CA-based company previously raised $4 million from Shasta last December, for a total raise of $14 million. The company was founded by Yen Lee, formerly the GM of Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO) Travel, so this isn’t a new area for him. The difference between UpTake and a site like Yahoo’s UpTake is striving to be more meta, drawing on info from a range of travel sites, like TripAdvisor, Expedia and Yahoo! Travel. The company will use the funding to expand its offerings, build out its technology and for growth via acquisition. No doubt there are a lot of tiny travel sites out there to be scarfed up. Release.