Online Investment Company Wealthfront Raises $20 Million

Wealthfront is an online investment company that has raised $20 million led by Index Ventures.  Other investors that have participated in this round include The Social + Capital Partnership and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder).  Existing investor DAG Ventures also participated in this round.  Other investors that participated in this round include Matt Mullenweg, Andy Dunn, Adam D’Angelo, Michael Schroepfer, Hunter Walk, Cipora Herman, Satya Patel, and several others.

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Quora Will Be Expanding Beyond Q&A

Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo wrote on the company blog earlier this week that they intend on expanding beyond a Q&A format.  “Today Quora is largely questions and answers, but that is not the ideal format for all knowledge. Other formats will gradually be added as we scale up.”

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Asana Raises $28 Million

Asana is a web and mobile application company that has raised $28 million in a round of funding led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.  Asana was launched by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and engineer Justin Rosenstein.  Both of them previously worked on improving the productivity of Facebook employees.  Peter Thiel was an early investor in Facebook.  Matt Cohler and Adam D’Angelo of Benchmark Capital also worked on the Asana deal.

Facebook Outbid Twitter For Instagram

When Facebook bought out Instagram, they had outbid Twitter for a deal. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was also an investor in Instagram and he tried to purchase the company before Facebook. Dorsey had used Instagram on a daily basis to send photos to Twitter, but since the deal has been announced he stopped using it.
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Facebook Acquiring Instagram For $1 Billion

Facebook has announced that they are acquiring Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application, for $1 billion in cash and stock. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement on a profile post from his account. Zuckerberg said that they are planning to allow Instagram run independently from Facebook. It was only three days ago where it was that Instagram raised $50 million.
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Quora Hires Sandra Liu Huang From Facebook

Q&A website Quora has hired Sandra Liu Huang, a product executive at Facebook. She will be the lead of product development at Quora. Huang previously worked on the Instant Personalization program where TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Pandora integrated Facebook into their services.
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Instagram Raises $7 Million and Hits 1.75 Million Users

Instagram is a photo editing iPhone application that lets you add filters to the snapshots that you take. Instagram has hit 1.75 million users and they have seen about 290,000 photo uploads per day. The company has raised $7 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and individual investors such as Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca, and Adam D’Angelo. [BusinessInsider]