There are only a certain number of start-ups that can walk around feeling like over a billion dollars or more.  Facebook and LinkedIn are both in that club.   And now Twitter will be joining the billionaire’s club in their next round of funding that will give them that valuation.  Twitter co-founder revealed a new round of potential funding that will put them at a $1 billion valuation at an all hands meeting according to a TechCrunch source.

Twitter will raised $50 million to receive the $1 billion valuation.  In the past Twitter had already raised $35 million from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.  The $35 million round gave them a valuation of $250 million.  Thus far Twitter has raised $55 million in funding.  That should keep them going for a while despite not having a revenue model.  The rumored investor in the upcoming round is expected to be New York based venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners.

In less than 2 years since launching, Mint.com is supposedly selling themselves to Intuit Inc. Mint.com is a financial tool that allows you to aggregate all of your bank and credit card information and find ways to save money. The deal is expected to close within the next few days.

Mint had launched at the TechCrunch50 conference two years ago and took the top prize giving them $50,000. Mint raised $31.8 million in total funding from First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, Hite Capital, DAG Ventures, and The Founders Fund. Angel investors in Mint include Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Geoff Ralston, and Dave McClure.

This acquisition is interesting because Intuit had previously sent Mint a letter demanding an explanation for how they jumped to 850,000 users within several months.

Riot Games is a social game development company that is best known for creating the League of Legends.  Earlier this week Riot Games announced that they have raised about $8 million in Series B.  The investors include Benchmark Capital, FirstMark Capital, and Tencent Holdings.  Rather than making revenue from advertising, Tencent and Riot games depend on the sales of virtual goods.

Riot Games is currently developing an online game platform which is what the funding will go towards.  Considering that Tencent is one of the largest virtual good dealers in China, they may even lend their expertise to Riot Games.  The company is licensing the League of Legends in China and will launch in the country by 2010.

Tencent is the parent company of Internet portal QQ.com.  They sell virtual goods through their portal, IM software, social networks, and games.  These virtual goods include pets, clothing, wallpapers, etc.  Tencent made about $700 million last year according to BusinessInsider.

Fanbase.com officially launched today.  Fanbase has been in development over the last 18 months and was even backed with $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital.  Fanbase aims to connect sports fans from all over the world through sharing of information that covers every team, every athlete, and every sport.

As of right now about 500,000 users have made about 60,000 contributions to the website.  Now there is information available across 1.7 million athletes and 20,000 teams.  Now that there is a large amount of information on teams and athletes, the next step is getting as many photos and videos in the website.

Fanbase was co-founded by Nirav Tolia who also led Epinions.com in a previous job.  Epinions was eventually sold to eBay.

Polyvore is a fashion website that has a drag and drop interface for mixing and matching clothes from different stores.  Polyvore recently raised $5.6 million in capital from Matrix Partners.  Dana Stalder of Matrix will be joining as a Board member of Polyvore.

The previous round of funding that Polyvore had was $2.5 million from Benchmark Capital and other angel investors.  Stadler joined Matrix last year after previously working at PayPal.

“I think e-commerce as it has been done for the last 10 to 15 years on the Internet doesn’t work particularly well for soft goods — people are buying books the same way they’re buying skirts online,” stated Stadler. “This site has the ability to revolutionize e-commerce and the apparel category.”

Peter Fenton was one of the lead partners behind the investments in SpringSource and FriendFeed.  Both of these companies were acquired this past Monday.  SpringSource was acquired for $420 million by VMWare and FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook for about $50 million.

Fenton also sits on Twitter’s and Yelp’s board of directors. Benchmark started in 1995 and manages about $2.5 billion in assets.  Benchmark made a substantial amount by investing early in eBay too.

Fenton’s staregy for choosing the right companies to invest in is based on when the company’s adoption curve meets the declining risk curve.  “The challenge is to identify the acceleration/adoption phase before it’s obvious.”  Before SpringSource was acquired, he was deeply involved in the $10 million investment into the company.

[via VentureBeat]

Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) has acquired Pure Digital Technologies Inc. for $590 million in stock.  Pure Digital is a company that makes digital cameras and video camcorders.  In addition to paying $590 million, Cisco will pay about $15 million in equity incentives to keep Pure Digital workers on board.

Pure Digital builds the Flip Video camcorder for $150-$230.  The Flip Video can record 60 minutes of video and can be plugged into USB drives.  These videos can be uploaded to YouTube.

Pure Digital started about 8 years ago and was powered by VC capital by Sequoia and Benchmark Capital.

The service that makes you blog at less than 140 characters and has built an ecosystem around it has raised additional funding.  This round of funding is at over $50 million and is part of the third round.

This round of funding was put together by Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.  Considering Twitter’s 900% growth in a year, it is no surprise that these two venture capital firms wanted to be a part of it.  Twitter wasn’t exactly planning on receiving additional investment since they still have money left over from previous rounds of funding.  There could be a lot of money made for the VC companies if Twitter receives an acquisition offer for what they are currently being valuated at.

Facebook already reportedly threw a $500 million offer in their direction in the form of cash and stock, but Twitter decided to walk away.  It may have been a good move since Facebook’s stock value has been fluctuating quite a bit between the internal numbers and the valuation that Microsoft based their investment on.

From a traction stand point, investing in Twitter makes sense.  But many people are raising their eye brows based on the fact that Twitter does not have a revenue model.  Many companies are starting to realize that just having advertising may not cut it in terms of a business strategy.  I believe that if Twitter can ride through the recession they may not necessarily need a revenue plan. Why do I say this?

Here is a one word example: YouTube.  Remember the time before YouTube got acquired for $1.6 billion?  YouTube barely had any profit and was also being closely watched by major TV companies in terms of litigation.  When Google bought out YouTube, Viacom quickly slapped them with a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit.  Google still has trouble dealing with the monetization of YouTube.  Google already knew this would be an issue at the time of the acquisition, but that did not stop them.

Now Google owns the number one video site in the world and has a hell of a marketing tool at their disposal.  Google used YouTube to inform people about the Chrome web browser.  Google Chrome gained quite a bit of market share for being a brand new browser.

This could be the same case with Twitter minus the litigation.  Twitter is a major marketing tool that any bigger company could make tremendous use of.  An investment in Twitter was probably the best that a VC could make right about now, despite the lack of a revenue model.  No profit, no problem.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has invested in Move Networks, Inc. to help support the company’s initiative to develop video technology using Microsoft Silverlight.  The official announcement should be released soon on Microsoft PressPass.

Although it is not known how much was invested by Microsoft, a source claims that it was an add-on investment on a $46 million Series C that closed last summer.   Other investors that participated in Move’s Series C includes Comcast, Cisco Systems, Benchmark Capital, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, and Steamboat Ventures.  Move is now valuated at around $150 million.

Related Link:
1. PEHub

“Gizmoz has enjoyed widespread adoption by consumers, advertisers and media partners over the last year, and with a number of exciting new products, programs and partnerships underway, the company is poised for significant expansion in 2008,” stated Eyal Gever, CEO/Founder of Gizmoz. “As we move forward on a number of key initiatives, building cross platform synergies into our service is at the top of the list. To pursue our strategy, Asia will be key. This financing will play an important role in helping us develop unique offerings for this market.”

Today Gizmoz, a social network that allows users to make 3D faces sync with their voices has raised $6.5 million. This is Gizmoz second round of funding, led by DoCoMo Capital. Other investors of this round includes Benchmark Capital, ngi capital inc., and Columbia Capital.

Gizmoz plans on using this round of funding to introduce their services around Asia, starting in Japan.

“Japan represents a large and strategic market for the company. Gizmoz’s offerings come at an opportune time in the development of Japan’s extensive mobile ecosystem, and they should feed the strong desire of Japanese consumers to embrace innovative content enhanced by Gizmoz’s technology,” stated Nobuyuki Akimoto, President and CEO of DoCoMo Capital.

AIM users may have also noticed on the start page that Gizmoz has signed a deal with AOL. AOL Instant Messenger, the most used messaging system in the U.S. can now create AIM Gizmoz Expressions and connect it to their account. Gizmoz previously advertised for Taco Bell and has a Facebook Application called In Your Face. Gizmoz widgets can be embedded in Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, and MySpace pages as well.

Competitors include JibJab and Blabberize. Gizmoz was started in 2003 and has offices in Menlo Park, Calif. and Israel.

“We got involved in an exciting and competitive investment in Bebo because we believed in the social networking space and the fact that Bebo was positioned for exponential growth,” stated Barry Maloney, a partner at Balderton.  “Our expectations for Bebo have been exceeded in a relatively short period of time, and today’s transaction with AOL has delivered an exceptional return on our original investment in 2006.”

The venture capital firm, Balderton Capital has sold off their shares of Bebo to AOL today.  The amount that they will earn from the deal is $140 million.  This is about 9 times the return on investment that they made into the social network 2 years ago.  Balderton plugged in $15 million to Bebo in May 2006.  Balderton also invested in MySQL, which sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion.

Balderton is based in London, England.  Balderton also invested in Betfair, Codemasters, Habbo Hotel, Setanta Sports.  Balderton used to be the European arm of Benchmark Capital.

Metacafe has over 25 million unique views per month. And yesterday the company officially announced that they have officially raised $30 million in Series C from Highland Capital, DAG Ventures, Accel Partners, and Benchmark Capital. While YouTube dominates traffic for online video, it seems that Metacafe has a more established business model since users are actually rewarded financially for their creativity.

“Metacafe is defining the next generation of online video, moving away from simple video sharing and hosting to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience for short-form content, said Richard de Silva, Partner, Highland Capital Partners. “Its sophisticated approach to audience-driven programming is unique in the industry.”

With this round of funding, Metacafe plans on supporting continuous operations and developing the Producer Rewards program further. The Producer Rewards program gives users a financial incentive to develop intriguing video content. For every thousand views a video gets on a site, the user will receive $5. The video has to reach a minimum of 20,000 views.

Highland Capital Partners’ Richard de Silva and DAG Ventures’ Tom Goodrich will join Metacafe’s Board of Directors. Metacafe is privately headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and NYC, NY.

References:
[1] alarm:clock: Video Site MetaCafe Hammers $30M Round

Avvo.com, a start-up that is currently in stealth mode.  The company is based in Seattle, WA and is run by former Microsoft and Expedia founders.  The $10 million in funding was provided by Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital.

The first round of funding was for $3 million so that brings them a grand total of $13 million.  Mark Britton is the CEO/President and was a previous Executive VP of Worldwide Corporate Affairs at InterActiveCorp Travel / Expedia Inc.  Paul Bloom is the VP of Products & Marketing at Avvo and is a former senior manager at Microsoft’s Consumer Division.

Through this fround of funding, Brad Silverberg will be joining the board of directors.  Silverberg is a founding partner at Ignition Partners.

“This investment from Ignition and Benchmark further supports our belief that we have the right solution for helping consumers navigate the highly confusing legal industry,” stated Britton. “Brad is simply the perfect addition to our team with his extensive operating experience, technological prowess and raw smarts. We are lucky to have him.”

For more information, there is a press release available on the Avvo.com Press page.