Qubole that was founded by former Facebook engineers Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma. The company has raised $7 million in funding between their seed round in late 2011 and their recent Series A, according to GigaOM. Qubole is building the next generation cloud data platform, which hides the complexity of storing and managing data. Qubole’s services can run a variety of Hadoop tasks like Hive, MapReduce, and Pig in the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Dropbox has bought Mailbox, a popular e-mail application for iOS. Mailbox will remain a separate application, but the application’s developers and team will be joining Dropbox. CEO Drew Houston said Dropbox “could help Mailbox reach a much different audience much faster.” Mailbox’s technology will be used to improve Dropbox’s features like the ability to handle e-mail attachments.
TrueLens is a marketing startup that has raised $1.2 million and they have unveiled a core customer intelligence product called Socialgraphics. TrueLens co-founder and CEO Roy Rodenstein believes that the company is in a different bucket than other social marketing companies.
Zendesk is an online customer service company that has raised $60 million in new financing led by Redpoint Ventures. Index Ventures, GGV Capital, Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Matrix Partners also participated in this round. The round was $45 million in equity and $15 million in a credit facility.
Ark is a people search engine launched at Y Combinator Demo Day that has raised $4.2 million in a seed round of funding. Ark crawls Facebook, RenRen, LinkedIn, and Twitter to find out as much data as possible. The founders at Ark got the idea for the startup when they found out that 30% of searches are for people.
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Millennial Media is a mobile ad network that has debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MM.” The shares popped 97% in the first trade of $25. Millennial Media’s valuation jumped to almost $2 billion and the company priced their IPO at $13 per share. Trading reached as high as $27.90 in early trading.
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AOL has acquired Hipster and their five-person team will be working at the company’s mobile team in Palo Alto, California. They will be reporting to Sol Lipman. Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow will be the director of mobile product management. Hipster will not be shut down.
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Yammer, the service that is known as the Twitter-for-enterprise, has raised $85 million in funding, which brings them to a total of $142 million. This is Yammer’s fifth round of funding. DFJ Growth led the investment. New investors Meritech Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Capricorn Investment Group joined in this round. The existing investors that also participated include Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund. Randy Glein of DFJ Growth will be joining Yammer’s board of directors.
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