The Rubicon Project is a Los Angeles, California based advertising-optimization start-up company co-founded by Frank Addante, Craig Roah, Duc Chau, and Julie Mattern. The company has just raised a $9 million Series C round of funding, putting them at a total of $43 million. The Series C investors include Peacock Equity, Clearstone Venture Partners, and Mayfield Fund.

Rubicon Project has about 1,300 clients which include Gannett, Salon, Washington Post, and Newsweek. They optimize over 15 billion ads per month across 300 advertising networks. Rubicon monetizes ad space that has been unsold by ad networks.

Earlier this month Rubicon Project acquired Others Online. The Others Online CEO and founder Jordan Mitchell became the VP of Data Intelligence at Rubicon as a result of the acquisition.

Background checking company Intelius has bought Spock.com, a search engine that “tracks people.”  The data is mainly grabbed from social network profiles (Friendster, MySpace, etc.) and search results for names.

Jaideep Singh confirmed the deal with VentureBeat and TechCrunch speculated the deal earlier.  Spock raised $8 million around December 2006 from Clearstone and Opus.  Spock receives about 10 million unique visitors per month according to Singh.  Some buyers passed on Spock, but other offers were made too.

No word on the financial details about the transactions.  Intelius, Inc. made about $55 million in revenue in 2006 and the company was considering going IPO last year to raise around $143.75 million.

ThisNext.com is a website based in Los Angeles, Calif. that is known for providing a way for mom-and-pop e-commerce to sell to a broad market of Internet consumers.  By building a  hub for products that are “different” from typical retailers, ThisNext narrows their customer demographics and at the same time distinguishes themselves from other Internet e-commerce companies.

ThisNext belongs to a category of “social shopping” and is taking on other web companies in the same space such as Kaboodle, Wists, and StyleHive. Today, StyleNext announced that they have formally hired a President and board member, Scott Morrow.

Morrow was previously an executive at IAC/CitySearch and was the head of marketing/sales for Download.com, a subsidiary of CNET Networks. Morrow will handle the business strategy operations of ThisNext.  ThisNext’s CEO is Gordon Gould.

Venture capital investors of ThisNext include Anthem Venture Partners and Clearstone Venture Partners.

“It takes a great team to build a great company. We have an outstanding execution team with solid fundamentals and high aspirations.”
-Frank Addante, CEO and Founder of the Rubicon Project

The Rubicon Project is a Los Angeles based Internet advertising technology company. The company announced that they raised $6 million in funding for its operations. The Rubicon Project is named after a river in Italy and also has an idiom that means a point of no return [Source: Rubicon Project-About].

The investors include Clearstone Venture Partners ($4 Million) and Square1Bank ($2 million). “It takes a great team to build a great company. We have an outstanding execution team with solid fundamentals and high aspirations. Clearstone’s philosophies, as an investment partner, makes for an ideal match,” stated Frank Addante, the CEO and Founder of The Rubicon Project. “Clearstone’s past successes with Overture on the advertising side and PayPal for automated billing systems translates perfectly with the markets that the Rubicon Project is aggressively pursuing.”

The Rubicon Project will launch in private beta on October 8, 2007. Individual Rubicon team profiles are available at: http://www.rubiconproject.com/team.html.

Dollar Amount Involved: $1.9 Million
YouMail is a start up company that has brought on a veteran from America Online as their CEO and has raised $1.9 million in angel funding. The company is planning to offer a service that converts voice into text. Luis Villalobos was the lead investor in YouMail. Former AOL executive, Alex Quilici is now the YouMail CEO. YouMail is based in Irvine, CA.

One of the co-founders of YouMail, Ken Brickley mentioned that the funding will allow the company to attract more users. In regards to the market potential, Brickley stated, “In the U.S. alone, there are 150 billion voice mails a year.” Brickley plans to turn these voice mails into page views. YouMail is currently filing for several patents.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $17 Million
Mimosa Systems, an information management solutions company that offers services such as e-mail archiving and recovery in Santa Clara, CA has announced today that they have raised $17 million in Series C funding.The new round of funding was provided the $17 mill was led by Mayfield Fund and was joined by previous investors: Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

“Mimosa is a rising star in the multi-billion dollar, white-hot live content archiving market for unstructured and semi- structured information management, a critical need that is being fueled by eDiscovery and regulatory compliance,” stated Navin Chaddha, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. With significant customer momentum and an experienced management team, Mimosa is poised to lead the email archiving market. We look forward to leveraging our global network of resources to propel Mimosa’s worldwide growth.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $100 Million
New York based Dice Holdings, Inc. is preparing to file for an IPO soon. The amount will be worth $100 million in common stock and will trade under NYSE. Several major financial underwriters such as Credit Suisse Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley will underwrite the IPO.

Dice Holdings has several brands under its name including one of the most renown technology and engineering job board websites, Dice.com.The company also operates eFinancialCareers (acquired on October 31, 2006), JobsintheMoney (finance/accounting job board), ClearanceJobs (U.S. government security clearance job board), TargetedJobFairs (job fair/career event board), and CybermediaDice (Tech job board in India).

Dice has also previously worked on a project to help former Enron employees get back on their feet.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
RIPL is an upcoming social network that is based in Seattle and will have advertisement supported music and photo sharing services. Currently the website is only accessible by those who have an invitation or attend the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida.RIPL will have a product called the RIPL Receiver (which I’m assuming is a widget) that will sample music, videos, photos, and people in one’s network on the website. RIPL’s marketing plan hopes to emulate a similar technique as the iPod. Start from the teenage generation and then move up/down the age spectrum.The site was founded in December 2005 and raised $1.1 million in Series A Preferred seed capital in July 2006. Now it is rumored that the company has raised an additional $2 million as a Series A funding according to a regulatory filing.

 

RIPL is led by CEO, Bill Messing who is a former VP of Production at Classmates Online and a former Director of MSN.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $10 Million

Cellfish Media, LLC is a New York based company that has a website where users can download games, ringtones, and share videos and photos with friends. Cellfish services are compatible with Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony phones.

 

Cellfish has announced yesterday that they have raised $10 million from Solidarity Fund QFL. It had previously raised $50 million in October from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund, and from a Desjardins Venture Capital affiliate. Cellfish is a subsidiary of French company, Lagardere Group.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Coming Soon

Zoodango is a social network for professionals that is looking to take LinkedIn head on. Currently, Zoodango receives about 30,000 page views per day and had close to 3,000 profiles. Zoodango focuses more on setting up face-to-face meetings for professionals.

 

Zoodango announced that within 30 days they will announce an investment from “big profile strategic investors.” Zoodango has received angel funding from a Seattle-based billionaire investor.

The founder of Zoodango is James Sun, who is also a contestant on Donald Trump/NBC’s The Apprentice-Los Angeles.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $6 Million
Reply!, a decision search engine has attained $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Debi Coleman (former CFO of Apple Inc.). Reply! is looked at as a competitor to Zillow.

Reply! was started in San Ramon, Calif. 6 years ago and used to be known as Next Phase Media.

Through this round of funding, Reply! intends on extending its services beyond real estate and automotive listings.

“We’d like to expand into other categories like insurance and home improvement,” stated founder and CEO, Payam Zamani. Randy Haykin, Managing Director of Outlook Ventures has stepped on the Reply! board of directors as a result of the funding.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Acquisition Speculations
Let’s just say that this digital advertising technology company is being eyed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The company acquired Tangozebra last month to gain a stronger market prescence in Europe.

 

The company announced a couple days ago that it is setting up an auction-like bidding system for advertisements. DoubleClick is based in New York and has been priced at an amount north of $2 billion.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $18 Million
OZON.ru is Russia’s largest e-commerce website for video, audio, books, games, and other electronics. It is known as “the Amazon.com of Russia.” Investors in the company have announced that they have plugged $18 million in the company. The funding was led by Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Cisco Systems Inc.

“With the support of our controlling shareholder BVCP, we at OZON.ru are extremely proud to have attracted top tier European investors such as Index Ventures. This investment round will allow us to pursue our ambitious growth strategy and further strengthen our logistical operations, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing Russian regions. We also look forward to benefiting from the extensive knowledge pool, expertise and international networks of our new shareholders,” stated Bernard Lukey, CEO of OZON.ru.

OZON has more than 260,000 items in 12 product categories and 400 suppliers. OZON has a distribution center in Tver and is HQed in Moscow.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $20 Million
Finally some good news from the mitten-shaped state… Ann Arbor, Mich. based company ForeSee Results has raised $20 million from Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and CFI Group.

 

ForeSee Results is an online satisfaction measurement company that utilizes methodologies from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Compuware Corporation and CFI Group are both co-founders of ForeSee Results.

My apologies for the slight delay in updates. I have been travelling a little bit the last couple days to Chicago and Minneapolis. But here’s a fresh update of tech deals:

Dollar Amount Involved: $114 Million
On Friday, March 30, Academy Music Group Holdings, Ltd. (AMG) confirmed that now a majority of the company is owned by Gaiety Investments [no website available] and Live Nation, Inc. Both Gaiety and Live Nation paid $114 million to purchase 56% of AMG from RJD Partners. AMG owns 12 music venues that host over 2500 events and attracts over 3 million in audience. AMG also owns Carling Academy Brixton and Shepherd’s Empire. Live Nation has the technology needed to stream concerts and events live so through this investment, AMG would constantly provide web content as well.

“AMG has one of the strongest live music venue brands in the UK,” stated Live Nation’s CEO Michael Rapino. “The venues that we are acquiring are among the best in the world. The acquisition of AMG will enable us to grow our UK venue network with a brand that music fans know and love.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $1 Million
Hercules Technology Growth Capital stated on Friday that they would be investing $1 million into Wallop. Wallop was launched on April 25, 2006 by Microsoft Corporation’s Research division and is based in Silicon Valley. The project is led by Karl Jacob and was backed with $13 million from Microsoft’s IP Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners, and Consor Capital.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $4.35 Million
CARTASITE is a Denver, Colorado based company that monitors remote assets in real time and uses a Network Operation Center (NOC) to interconnect with wireless carriers. Last year, authorities in Gainesville, FL recovered $1.5 million worth of art from a Budget truck driver that tried to run away and sell its cargo on eBay. However, the GPS system used in the truck was monitored by CARTASITE.”The irony is that Budget didn’t purchase our system as a theft recovery device,” stated David Armitage, the CEO of CARTASITE. “They are utilizing it as an inventory management tool that allows them to have enough vehicles in the right location at the right time.  It’s a huge operational benefit for them. The fact that it can also be used to handle rare situations like this is just a bonus.”It is because of this technology that Canterbury Partners and Arcadia Partners invested $4.35 million Series A into CARTASITE.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $7 Million
iUpload is a company that develops content manager, community publisher, and personal publisher online applications. The company is based in Burlington, Ontario Canada and serve major customers such as McDonald’s, Kodak, Northwestern Mutual, the New York Times and Newsweek. iUpload was founded in 1998.The Series A funding comes from Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Many customers are currently utilizing iUpload to set-up wikis, blogs, forms, and workflow diagrams.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
Sportsvite is a New York based company where users can invite each other to participate in various sports events. Sportsvite has roughly 20,000 members. The investor of Sportsvite is Grace Drive Management [no website available]. Although the website was funded last month, the amount was just declared to be $2 million as a first round.  Sportsvite was created by 212Media, who also operates 3 other companies: Bodvod, New Play Media, and Conscious Content.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $5 Million
Games2Win is a company based in Bombay, Maharashtra India that designs Adobe Flash games with comedic twists. Clearstone Venture Partners partnered with SVB Financial Group and led the $5 million recent investment into Games2Win. Games2Win also plans on launching multiplayer Flash games. Games2Win was founded by Mahesh Khambadkone and Cyrus Oshidar. “Internet users in India are still highly underserved when it comes to online entertainment that’s relevant and compelling. With its unique blend of topical, irreverent and action-packed games we are confident that Games2win will be a dominant player in the rapidly growing online gaming marketplace in India. With Clearstone’s track record of building category leading consumer internet businesses like Paypal, MP3.com and Etoys we look forward to building Games2Win into a globally recognized brand” stated Clearstone Director, Rahul Khanna.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $600,000
Austin, TX based company, Naturally Curly (www.naturallycurly.com) has recently announced that they have raised $600,000 from Jim Trebig,, Dr. Philip Sanger, and Tim Wall. The website was founded 9 years ago and has about 10,000 daily visitors.NaturallyCurly.com will use the funding for technical development and marketing. “Companies like NaturallyCurly have been able to see opportunities that have gone unnoticed by high-tech nerds like me,” stated Treybig. “The movement to communities like NaturallyCurly is the foundation for the future of advertising.”The founders of NaturallyCurly are Michelle Breyer and Gretchen Heber, who have also launched CurlyKids.com. NaturallyCurly.com was nominated in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition in Austin.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
John Mackay, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc. financed spiritual social network, Zaadz. Zaadz is based in Los Angeles and Brian Johnson is the founder and CEO. The social network has close to 50,000 users and calls itself a “place of political refuge for MySpace immigrants.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Search Physics is a startup that has developed a search engine capable of extracting content from websites, store additional information, classify links, and narrow down search results.Search Physics is based in San Francisco and raised an undisclosed amount of funding. The investors of Search Physics are Stanley Wong and David Shen, both from Yahoo! The founder of Search Physics is Dr. Minh Duong-van, a theory of chaos and quantum theory physicist.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $505,000
NeoSaej Corporation is a start-up that is currently in “stealth mode” (quiet about its idea for now). The company is based Burlington, Massachusetts. NeoSaej is looking to address “the severe inefficiencies in current online marketplaces, and greatly improves the e-commerce experience for all participants.”NeoSaej has received $505,000 of a $1 million Series A, led by Stata Venture Partners. The company was founded by Rohit Goyal in August 2006. Goyal is a former network engineer at Enterasys Networks.Another investor in NeoSaej is NeoNet Technologies, LLC.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
TRACE.TV has recently made a new partner: Universal Music Group. Universal Music Group will be providing TRACE with music and video rights. Universal will also provide TRACE.TV a weekly slot in Universal’s International Music Feed. TRACE was launched in 2003 in Paris, France and started out as True Magazine in London.TRACE is looking to expand to U.S. markets next year. Goldman Sachs is a previous investor.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $1.53 Million
Fliptrack is a website where users upload photos and videos and sync it with music provided. To keep the audience captive, the music is mainstream. Fliptrack is based in Mountain View, CA and has raised $1.53 million Series A funding by Mohr, Davidow Ventures, and other angel investors. Fliptrack raised $500,000 in angel funding. Fliptrack was founded by Stewart Putney.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $13.5 Million
Safeguard Scientifics has announced that it has provided $13.5 million in funding to Beyond.com. Beyond.com is based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and has more than 15,000 online communities. Beyond.com is aligned with Safeguard’s focus to partner with entrepreneurial technology companies that have a competitive advantage in Software as a Service (SaaS), Technology-Enabled Services and Internet-based businesses, stated Peter J. Boni, the President and CEO of Safeguard Scientifics. We’re executing upon our game plan to deploy capital in innovative and attractive companies to generate increased value for our shareholders. We welcome Beyond.com to the Safeguard team.”

 

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See [Pulse 2.0 - Greylock Partners Leads $4 Million Series A Investment In Payoneer]

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[Information Source: Alarm Clock]

Menlo Park search engine start-up, SPOCK has raised $7 million from Clearstone and Opus Capital Ventures. This is SPOCK’s first round of venture capital funding. Previously, SPOCK raised $1 million of incubation funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, thus placing SPOCK as an $8 million-backed company.

SPOCK is currently in private beta and is focused on the search of people. If you type in a name into the search, then SPOCK would be able to bring up a picture, address, occupation, and other information [CNET]. “When Spock launches, it will have 100 million profiles of people in its database” stated Matt Marshall. Through the new round of funding, William Quigly of Clearstone and Ken Elefant of Opus and Siva Kumar, a chief executive of TheFind.com will join the SPOCK board of directors.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo! will be competitors of SPOCK, but those search engines are not people-focused.  Another potential competitor of SPOCK mentioned by CNET is ZoomInfo.  Michael Kanellos of CNET writes “in my own personal tests of ZoomInfo’s deluxe service, I found more information about individuals on Google than through their service.”  I wholeheartedly agree with that.  I conducted a search on my own name on ZoomInfo and only result found was a Undersecretary-General of Pittsford Mendon High School.

Is the upcoming search engine, SPOCK expected to “live long and prosper?” Clearstone Venture Partners thinks so because they put $1 million of incubation funds into SPOCK.

According to VentureBeat, SPOCK is expecting to take on Google head-on as the preferred search engine of choice. “When SPOCK launches, it will have 100 million profiles of people in its database, by far the largest open repository of profiles anywhere. SPOCK delivers a mixture of facts and research on a people, but also opens a profile to social input, giving it a touch of Wikipedia” stated Matt Marshall of VentureBeat. “SPOCK, however, exploits all the latest tagging technology and the exploding number of public profiles on the Web since social network sites like MySpace became popular last year.”

Once you search for certain subjects, SPOCK has a more organized fashion of displaying results. For example if you search for “actress,” SPOCK reveals relevant tags to its results on why that result was chosen. The example VentureBeat provided was that if you search for “actress” then the first result would be actress Felicity Huffman. And below that result, it states tags, “Oscar nominee for best actress” and “Desparate Housewives.” Tag font sizes vary based on popularity.

SPOCK has 15 employees (7 in Menlo Park, 2 in India, and 6 other part-timers). The co-founders of SPOCK are Jaideep Singh and Jay Bhatti. Jaideep is a former VC at Clearstone and Jay is a former employee at Microsoft. Clearstone has also invested into mp3.com, cooking.com, Overture, and PayPal.