Visual.ly is an infographics design company that has raised $2 million in seed funding. The investors in this round includes Crosslink Capital, SoftTech, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Giza Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Mark Goines, Josh James, etc. Visual.ly had about 26,000 users sign up as part of their beta. Over 300,000 infographics have been created and they receive about one million pageviews per month. Some of the companies that Visual.ly works with include BuzzFeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, GOOD, NASDAQ, Skype, the Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic. Visual.ly plans on using the funding for building their development team and hire additional data visualization specialists.

MotherKnows is an online health record service website that has raised $1.7 million in a seed round of funding. The round was led by First Round Capital. Giza Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Band of Angels, Maneesh Arora, and several other angel investors participated in this round. MotherKnows plans on using the funding for product development.

VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies is a company that developers advanced visual prosthetic devices for improving vision for patients that have end-stage age-related macular degeneration. VisionCare has raised $31 million in Series E funding led by Saints Capital. Giza Ventures, General iFinancial Holdings, BSI SA, Pitango Venture Capital, Three Arch Partners, ONSET Ventures, and Newbury Acquisitions Fund/Infinity CSVC Management also joined in this round. Elka Nir, the Managing Director and head of Life Sciences of Giza, will be joining the VisionCare board of directors.

SemantiNet is a semantic web startup company that has raised $3.4 million in Series A funding. The company is currently in stealth mode, but plans on launching later this month. The funding was led by Giza Ventures. Other investors include Dr. Joseph “Yossi” Vardi (ICQ founder), Jeff Pulver (Vonage co-founder), and Sir Ronald Cohen (Apax Partners).

“SemantiNet’s core technology is now being leveraged by a unique consumer
application, combining a crowd-sourcing approach with the power of semantic
web reasoning,” stated Oz Leave, Chairman of SemantiNet. “We
are very excited to be launching later this month and are looking forward to
providing our users with an information discovery assistant that is fun to
use, easy-to-understand and seamlessly integrated into their browser.”

SemantiNet has R&D operations based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Some of the R&D efforts are provided by engineers in the Israeli Army R&D unit. The company also has offices in San Francisco, Calif. where they have a sales and marketing division. The announcement was made official in a press release.