Facebook has acquired Parse, a mobile backend-as-a-service startup. Parse is a company that sells tools and services that helps build mobile apps. The deal was worth around $85 million and includes retention, according to TechCrunch. Facebook had to outbid multiple Silicon Valley companies for the deal.
Motif is an investment ideas platform that has raised $25 million in Series C funding. The company starts by finding an investment idea, analyzes stocks related to the idea, weighs up to 30 stocks to form a motif, and sells each motif for $9.95.
Cloudera is a big data analysis company that has raised $65 million. The company was founded in 2008 by three engineers: Jeff Hammerbacher, Christophe Bisciglia, and Amr Awadallah. This round of funding was their Series E and it was led by Accel Partners. Accel previously led the company’s $5 million Series A round in 2009. Existing investors that participated in this round include Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners.
Continuuity is a big data platform company that has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures and Ignition Partners. Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective and Amplify Partners also participated in this round of funding. Continuuity now has a total of $12.5 million in total funding. Continuuity was co-founded by former engineers at Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The company recently came out of stealth mode to launch their big data app hosting platform called AppFabric. AppFabric uses Hadoop to enable developers to deploy and scale big data apps.
Airbnb is growing at a rapid pace. Last year, they hit over 10 million total nights booked with over 200,000 active properties listed on their website. They are growing like crazy in London because of the Olympics too. About 20% of the company’s bookings happen through mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, Android, and mobile web browsers. Airbnb has acquired DailyBooth and brought out on their CEO Brian Pokorny to head up the design and engineering team.
Hipmunk is a travel website that is known for “taking the agony out of travel planning.” Hipmunk has raised $15 million in a second round of funding. The funding will allow the Hipmunk team to double their employee count to 32 in the next six months.
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WePay has raised $10 million from Ignition Partners, Highland Capital Partners, and August Capital. The company launched as a way to help friends and family pool resources. Now they are offering online payment tools for merchants and non-profits.
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Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created by the merger of CouchOne and Memebase, has raised $14 million in new funding. The investors include Ignition Partners, Accel Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund. The Series C funds, which bring the company’s total to $30 million, will be used to grow Couchbase’s enterprise and help the company expand internationally. [TechCrunch]
