Like.com, the visual search engine started by Munjal Shah, Burak Gokturk, and Azhar Khan has raised a substantial round of funding.  Like.com raised $32 million in Series C from Menlo Ventures, Crosslink Capital, BlueRun Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures.  Through this round of funding, Prazan Vazirani from Menlo Ventures joined the Like.com Board of Directors.

Through this round of funding, Like.com is believed to be above a $100 million valuation.  Employees that have shares in the company also had the opportunity to sell shares through the funding process as well.  Like.com launched in November 2006 and their strongest service is matching goods that are displayed in a picture.

Like.com made about $1 million in revenue in about one year.  Now they are making about $20 million.  And they are planning to launch a UK version of the site.  The company also created an iPhone application called LikeThis that allows phone users to take a picture of an item and find similar items for sale.

A few months ago, Like.com started placing ads on Facebook that matched fashion products that linked to a user’s profile picture.  For example, if I was wearing Oakley sunglasses on my profile picture, the ad will appear alongside with sunglasses that look very similar.

LikeThis is also available on the Like.com website for testing.  To test it out, I uploaded a picture from Entourage.  Then I highlighted the shoes of the guy in the green shirt (center).  After uploading, Like.com will ask you which attributes are most important to you between Color, Shape, Pattern, or all three equally.  I selected all three are equally important to me.  Like.com asked for my e-mail to let me know when they are done analyzing the photo.

Once I get an e-mail back, I’ll let you know how accurate the results are.  Look for an update on this post.

Update: Below are the results

“We are excited by the opportunity to accelerate our growth and build on our momentum,” stated Simon Tisminezky, CEO of SpeedDate.com. “We are focused on providing our users with the quickest way to meet other singles for live online dates. No other dating site allows you to log on and be matched on live dates immediately.”

SpeedDate.com is the first online video dating streaming service. SpeedDate’s users have been growing about 50% every month. SpeedDate had about 1 million online dates take place within the last several months. SpeedDate.com launched about 10 months ago.

Using SpeedDate, singles interview each other for about 3-5 minutes and determine whether to take their desires to the next level. Remember those cheesy love connection TV shows? This is nothing like that because candidates aren’t interviewed by a host. The interaction is 1-on-1, the way it should be.

SpeedDate has announced today that they have raised $6 million in Series B funding from Menlo Ventures. Menlo Ventures is a Menlo Park, Calif.-based VC company that has invested in companies like IMVU.com, Infoseek, Jobfox, Like.com, MobiTV, Eve.com, CinemaNow, Cellfire, and BigTent.com. This is the second time that Menlo has invested in SpeedDate

“SpeedDate.com has developed a revolutionary product and rapidly achieved a critical mass of users,” stated Mark Siegel, MD at Menlo Ventures. “We have been impressed with SpeedDate.com’s phenomenal growth rate and we are confident that it is well positioned to capture significant market share and expand the online dating category.”

SpeedDate also has an application that is compatible with Facebook, Bebo, meebo, and MySpace.

Related Links:
1. SpeedDate.com
2. Yahoo! Finance

Like.com is a visual search engine with a focus on shopping and consumption.  According to VentureBeat founder, Matt Marshall, Like.com will be preparing to raise double digit funding within the next two weeks.  The round of funding, provided by Menlo Ventures, will complement Like’s revenue success.

Like.com allows users to search for consumer products by specific details, colors, and find goods worn by celebrities.  Like is working on a technology that allows users to upload photos and find similar goods.  When consumers click through the goods on the search engine and buys it from retailers, Like.com shares the revenue.  Like.com’s revenue is rumored to be close to $20 million.

To date, Like.com’s total funding is roughly $19.5 million, provided by Bay Partners, BlueRun Ventures and Leapfrog Ventures.  Like.com is a spin-off from Riya.com.  Riya.com was founded by Munjal Shah in 2004.  Riya was rumored to be courted for an acquisition by Google 3 years ago for roughly $40 mill [GigaOM].

Related Links:
1. Like.com
2. Riya.com

NebuAd is a Redwood City, Calif. based behavioral targeting company that works with Internet Service Providers to determine how advertisers should design their media for different markets.  The names of the ISPs they work with seems to be confidential and undisclosed on their website. 

“NebuAd combines this web-wide view of pages navigated, searches performed, ads clicked, etc., with the industry’s most accurate targeting capabilities, matching consumer interests across more than 1,000 categories. And all of this is done without collecting and using any personally identifiable information,” states their Advertisers Overview page.

The investors of NebuAd includes Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures.  NebuAd has roughly $30 million in funding and has ambitious plans for operation expansion.  Considering the market opportunities, its an excellent time to sell services related advertising analytics such as those provided by NebuAd.  Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and AOL have all acquired digital advertising companies for billions of dollars, thus indicating that such opportunities will be around for a long time now.

Every retailer can tell you that customer ratings on web sites are crucial.  Reviews can make or break everyday sales of products.  Good reviews get sales, bad reviews implies to the vendor to make improved products or provide better services.  Little did I know that there is a company that powers a lot of the customer ratings features for many clients.

PowerReviews.com has raised $15 million in funding from Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures,  and Draper Richards.  The total funding that PowerReviews has raised thus far is $21.25 million. 

(more…)

Dollar Amount Involved: $9 Million
From the land that brought you Boeing,
Microsoft and Starbuck’s comes good news for Seattle-based custom imagery website, OnRequest Images. 

The funding came from Menlo Ventures and previous investors, Frazier Technology Ventures and Maveron LLC.  The amount of third round funding is $9 million. 

“Menlo Ventures is proud to lead this round of funding for OnRequest Images”, mentioned Menlo Ventures founder and Managing Dir., H. DuBost Montgomery. ”Having spent 30 years working with companies in the technology and communications industries, I understand the tremendous workflow and productivity improvements OnRequest Images is delivering to corporations. Leveraging its proprietary OnProâ„¢ production technology, which streamlines the complex process of creating, sharing, and managing custom imagery, brand marketers can now have custom brand-aligned image libraries to complete their brand marketing strategies.”

OnRequest Images serves high-end clients in the Fortune 100 and employs 1,600 photographers.  On the OnRequest website, there is a case study of the brand imagery created for T-Mobile.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Forbes Media, a publication company that is known for publishing lists of the world’s richest powerful men and women, has acquired a Canadian company that owns finance resource website, Investopedia.com.  Investopedia gets over 1.5 million visits and has over 15 million page impressions per month.Investopedia is a guide for Stock Quotes and financial exam certifications such as Series 6, Series 7, Series 63, etc.  Investopedia also has a financial dictionary commonly used by finance professionals.The amount paid for this company was not disclosed.  Investopedia was started in June 1999 by Cory Janssen and Cory Wagner.  There are over 5000 dictionary entries, 1500 financial articles, and 750 tutorials.  Investopedia Inc. is based in Edmonton, Alberta.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Yesterday Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati blogged that the company has made their first major acquisition yesterday.  The company that was acquired is Berkeley, Calif. based company, Personal Bee. Personal Bee allows users to create personalized homepages similar to services provided by NewsVine.

Personal Bee previously raised $500K from Mohr, Davidow Ventures (MDV).  Sam Jadallah provided this funding for Personal Bee and believes that the company has found a great partner.  Sam said “Normally we don’t expect such quick exits for our investments, but the fit for Personal Bee and Technorati made enough sense that we agreed.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: Upcoming Acquisition Rumored at $100 Mill+
Rivals.com is powered by 300 writers and reporters and has more than 85 employees in Tennessee.  Rivals.com has been around since 2001.  Rivals.com had 3.5 billion page views in 2006 and has 2.5 million readers.  Rivals.com is a leading website for basketball and football coverage.The company has raised $75 mill in previous funding.  Jim Heckman was a previous manager at Rivals.com, but then later founded Scout Media.  Scout Media is now owned by Fox Interactive Media.

Rivals.com syndicates content from Yahoo!, AOL, Sports Illustrate.com, MSNBC, USA Today and Sirius.

Yahoo! is rumored to be eyeing the company and quite possibly may wrap up the deal soon.

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