DataXu has raised $11 million in Series B funding.  Investors include Menlo Ventures, Atlas Venture, and Flybridge Capital Partners.  Atlas and Flybridge were involved in DataXu’s first round in April 2009.  The new round of funding will be used for product development, sales, marketing, and expansion.  DataXu has offices in Boston and N.Y.  DataXu is an online ad exchange service. [paidContent]

Siri is a startup that utilizes speech-to-text and searches for what you want it to through voice commands. They call it a virtual personal assistant (VPA). The company raised $15.5 million in its second round of funding from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

For example you could tell the device that you want to see a movie and it will find tickets prices and showtimes. Or you can call a cab when you are out of town. Previously Siri raised $8.5 million in funding. The company has not officially launched its product yet.

DriveCam is a company that improves risky drivers by setting up video event recorders on the windshield behind the rear-view mirror.  DriveCam reduces claims costs and improves the way people drive.

DriveCam offers driver coaching and expert analysis.  The company has announced that they have raised $19 million Series D.

The $19 million Series D round of investment was led by Triangle Peak Partners.  Other investors include Menlo Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, JMI Equity, and Integral Capital Partners.

DriveCam had year-over-year revenue growth and an 85% growth in their client base.  The company also had a positive cash flow for the first time in history.

[via NYT]

Due to a class action lawsuit, NebuAd will be calling it quits.  Last year NebuAd had to lay off most of their staff in order to cut costs too.  Rather than bleeding more cash, NebuAd will be giving their assets to creditors and will “cease to exist as an ongoing concern” according to court documents.

The shutting down of NebuAd will be seen as a failed investment by venture capital firms Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Both companies invested $20 million into NebuAd around September 2007.

NebuAd was an advertising company based in Redwood City, California.  NebuAd sought deals with ISPs for behavioral targeting purposes.  At one point, NebuAd had enough partnerships to cover 10% of the broadband population in America.

The company faced a substantial amount of controversy that led to their downfall.  Back in July NebuAd CEO Bob Dykes appeared in front of the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications Subcommittee and admitted to collect information from people without their permission.

Four months later, a group of people filed a lawsuit against NebuAd and six ISP companies for the tracking activities.  Will NebuAd be missed?  Very unlikely.

[via WSJ]

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.