Millenial Media is a mobile ad network that competes with AdMob. AdMob was recently acquired by Google for $750 million in stock. Millenial Media is based in Baltimore, Maryland and raised $16 million in Series C for New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, and Charles River Ventures.

Millenial will use the funding to help push the company past profitability, grow overseas, hire additional talent, and build more technology. Given that Google already spent a ton of money on a mobile ad network it seems uncertain what Millenial’s exit strategy will be.

Playdom is one of the biggest competitors of Playfish, a virtual application company that was acquired by EA for $400 million earlier this week. Given that Playdom is one of the very few remaining large virtual application companies, investors want to get in on their business model. Playdom raised $43 million based on a $260 million valuation.

In terms of revenue, TechCrunch speculates that they are making $60 million per year. The participants in the $43 million round of funding was Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Rick Thompson, and New Enterprise Associates.

While Zynga and Playfish focus on Facebook for selling virtual items within game applications, Playdom focuses more on MySpace. Mob Wars has about 14 million users on MySpace and the company as a whole has about 28 million monthly game players. About 60% of the traffic is from MySpace and 40% is from Facebook.

In terms of payments, Playdom makes 70% from direct payments, 10% from advertising, and 20% from third party offers. Playdom is based out of San Francisco and doubled their employee count over the last couple of months to 110 people.

Now that Playdom has a lot more money in the bank, they have decided to go on an acquisition binge. Playdom acquired Green Patch Inc., a Facebook application company and Trippert Labs, an iPhone application company. Green Patch made a garden simulation application on Facebook and has about 1.5 million monthly application users. Trippert Labs created several iPhone applications such as MobAir: Pilot Training and Blowfish.

“Plusmo’s technology will help us build upon the success and momentum we’re experiencing in mobile local search, which continues to see strong growth,” stated AT&T Interactive CEO and President David Krantz. “The addition of Plusmo adds a new dimension to our technology prowess through its multi-platform approach. It highlights our commitment to invest in mobile application innovation and search leadership.”

AT&T announced today that they will be acquiring Plusmo, a mobile applications company that receives about 100 million monthly pageviews. The company makes mobile applications for the iPhone, Google Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Java/J2ME, and Windows Mobile. Plusmo will become a subsidiary of AT&T Interactive. The financial details were undisclosed.

Plusmo’s mobile platform decreases the development time for building widgets and applications. Plusmo uses web development standards across different mobile operating systems. Plusmo also has several sports applications such as soccer, football, cricket, etc. Plusmo was started by Krishna Vedati and Srinivas Mandyam. New Enterprise Associates invested $4.41 million into Plusmo around May 2008.

Google has reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have invested $2.6 million in the genetic testing startup 23andMe as part of a Series B round of funding.  23andMe was co-founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife Anne Wojcicki.

It is uncertain whether the deal was made directly through Google or through their Ventures subsidiary.  The $2.6 million round of fund was part of a $12.6 million Series B round.  The other $10 million came from Sergey Brin’s personal wealth of $12 billion.  This brings 23andMe’s total funding to about $21.6 million.  Other investors include Genentech, New Enterprise Associates, and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Google owns a minority interest in 23andMe and also plans to lease space to the genetics company.  Google wrote in the filing that they took measures to ensure the decision before investing to make the agreement was free of conflict of interest.  Sergey Brin was not part of the investment discussions according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

[via BusinessInsider/NYT]

23andMe is a personal genomics and biotech company based in Mountain View, California.  23andMe offers tests for genome-wide, single nucleotide polymorphisms for the cost of $299.  23andMe received $3.9 million investment from Google.  Google co-founder is married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki.

Today it was announced that 23andMe raised an additional $11 million of a $24.26 million venture round according to a regulatory filing.  23andMe’s first round of funding was $9 million by Google, Genentech, New Enterprise Associates, and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

In this new round, there wasn’t any investor information mentioned.  No info on whether Google Ventures or Google.org was part of the investment.  23andMe’s website currently only lists New Enterprise Associates and Google as their investors.  If we find out who the investors are, we’ll update with a new post.

McLean, Virginia-based widget development company, Clearspring has raised $18 million in a third round of funding. This round of funding was led by New Enterprise Associates. Novak Biddle Venture Partners also participated in this round. This brings Clearsprings total funding to $35 million. Previous investors include Steve Case, Mark Jung, and Ted Leonsis. Clearspring is banking on ads built into widgets.

Clearspring primarily utilizes two services. LaunchPad and WidgetMedia are two of Clearspring’s biggest services. LaunchPad enables users to create, pubish, and distribute widgets across social networks. And WidgetMedia allows users to monetize widgets.

Clearspring clients include the NBA, RockYou!, NBC, Facebook, Adobe, Time, JibJab, MySpace, The Discovery Channel, Maxim.com, and Blogger. The company was founded by Hooman Radfar and Austin Fath.

Information Source:
[1] Widgeteer Clearspring Gets Its Big $18 Million Third Round by Joseph Weisenthal

Xoom is one of the biggest money transfer companies on the Internet today.   The $20.29 million Series E funding was sent to Xoom from Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Fidelity Ventures, and DAG Ventures.

Xoom is based in San Francisco, Calif. and previously raised $15 million in Series D in 2006.  Cumulatively, Xoom raised over $50 million to power its business operations.

Xoom makes money transfer easy in 4 steps:
1.) Enter your contact info, recipient’s info, and the amount of money to be sent.
2.) Select a delivery method.
3.) Select a payment method (Visa/MasterCard/eCheck, Discover, Paypal).
4.) Send your recipient a tracking method.

However, due to all the third parties involved, its rather difficult to support all of the developing countries for their operations.  This is why Xoom is limited to only Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Paraguay, Peru, Phillippines, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, Vietnam.  I’m assuming that with this new round of funding, Xoom will be able to expand its operations to support other countries. 

Recipients of money transfers for Xoom do not necessarily require a bank account or Internet connection to receive funds because Xoom has money transfer partners to provide ways to send money to family and friends in other countries.

Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, Dick Kramlich of New Enterprise Associates, Anne Mitchell of Fidelity Ventures, Keith Hartz of the founding team of Xoom, and Keith Rabois sit on the Board of Directors for Xoom.