New York based discount flash sales website Gilt Groupe has raised $138 million in venture capital funding. Investors in this fifth round of funding include Softbank Group, General Atlantic, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, NEA, DFJ Growth, Pinnacle Ventures, TriplePoint Capital, and Eastward Capital.

Car sharing company Zipcar has raised $21 million in Series G funding. This may mean that the company is postponing their IPO. Zipcar has about 500,000 users. Zipcar filed for an IPO back in June and it is likely that they would have raised $75 million. The S1 also indicated the Zipcar would borrow $70 million under a one-year credit facility for purchasing new cars. Zipcar also recently bought their U.K. competitor Streetcar.

Chegg is the biggest online textbook rental company and they are aggressively funding themselves in order to expand their business. The company raised $57 million in Series D equity funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Insight Venture Partners also provided Chegg with $25 million in credit facility. Before that Pinnacle Ventures and TriplePoint Capital provided Chegg with $30 million in debt facility. This gives Chegg a total of $112 million to work with.

Insight Venture Partners Managing Director Deven Parekh will be joining the Chegg Board of Directors as part of the funding round. By providing textbook rentals, Chegg has helped students across 6,400 colleges save about $65 million.

“We are thrilled with the continued excitement from leading investors who understand the tremendous value we provide to students around the country,” stated Chegg.com CEO and Co-Founder Osma in a press release. “This new funding is a significant step up from Series C and a testament to the growing market opportunity for Chegg.com’s textbook rental offering. With college tuitions continuing to climb and higher unemployment rates, parents and students are looking for any and all ways to cut costs.”

Flixster, the movie review company with a popular Facebook application has raised $5 million out of a planned $8 million second round.  Flixster is essentially a movie review social network that started in January 2006.  Flixster receives roughly 20 million-50 million pageviews per day. 

This round of funding was provided by Pinnacle Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  In order to compete, Netflix introduced similar social networking and reviewing features within their DVD rental services.

Lightspeed Ventures previously invested around $2 million or less around January 2007.  Here are some of the statistics on the site as of January 2008 (via Wikipedia):

• User Homepages: 42,122,063
• Movie Ratings: 1,225,752,033
• Quiz Questions: 3,017,434
• Movies: 34,254
• Actors: 71,934
• Photos: 1,312,286
• Videos: 353,672

Information Source:
[1] PEHub: Flixster Raises Second Round