2tor has announced that they have raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures and was co-invested by Novak Biddle Venture Partners and City Light Capital.  The company was founded by Princeton Review Inc. founder John Katzman.  2tor is an online education company that helps universities manage online courses.

“2tor is proving that online education can be excellent and innovative. We are delighted to have Redpoint, Novak Biddle, and City Light on our team, as well as the expertise, commitment and perspective of their partners,” stated Katzman in a press release. “With them, we will continue to scale up our first program, ready the launch of our second, and step up to the role as the bridge between great universities and online learning.”

As part of the funding, Redpoint Partner Greg Martin and Novak Biddle General Partner Philip Bronner will be joining the 2tor Board of Directors.

Obopay.com is a mobile service that allows people to transfer money through text messages.  The Redwood City-based company was founded by Carol L. Realini and John Tumminaro.   Nokia Corporation wanted to get in early on the company’s success so they invested $70 million into the company.  The deal was primarily in exchange for preferred stock.

Obopay currently works in the U.S. and in India.  Some of Obopay’s competition includes PayPal Mobile, TextPayMe, and Mpayy.

Now Obopay is over $139 million in funding.  The previous round was $69 million from Qualcomm, Essar Communications Holdings Ltd., Alliance Bernstein, ONSET Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Richmond Management, Richmond Global Cellular, Citi, Societe Generale, Promethean, and Olayan America Corporation.

[via VentureBeat]

Satish Dharmaraj is the founder of corporate e-mail software company Zimbra.  Yahoo! acquired the company for $350 million in 2007.  With that kind of money it does not come to any surprise that Dharmaraj would join a VC firm.  Redpoint Ventures has announced that they have hired Dharmaraj as a partner of the company.

After many executives leave a company, they move on to a new venture or become an entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm, but Dharmaraj decided to become a direct employee.  Satish left Yahoo! this past January. Some other Yahoo! alumni executives that joined VC firms include David Goldberg, Jeff Weiner, and Andrew Braccia.  Weiner now is the President of LinkedIn.

Currently Zimbra has over 20 million paid users.  Comcast helped Zimbra’s user base grow tremendously.

Some of the companies that Redpoint invested in includes Scribd, SocialVibe, Adap.tv, Entertonement, and Oodle.

[via BoomTown]

Scribd is a document sharing website that has about 50 million monthly users and has about 50,000 documents uploaded daily.  The company was rolled out of Y-Combinator and eventually raised funding from Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and The Kinsley Hills Group.  It was recently announced that Scribd signed an agreement with major publishing companies to host free e-books.

Through Scribd, users can upload PDFs, DOCs, and other text files.  Scribd then presents the document in a web Flash format.

Scribd signed agreements with Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Workman Publishing Co.  The terms of the agreement was undisclosed.  Scribd will provide a variety of book material at no cost.  This includes excerpts from books and even full books.  Full novels without much of an audience will be the ones made free.

[via Ars Technica]

SocialVibe announced earlier yesterday that they have raised $8 milion Series B in funding from JAFCO Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.  SocialVibe is a social media company that has social network users create advertising badges on social networks.  Advertisers using the badges include Sprint, Adobe, and Coca-Cola.

“SocialVibe has brought soul to the intersection of social media and online advertising with a solution that resonates with advertisers, publishers and members,” stated Greg Martin, Partner of Redpoint Ventures. “SocialVibe is more than a great business, they are a force for good.”

Through this round of funding, Managing General Partner of JAFCO Ventures Joe Horowitz will be joining SocialVibe’s board of directors.  SocialVibe has grown to about 500,000 members.  These members are sharing brand badges with about 10 million of their friends on social networks.  In turn this creates 100 million endorsed impressions.

“Today’s funding round represents a tremendous vote of confidence in our team, vision and business model,” stated SocialVibe CEO Kurt Johnson. “JAFCO and Redpoint Ventures are quality venture firms that understand our business and have the experience to help us grow into a leading advertising and monetization solution for social media.”

If you are watching a video on the Internet and you see an advertisement for Amazon.com, Netflix, eMusic, or Kayak.com, there is a pretty good chance that Adap.tv is behind them.  This week Adap.TV raised a $13 million round of funding in Series B.  Spark Capital led the round of funding and Dennis Miller joined the board.  Redpoint Ventures and Gemini Israel also participated in the second round.

Redpoint and Gemini provided Adap.tv with their first round of funding at $10 million.  Adap.tv plans on using this new round of funding to accelerate the development of their products.  Spark Capital are also investors in 5min.com, Covestor, Iminlikewithyou.com, KickApps, Me.dium, Tumblr, Twitter, and Veoh.

Adap.tv’s flagship product is called OneSource.  Through OneSource, Adap.tv can place product overlays, expanding overlays, video pre-rolls, animated overlays, banner overlays, and text overlays on top of videos.  One of the problems Google struggles with is making enough revenue on YouTube to help offset some of the bandwidth costs.  Adap.tv may be a good partner for the search engine company as it continues to find ways to embed ads subtly in the videos without pissing off users.

Entertonement is a ringtone company that MySpace users have access to.  The company announced that they have received $5 million according to PEHub.  The $5 million in funding was found in a regulatory filing.

The company is a subsidiary of Right Sized Media Inc.  The company is based in Sausalito, Calif.  And the company is run by David Mandelbrot, a former VP of and GM of Media and Entertainment at Yahoo!  The company was founded by Fouad ElNaggar while at UCLA business school and is now an Associate at RedPoint Ventures.

Tones include movie quotes and songs which can be rated and shared.  The ringtones are categorized by TV, movies, music genres, etc.  The Entertonment blog is available at: http://blogs.entertonement.com/blog/ but has not been updated since March 2007.

Information Sources:
[1] Mashable: Entertonement Rakes in $5M
[2] alarm:clock: RedPoint Ventures Associate Raising Funds For MySpace Tool Entertonement

What does Georgia Tech, Digg, and Mozilla.org have in common? According to Yodel Anecdotal: Yahoo’s company blog, the email and group calendaring system is all powered by Zimbra. And because why it is so “damn cool” as described by Yahoo!’s Brad Garlinghouse, the search engine just bought the open source email/calendaring company for $350 million in cash.

This acquisition comes at a time that Google is gearing to develop further online office suite applications and when Microsoft is supposedly developing and testing online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well. Yahoo! is now on the bandwagon and will bring Yahoo! new customers and be able to benefit from the open-source community in terms of email software development.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.5 is the current release by Zimbra, but with the announcement of the acquisition, version 5.0 will not be delayed.

For those who are current Zimbra customers or want to learn more about how the acquisition, there is a Q&A available and Network Edition Trial on the Zimbra website.

The company raised $30.5 million over the course of three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich according to TechCrunch.

Oodle is a startup that has over 20 million classified ads and features listings from all over the U.S. and the UK. Oodle has raised $11 million in a 2nd round from current investors, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures along with new investor, JAFCO Ventures. The first round was $5 million. Oodle has a partnership with The Washington Post (D.C.) and The Sun (British tabloid owned by News Corp).

This is Amp’d Mobile’s 5th round of funding and the amount is quite substantial. According to the SEC, Amp’d has raised $107 million. This round of funding was provided by Old Lane Management (hedge fund created by former Morgan Stanley execs) and joins previous venture backers: Columbia Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Intel Capital, MTV Networks, Tudor Investments and Universal Music. The CEO of Amp’d is Peter Adderton, who also founded Boost Mobile.

Gal Trifon and Ofer Zadikario founded Eyeblaster in 1999 and has established the company as a leader in digital marketing. The company had announced today that it has raised $30 million in funding from private investors. The company has been profitable every year since 2002. The company was founded in Israel and had previously raised $10 million ($8 of which came from Insight Venture Partners). The current investors are Eli Barkat (BRM Capital), Jonathan Kolber (Koor Industries, Ltd.), Shlomo Dovrat (Carmel Ventures), Harel Beit-On (Carmel Ventures), and Nir Barkat. Eyeblaster designs rich media and standard banners.

MyCoupons, a Pittsburgh-based company that was the first online coupon site launched in 1995 and took in $750,000 to re-launch its product… as a social network. “We have invested close to three quarters of a million dollars over the past year and we are proud to be able, today, to announce our re-birth” stated a company representative [Source: alarm:clock]. Jason Wolfe, the original founder of MyCoupons had bought back the domain name from Direct Response Technologies after the Save.com (who bought it for MyCoupons.com for $20M) went bankrupt after the dot-com bust.

Ludic Labs is a San Mateo-based company that is run by Dr. Brian Totty. According to alarm:clock, Totty was most recently a Venture Advisor at Foundation Capital and was a Founding VP of Research and Development and a General Manager of Inktomi. Inktomi was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003. “Ludic Labs is creating a mass-scale, social-media service for internet and mobile devices” stated a Ludic Labs representative. The company says that they are well funded and are planning on hiring Python, Web UI, and Internet Service developers around Silicon Valley shortly.

Boorah, a retaurant review website based in New York has raised angel funding and is now looking for venture capitalist funding. The company was founded by Nagaraju Bandaru and Eric Moyer. Both of them were previous executives for wireless broadband provider, MetroFi. Moyer presented BooRah at the past DEMO conference.

[Information Source: PaidContent and alarm:clock]