Quantcast, a website that monitors stats for websites announced earlier this week that they have raised $27.5 million. Cisco Systems is the leader investor in Quantcast. Quantcast competes with Alexa and Compete.com. Quantcast plans to use the funding to expand their advertising platform.
“Quantcast’s approach and technology for delivering high-value, targeted advertising aligns with the needs of Cisco’s customers, from service providers to media companies and ultimately consumers,” stated Cisco SVP and general manager of Media Solutions Group Dan Scheinman. Other investors include Polaris Venture Partners, The Founders Fund, and Revolution Ventures.
Gowalla is a location based social networking website that has raised $8.4 million in funding. Greylock Partners was the lead investor and the company plans to use the funding to strengthen their development capabilities. Thus far Gowalla has raised over $10 million since they started in 2007.
“Gowalla has rapidly attracted a passionate user base by creating an innovative, useful service that is also a lot of fun,” stated Greylock’s David Thacker. “It’s exciting to discover new places and earn stamps for your passport from places as diverse as Buckingham Palace and the Sydney Opera House to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the coffee shop down the street. Gowalla also connects you with your friends, letting you share your travels and meet up with others in real time.” Thacker has joined the Gowalla Board of Directors as part of the investment.
LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman also joined Gowalla’s board of directors as an observer.
Other investors in Gowalla include Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Maples Investments, Shasta Ventures, Ron Conway, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, and Chris Sacca. Previous investors Alsop-Louie Partners and Founders Fund also participated in this round.
Luke Nosek is a co-founder at PayPal and is a Managing Partner at Founders Fund. Nosek wants to move from the Internet and new media sector and get into science. Nosek is joining Halcyon Molecular, a human genome sequencing firm as a founding president.
Halcyon plans to sequence complete human genomes in less than 10 minutes at a cost of $100. This is a much smaller price and smaller amount of time than currently existing genome sequencing labs. Nosek will continue to lead The Founders Fund’s genomics investing division. Peter Thiel will be joining the board of directors at Halcyon Molecular too.
Halcyon will be competing with 23andme, a genomics company founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Halcyon even received a $2 million aberration corrected STEM electron microscope on loan from the U.S. DoE.
Udorse is a visual endorsement engine that launched at TechCrunch50. The company raised $500,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund and Peter Thiel joined the Board of Directors. The idea behind the website is that people endorse items they love in the form of pictures. This could include t-shirts, watches, cufflinks, etc. Udorse encourages users to endorse items and places in photos by tagging them. They places or items in the photos are tagged to websites.
For example, if you want to endorse the new Ray-Ban sunglasses you bought, you are encouraged to tag them in a picture of yourself wearing them to a website where others can buy it. The brands will appreciate the free endorsement too. Udorse even has several partners. If sales are made by your referral picture, then you get a cut too.
Udorse even allows you to connect your Facebook Photos to your Udorse account, making it easier to tag the photos initially. The person that highlights the item receives a 25% commission fee if another person purchases the item. As of yesterday Armani and American Apparel partnered with Udorse. Udorse was founded by Geoffrey Lewis and Trevor Austin.
In less than 2 years since launching, Mint.com is supposedly selling themselves to Intuit Inc. Mint.com is a financial tool that allows you to aggregate all of your bank and credit card information and find ways to save money. The deal is expected to close within the next few days.
Mint had launched at the TechCrunch50 conference two years ago and took the top prize giving them $50,000. Mint raised $31.8 million in total funding from First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, Hite Capital, DAG Ventures, and The Founders Fund. Angel investors in Mint include Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Geoff Ralston, and Dave McClure.
This acquisition is interesting because Intuit had previously sent Mint a letter demanding an explanation for how they jumped to 850,000 users within several months.
Thread is a dating application on Facebook that suggests potential matches that has just raised a new round of funding. The company raised $1.2 million from Sequoia Capital, the Founders Fund, First Round Capital, and angel investor Ron Conway.
Thread was founded by several former PayPal product managers. “The best people to date are friends of friends,” stated Thread CEO Brian Phillips. “Not all the best people are on dating sites. All the best people are on Facebook.” Phillips recently went on his third date with someone he met on Thread.
Thread pulls in your contact information using Facebook Connect and pulls the public profiles of all your friends. Through the website, you can find out which friends of your friends are single and ask you mutual friend to introduce you. Stalking at its finest.
Thread was originally known as Frinto (friend+intro) but decided to change their name. The Thread.com domain name was already taken and it took them two years to negotiate a deal over the ownership. The owner was told that they would receive equity if the business was successful. If it wasn’t successful, the owner would get the domain name back.
Zivity is a San Francisco start-up company founded by Scott (husband) and Cyan (wife) Banister. Zivity’s business model was to sell a subscription fee of $10 per month to people that wanted to look at provocative pictures of women. I always had my doubts about this company because they were essentially competing against all image search services and image websites. Why would someone pay to use Zivity when you can find such content free?
Around October 2008, Zivity fired about one third of their staff and now they are splitting the company. Zivity launched a new website called TopFans.com and it looks… for lack of a better word.. mediocre. Celebrity websites are found all over the Internet, but TopFans just looks bland compared to all the rest.
When Zivity first launched, the company received plenty of media coverage which may be the reason how they raised $8 million in two rounds. The company today has $4 million of cash left. Zivity will retain $2 million and $2 million will be given to TopFans.com. Thats unfortunate considering that the design of TopFans looks very cheap. If you gave me $2 million, I could probably build the next Google.
Cyan will remain with Zivity, but CEO Jon Elvekrog will become the head of TopFans. Remaining employees will be dispersed between the two.
BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund will have ownership in TopFans.com now. Will they see a return on their investment? Unlikely.
CoTweet is a startup that has built a Twitter platform for helping companies reach and engage customers. CoTweet has several prominent companies using their platform such as Ford, Starbucks, Microsoft, Sports Illustrated, Zendesk, and Dish Network.
CoTweet announced earlier this week that they have raised $1.1 million in first round funding from Baseline, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments, and Freestyle Capital.
The company platform has the ability to manage multiple tools and accounts at once. Several people also have the ability to post to a single account using the CoTweet platform.
CoTweet is available for free as of right now but the company will eventually charge for their services. “CoTweet is an essential tool that allows us to manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard, or have a single account with multiple people managing it,” stated Scott Monty, the digital and multimedia communications manager at Ford Motor Company in a press release. “We can also identify who’s responsible for Tweets, which gives us the flexibility to pull experts into the discussion, and to keep a human face while doing so.”
Quantcast, a website that monitors stats for websites announced earlier this week that they have raised $27.5 million. Cisco Systems is the leader investor in Quantcast. Quantcast competes with Alexa and Compete.com. Quantcast plans to use the funding to expand their advertising platform. 
