Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Trinity Ventures

Samsung Acquires Mobile Entertainment Company mSpot

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:28:10 +0000

Samsung Electronics has acquired mobile entertainment company mSpot. The financial terms were undisclosed, but it is rumored that the company was sold for $8.8 million. mSpot allows users to stream and watch full length movies on their mobile phones and on the web. mSpot has deals with Disney, Sony, NBC, Lionsgate, Warner, and several other companies.

mSpot also has cloud-based music services that lets you upload music to the cloud stream content from PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Androids. Last year mSpot launched a service that is similar to Pandora.

mSpot raised $2.3 million in funding from Trinity Ventures before getting acquired. Samsung plans to use mSpot to provide an “entertainment experience of music, video and radio services for users of Samsung devices, while extending mSpot’s cloud and streaming solutions to a broader base of global entertainment fans…mSpot’s entertainment services will be a key integrated offering on newly announced Samsung mobile devices.”

Groupon Buys Travel Startup Company Uptake

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:40:04 +0000

Groupon has acquired the travel startup company Uptake. The acquisition was believed to be between $10 and $20 million. Uptake allows users to plan their vacations. Uptake has travel-related content and recommendations based on the social graph.

It is believed that Groupon acquired Uptake mainly because they are interested in the 20-person team they have in Palo Alto, California. Uptake will be working with Groupon to provide their travel expertise. They will also provide general engineering and local search knowledge.

“Groupon has acquired Uptake, and we’re excited to continue to build the Palo Alto engineering team with an all-star roster of startup founders and experts in the mobile and social space,” said Groupon in a statement. Uptake has raised $14 million in funding from Trinity Ventures and Shasta Ventures.

[TechCrunch]

Kixeye Raises $18 Million, Adds Zynga Co-Founder to Board

Riley Kennysmith — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:37:13 +0000

Game developer Kixeye, formerly The Casual Collective, has raised $18 million in new funding. The investment comes from Jafco Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Kixeye also boasts two additions to the company’s board: Jafco partner Joe Horowitz and Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader. [TechCrunch]

Invoicing Company Taulia Raises $8.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:09:22 +0000

Taulia is an invoicing company that has raised $8.5 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures. Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures also participated in this round. Taulia has now raised a total of $12 million in funding.

Taulia allows corporations to pay their invoices early on. The early invoicing is made possible with the SaaS Dynamic Discounting software. Some of Taulia’s customers include Pfizer and Coca-Cola. Taulia plans on using the funding for sales and marketing.

Mobile Developer Cloud Platform StackMob Raises $7.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 17 May 2011 04:05:10 +0000

StackMob is a cloud platform for mobile developers that was built into Heroku. StackMob has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Trinity Ventures. StackMob allows mobile developers easy build a back-end cloud platform that allows them to manage their applications.

“We see ourselves as the experienced back end for the masses. Everyone forgets how early we are in mobile. There will be great ideas out there but people don’t know how to implement the back end,” stated StackMob CEO and co-founder Ty Amell. StackMob offers simple API creation/management, social integration, analytics, and messaging on the cloud. StackMob has about 200 iOS apps on their platform and they are currently in private beta.

[GigaOM]

PaaS Company DotCloud Raises $10 Million In Series A

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 22:03:47 +0000

DotCloud is a platform-as-a-service company that has raised $10 million in Series A. Ron Conway and Chris Sacca was the company’s angel investors. Investors in the Series A round includes Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. Jerry Yang (Yahoo! co-founder), Marc Varstaen (Apple engineering manager), Peter Fenton (Benchmark Capital), Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures) will be joining DotCloud’s board of directors. DotCloud allows developers to build applications through custom components.

“With DotCloud, developers get their dream application platform and they no longer need to fill that sys admin role. Instead, developers and their IT teams can choose a stack, push code into our automated system and see their apps deployed with very little work,” stated DotCloud co-founder Sebastian Pahl.

[TechCrunch]

CrowdFlower Raises $7 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:10:44 +0000

CrowdFlower is a company that designed data categorization tools used by e-commerce companies that has raised $7 million in funding led by Harmony Partners. Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners participated in this round. CrowdFlower has raised a total of $12 million thus far.

CrowdFlower helps businesses complete tasks that relate to data collection, moderating content, and make product search relevant. CrowdFlower breaks up tasks into units that can be conducted by one person. The task is priced accordingly. The channels that CrowdFlower works with include Amazon.com Mechanical Turk and Facebook.

[TechCrunch]

Stealth E-Commerce Company BeachMint Raises $10 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 23:01:38 +0000

BeachMint.com is a social commerce company that has raised $10 million in funding. The investment was led by Trinity Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Anthem Ventures, and Stanford University. BeachMint was founded by MySpace co-founder Josh Berman. Diego Berdakin is the other co-founder of BeachMint. Below is the full press release:

BeachMint Announces $10 Million in Funding From Trinity Ventures, Stanford, NEA and Anthem Ventures

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Dec. 27, 2010 /PRNewswire/ — Recently launched social commerce company, BeachMint, announces a $10 million round to accelerate the company’s remarkable growth and reach new markets. The investment is led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from Stanford University and existing investors, New Enterprise Associates and Anthem Ventures.

BeachMint, a social commerce company founded by MySpace Co-Founder, Josh Berman, and serial tech entrepreneur, Diego Berdakin, successfully launched their first ecommerce vertical in jewelry with style icon, Kate Bosworth, and her celebrity stylist, Cher Coulter. JewelMint (www.jewelmint.com) is an exclusive jewelry of the month club featuring monthly collections designed by Kate and Cher.

The growth of JewelMint helps the company penetrate the rapidly growing online retail industry, which is expected to reach $175 billion in sales in 2010, according to Forrester Research. Berman noted, “We are extremely excited to add Trinity Ventures and our new Board member, Patricia Nakache, to our team. Their vast ecommerce experience and understanding of the explosive growth in the social commerce space is a welcome addition for BeachMint and our journey ahead.”

This new round of funding will be used to bolster the staff and launch new verticals and celebrity partnerships in 2011, which BeachMint will announce in Q1. Berdakin noted, “We’re on fire and looking to hire aggressively. We couldn’t be more excited about this space and its potential. The company currently has a headcount of twenty, which we’re planning on doubling over the next couple months.”
For more information, or to view membership details of BeachMint’s first vertical, please visit: WWW.JEWELMINT.COM

SOURCE BeachMint

gWallet Raises $12.5 Million From Adams Street, Trinity, and Stanford

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:00:21 +0000

gWallet is an offer-based ad network company that focuses on virtual goods and online games. gWallet raised $12.5 million from Adams Street Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Stanford University. The funding will go towards opening an office in London and in New York City.

gWallet plans to avoid some of the same scams that Zynga accepted as ad deals by offering a “transparent” platform. This means that game developers and social networks choose what ads to accept.

Gurbaksh Chahal is the founder of gWallet and he has experience in selling advertising companies. Chahal founded and sold ClickAgents to ValueClick and then BlueLithium to Yahoo! BlueLithium was bought by Yahoo! for $300 million. Although I admire Chahal for his entrepreneurial spirit, I thought his reality show Secret Millionaire was terrible.

Former Yahoo! Travel Exec, Yen Lee Raises $10 Million Series B For UpTake.com

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:11:33 +0000

Yen Lee, former General Manager of Yahoo! Travel has raised $10 million in Series B funding for his start-up. His start-up is called UpTake.com and the funding was led by Trinity Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The first round of funding was $4 million in December 2007. UpTake.com is a travel search engine that grabs data from multiple sites at once. This includes websites: TripAdvisor.com, Expedia.com, Fodors, goCityKids, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel.

With this round of funding, UpTake plans to expand into Lodging, Things To Do, Restaurants, and Beaches features. UpTake will continue to invest in it’s own search engine technology. UpTake works with BedandBreakfast.com, Restauranti.ca, OpenTable, La Quinta Inn & Suites, Away.com, and FriendCommunications for RV and campground reviews.

“We looked at dozens of investment opportunities in the online travel industry for several years before deciding to invest in UpTake,” stated Patricia Nakache, general partner of Trinity Ventures. “UpTake has a distinct approach that addresses a big search and discovery gap in the travel market and is run by a proven CEO and team.”

UpTake has aggregated and organized about 20 million traveler reviews, ratings, and articles. UpTake is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has engineering units in Beijing and Moscow.