Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Village Ventures

BankSimple Raises $10 Million Led By IA Ventures

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:32:16 +0000

BankSimple has announced $10 million in funding led by IA Ventures and previous investor Shasta Ventures. This is BankSimple’s Series B round of funding. The company previously raised $3.1 million in their Series A round. The company’s seed investors include IA Ventures, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Village Ventures, etc. That is not the only thing that the company had announced. They also made some partnerships.

BankSimple made partnerships with CBW Bank, Allpoint, Visa, The Bancorp Bank, TxVIA, and Andera. BankSimple is currently in stealth mode. The company should be opening up by the end of the year and will be sending cards out to their family and friends soon to test out.

BankSimple was co-founded by CEO Joshua Reich, CFO Shamir Karkal, and CTO Alex Payne. BankSimple aims to make banking less complicated by providing a way for people to save money. BankSimple also wants to make it possible to track transactions in real-time.

[TC]

HealthGuru.com Raises $6 Million in Funding

Riley Kennysmith — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:51:32 +0000

Health Guru Media provides, as the name suggests, health info videos at HealthGuru.com. TechCrunch reports that thanks to investors Western Technology Investment, Castile Ventures and Village Ventures, HealthGuru.com has raised $6 million in funding for their startup. Their CEO Joshua Silberstein says the site streams more video than rivals WebMD and Everyday Health combined.

Sulia Raises $3.5 Million For Sorting People To Follow On Twitter

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:24:43 +0000

Sulia is a website that finds and sorts influential Twitter users and groups them into categories. It is a good starting point for Twitter beginners. Sulia has raised $3.5 million in a round led by FirstMarket Capital. Other investors in this round include Village Ventures, IA Ventures, Founder Collective, and SV Angel. Sulia used to be known as TLists. [AllThingsD]

Travel Ad Network Raises $15 Million In Series C

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:02:36 +0000

Travel Ad Network is an advertising network that focuses on travel content. Travel Ad Network works with about 300 travel websites including Lonely Planet and Hawaii.com. Their network reaches about 20 million unique U.S. visitors per month. Travel Ad Network’s revenue has increased 30% over this past year. To keep growing their network, the company has raised $15 million in a third round of funding. This round was led by StarVest Partners. Other investors in this round include Rho Venture and Village Ventures. [paidContent]

Foursquare Co-Founder Dennis Crowley Invests In Metamarkets

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:24:15 +0000

Metamarkets is a real-time data startup company that provides price data and analytics to global media companies. The company launched in late 2009 and is working towards solving the problem behind ad price discovery on mobile and web platforms. The company has raised $2.5 million from IA Ventures, Village Ventures, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Mike Maples, Stan Shuman, AOL Ventures, Josh Stylman, Jim Pallotta, Peter Hershberg, and Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley. IA Ventures led the round.

Metamarkets was founded by David Soloff and Michael Driscoll. Soloff is the former lead architect at Rapt, a company acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Driscoll is the founder of Dataspora. This new round of funding will be used to build the company’s engineering team. [TechCrunch]

Outside.in Raises $7 Million From Union Square, CNN, Betaworks, Village Ventures, NYC Fund, and Milestone

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:19:00 +0000

Outside.in is a hyperlocal news aggregation company that has been attracting quite a bit of investment from multiple sources. In the company’s Series B round of funding, Union Square Ventures was the lead investor. Others that participated include TV news network CNN, Betaworks, Village Ventures, New York City Investment Fund, and Milestone Venture Partners.

This means Outside.in has raised over $12 million in total funding since the company launched in 2007. After the jump is the full press release from the company:

BROOKLYN, NY (December 8, 2009) – Outside.in (http://www.outside.in), the leading hyperlocal content and advertising platform, today announced the close of a $7 million B round of financing, led by Union Square Ventures and including CNN Worldwide, one of the world’s most respected and trusted sources for news and information as a strategic investor. The round includes all previous venture investors, including Village Ventures, Betaworks, the New York City Investment Fund and Milestone Venture Partners, as well as continued support from a strong group of angel investors.

“In our opinion, there has never been a better time to build a new business in local media. This round represents a huge vote of confidence from our investors and CNN Worldwide that they agree and believe our results and approach are positioned to win,” said Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in. “The continued support of our investors shows our proven track record and their confidence that we will continue to focus on delivering huge value for all participants in the local media ecosystem—consumers, publishers, bloggers and advertisers.

Said Fred Wilson, principal at Union Square Ventures, “Local media is undergoing a radical reinvention and Outside.in is at the center of it, providing readers, advertisers, publishers, and bloggers the tools they need to make local news and information more relevant and profitable. Outside.in’s reach has grown 500 percent in the past year, showcasing the power of this new model.”

As part of its investment, CNN Worldwide entered into a concurrent multi-year deal to use the Outside.in for Publishers aggregation and curation platform to power hyperlocal news across all of CNN.com and its related properties. The first implementations are expected to be completed in Q1 of 2010.

“We are proud to have partnered with Union Square Ventures, Betaworks, and others to support Outside.in during the next stage of its business evolution, as the company continues to build an industry leading platform serving the hyperlocal market,” said Estenson. “Our strategic investment in this company and the hyperlocal platform they have built demonstrates our commitment to delivering a strong local news offering to our users.”

The funding round comes after a year of significant milestones for Outside.in.

More than one hundred media partners around the country now use the Outside.in For Publishers platform, including the New York Post, Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) Local, Media General (NYSE: MEG) and Chicago Tribune

Traffic to the Outside.in Network has grown to nearly 6 million monthly unique visitors

More than four thousand local bloggers use Outside.in’s distribution, geo-tagging and mapping tools

The funding will be used to support the continued development of the Outside.in platform for local content and advertising.

Online Parenting Website Babble Raises $1 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:15:53 +0000

Babble is an online “magazine and community for a new generation of parents.” Somehow using that as a tag line has been enough to gather $1 million in funding and attack tons of traffic.

Greycroft Partners are the VC firm behind the $1 million in funding which adds to the other $2 million made from Village Ventures. The total $3 million is paret of the same round at the same valuation.

Babble is a spin-off from Nerve Media, a sex and dating community website. Babble is targetted towards a commnity of younger parents that live in major cities. Competitors include Urbanbaby.com and Cookie Magazine. Babble is also getting a newly appointed CEO by the name of Sean Mills. Mills is the former president of The Onion and will be replacing Babble founder Rufus Griscom.

[via TechCrunch]