New York-based Ideeli, a flash sales site founded in 2007, has raised $41 million in Series C funding led by Next World Capital with Cue Ball Capital and other investing firms participating in the round. The latest round brings the total funding of Ideeli to almost $70 million.
The possibility of raising more funds means the three-year-old company has already had a lot of success. The earlier $30 million came from high-profile investors like Kleiner Perkins’ sFund and Liberty Media. Last February it was reported to have 18 million members in 195 countries, and has eight original Web video series in production for 2011, one of which was launched last week. It has 73 employees, and nabbed Plixi, a photo-sharing site.
Boxee has closed a tremendous third round of financing at $16.5 million. Find out what this means for the future of Boxee after the jump.
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Cheezburger is in ur investment portfolio, spending ur cash. The publishers of online humor sites I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, Memebase and The Daily What have raised $30 million in funding. Venture capital firm Foundry Group, which also funded Zynga and Topspin, led the investment with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures and SoftBank Capital. Foundry Group managing director Brad Feld and Cheezburger CEO Beh Huh gave mbStartups the details.
“Ben and his team have built something that we think is pretty amazing,” Feld told mbStartups. “I think anybody who is part of Internet culture has seen pieces of the site, whether it’s something from FAIL Blog or one of the LOLs,” he said. Founded in 2007, the Seattle-based company owned by Pet Holdings, Inc. has attracted 16.5 million users, with 375 million page views and 110 million video views per month. “With very limited capital, they have [become leaders] in a category that’s emerged around user-generated content.”
Online taste-and-mood based movie and TV recommendation engine Jinni just closed $5 million in Series B funding, led by Belgacom and a Tier-1 connected-TV manufacturer.
Twitter now has $200 million to burn a hole in its pocket. What’s the best way to put these new riches to work?
In recent months, Blip.tv has been forging ahead in an attempt to engage viewers, crush competition, monetize and secure a spot at the top of the online video industry. We recently covered Blip.tv’s partnership with 7-Eleven on their Road Trip Rally web series and their expansion into Hollywood. This morning the online video site is announcing that it has raised a whopping $10.1 million in their third funding round.
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Grockit, an up-and-coming social network for students, has just received $7 million in its latest round of funding. In previous rounds, Grockit received funding from Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga. Led by Atlas Venture, the current round of funding also saw previous investors Integral Capital Partners and Benchmark Capital contribute.
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The current U.S. administration might be Internet-savvy, but it’s not clear if certain branches of the military are yet. To wit, the United States Air Force is building a cyberwar control center, for which defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton received over $14 million, followed by a second contract of $20M for what might amount to setting up a wiki and a few other “collaboration” features for telecommunications researchers.
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As if there aren’t enough “gadget” blogs out there, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block have started another one, Gdgt, but this one with a difference. Not only are they not planning to hire paid writers, they’re planning to crowdsource review ideas and reviews from you, the reader. In other words, they’re going to use UGC, User-Generated Content, and already have over $3M in funding based on this premise.
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