Series A
Workpop, a free hourly wage job posting board, has raised $7 million from Trinity Ventures shortly after securing $900,000 in seed funding from a host of investors that included SV Angel, Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Ventures, and Box CEO Aaron Levie. The company is based in Los Angeles.
ClassPass, a digital gym membership program that is portable across a number of participating gyms in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, has raised $12 million in Series A to bring overall funding to $14 million. Franz Lanman (Square seed investor) and Hank Vigil (Senior VP of Strategy at Microsoft) led the round. The service is $99/month and has facilitated 500,000 reservations since June. ClassPass is a 2012 graduate of the TechStars program.
Series B
LightSpeed, a Montreal-based provider of retail sales and inventory management software, has secured $35 million in Series B funding from iNovia Capital and existing backer Accel Partners. The company, which also offers tools for building branded iPad apps and e-commerce platforms, will use the new funds to build out a payment support platform that would allow retailers to sell goods directly through its platform. LightSpeed was founded in 2005 and helped its customers process over $7.5 billion in sales last year.
Series C
Online and mobile video platform JW Player has raised $20 million in Series C funding from Greenspring Associates, e.ventures, and existing investors Greycroft Growth and Cueball Capital. Videos played through the JW Player platform are viewed 900 million times each month, across 2 million websites, according to the company. Its customer list, meanwhile, includes TripAdvisor, IMDB, The Guardian, and Electronic Arts. Speaking to TechCrunch, JW Player President Chris Mahl believes that his company has found a niche with publishers who are interested in “life after YouTube, or life beyond YouTube.” JW Player was founded in 2007 and is based in New York.
Funding
Jet.com, an e-commerce website led by Quidsi (parent company of Diapers.com, Soap.com, etc.) co-founder Marc Lore, has raised $20 million in debt financing from Western Technology Investment, plus an additional $5 million through an asset-backed loan from Silicon Valley Bank. Currently in stealth mode, the company had just announced in July that it raised $55 million from MentorTech Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Accel Partners, and New Enterprise Associates. The company is expected to launch some time in 2015, when it will offer “lower prices than any other online retailer,” according to a short description of the company on the NEA website.