Seed
Bipsync, an automated productivity platform for investment professionals, has received $1.5 million in seed financing. Among the investors are Richard Seigelman (former Kleiner Perkins), David Eisner (themarkets.com founder), and Steadfast Venture Capital. “The IT security and compliance requirements are beyond anything a consumer-facing software hosted on the public cloud can provide. At the same time traditional financial software is notoriously complex and clunky,” said Bipsync CEO and former hedge fund analyst Danny Danado through a press release. “Amazingly, this means that a personal investor using a patchwork of productivity software like Evernote and Dropbox is better equipped than a professional investment analyst. That ends today.” Or at least the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company hopes so, as the company launched its Open Beta today alongside the investment.
Alfred Club, a Boston-based service that matches people looking to unload errands on those willing to do them, has secured $2 million in seed capital from CrunchFund, SV Angel, and Spark Capital. The startup, founded out of HBS, also won $50,000 in prize money from TechCrunch Disrupt SF this past September. Alfred Club competitors include TaskRabbit, Handybook, and Postmates.
Series A
San Francisco-based Shift, a mobile-based used car “concierge,” has received $23.8 million in Series A financing. Backers include Draper Fusher Jurveston and Highland Capital Partners, with additional participation coming from Jim McKelvy, Chris Barton, Great Oaks VC, and SV Angel. Replying to Dan Primack (Fortune), who suggested that the company might struggle given the declining interest in car ownership among typical early adopters of mobile products, CEO George Arison said: “Europe is a great place to look at when people have much better ground transportation beyond their own car, and you still see people have one car per family. Maybe not two cars, but that’s fine for us.”
The enterprise security and collaboration company Veradocs has raised $14 million in venture financing. The Mountain View, Calif.-based firm is being backed by Battery Ventures, Amplify Ventures, and Nick Mehta (former LiveOffice and current Gainsight CEO).
Obvious Ventures, the newly formed VC fund from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, has led its first financing round, a $5 million investment in Breezeworks. Breezeworks is a mobile app designed for business management, providing users with an integrated platform for scheduling, communicating, paying, and invoicing. Joining Obvious in the Series A are several members of the PayPal Mafia (Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, David Sacks), Marc Benioff (Salesforce founder/CEO), and James Murdoch (COO 21st Century Fox).