Series A
Blog aggregation platform Bloglovin has secured $7 million in a Series A funding round led by Northzone. Among current investors contributing: Betaworks, White Star Capital, Lerer Ventures and Bassett Investment Group. The round also saw participation from the founders of Babble and SoulCycle. The company boasts 16 million active users and was founded in Taby, Sweden.
Mountain View-based ElasticBox has realized a $9 million Series A investment round from Intel Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. The company’s seed backers include a16z and Sierra Ventures. ElasticBox simplifies the development, deployment and management of applications for any cloud infrastructure, according to its website. “It brings Dr. Dre-like creativity to enterprise application development,” says the company’s CEO and co-founder, Ravi Srivatsav, in a press release.
Image site Imgur has received $40 million in a Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz with a small contribution from Reddit, according to WSJ. The New York Times states the site had previously been bootstrapped, with the company’s founder’s sole financial investment in the company coming to $7 –– the cost of registering its domain name. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.
Series C
Peer-to-peer lending company Social Finance, Inc. (SoFi.com) has gained $80 million in a Series C investment. Discovery Capital Management led the funding, while Wicklow Capital, Peter Thiel, and current investors contributed. The San Francisco-based company has backed $450 million in loans to more than 5,000 members since its 2011 launch, according to a press release.
IT infrastructure monitoring services company Boundary has raised $22 million in a Series C funding round led by Adams Street Partners. Triangle Peak Partners joined current backers Scale Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners in contributing. Total backing behind Boundary comes to $41 million. The Mountain View-based company serves clients such as The Weather Channel, Gilt, Zendesk and Expedia.
Funding
Envelope Tracking (ET) technology company Nujira Ltd has completed a £12.2 million ($20.2 million) funding round. Amadeus Capital Partners, Climate Change Capital, SAM Private Equity, NES Partners and Environmental Technologies Fund invested. Investec Bank also introduced new funders to Nujira including GAM on behalf of GAM Star Technology strategy and Investec, plus clients. “Envelope Tracking is set to be universally adopted across the smartphone industry in 2014, with a potential market of 4 billion units a year,” according to a press release.
San Francisco rideshare company Lyft has raised $250 million in funding. Coatue and Alibaba Group joined existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Mayfield in the round. Since the company arrived in its second city last year, Lyft has expanded to 30 cities in the United States, according to a blog post
Munich-based e-commerce company Westwing has gained €72 million ($99 million) in funding. The round counted investors such as Odey, Tengelmann, Fidelity Worldwide Investment and more. The company, which serves the home and living space, has secured €150 million total backing “after 2.5 years on the market,” according to a press release. Last year, Westwing increased net revenues by nearly 3x from €41 million in 2012 to €110 million in 2013.
M&A
U.K.-based customer science company and Tesco PLC subsidiary dunnhumby Ltd. has revealed the acquisition of Berlin’s global advertising technology firm Sociomantic Labs GmbH, according to a press release. Sociomantic drove more than $100 million in revenues last year.
Spredfast, which delivers social relationship platforms, is combining with social marketing experiences facilitator Mass Relevance. Both companies are based in Austin. “The new entity will offer marketers the only seamless solution to manage, monitor and integrate social content across any digital screen,” according to a press release.