The online bulletin board Pinterest has secured $367 million, with an option to raise as much as $211 million more, from an undisclosed group of new and old investors. The financing reportedly values Pinterest at $11 billion and brings total funding for the company to over $1 billion. According to The Wall Street Journal, there are only five private, VC-backed companies currently worth more: Xiaomi, Uber, Palantir, Snapchat, and SpaceX. Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Rakuten have all made big bets on Pinterest previously.
The New York-based tablet application developer FiftyThree, whose products include popular mobile tools like Paper and Pencil, has raised $30 million in new funding from New Enterprise Associates. Andreessen Horowitz and Jack Dorsey have backed the company in previous rounds. Paper, a sketching app with features like auto-correct diagramming, has been downloaded over 13 million times.
Dataminr, a web crawler that specifically targets Twitter and other social media sites for insights relevant to those in media, finance, and public safety, has raised $130 million in a round led by Fidelity. Also participating were Institutional Venture Partners, Venrock, Wellington Management Company, Credit Suisse, John Mack (formerly of Morgan Stanley), and Vikram Pandit (formerly of Citi). The company has now raised nearly $180 million since 2010. “Since our founding in 2009, reliance on Dataminr has become widespread not only on Wall Street, but also across many industries that depend on real-time information,” Ted Bailey, Founder and CEO of Dataminr wrote in a blog post.
Birst, a provider of cloud-based business intelligence solutions, has raised $65 million from Wellington Management and Sequoia Capital, among others, as it gears up for an IPO, according to CEO Jay Larson. The company is competing with similar services from Oracle and IBM, and other BI upstarts like Looker, which raised $30 million just last week. Hummer Winblad Partners, DAG Ventures, and Northgate Capital were also involved with Birst’s Series F, which brings total funding for the company to $156 million.