Series A
Everstring, a San Mateo, Calif.-based sales analytics company, has raised $12 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and existing investors Sequoia Capital and IDG Ventures. The team of 28 expects to hire more data scientists and enterprise salespeople. “Our goal is to bring the most sophisticated machine learning and unstructured data analytics to help companies target, engage with and close new customer prospects,” said EverString’s CEO Vincent Yang.
An online marketplace for used furniture, Chairish, raised $4 million in a Series A round led by Azure Capital and OATV. Chairish specializes in designer used furniture. Co-founders Gregg (founder of TripIt) and Anna Brockway (former VP of Marketing at Levi’s) are husband and wife. Chairish is based out of San Francisco. Founded last July, the round brings total funding to $7.2 million. “Chairish has created a burgeoning marketplace that works effectively for both buyers and sellers,” said Managing Partner at Azure Capital, Mike Kwatinetz.
JoyTunes, an Israeli music education technology company, has raised $5 million from investors Aleph VC, Formation 8, and existing investor Genesis Partners. JoyTunes has a suite of games and applications that are able to complement a musician’s own instruments without any additional hardware.
Redpoint Ventures has invested $4.5 million in Platform9, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company with a SaaS platform that transforms an enterprise’s infrastructure into a private cloud. Platform9 was founded in 2013 by a team of early VMWare engineers. “We founded Platform9 because as early engineers at VMware, we observed how customers were struggling to achieve AWS-like efficiency with increasingly archaic management software,” said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9.
Series B
Kleiner Perkins partner and Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob and back-up center Jermaine O’Neal participated together in a $12.2 million Series B for Athos, a Redwood City, Calif.-based maker of “smart” athletic apparel. They were joined by Social+Capital Partnership and existing investors True Ventures and DCM. “When I saw Athos for the first time, my immediate thought was how much more longevity it can give athletes by allowing us to train smarter and prevent injury though a better understanding and fine tuning of our bodies,” said O’Neal, who has made six All-Star teams since jumping from high school to the NBA in 1996. O’Neal joins New York Knick Carmelo Anthony, who launched his own VC firm last month, as an NBA player/early-stage tech investor.