enterprise

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

It was a big day for funding today. Here’s the quick overview, with links to full stories.

Fab raises $150 million

Fab announced last night that it has raised $150 million in a fourth round of funding led by Chinese company Tencent, who’s also appointing a director to the company’s board. The company’s valuation, excluding the new funding, was $1 billion, and this is only the first tranche of it’s fourth round. Fab started life as a gay social network, the pivoted — and what a pivot it was — to an online design store.

More info

ThousandEyes raises $5.5 million

Cloud performance monitoring company ThousandEyes emerged from stealth mode to help IT teams at companies like Equinix, Evernote, Priceline, ServiceNow, Twitter, Zendesk and Zynga resolve performance problems quickly.

“Performance management products have not kept pace with the innovation in cloud services. Legacy products are ineffective in solving problems enterprises face today, creating migraines for IT,” said Mohit Lad, co-founder and CEO of ThousandEyes. “We have built a product from ground up for the cloud era to help companies get the best performance out of their cloud applications.”

The Series A round was led by Sequoia Capital and un-named Silicon Valley angel investors.

Cortica raises $6.4 million

Image software startup Cortica announced its second round of funding today for $6.4 million.

Cortica creates image recognition software that function similarly to the human brain. It can see something such as a landmark and then provide contextual information about that place. It has a lot of potential for advertising, particularly in wearable computing devices such as Google Glass. The company announced a portion of the funding in May – $1.5 million from Russia’s Mail.Ru.

Today’s funding was led by Horizons Ventures, and others.

SocialRadar raises $12.75 million

SocialRadar combines location-based mobile technology and social media information to make you aware of the people and connections around you. It seems a lot like Highlight, which generated a lot of fanfare at the SXSW conference in 2012 but hasn’t made much noise since. SocialRadar is still in the development phase and is working with iPhone, Android, and Google Glass to “change the way people connect.”

Founder and CEO Michael Chasen was a cofounder and former CEO of ed-tech behemoth Blackboard, where he took the company public in 2004, and then sold it to Providence Equity Partners in 2011 for $1.7 billion.

More info

CRM startup Intercom snags $6 million

Intercom, a software startup that promises to simplify customer relationship management (CRM), has just announced a healthy first round of funding.

The $6 million infusion was led by the Social+Capital Partnership with participation from previous investor Freestyle Capital and David Sacks, the founder and chief executive officer of Yammer.

More info

Entelo raises $3.5 Million

Entelo is building the next generation of talent acquisition tools focused on helping companies better leverage social data. To address demand for its solutions, Entelo will use the funds to accelerate its growth and research and development efforts, specifically to develop additional products leveraging its impressive data set and predictive analytics engine.

The $3.5 million in financing was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures.

Bunch raises $1 million
Bunch is a platform that lets people share and discuss things online that they are truly passionate about. Bunch users form communities around topics, and the platform allows these users to publish, and then engage around, longer-form content. The company’s vision is to provide users deeper engagement around topics they care about and to be the first social publishing and discussion platform built for the average Internet user.

The company raised $1M from Real Ventures, 500 Startups, BDC Venture Capital, and Round13 Capital.

Image credit: Cash register/ShutterStock

Filed under: Business, Deals, Enterprise, Entrepreneur, Mobile, Social

This article originally appeared on VentureBeat Read More

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Google chief legal office and senior vice president David Drummond got right to the point.

Asked in a Q&A session with The Guardian immediately following whistleblower Edward Snowden’s live Q&A, Drummond denied that the NSA has access to Google’s data and servers, as has been extensively alleged via the NSA’s PRISM program.

I’m not sure I can say this more clearly: we’re not in cahoots with the NSA and there’s is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported. Note that I say “originally” because you’ll see that many of those original sources corrected their articles after it became clear that the PRISM slides were not accurate. Now, what does happen is that we get specific requests from the government for user data. We review each of those requests and push back when the request is overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process. There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box.

This is much, much clearer and more specific than any of the company denials from Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo, and other companies accused of indiscriminately sharing data with the NSA. Those earlier denials seemed strangely similar, and seemed to offer big holes via which data sharing could still be taking place.

This is a good message to hear from Google, which has seen its users’ confidence shaken significantly with the PRISM accusations.

We heard “no direct access to servers” before. We haven’t heard “no indirect access,” and we haven’t heard “no back door,” or “no drop box.” What that means — assuming Drummond is truthful and in possession of all the facts — that PRISM is not the program that we initially thought it was: a program by which Google and thousands of other companies were potentially supplying shadowy government agencies with vast quantities of what was supposed to be private data on American citizens.

The message squares with what NSA director General Keith Alexander told Congress yesterday, saying that NSA surveillance programs were were limited, legal, and necessary for the protection of the U.S.A.

And Drummond reiterated his truthfulness as well as Google’s in response to a Google’ user’s question about whether he was lying:

We’re not in the business of lying and we’re absolutely telling the truth about all of this. Our business depends on the trust of our users. And I’m an executive officer of a large publicly traded company, so lying to the public wouldn’t be the greatest career move.

Hard-core conspiracy theorists will have their doubts, of course. And you don’t have to be anywhere near hard-core to have significant concerns and questions about PRISM and other NSA activities, and public U.S. companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple’s involvement with them.

Drummond talked about Google’s legal attempts to force the government to allow it to reveal the extent of data-sharing that it has been obligated to do. We should all hope that that attempt is successful.

Filed under: Big Data, Business, Cloud, Enterprise, Security