With so much going on in the city’s thriving ecosystem, it is easy to miss some of the happenings in the space. We keep you abreast of a few of things that you may have missed in NYC Tech this week including the fundings, exits, and events.
CLICK HERE TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED IN SILICON ALLEY LAST WEEK
eProdigy, whose suite of companies, including Capital Stack, ACH Capital, eProdigyACH DBA ACHBanking, eProdigy Loans, 1Workforce, and Daily Funder, to provide clients, funders, merchants and syndicate partners with a comprehensive options for small and mid sized businesses, and tools to allow partners to seamlessly manage their deals, announced that it has landed $100 million from an unnamed private equity firm in the form of a term loan, a convertible note feature, and participation rights.
The convertible note portion is a $20 million facility with the noteholder’s right to convert the full amount to equity at a $100 million valuation.
Justworks, the HR solution that makes it easy and affordable for businesses to hire and take care of people, giving companies of any access to enterprise-level benefits and services, has raised $13 million in Series B funding. Bain Capital Ventures led the round, with participation from previous backers Thrive Capital and Index Ventures.
Hightower, whose enterprise app helps commercial real-estate brokers and owners manage their leasing operations via their smartphones in real time, has raised $13 million in Series B funding from RRE Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Thrive Capital and Pritzker Venture Capital.
Palico, a New York and Paris-based online marketplace for the private equity fund community, has raised $7.3 million in equity funding from six family offices and prominent private equity executives from Europe and the U.S.
Text-to-video startup Wibbitz has raised $8 million in Series B funding led by NantMobile, founded by LA-based billionaire physician and entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong. Earlier investors Horizon Ventures, Lool Ventures, Initial Capital and Kima Ventures also participated.
Next Big Sound, an online music analytics platform, has been acquired by the streaming music service Pandora for undisclosed terms.
Blade, an app and logistics company centered around helicopter use and aka the Uber for helicopters, has raised $6 million in Series A funding at a $25 million valuation from Raine Ventures and some quite well known one-percenters, including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Discover Communications CEO David Zaslav, IAC’s Barry Diller, Alex von Furstenberg, and iHeart Media chairman Bob Pittman.
And just in time for the Hamptons!
Amazon Prime will now start delivering from local stores in Manhattan. In certain zip codes, anyway, including 10012,10014,10011,10113,10114,10199,10003,
10211,10260,10270,10276 – et al. That’s one-hour delivery, and merchants vary by zip code.
They will be expanding to other neighborhoods and cities later this year.
Charles Birnbaum has been promoted to Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners, the $4 billion global venture capital firm. In his new role, Birnbum will help lead BVP’s New York office in backing great entrepreneurs leading transformative early-stage and hyper-growth companies.
Birnbaum joined the firm as a Senior Associate in 2013, focusing on investments in the financial services, education, Internet of things and consumer Internet sectors. He has already helped lead Bessemer’s investments in August Home, Quantopian, OMsignal, Abacus, BrightBytes and Main Street Hub. Currently, he represents BVP as a director at United Capital and is actively involved at August Home, Betterment, BrightBytes, Main Street Hub, OMsignal, Quantopian and Yodle.
Prior to joining BVP, Charles led teams at Foursquare and various equity capital markets, working on more than 50 IPOs
Image credit: Linkedin
Formerly known as LiveLens, FlyOnWall, a social platform that allows anyone to stream live video from their mobile device to their followers easily,has raised $3 million in Series B funding from private investors.
Taboola, the content recommendation platform, has raised “multi-millions” of dollars from Baidu, as a follow on to their recent $117 million Series E round, which brings the company’s valuation to a $1 billion.
It was a full house as entrepreneurs gathered on Wednesday morning at the SOS Breakfast to hear Nnamdi Okike, Co-founder & Partner at 645 Ventures, who shared his insights on what he looks for in a startup – and the due diligence that entrepreneurs need to do on potential investors in their companies. And heads up: Convertible notes will also greatly dilute the founders, the Harvard MBA and JD warned.
CloudTags, the data platform for the physical store that drives results for Fortune 1000 retailers by powering digital interactions between customers and physical products, has raised $2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by IDEA Fund Partners, Alerion Ventures, Knoll Ventures and Hallett Capital.
CloudTags was named the “Most Disruptive Retail Technology” in 2014 by Retail Systems.
Insight Venture Partners, one of the one of the leading full-service New York-based venture capital and private equity firms, is nearing the close of a pair of funds totaling more than $4 billion. Insight Venture Partners IX LP fund has gathered $2.9 billion in commitments, according to a document distributed to investors. The other fund, Insight Venture Partners Growth-Buyout Coinvestment Fund LP, has reportedly raised about $1.1 billion so far.
Our friends at ENIAC Ventures hosted their annual M1 Summit in NYC on Tuesday and it was a day of brilliant mobile programming with over 1100 attendees. We particularly enjoyed Benedict Evans presentation from Andreessen Horowitz.
The LDV Vision Summit was held last week at the SVA Theatre and provided a 2 day look at how advances in machine learning and visual imaging tech is changing society. Two startups caught our eye:
1. Emotient – captures mood and sentiment of people in images at scale.
2. Orbital Insights – visual analysis of various types of satellite imagery to provide actionable data.
