Payments Network Dwolla Raises $16.5 Million Series C From Andreessen Horowitz & Others, Expands To San Francisco
Building new infrastructure for digital payments may not sound sexy, but it’s an area that’s ripe for innovation. The legacy payments networks in existence today are bogged down with outdated technology, slowing progress. Des Moines-based Dwolla decided that the way to innovate in payments was to essentially blow up the outdated infrastructure entirely and start over by building out a new network from scratch. Today, that work has scored the company $16.5 million in new funding, in a Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company’s previous investors, Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Union Square Ventures also participated in the round. Dwolla is sometimes confused as an alternative to PayPal – and though it may compete with PayPal more directly on some initiatives, like MassPay which undercuts PayPal’s fees on a service business’ use in lieu of writing checks – that’s only a result of the new payments infrastructure the company has built, not the entire vision ...
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Duedil Raises $5M For Open Data Platform To Conduct The Due Diligence Companies Need
Duedil has raised $5 million for its platform that uses open data to help companies conduct due diligence. The Series A round was led by Notion Capital. Also participating were Oak Investment Partners as well as Passion Capital and Spotify investor Shakil Khan. With the funding, Duedil is hiring data scientists and beefing up its resources for expansion. Duedil is a company that shows what innovation can come when governments open their data. That’s what has happened with Duedil, which directly benefits from open data policies in the United Kingdom and those emerging in the European Union. With open data, Duedil can link data from different sources, aggregate it and provide it free or soon to come, on a subscription basis. At its core, Duedil offers a data analytics and visualization engine. Using the service, for example, a corporate lawyer can research a company’s corporate structure. The lawyer can visualize in a mind-map the company’s shareholders and investments. Last fall, ...
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Like A CarWoo For Used Cars, AutoRef Raises $850K Seed Round Led By European Car Buying Marketplace, AutoScout24
Pittsburgh-based startup AutoRef.com, which is something like a CarWoo for used vehicles, has raised $850,000 in seed funding. The round was led by an interesting, strategic investor: the large European online car marketplace, AutoScout24, which is owned by Deutsche Telekom. T-Venture, the venture arm of Deutsche Telekom, also participated in the round alongside Innovation Works, plus local angels and other investors.
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SiSense Raises $10M For Data Analytics Platform That Gives Everyday User A Data Scientist's Tools
SiSense has raised $10 million from Battery Ventures for platform that targets the growing number of companies with terabaytes of data to analyze and visualize The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Opus Capital and Genesis Partners. SiSense uses what it calls the “ElastiCube,” a high-performance analytical database that leverages server technology to maximize machine RAM and CPU use. The package includes the database and data visualization software for showing the analysis. The software can be installed as software on the cloud or on premise. CEO Amit Bendov said the majority of customers prefer to use SiSense on premise where most of a company’s data resides. SiSense, founded in 2004, started with five employees who spent six years developing the SiSense platform. Today, the company has 37 employees and expects to have 70 people by the end of the year. The growth comes from SiSense capabilities to process data without the need to build out complex, on-premise ...
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NanoSatisfi Raises $1.2M To Disrupt The Aerospace Industry With Small, Affordable Satellites
For years, Peter Platzer was pretty close to a stereotypical rocket scientist on Wall Street — he was trained as a high-energy physicist, but he spent most of his professional career in finance. But he told me he's always had an interest in space exploration, and now he's working on an aerospace startup called NanoSatisfi, which just raised $1.2 million in seed funding. Platzer said he avoided the industry in the past because it was slow and government-dominated, with little innovation. It took an enormous amount of time and money to launch satellites, which meant that the technology on those satellites lagged behind what was available on the ground.
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