[Posted on August 5, 2008 - 5:55 PM]
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Koolanoo
Chinese media company Koolanoo Group has raised $25 million in a third round. The financing was led by an unnamed investment group, joined by existing investor Giza Venture Capital of Tel Aviv. The Beijing company owns and operates large Web properties in China including 360Quan, a teen social network, and iQ, a new Chinese Internet browser. Koolanoo plans to use the capital to continue expansion of its operations in China and to launch new products.
Weplay
Weplay Inc., a social network focused on youth sports, has raised $8.6 million in Series B financing. Deep Fork Capital of Jenks, Okla., led the investment, with participation from existing investors FirstMark Capital (formerly Pequot Ventures) of New York, Weplay senior executives and professional athletes Derek Jeter, LeBron James and Peyton Manning. The funding will be used to accelerate the company's growth as an online youth sports destination. The company closed a $4.4 million Series A funding earlier this year and now has partnerships with Pop Warner Football and youth football organization Cheer.
Education.com
Redwood City, Calif.-based Education.com has secured $9.75 million in a Series B funding led by California Technology Ventures of Pasadena, Calif. Also participating were return investors Azure Capital Partners of San Francisco and TeleSoft Partners of San Mateo, Calif. The Web site is an online destination for parents with school-age children. It provides information, resources and content on issues such as child development, special needs, bullying and kindergarten readiness.
Software
Elastra
San Francisco-based cloud computing startup Elastra Corp. has landed $12 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Bay Partners of Cupertino, Calif., with participation from new investor Amazon.com Inc. of Seattle and from returning backer Hummer Winblad Venture Partners of San Francisco. Elastra is a provider of software for configuring and managing complete application systems in public and private compute clouds. Neal Dempsey of Bay Partners will join the company's board. Elastra will use the funds for customer acquisition and to further develop its software.
dynaTrace
DynaTrace software closed a $12.9 Million round in Series B financing led by Bay Partners of Cupertino, Calif., joined by insider Bain Capital Ventures of Boston. Bay Partners general partner Salil Deshpande will also join the dynaTrace board. The Boston startup is a maker of life-cycle application performance management technology for distributed Java and .NET applications. The software aims to help companies reduce costs and improve performance by giving them control of complex distributed applications. The new capital will be used to expand sales and marketing and for business development.
Financial services
Payoneer
New York's Payoneer Inc., a provider of prepaid debit MasterCard cards and Web technology for paying others, has raised $8 million in a Series B round. The investment was led by Israel's Carmel Ventures, joined by Greylock Partners of Boston, Crossbar Capital of New York and angel investor Zohar Gilon. Founded in 2005, Payoneer will use the funds to expand its services for Web 2.0 companies and other businesses, as well as to expand its payment service offerings internationally.
360quan is a total fail case in SNS websites in China. The management team is very superficial of SNS, thus the ones who were interviewed by GM CQ took his as a fool. The traffic of 360quan was bought from Union and the title of top3 of Chinese SNS was bought from Iresearch. If you had 3 million you could do much better than them.