OpenX, an online advertising company whose customers include deals service Groupon and news site Business Insider, just announced that it has raised $20 million in a fourth round of funding.

The Los Angeles-based company bills itself as an open source alternative to ad serving products like Google-owned DoubleClick. In February, it launched its latest product, OpenX Enterprise, which includes both an ad server and an ad exchange. At the time, chief revenue officer Jason Fairchild described OpenX Enterprise as the company’s first product to really beat the competition on technology, not just price, for example by giving advertisers a more holistic view of their ad inventory.

OpenX says that revenue has grown nearly 600 percent in the past year, and it notes that it’s growing internationally thanks to partnerships with Dentsu-cci in Japan and Orange-France Telecom in Europe.

The company has now raised more than $50 million. The new round was led by SAP Ventures. Other new investors include AOL Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, and the Sumitomo Corporation’s investment vehicle Presidio Ventures. Past investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures also participated.

In a press release, chief executive Tim Cadogan said:

Having new investors representing one of the world’s largest enterprise companies (SAP), one of the world’s largest internet pure-plays (AOL) and two of the most important global Asian trading firms (Mitsui and Sumitomo) all coming together to invest in the global technology platform company we are creating is — we believe — a compelling and powerful mix.

Tags: ad exchanges, ad servers

Companies: Accel Partners, AOL Ventures, Index Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Openx, Presidio Ventures, SAP Ventures, Sumitomo Corporation

People: Tim Cadogan

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Finnish game developer Supercell has raised $12 million in funding for its hardcore real-time social gaming business.

The investment shows the increasing appetite for investments in social games, especially those that hope to one-up dominant social game companies such as Zynga by providing a next-generation style of game play on platforms such as Facebook.

Accel Partners, which led the $42 million investment in Angry Birds developer Rovio, led the round. Klaas Kersting, founder of Gameforge and chief executive of Flaregames, also participated.

Ilkka Paananen, chief executive of Supercell, said the company is focused on making games that are bigger in scope than most social games but are less involved than massively multiplayer online games or console games. The Helsinki company’s first title is Gunshine, a crime-fighting game where players shoot criminals and other enemies in real-time in a place called Dawnbreak City. It is played from an overhead view. While the action is fast, the graphics aren’t that complex. The game has been in closed beta testing since February and is going to open beta today.

The company uses Adobe’s Flash 10 platform to create its games. That allows the games to run in a web browser with no need for a download. And while Supercell uses Facebook Connect to help gamers find friends to play with, Gunshine itself is hosted on its own web site, not Facebook. The company also has a way to convert the games to run on just about any platform.

While the company is very late to the social gaming party, Paananen said that Supercell has new features such as the ability to play synchronously, or in real time, with three other friends. You can also play with friends asynchronously, or when they are offline and each takes a turn one at a time.

“We have more immersive and deeper games than most Facebook games,” Paananen said. “Our game is also better when you play it with friends.”

The games will all be free to play, where users can play for free and pay real money for virtual goods in small transactions.

Previous investors include London Venture Partners, Initial Capital, Cerval Investments and Lifeline Ventures.

Supercell was founded in June 2010 and has 20 employees. Kevin Comolli, a partner in the London office of Accel, will join Supercell’s board. The company acknowledges it has hundreds of rivals in online games, from Bigpoint to Gameforge and Innogames. Rivals targeting the hardcore audience on Facebook include Kabam and Kixeye.

“The market is hot now, but you have to do something unique,” Paananen said.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

Tags: Gunshine

Companies: Kabam, Kixeye, Supercell

People: Ilkka Paanaanen

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Today’s funding announcements include services for finding jobs, analyzing data and conducting scientific research:

BranchOut brings in $18M for Facebook jobs service: The career networking service has raised a second round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Floodgate Fund. The company, which launched in July 2010, raised its first funding round of $6M in September. Today, the San Francisco-based company also announced Jobs Tab, a new enterprise product that allows companies to publish job openings to their Facebook pages.

Concurrent gets $900K to help companies work with large data sets: The San Francisco-based company has raised seed funding to help large businesses with data processing, according to a filing with the SEC. The company’s first publicly available tool, Cascading, is open-source software for creating data processing applications. The company was founded in 2008.

Lyncean Technologies raises $1M for X-rays: The Palo Alto-based company has raised a new round of equity funding to develop compact X-ray sources, according to a filing with the SEC. The company, whose name means keen-sighted, is developing an X-ray technology that will allow scientists to use radiation applications in their own labs. The company has previously received several grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Speechbobble gets $1.5M to bring social networking to the office: The enterprise social network has raised a round of seed funding from a group of Canadian investors. Based in Toronto, the company is developing software that will facilitate employee communication and collaboration in the office.

Companies: Accel Partners, BranchOut, Concurrent, Floodgate Fund, Lyncean Technologies, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Speechbobble

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

KupiVIP, Russia’s first online shopping club with more than 7 million members, has raised $55 million in a record funding.

KupiVIP hosts up to 20 private online flash sales every day, much like the Western rival Gilt Groupe. It sells heavily discounted fashion and home goods from 1,200 luxury brands. The deal shows that social shopping is a trend that is remaking e-commerce around the globe.

The third round of funding is a record for a Russian e-commerce business and will help the company offer white label e-commerce services to international brands.

New investors include Balderton Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Russia Partners. Existing investors Accel Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners did not invest in the new round.

Dharmash Mistry, a partner at Balderton Capital, said Russia is the second-largest internet market in Europe and will soon overtake Germany thanks to its 35-percent year-over-year growth.

KupiVIP was launched in October 2008 and has 750 employees. Its prices are typically reduced 70 percent for its members. But the company has also launched its “private e-commerce services” for other retailers such as Quiksilver and TSUM (Russia’s leading luxury retailer).

The Moscow-based company was founded by 28-year-old Oskar Hartmann, a German-born entrepreneur. The company previously raised $20 million in January 2010 from Accel and Mangrove. Revenue in 2010 grew 600 percent. Hartmann says the company is only beginning to scratch the surface. More than 200,000 customers log in each day, and the company delivers millions of packages a year.

Tags: fashion, online social club, social shopping

Companies: Accel Partners, balderton capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, KupiVIP, Mangrove Capital Partners, Russia Partners

People: dharmash mistry, Oskar Hartmann

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Accel Partners, the venture capital firm known for invest in big tech homeruns such as Facebook, has gone Hollywood with a $40 million investment in Dark Knight producer Legendary Pictures, according to Forbes.

The deal is unusual because venture capitalists have typically stayed away from from risky bets on movies, which can easily be hits or flops. Investing in content is a much different business than investing in technology, which can be more easily evaluated by VCs or engineers working for them. Accel seems to have gotten beyond that worry.

Legendary Pictures in Burbank, Calif., is best known as the film production company that created The Dark Knight, one of the most successful movies of all time. Founded by Thomas Tull, Legendary co-produces and co-finances films with Warner Bros. Legendary had previously raised Wall Street private equity and hedge fund money from ABRY Partners, AIG Direct Investments, Bank of America Capital Investors, Columbia Capital, Falcon Investment Advisors and M/C Venture Partners.

The investment was led by Accel’s Jim Breyer, who was primarily responsible for driving the Facebook investment. Breyer earned some Hollywood chops as a member of the board of Marvel Entertainment, which made not only comics but blockbuster movies and has now been acquired by Disney. Breyer was named the No. 1 VC today on Forbes’ Midas List of top VC investors.

Accel has also moved beyond content risk worries by investing in game maker Rovio, whose Angry Birds game has become a monster hit on mobile with more than 100 million downloads across mobile devices.

Companies: Accel Partners, Legendary Pictures, Marvel Comics

People: Jim Breyer

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Fusion-io, a maker of super-fast flash memory modules, announced today that it has filed for an initial public offering. The company’s memory modules are becoming more and more important to the creation of faster and more power-efficient servers in corporate data centers.

Salt Lake City, Calif.-based Fusion-io (a DEMO veteran) has had great success selling its devices into financial institutions that can benefit from its five-fold increase in memory data transfer. The company’s partners such as IBM are carrying Fusion-io into a wider variety of data centers, thanks to the benefit that Fusion-io brings in energy efficient computing. With the better memory module designs from Fusion-io, companies can reduce power consumption, cut cooling expenses, and eliminate expensive storage solutions. At the same time, they can vastly improve performance.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are handling the IPO for Fusion-io. The price range for the shares hasn’t been set yet. The company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission says it pioneered a next-generation storage memory platform for decentralizing data in a data center. It relocates critical data from centralized storage (where its stored in banks of hard drives) to the server where it is processed in the form of flash memory modules within the server itself.

To date, Fusion-io has shipped more than 20 petabytes of enterprise-class memory to more than 1,000 customers. (That basically means a lot of storage). The success is driven by the exponential increase in data storage required in the age of the internet and strict compliance regulations necessitating the storage of corporate records. Roughly $52 billion will be spent on high-performance storage and networking and memory-rich servers in 2011, according to market researcher IDC.

The SEC filing shows that Fusion-io is losing money. It generated $58.2 million in revenue for the six months ended Dec. 31, up from $11.9 million a year earlier. The net loss was $8.2 million, down from a loss of $13.1 million a year earlier. The company could definitely use cash, as it has just $3.5 million on hand. Most of  its assets are in $48.4 million in inventories and $39.7 million in working capital. The company has 348 employees. Among the risk factors listed is that “ineffective management of our inventory levels could adversely affect our operating results.”

Fusion-io recently said that IBM will now offer eight versions of input-output adapters based on Fusion-io’s ioMemory technology across a dozen different IBM servers. That’s a big expansion and a bigger endorsement by Big Blue for Fusion-io. The new adapters will be available on March 1. Supermicro is also using Fusion-io in a new line of server and storage devices.

The Fusion-io flash memory speeds the process of transferring data from temporary memory to permanent memory by placing data closer to the processor that needs it the most. A single ioMemory module has the capacity of 100 traditional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) memory modules and the performance of 1,000 hard disk drives. The Fusion-io products are memory modules that can be added into servers housed in racks within a big data center.

Fusion-io says its performance increases range from three times to 10 times, depending on the application. Fusion-io was founded in 2006 and has more than 370 employees. The company was started by David Flynn and Rick White. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak serves as its chief scientist. Rivals include LSI and other memory chip makers. Fusion-io’s customers include Zappos, MySpace, Wine.com, Answers.com, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

The company has raised $115.5 million in three rounds. Investors include Meritech Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Triangle Peak Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Ventures, and Sumitomo Ventures. Dell and HP are also partners. Competitors include Samsung, Seagate, STEC, Toshiba, Western Digital, Intel, LSI, Huawei Technologies and Micron Technology — and that’s just in chips. In  enterprise storage, rivals include EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp.

Tags: data centers, flash memory modules

Companies: Fusion Io, IBM

People: David Flynn, Rick White, Steve Wozniak

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Breezy, a mobile startup that helps users print and fax documents from their phone, just announced that it has raised $750,000 from big-name investors.

I last wrote about the Oakland, Calif. company in December, under its old name BreezyPrint. Founder and chief executive Jared Hansen told me he changed the name because he doesn’t want to be limited — the app already allows users to fax as well as print documents from their phone, and Hansen said he’s interested in adding a scanning feature too.

It’s pretty easy to see why the app might be useful — if you do a lot of work on your phone, particularly reading emails, then it can be a pain to have to switch to your computer when you need to print something out. Breezy removes the intermediate step, and Hansen has estimated that the app can save seven minutes in the process. (Hansen is a former corporate lawyer, and he said he created in the app out of frustration with the lack of a print feature on the BlackBerry.)

The bigger question is whether Breezy can turn into a viable business, especially when it’s competing with built-in features like AirPrint on the iPhone. For a consumer, the most promising thing about Breezy is probably its partner network, which will allow users to print in hotels, copy shops, and other partner locations. The network hasn’t launched yet — in part, Hansen said, because he’s been more focused on fundraising for the past few months.

For a business that wants to offer Breezy to its employees, Hansen said Breezy can do more than a service like AirPrint because Breezy works on multiple devices (BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Phone right now, with an iPhone app in the works), and because it provides analytics about who’s printing what, which can be useful for security and controlling costs.

The funding comes from well-known investor Jeff Clavier’s firm SoftTech VC, Accel Partners (whose partner Rich Wong previously invested in successful mobile companies like AdMob and GetJar), and Felicis Ventures (whose founding partner Aydin Senkut invested in mobile startups Erply and Bump, and who is also an investor in VentureBeat).

Breezy is a graduate of the Founder Institute, an entrepreneur training program and incubator led by TheFunded’s Adeo Ressi.

Tags: mobile printing

Companies: Accel Partners, Breezy, BreezyPrint, Felicis Ventures, Softtech Vc

People: Aydin Senkut, Jared Hansen, Jeff Clavier, Rich Wong

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

GetJar just announced that it has raised $25 million in a third round of funding for what it calls the largest “open” mobile app store in the world.

The news comes just a few days after chief executive and founder Ilja Laurs published an op-ed arguing that the United States is “still the land of opportunity for VC funding.” It seems he had even more reason to make that argument than was obvious at the time.

San Mateo, Calif.-headquartered GetJar says that users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications from its store, which supports Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and other devices. The company had a huge success last fall when it was the first app store to offer the hit Angry Birds game for Android — though the demand was so high that its site went down temporarily.

The round was led by Tiger Global Management. Accel Partners, which led GetJar’s first two rounds, also participated in the new funding. (Laurs is pictured with Accel partner Rich Wong above.)

“We’ve been highly impressed with the leadership team and their ability to disrupt the marketplace with the fraction of spend compared to the likes of Google and others,” said Lee Fixel, Tiger Global Management’s managing director, in the press release.

GetJar has now raised a total of $42 million.

Tags: app stores

Companies: Accel Partners, GetJar, Tiger Global Management

People: Ilja Laurs, Lee Fixel, Rich Wong

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Daily deals site Groupon announced some changes to its board of directors today, with Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz joining while three of the eight current members step down.

Late last year, Groupon turned down a $6 billion offer from Google and subsequently raised a massive $950 million round. The company needs to continue its rapid growth if it’s going to pay off for investors, and the board is probably hoping Schultz’s experience can help with that, especially as it faces competition from hordes of similar sites.

Co-founder and chief executive Andrew Mason told VentureWire that Schultz was “the top choice” when the board starting talking about new members last year, saying, “Let’s think really big about this company. If we could have anyone on this board in the world, who would we have?”

Meanwhile, R. R. Donnelly CEO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates partner Harry Weller, and 37Signals founder Jason Fried are all stepping down. (Or rather, Mason says they stepped down following the latest financing.) So the board now consists of Schultz, the company’s three founders, Peter Barris from investor NEA, Kevin Efrusy from investor Accel Partners, and AOL vice chairman emeritus Ted Leonsis. The company says it’s leaving the remaining seats open for “future additions.”

Schultz’s venture firm Maveron just invested in Groupon as well — not as part of the recent round, but instead by purchasing shares from existing investors and employees. When asked for more details about the deal, Mason reportedly responded, “It’s not news. It’s not interesting.”

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

“At Accel Partners, we have a long history of working with Goldman Sachs and at Accel Partners, we’re certainly work closely with Goldman Sachs in the future,” said partner Jim Breyer. “[Their name] is not mud [in Silicon Valley].” [Deal Journal]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker