Miramar Labs, a dermatological medical device company, has raised $1 million in debt, options, warrants or other securities, according to a filing with the SEC.

Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., the startup uses electromagnetic energy for aesthetic procedures. The company’s first development, called miraDry, is a non-invasive, outpatient procedure to treat axillary hyperhidrosis, or excessive underarm sweat. The treatment is not yet available for commercial use in the United States or Canada.

Founded in 2006, Miramar Labs last raised $20 million in 2008 from investors including Morgenthaler Ventures, Split Rock Partners and Domain Associates.

Companies: Domain Associates, miraDry, Miramar Labs, Morgenthaler Ventures, Split Rock Partners

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Looking to make their display ads more appealing to advertisers and agencies, Yahoo today announced on its blog that it has plans to buy Dapper, a mashup technology to bring the advantages of search-based advertising into the world of display ads.

Dapper’s technology lets users easily set up their display ad preferences online, such as total amount to spend on a campaign, and put the most updated and accurate website information into display ads. For example, an e-commerce website selling electronics would be able to showcase its most recent sales items in its display ads in real-time.

The company launched back in 2008 when companies like Yahoo ironically were saying their display ads were declining and rumors had it that companies like Yahoo and Google were working on their own similar technology.

Competitor LucidMedia, a similar platform for optimizing display ads, was used by Yahoo Right Media in 2008 to ensure that advertisers’ creative display advertisements appear alongside relevant content on publishers’ sites.

When the company launched, results were promising but not well documented due to the early stages. Today, Dapper appears to showcase some impressive statistics, including results of 2 1/2 and 8 times higher engagement from consumers.

Dapper’s vice product of product marketing, Amit Kumar previously led Yahoo’s SearchMonkey platform before joining the startup in September and could have been a strong connection in the acquisition.

The San Francisco-based company previously raised $3 million from Accel Partners, Mitch Kapor and others.

Tags: display ads, mashup ads

Companies: Dapper, Yahoo

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Notorious Russian billionaire Len Blavatnik has decided to place a sizable bet on mobile data leader Acision, on Tuesday announcing he would lead the way in a $100 million funding infusion into the firm.

Blavatnik will partner his existing shareholdership in Access Industries with Irish investor Dermot Desmond’s International Investment and Underwriting, and private equity fund Atlantic Bridge, to underwrite the deal.

Privately held Acision currently offers a range of mobile services through its proprietary communications network, including mobile messaging, mobile internet browsing, voicemail, mobile broadband and close to a trillion text messages a year.

The company said that it will use the funding to shore up its position as a global leader in the current frenzy to capitalize on smartphone-ready mobile data. It is rumored to be going public sometime in the next two years–good timing considering its internal forecasts show that global mobile data traffic is set to increase 39 times between 2009 and 2014.

The $100 million shot in the arm will be needed. Acision recent coups in swooping up the business of companies including Pakistan’s Mobilink, MTS, Videocon Telecommunications, Telus, Tata Teleservices and VimpelCom will leave it needing as many resources as it can muster.

Photo via Ed Yourdon

Tags: Android, deal, iPhone, mobile data, smartphones, Venture Capital

Companies: Access, Acision, Atlantic Bridge, IIU, MTS, Tata, Telus, Videocon, VimpelCom

People: Dermot Desmond, Len Blavatnik

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The Echo Nest, a startup building a massive database of musical artists and songs, just raised $7 million in a funding round led by Matrix Partners.

Matrix’s Antonio Rodriguez is joining the Echo Nest board. Asked to describe the Somerville, Mass. startups, he said that if music applications and services like Pandora are the new gold diggers, then EchoNest is “the commissary that will sell the picks and shovels.” In other words, it creates the data (such as musician news and reviews, song beats and similar songs, listener demographics, and more) that can be used to create new music apps.

Pandora actually has its own data platform, created by what it calls the Music Genome Project, but its data is generated by musicians listening to music, and they take about 20 minutes per song. The Echo Nest has built technology for analyzing music without human involvement, so the process take about 3 seconds per song.

But the Pandora comparison just illustrates what The Echo Nest is trying to do. The companies aren’t direct competitors, since Pandora makes money off its own Internet radio services, while The Echo Nest offers its data to music application makers, i.e., the potential Pandora competitors. You can see a list of some of the company’s partners here, the best-known include MOG and Thumbplay.

Of course, a number of music startups (including Pandora) have struggled to negotiate reasonable licensing fees with the record labels. Echo Nest’s customers may find a way to avoid these difficulties. Chief executive Jim Lucchese said his larger customers are looking to work with small developers, which benefits both sides — large companies get to tap into the cool work that indie developers are doing, while the developers get to take advantage of the licensing agreements that their larger partners have already made.

Previous Echo Nest backer Commonwealth Capital Ventures also invested in the new round.

[image: Flickr/flattop341]

Tags: music apps, music discovery

Companies: Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Matrix Partners, The Echo Nest

People: Antonio Rodriguez, Jim Lucchese

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The Foundry Group just revealed that it has raised a $225 second fund — supposedly the same size as the firm’s first fund.

In the announcement, the firm’s partners say, ‘We will continue to do exactly what we have always done: invest in seed and early-stage investment opportunities in the software and IT space that are located across the United States.”

Even though the Foundry Group is based in Boulder, Colo., it says it bases its investments on specific “themes”, regardless of where the companies are located in the US. Those themes are: human computer interaction, implicit Web, email, glue (i.e., services connecting Web services and content companies), and digital life.

Current portfolio companies include ad optimization startup AdMeld; Gist, which adds social data to email; location platform SimpleGeo; and social gaming giant Zynga. The firm’s partners include Brad Feld (who’s also co-founder of the TechStars incubator), Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.

Companies: Foundry Group

People: Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre, Seth Levine

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Zynga’s acquisition spree continues as the social game company announced today it has acquired Bonfire Studios, a Dallas-based social game startup. The price wasn’t disclosed.

The new studio will be called Zynga Dallas. The company’s three founders — David Rippy, Bill Jackson and Scott Winsett — started the company in November, 2008, after Microsoft shut down Ensemble Studios, the legendary maker of the Age of Empire games.

Dismantling Ensemble Studios was likely one of the more foolish things Microsoft has done. But it has led to opportunity for new startups. Another studio founded by Ensemble veterans, Robot Entertainment, is making Age of Empires Online for Microsoft. But Bonfire Studios went its own way. The company hasn’t yet published a Facebook game, but given Zynga’s heritage, it’s a safe bet that it will do so. Rippy will serve as general manager of Zynga Dallas; Jackson will be its creative director, and Winsett will be senior art director.

Like Zynga’s chief game designer, Brian Reynolds (who will speak at our DiscoveryBeat 2010 conference) , who made the Civilization games before joining Zynga, these game veterans have impressive resumes. Rippy was lead producer of Ensemble’s Age of Empires 3, Age of Mythology and various prototypes for games. Jackson had been a programmer and producer at Ensemble since 2000, working on titles such as Halo Wars. And Winsett served as art lead on Age of Empires, The Rise of Rome expansion pack, Age of Empires 2, and The Conquerors expansion pack. The trio funded their own startup. Zynga declined to say how many employees Bonfire has.

Zynga makes simple Facebook games such as FarmVille. It has often been criticized for copying other games, but the company has more than 1,200 employees — including 600 engineers — and it is investing heavily in the talent to make quality games.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our Needle in the Haystack discovery business idea competition. VentureBeat would like to thank the industry leaders that are supporting DiscoveryBeat 2010, including co-host Flurry, AppLaunchPR, Herakles Data Center, Adobe, Offermobi, Appolicious, and appbackr. Unique sponsorships are still available. For more information contact sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click on this link.

Tags: discoverybeat, discoverybeat 2010, Farmville

Companies: Bonfire Studios, Zynga

People: Bill Jackson, Brian Reynolds, David Rippy, Scott Winsett

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Facial recognition startup Viewdle just raised $10 million from retailer Best Buy, chip maker Qualcomm, and the BlackBerry Partners Fund.

Chief Product Officer Jason Mitura said Viewdle stands out from other facial recognition companies in two ways. First, it’s focused on making its technology work using the limited hardware of a smartphone, not just on an online server. Second, competitors promising facial recognition on the phone haven’t delivered, Mitura said, whereas Viewdle has a real product that will be available for sale next year. (Competitor Polar Rose was recently acquired by Apple.)

What’s so great about being able to recognize faces on your phone? Viewdle’s technology will be built into your phone’s camera, Mitura said, so when you take a photo the people in it will be automatically tagged. Then the photo can be automatically posted to sites like Facebook with all the tags already in place.

“Calling it a ‘tag’ doesn’t really mean much,” Mitura said. “I look at it as routing data.
Viewdle generates all this fantastic routing data and pushes it from node to node in the social graph.”

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Viewdle is working with manufacturing partners to get its technology pre-installed on phones. It’s too early to announce those partners, Mitura said, but he did note that most of the company’s latest investors are strategic. So whatever the exact nature of the deals, we can probably expect BlackBerry, Qualcomm, and Best Buy to be involved.

Anthem Venture Partners, which invested $2.5 million in Viewdle’s first round, also contributed to the new funding.

Tags: Blackberry Partners Fund, facial recognition

Companies: Anthem Venture Partners, Best Buy, Qualcomm, viewdle

People: Jason Mitura

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

ThreatMetrix, an online service that helps businesses verify a person’s identity and cut down on fraud, announced today that is has raised an additional $12.1 million in its third round of funding.

ThreatMetrix gathers non-personal information from visitors to various e-commerce and financial institution websites and builds a profile over time. The information can include country of origin, what kind of fonts are on the device and whether users are behind proxy servers. But ThreatMetrix does not gather or use sensitive data like social security numbers and driver license numbers, which consumers have become increasingly hesitant to give out.

A good profile — meaning it regularly comes from the same source and behaves consistently — receives a positive grade. At the same time, a profile that rapidly registers for e-mail accounts or credit cards, or comes from multiple countries and has clearly been compromised, is graded negatively. ThreatMetrix profiles around 12 million devices every day, said president and CEO Reed Taussig.

The funding is pegged for further development of its fraud detection algorithms and marketing strategies. ThreatMetrix was actually over-subscribed, raising an additional $100,000 beyond its original goal of $10 – $12 million.

There’s a lot of space to grow in fraud-detection, which Taussig said is a roughly $1 billion market. Sophisticated attacks on financial institutions grew by around 500 percent last year, and money transfer fraud grew by around 1,400 percent, Taussig said.

“What’s different about it is it used to be that the strategic air command protected us against the bad guys,” Taussig said. “Nowadays, every individual that does business is a potential victim of this whole thing, and it’s become very personalized.”

All the analytics and processing occurs on an in-house database that registers around 200 million matches in around a half-second, he said. The data processing isn’t outsourced to other cloud infrastructures like Rackspace or Amazon’s EC2 because it’s too intense for the on-demand computing that those companies offer.

Primarily e-commerce companies, financial institutions and Web 2.0 companies like social networks currently use the software. ThreatMetrix is also seeing some traction in the mobile space, particularly because of the proliferation of the iPad, which behaves like a mobile device because it uses Apple’s iPhone operating system, Taussig said. Around 5 percent of users profiled by ThreatMetrix use mobile devices, and the share is growing, he said.

ThreatMetrix has raised about $24.1 million to date, with $6 million from its first and second rounds of funding. The second round, led by US Venture Partners, closed last year. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company has 38 employees and around 300 business customers, including 3 of the top 5 e-commerce sites — though Taussig wouldn’t disclose which ones.

[Photo: Don Hankins]

Tags: cloud, cloud infrastructure, credit card fraud, fraud, identity theft, nigerian prince, wire fraud

Companies: Threatmetrix

People: Reed Taussig

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Memoir Systems, a stealthy startup developing technology for memory performance, has raised $5.1 million in a first round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC.

Lightspeed Venture Partners was the sole investor in the round, according to peHUB. The company also raised $750,000 in debt, options, warrants or other securities from a single investor in September. Founded in 2009, Memoir Systems is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Companies: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Memoir Systems

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Typekit, a subscription-based font service for web designers, has raised $2.05 million of an expected $3 million in equity. True Ventures led the round, according to a filing with the SEC.

Based in San Francisco, Typekit provides users with a library of fonts that are both high quality and legal. The fonts are also easy to embed online by simply adding a line of code to a web page. Users can try the cloud-based service for free, and subscriptions range from $24.99 per year for a personal blog to customized pricing for large enterprise customers.

Last month, The New York Times redesigned its Opinion Pages using Typekit. Originally called Small Batch, the startup was founded in 2008 and raised $700,000 in 2009 from investors including True Ventures, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr founder Caterina Fake and investor Ron Conway.

Companies: Small Batch, The New York Times, True Ventures, Typekit

People: Caterina Fake, Evan Williams, Ron Conway

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More