Social bed and breakfast startup Airbnb is in the process of closing a $100 million round of funding led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that would raise the company’s valuation to more than $1 billion, according to TechCrunch.

This is a significant investment for Airbnb, which has previously raised $7.8 million, and comes days after actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher invested a significant amount of money in the company.

Kutcher, who was an early investor in Foursquare and the deal to purchase Skype back from previous owner Ebay, is increasingly being looked at in the investment world as someone to watch when it comes to predicting the next hot startup company.

Airbnb offers a service in which travelers looking for a unique experience (similar in scope to a bed and breakfast) can rent a living space from locals for a fee.  The service has seen incredible growth of 800 percent in the last year and had over 1.6 million local homes booked since it launched in 2008.

An investment this large may seem drastic, but Airbnb looks to be fulfilling a need in the marketplace. And while business trips and conference attendees will likely stick to booking hotel rooms, Airbnb could make a real splash with recreational travelers .

Tags: funding

Companies: Airbnb, Andreessen Horowitz

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

A cool iPad app can go a long way these days. Flipboard announced today that it has raised $50 million in venture funding at a $200 million valuation, according to BoomTown.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Flipboard has created a beautiful app for viewing social media using a book’s page-turning metaphor. It shows that taking advantage of a touchscreen interface to create a simpler way of doing something that can already be done elsewhere is a valuable contribution, particularly if users adopt it.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” said Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue told BoomTown.  “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

Much of the funding came from New York-based Insight Venture Partnres. Previously, Flipboard raised $10.5 million.

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Lockerz, a social shopping startup aimed at users in their teens and 20s, is raising a big new round of funding. The Seattle company has already closed $30 million, and the round could go as high as $45 million.

The news first leaked out through a regulatory filing spotted by GeekWire, and a Lockerz spokesperson confirmed the funding via email.

Even at its current level, the round is bigger than many of the recent fundings for startups trying to reinvent the way users shop online. In February, for example, home decor-seller One Kings Lane raised $23 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which previously invested in Lockerz through its sFund for social startups) and Greylock Partners. Both rounds, of course, are dwarfed by the $950 million that group-buying company Groupon raised in January.

When I interviewed her earlier this year, Lockerz founder and chief executive Kathy Savitt described the site as the first online shopping experience that’s designed for younger users who are taking a “curatorial” approach to shopping and content. Geekwire reports that the site now receives 37 million unique visitors per month, and that the round will make it one of the most heavily-funded consumer Internet companies in the Seattle area.

Tags: social shopping

Companies: Lockerz

People: Kathy Savitt

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Scoutmob, a location-based group deals company, plans to announce tomorrow that it has secured a first round of funding for $1.5 million, according to New Atlantic Ventures representatives, who led the funding. The new funding will be used to roll out its deal service to new cities, continue development and hire more employees.

The company appears to be an interesting mix of a group buying site, like Groupon or LivingSocial, and location-based deal service, like Foursquare or Facebook Places. Users can visit the company’s website and agree to receive email notifications for deals, or download the iPhone or Android applications. When a deal is available, the user can either send to their phone via text or access the deal within the application. To redeem, the user simple goes to that merchant’s location and shows them the deal on their phone.

Unlike traditional group buying sites where users have to buy the digital coupon upfront, Scoutmob creates coupons that are free to users. The company makes its money by charging the merchant when a coupon is redeemed, which is tracked by the GPS in a user’s phone.

In addition to the funding, Scoutmob also announced its expansion to 10 more cities across the U.S, including Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland, Seattle and Washington D.C. The company previously only had deals in San Francisco, New York and Atlanta.

The Atlanta-based company, founded in 2010, secured the round of funding from New Atlantic Ventures, which also invested an undisclosed angel round.

Tags: deals, group buying, localion-based deals, location-based

Companies: Facebook Places, Foursquare, Groupon, Livingsocial, New Atlantic Ventures, Scoutmob

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Stack Overflow, which runs a popular programming question-and-answer site, has raised $12 million in a second round of funding. It has also adopted a new name, Stack Exchange.

The programming site supposedly received 95 million pageviews in February, so it may seem like a bad idea to rename a property that has already built a big audience. In fact, it looks like StackOverlow.com will continue to operate as a programming Q&A site. (It also recently launched a job-finding service called Careers 2.0.) The new name, meanwhile, should signal that the company’s goals are bigger than a single website, no matter how popular.

Specifically, the Stack Exchange Network now includes 45 similar Q&A sites covering topics like cooking, photography, and physics. The company says the network received 20 million unique visitors last month.

The new round brings Stack Exchange’s total funding to $18 million. Index Ventures led the funding, with participation from previous investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Tags: Q&A

Companies: Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, Union Square Ventures

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Securing documents became more relevant after Wikileaks unleashed thousands of confidential documents concerning the U.S. government onto the Internet. Enter Confidela, a provider of software designed to secure documents and make them more difficult to crack unless the reader has permission to view them.

Confidela, designer of the WatchDox document security program, announced today that it has raised $9.25 million in its second round of funding led by Shasta Ventures.

WatchDox basically wraps up a document in a protective layer that requires another user to have permission to read it. The sender has full control over the document and can decide whether to delete it, allow the reader to print it and pretty much everything else. The document is read through a web browser after it has been opened. There are also applications to access WatchDox-protected documents on the iPad and iPhone.

The company has around 3,000 customers, including a number of businesses in the financial services industry that deal with more sensitive information. Other customers include some companies in the semiconductor industry, where intellectual property needs an additional layer of protection. But perhaps the most notable new customers coming to WatchDox are governmental agencies concerned with potentially disastrous leaks following the Wikileaks scandal.

The service can already be integrated into some email services like Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Part of the funding will be spent on developing a plug-in for Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software and Microsoft’s Sharepoint software, said Moti Rafalin, Confidela’s chief executive. But the majority of the funding will be used on sales and marketing, he said.

Confidela earlier raised $5.5 million from Gemini Israel Funds and Shlomo Kramer, co-founder of Check Point and Imperva — two other security firms.

Tags: document security, leaks, security, Watchdox

Companies: Confidela, WikiLeaks

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Square, the mobile payments startup founded by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, announced today that it has raised $27.5 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital. The Wall Street Journal reported that the funding valued the San Francisco startup at $240 million, which I confirmed with chief operating officer Keith Rabois.

TechCrunch previously reported that Square was closing a round from Sequoia at a $200 million valuation.

Becoming truly mass-market company will be “a big challenge,” Rabois acknowledged, but he pointed out that Square is already achieving impressive growth without paying for traditional advertising or other promotions. He said Square is processing millions of dollars in transactions every week, and that it’s signing up 30,000 to 50,000 new merchants every month. Rabois said many of those merchants were previously cash-only, but they were attracted by Square’s ease-of-use (the card-reading device plugs into iPhones, iPads, and Android phones) and low financial risk (Square takes a small percentage of each payment, but the device is free, there are no upfront costs, and no long-term commitments) to start taking credit card payments for the first time.

Beyond the extra cash and impressive valuation, the funding also creates another connection between Square and the group of original PayPal executives who are known as the PayPal Mafia. Rabois joined Square from social startup Slide (which was itself led by PayPal co-founder Max Lecvhin), and he previously held executive roles at PayPal. Now Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, who was PayPal’s chief financial officer, is joining Square’s board of directors. (Sequoia reportedly beat out Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital to lead the deal.)

Bringing those connections to Square seems particularly important, given the company ambitious plans for upending the payments industry. (Building out the financial infrastructure has already caused the some delays.) Rabois said compared the complications involved in building a service that works with existing financial institutions and regulations is to building spaceship. (And, in fact, another PayPal mafia member, Elon Musk, is building spaceships with his company SpaceX.)

Rabois acknowledged that he and Boetha are connected through PayPal, but he also said that Sequoia has a long history of investing in financial service companies. Sequoia’s partners are also “product and design connoisseurs”, he said, which makes them a good fit for Square’s goal of making payments seem “magical”.

Khosla Ventures, which led Square’s $10 million first round of financing, also invested in the new round.

Tags: mobile payments

Companies: Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Square

People: Jack Dorsey, Keith Rabois, Roelof Botha

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Groupon, the daily deal site that has risen to infamy after rejecting a buyout offer from Google worth $6 billion, is on top of the world — for now.

To make sure things stay that way, the daily deal company is looking to raise more than $100 million in venture capital funding to fight off newcomers like LivingSocial, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

Groupon is the king of the hill, based on a recent Experian Hitwise blog post that showed that Groupon received 79 percent of U.S. visits among 81 group-buying sites last week. But LivingSocial, another daily deal site, has been creeping up on Groupon and recently confirmed an earlier VentureBeat report that it was receiving an investment from Amazon worth $175 million.

Both Groupon and LivingSocial, as well as a host of imitators, now offer deeply discounted offers for services, meals, and group activities from local merchants that have previously struggled to reach new customers online. The sites make money by convincing businesses to offer steep discounts, then selling those discounts directly to consumers and picking up the difference. The biggest opening for daily deal sites, though, is a $133 billion market for local business advertising that they can make their own.

The newest round of funding would place Groupon’s valuation at less than $6 billion, according to the Bloomberg report. It was valued at over $1 billion following a large round of funding in April. Recent valuations peg the company as worth around $3 billion with around $500 million revenue.

Tags: daily deals, funding

Companies: Groupon, Livingsocial

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Personal genetics company 23andMe has raised $22 million in a third round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC. Founded by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company analyzes DNA to provide customers with personalized information on ancestry and genealogy.

New investor Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation and existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Google Ventures participated in the round. 23andMe plans to use the funding to accelerate research and development.

Based in Mountain View, Calif., 23andMe was founded in 2006 and has raised more than $44 million to date.

Companies: 23andme, Google, Google Ventures, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, New Enterprise Associates

People: Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Red Foundry, a Chicago-based startup that has developed an easy way to let anyone make mobile apps without knowing a lick of code, announced today that it has raised $1.1 million in first round funding.

There are quite a few other services focused on helping average users make mobile apps, including iSites and Xyndi, but Red Foundry differentiates itself with its Mobile App Platform by focusing on design and ease of use. The company boasts that apps created with its platform are “beautiful out of the box” — and judging from the demonstration video below, I would have to agree.

Users can easily customize their apps without any programming knowledge, and the service lets you add content like music, videos, photos, blogs, maps, and more. The service also lets you add social networking integration so users can easily share your app with their friends. Lastly, Red Foundry includes intelligent analytics capabilities so you can learn how best to serve your users and make your app more popular.

The company says it will use the funding to “expand its staff, customer base, and offerings” while also working on launching its mobile app platform to the public (it’s currently in beta testing). The service is free to try as you build the app; once you choose to publish it, there are monthly pricing options at $59, $99 and $199. Enterprise users can work out a special arrangement for even more support from the company.

OCA Ventures and I2A Fund participated in the funding round. We’re awaiting details on previous funding from the company.

Tags: Android, apps, iPad, iPhone, Mobile App Platform, smartphones

Companies: I2A Fund, Oca Ventures, Red Foundry

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals