Seed
London-based e-mail management service Mailcloud has raised a $2.8 million Seed round from Bessemer Venture Partners, Octopus Investments, Seedcamp, and a collection of angel investors. The company claims 50,000 people, from companies like Disney, Intel, and Uber, signed up for the Beta version of its service.
Series A
FinTech, Bitcoin in particular, continues to heat up. Bitnet Technologies, boasting a platform that enables large online retailers to accept Bitcoin payments, secured $14.5 million over the weekend to continue to build out its product. Backers include Highland Capital Partners and Rakuten, Japan’s leading online retailer and a frequent investor in American-based e-commerce companies of late that has agreed to implement the service into its own offerings. Bitnet’s founders are Visa veterans by way of Cybersource, the payments processing company Visa acquired for $2 billion in 2010. Describing the decision to start a Bitcoin-based service, in a conversation with Coindesk, Bitnet CEO John McDonnell said: “We saw Bitcoin as an opportunity to reduce direct costs of processing and eliminate a lot of the ancillary costs of handling credit cards…as payments veterans, this is the most exciting development in FinTech, ever.” Bitnet joins BitPay, Coinbase, and GoCoin as competitors in the space.
Osmo, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based gaming company that makes use of proprietary artificial intelligence technology to create interactive experiences aimed at children with tablets and other mobile devices, announced before the weekend that it had raised $12 million from Accel Partners and returning investors K9 Ventures and Upfront Ventures. Its founders, Jerome Scholler and Pramod Sharma, are former Google employees.
Series B
The San Francisco, Calif.-based online billing management company Recurly, Inc. has raised $12 million from Devonshire Partners, e.ventures, Polaris Partners, Greycroft Partners, and Fidelity Investments. The latest equity financing round brings total funding for the five-year old company to over $19 million. Recurly’s customer base is comprised primarily of SaaS and publishing companies with subscription billing models.
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