Happy Sriracha Week everyone! With all the chaos of the Launch festival, I completely missed that this week is the best of all weeks, for it is dedicated to my favorite food item. That’s right, not condiement, food item. Sriracha is a remarkably flexible ingredient that can be used on anything ranging from salads to steak, potato chips to ice cream sandwiches (for real). Here is your daily funding news, served with a massive squirt of Sriracha. Mmmm. Spicy.
For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.
Alloy Digital gets all bright and shiny with $30 million
Alloy Digital, the company behind male humor video publisher Smosh, has raised $30 million. Smosh apparently generated $10 million in revenue last year, successfully monetizing on their YouTube content. Alloy purchased Smosh in 2011 and now ABS is investing in Alloy, which also has other web video stars in its network.
Pertino raises $20M so you can make a pop-up network anytime, anywhere
Pertino, a cloud company that only just came out of stealth mode, has announced a healthy round of funding: a $20 million Series B led by Jafco Ventures with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Pertino lets its customers set up cloud-based networks that it says are as powerful and secure as any other kind of enterprise network. Read more on VentureBeat.
Scoot & Doodle gets cozy with $2.25M, to bring learning and play together
On Scoot & Doodle, young adults can get together to practice ’21st century learning and innovation skills,’ The startup provides a social platform where people can ‘play with ideas, create stories, draw, discuss, and solve problems together.” To support these “creative jam sessions,” angel investors and textbook company Pearson invested to expand the user base and extend the platform to other devices.
TastemakerX’s new game for music snobs nabs $1.25M to improve artist discovery
Music startup TastemakerX understands this. It has created a social game that specifically appeals to those precious music snobs. Essentially, TastemakerX lets people pull music from several different sources (Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud) to play songs they believe the community would enjoy. TastemakerX has also secured a new $1.25 million round of funding that it will use to improve development of its music discovery technology platform as well as forge new partnerships. The new funding included investments from Baseline, True, Guggenheim, and AOL. Read more on VentureBeat.
Sproutkin sprouts up with 1 million seeds for little sprouts
Subscription service for children’s books Sproutkin has secured $1 million of a seed round that should continue to climb. Sproutkin runs a rental service where parents and their kids receive shipments of new books on a regular basis. It’s like Netflix for children’s books, or a library trip without the trip. 500 Startups and the TechFellow Fund participated in this round, along with other angel investors.
Photo Credit: idovermani/Flickr
Filed under: Deals 
 |
 |