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By Nitasha Tiku 11/16/12 12:25pm

Fresh Capital

Mr. Gross.

With Its $9 M. Series A, Percolate Might Become the Next Buddy Media By Turning Brands Into Microbloggers

Smart pivots can pay off handsomely. Earlier this week, Percolate, a fast-growing New York City-based startup that helps brands curate content, announced a sizable Series A led by GGV Capital, the same Silicon Valley VC firm that backed Buddy Media, which was acquired by Salesforcefor a eye-popping $698 million. Existing investors First Round Capital and Lerer Ventures also participated in Percolate’s latest round.

Roughly a year ago, Percolate shrewdly changed its focus from helping users find the most relevant top stories toward a (more profitable!) service that helps brands figure out the most compelling content to push out to their followers–a process that starts by helping them interest graph, something that comes more naturally to humans. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 11/14/12 6:30pm

Fresh Capital

nate-westheimer

Picturelife’s Nate Westheimer Launches Red Bud Partners, a Seed Stage Fund for New York Startups

Serial entrepreneur Nate Westheimer is something of a renaissance technologist.

Picturelife, the photo startup he cofounded with OMGPOP founder Charles Forman, recently raised a $4 million round led by Spark Capital. Picturelife’s concept is timely: the service focuses on backing up, storing, and accessing all of your photos from the cloud. That got the attention of a number of other notable investors, including Crunchfund, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Highline Venture Partners, Betaworks, David Karp, SV Angel, and Chris Dixon. Mr. Forman put some of the “way more” than $22 million he earned from OMGPOP’s sale to Zynga and former Zynga GM Nabeel Hyatt, a partner at Spark, joined Picturelife’s board. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 10/25/12 9:08am

Fresh Capital

Cash monies.

Tradesy Raises $1.5 M. to Help You Cash in on the Clothes in the Back of Your Closet

Got a bunch of stuff hanging in your closet you’re no longer thrilled with? Well, the Los Angeles-based marketplace Tradesy wants to help you out–and the company has just raised a $1.5 million round to do just that. Participants include Rincon Venture Partners, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, DailyCandy founder Dany Levy, Daher Capital, Bee Partners, Double M Capital and Launchpad LA.

The site is the second project from Tracy DiNunzio, who previously started RecycledBride, a marketplace for wedding-related resale. But she wanted to do something broader all along, she told Betabeat.  Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/18/12 12:45pm

Fresh Capital

Mark Patricof

MESA Raises $10 Million Seed and Series A Venture Fund Focused on New York City

MESA+, a four-year old venture arm of the investment bank and strategic advisory firm MESA Global, is launching a $10 million venture fund today for seed stage and Series A investments. The fund will be allocated towards companies in consumer Internet, digital content, advertising, marketing, and commerce and focus on investments in New York, from the Mesa+’s Union Square headquarters.

“Since its inception, MESA has worked hard to connect startups with our network in the media and entertainment world,” the company said in a press release, noting that, “we are a startup ourselves.” The firm has ballooned from four people to more than 25, including its three partners: Jacob Brody, Andrew Montgomery, and Mark Patricof. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/16/12 12:00pm

Fresh Capital

Upworthy

After Traffic Boom, Chris Hughes-Backed Upworthy Raises $4 M. to Find Actually Important Viral Videos

After six months, news aggregator Upworthy has proven that viral videos work as a conduit for politically-relevant information just as well as, say, cats or Carly Rae Jepsen. The Chris Hughes-backed site, which describes itself as “social media with a mission,” picked up an impressive six million uniques in September according to Google Analytics, up from just over 4 million in August.

To help catapult that growth, the company has raised $4 million from the venture capital firm NEA, as well as a host of familiar angel investors, including Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and BuzzFeed cofounder John Johnson. Mr. Hughes, who is also fighting the good fight as owner of the The New Republic, reupped, participating in this round as well, the company confirmed.  Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/11/12 4:00pm

Fresh Capital

Collaborative Fund Brooklyn Beta

Collaborative Fund Pulls a Yuri, Offers Blanket Investment in All Brooklyn Beta Startups

“It’s a similar approach to Ron Conway and Yuri Milner’s deal with Y Combinator,” Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro told Betabeat this afternoon, on his way to a board meeting. Mr. Shapiro, whose firm has invested in Kickstarter, Simple, TaskRabbit, and Codecademy, was referring to the blanket investment Collaborative Fund just announced–offering $50,000 a piece in all five of the startups to come out of Brooklyn Beta‘s “Summer Camp,” an incubator of sorts.

(Last January, Mr. Milner and Mr. Conway launched the Start Fund to plunk $150,000 into every new Y Combinator startup.) Read More

By Myles Tanzer 10/03/12 4:00pm

Fresh Capital

Marc_Andreessen

Rap Genius Now Partially Owned By a Republican: Andreessen Horowitz Invests $15 M.

Rap Genius, the Brooklyn-based site that lets the hive mind take a stab at explaining hip hop lyrics, announced today that they have received $15 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The powerful venture capital firm is run by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and rap fanatic Ben Horowitz, notorious for starting his business-minded blog posts with a hip-hop epigraph. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 9/14/12 10:30am

Fresh Capital

(Photo: via The Pitch)

Lerer Ventures Is Raising $30 M. for Its Third Seed-Stage VC Fund in Two Years

Roughly a year-and-a-half after closing its second $25 million seed stage fund, Lerer Ventures is in the processing of raising money for a third. An SEC filing, first noted by TechCrunch, says the size of the round is $30 million.

Although the Form D indicates that the early-stage venture capital firm has yet to sell, expect the round to close quickly.

Last May, it only took Lerer Ventures “a matter of weeks” to raise that $25 million from individuals and family offices. And that was before the highly-regarded New York City firm–launched by Huffington Post cofounder (and Betaworks and Buzzfeed chairman) Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, cofounder of Thrillist–boasted a handful of exits.  Read More