FABulous funding Wednesday: From gay social network to billion-dollar design store

It was a big day for funding. Here’s the quick overview with links to full stories.

Fab raises $150M

Fab announced last night that it has raised $150 million in a fourth round of funding led by Chinese company Tencent, which is also appointing a director to the company’s board. The company’s valuation, excluding the new funding, was $1 billion, and this is only the first tranche of its fourth round. Fab started life as a gay social network and then pivoted — and what a pivot it was — to an online design store.

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ThousandEyes raises $5.5M

Cloud performance-monitoring company ThousandEyes emerged from stealth mode to help IT teams at companies like Equinix, Evernote, Priceline, ServiceNow, Twitter, Zendesk, and Zynga resolve performance problems quickly.

“Performance-management products have not kept pace with the innovation in cloud services,” said Mohit Lad, the cofounder and chief executive officer of ThousandEyes. “Legacy products are ineffective in solving problems enterprises face today, creating migraines for IT. We have built a product from ground up for the cloud era to help companies get the best performance out of their cloud applications.”

The Series A round was led by Sequoia Capital and unnamed Silicon Valley angel investors.

Cortica raises $6.4M

Image-software startup Cortica announced its second round of funding today for $6.4 million.

Cortica creates image-recognition software that functions similarly to the human brain. It can see something such as a landmark and then provide contextual information about that place. It has a lot of potential for advertising, particularly in wearable computing devices such as Google Glass. The company announced a portion of the funding in May — $1.5 million from Russia’s Mail.Ru.

Today’s funding was led by Horizons Ventures and others.

SocialRadar raises $12.75M

SocialRadar combines location-based mobile technology and social media information to make you aware of the people and connections around you. It seems a lot like Highlight, which generated a lot of fanfare at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in 2012 but hasn’t made much noise since. SocialRadar is still in the development phase and is working with iPhone, Android, and Google Glass to “change the way people connect.”

Founder and CEO Michael Chasen was a cofounder and former CEO of ed-tech behemoth Blackboard, where he took the company public in 2004 and then sold it to Providence Equity Partners in 2011 for $1.7 billion.

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CRM startup Intercom snags $6M

Intercom, a software startup that promises to simplify customer relationship management (CRM), has just announced a healthy first round of funding.

The $6 million infusion was led by the Social+Capital Partnership with participation from previous investor Freestyle Capital and David Sacks, the founder and CEO of Yammer.

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Entelo raises $3.5M

Entelo is building the next generation of talent-acquisition tools focused on helping companies better leverage social data. To address demand for its solutions, Entelo will use the funds to accelerate its growth and R&D efforts, specifically to develop additional products leveraging its impressive data set and predictive analytics engine.

The $3.5 million in financing was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures.

Bunch raises $1M
Bunch is a platform that lets people share and discuss things online that they are truly passionate about. Bunch users form communities around topics, and the platform allows these users to publish and then engage around longer-form content. The company’s vision is to provide users deeper engagement around topics they care about and to be the first social-publishing and discussion platform built for the average Internet user.

The company raised $1 million from Real Ventures, 500 Startups, BDC Venture Capital, and Round13 Capital.

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