Funding Daily: Electricity, clouds, and spam

Here are the day’s funding stories:

Beats Music reportedly raising as much as $100M to challenge Spotify

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Streaming-music service Beats Music has raised between $60 million and $100 million in new funding, according to a report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed sources. Beats Music last revealed funding for the service in March 2013 as the company was spinning off from Beats Electronics, a manufacturer of headphones and earphones. At the time, the streaming service was codenamed Daisy. It became available in January. Meanwhile competitor Spotify is giving off signals of an forthcoming public offering.

Smart Wire Grid captures $13.3M to get power where it needs to be

Smart Wire Grid, a company that has developed self-powered transformers to wrap around power transmission lines for dynamically re-routing electricity, has raised more than $13.3 million, according to a document the company filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Atlanta-based utility Southern Company is a customer, and the Tennessee Valley Authority has established a demonstration project with 99 Smart Wire Grid units. Investors include RiverVest Venture Partners. Smart Wire Grid, based in Oakland, Calif., did not return VentureBeat’s request for comment on the funding.

Adbrain takes in $7.5 million for companies to help you master mobile ads

Adbrain, a London-based artificial intelligence startup that allows advertisers to better target consumers across mobile, desktop, and tablet platforms, raised $7.5 million Tuesday. The company’s technology gives advertisers information to track user preferences and launch target-marketing campaigns. Octopus Investments led the round, with Notion Capital also kicking in. Adbrain previously raised $1.5 million when it officially launched in June of 2013. Read more on VentureBeat.

Next Games grabs $6M to become the next big Finnish mobile-game company

Next Games, a game development company that started last year in Helsinki, Finland, has raised $6 million in new funding. The money comes from high-profile institutional, strategic, and private investors. The game studio is working on two titles: The Walking Dead and an unannounced mobile game. With the money, Huuhtanen said the company will be able to pay for its own user acquisition as well as its own game development. Read more on VentureBeat.

Trulioo, hunting for spammy app users, picks up $6M

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Trulioo, a startup with software that companies can incorporate to weed out fake users for a website or mobile app, has raised $6 million, it announced today. The software supports sites that use login features provided by Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. And now Trulioo has verified more than 100 million online identities. Tenfore Holdings led the round. BDC Venture Capital and Blumberg Capital also participated. Read more at PRWeb.

DataRPM raises $5.1M to answer business questions faster

Business-intelligence startup DataRPM has taken on $5.1 million in new venture funding. InterWest Partners led the round, and CIT GAP Funds also participated. DataRPM has now raised $5.9 million since opening in 2012. The company will put the money toward sales and marketing as it shifts toward more of a storage container for lots of different kinds of data. It already stands out for its Google-like natural-language search interface. Read more on VentureBeat.

Cloud broker ComputeNext attracts $4M

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Computenext, a startup that constructed an e-commerce platform for cloud infrastructure last week raised $4 million of a planned $10 million funding round, according to an SEC regulatory filing, bringing its total financing to $8 million. The Bellevue, Wash.-based startup had been in stealth for three years before launching last year. It provides infrastructure from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Joyent, and other public-cloud vendors.

$500K rains down on Ruby app development service Cloud66

Cloud66, a startup that lets developers build Ruby on Rails applications and deploy them on public clouds like Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, and Rackspace, has raised $500,000 in seed funding, Tech.eu reported today. Investors include Kima Ventures, as well as Andy McLoughlin, Anil Hansjee, Richard Muirhead, and Christian Thaler-Wolski. The startup has racked up more than 500 paying customers, including Adobe and the BBC, chief executive Khash Sajadi wrote in an email to VentureBeat. Users span 110 countries, although almost all revenue comes from the United States, Sajadi wrote. The company aims add support for Node.js applications and deployments on OpenStack.

 

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