Funding Daily: Traveling chipmunks — what?

Today’s edition is short but juicy: We learned that at least one startup in San Francisco has real chipmunks working for it, as depicted in an office picture we got our paws on.

(Kidding, of course … or are we?)

Here are today’s deals:

Hipmunk gets $20M

Travel sites keep upping their competitive features, and Hipmunk now has more funding to reach new heights of de-agonized travel planning. On Friday, the San Francisco-based company — which prides itself on a transparently easy interface, cross-platform consistency, and mobile-only specials — said that it has landed a $20 million Series C funding round, which Oak Investment Partners led. Its Series B funding of $15 million completed in June 2012, and this is on top of $5 million in previous Series A and seed funding.

Read more on VentureBeat: Travel site Hipmunk gets more money to deliver less agony

NovoEd books $2M

What’s the greatest shortcoming of online education today? It’s boring. Really boring. That’s the problem NovoEd raised $2 million to solve. NovoEd, the fourth massive open online course (MOOC) platform to launch out of Stanford (following edX, Udacity, and Coursera) aims to make online education stickier. While most MOOC platforms attempt to re-create the lecture hall, NovoEd wants to facilitate collaborative, group-driven education for universities.

Read more on VentureBeat: Fighting to fix online education’s engagement problem, NovoEd books $2M