Funding Daily: Canned Beer

On this day in history, canned beer went on sale for the first time. The year was 1935. The Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale to drinkers in Richmond, Virginia. As the story goes, the fine folks at Krueger’s were initially unsure whether canned beer would appeal to consumers. Needless to say, it did. By the end of the year, over 200 million cans of beer had been sold (and presumably consumed). So why don’t you enjoy today’s Funding Daily with a nice, cold, can of beer? I can hear the symphonic fizz of cans opening now.

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.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":610315,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"entrepreneur,","session":"C"}']

WizIQ moves to head of the class with new funding

Online educational platform WizIQ has raised $4 million in its second round of investment. WizIQ provides virtual classroom software that connects teachers with students around the world. There are tools to create, manage, and deliver live courses online, as well as for organizations to deploy full training programs. WizIQ takes care of the hosting and IT so the educators don’t have to. It currently has over 200,000 teachers and 2.5 million learners on board. India’s first education-focused private equity fund Kaizen led this round, alone with Bertelsmann, a global media company based in Germany. Read the press release.

Restaurants: YOLO, use OLO

Chances are if a customer chooses to order food instead of prepare it themselves, convenience is a priority. OLO’s platform provides restaurants with web and mobile ordering capabilities so they can offer their customers the most convenient experience possible. The software quickly sets up order and payment processing for restaurants, but still allows them to maintain independent relationships with their customers. Clients include Five Guys burger chain, Cold Stone Creamery, Sonic, Subway, La Boulange, and that list is growing. This was a strategic investment led by PayPal, which made a strong push this year to penetrate its payment services into the offline world. Exisitng investors David Frankel, RRE Ventures, and Core Capital Partners also participated in this $5 million round, which brings OLO’s total capital raised to $13.75 million.

Distil.it boils down $1.8 million into website protection

Depending on how you look at it, distilling can lead to a lack of security. Distillation leads to whisky leads to compromised judgement and defense mechanisms. However, a team working out of Arlington, Virginia. has a different take. Security startup Distil.it serves as a cloud-based “intelligent gatekeeper” for the enterprise. Its Content Protection Network halts web scraping, content theft, competitive data mining, and malicious bots attacks to keep websites performing at a high level. Distil.it announced today that it will secured $1.8 million led by ff Venture Capital, with participation from Correlation Ventures, Idea Fund Partners, CIT, Piedmont RIA, Cloud Power Fund, and TechStars.

Ed tech company KnowRe gets smart with $1.4 million

The “who, what, where, when, why, and how” are important questions to consider when writing a news article, planning an event, and studying math. KnowRe has an adaptive learning product that assesses each student’s strengths and weaknesses, personalizes a curriculum for their focus areas, and engages the students with game features, graphics, and social learning. The founding team previously worked as math instructors and ran a math academy in Seoul, South Korea. They applied their expertise to “digitalize our offline methodology” and put the kind of personalized attention of offline educational environments online. SoftBank Ventures Korea led this investment, which comes shortly after KnowRe was awarded the grand prize at Global K-Startup. KnowRe is based in New York, and participated in the first class of SparkLabs, an accelerator supporting Korean entrepreneurs outside of Korea.

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":610315,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"entrepreneur,","session":"C"}']

Healthcare software biz Recondo Technology grabs $20M from Bregal Sagemount

Healthcare software and cloud solutions company Recondo Technology has received a $20 million investment from Bregal Sagemount to accelerate its growth in the booming healthcare sector. Greenwood Village, Co.-based Recondo Technology provides all kinds of software and services, including payments, insurance verification, and revenue recovery, to more than 450 U.S. hospitals. The investment will be used to expand sales and marketing efforts, improve customer service, and broaden product offerings. Read more on VentureBeat.

Pinterest sees $30M from SV Angel in secondary sale

SV Angel has raised $30 million to purchase shares of the popular online pinboard social network Pinterest from current investors, SV Angel’s David Lee confirmed to VentureBeat today. The money, which was raised by SV Angel last week according to an SEC filing, will be used to purchase secondary sales of Pinterest at 2 percent of the startup’s current $1.5 billion valuation. This Pinterest secondary sale will also be independent from the $40 million “SV Angel IV” fund the group raised back in August. SV Angel, Ron Conway and Lee’s investment firm, has previously invested in Pinterest as well as many other notable startups, including Square, Twitter, Airbnb, Foursquare, and others. Read more on VentureBeat.

[aditude-amp id="medium2" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":610315,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"entrepreneur,","session":"C"}']

Don’t mess with AppNexus: Ad tech company puts $75M in its holster

The biggest, baddest ad tech company to roll into town today is AppNexus, which announced raising $75 million in its fourth round of funding. AppNexus provides a flexible and customizable ad tech platform that businesses can use to build a differentiated ad network, trading desk, or custom exchange. This round was led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Venrock and Tribeca Venture Partners also participated in this round. It brings AppNexus’ total funding to $140.5 million. Previous investors include an elite group of First Round Capital, Marc Andresseen and Ben Horowtiz, Ron Conway, and Khosla Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat.

Spikes sticks up with $1 million in seed

Browser security startup Spikes has secured $1 million in seed financing. Spikes was founded by Branden Spikes, the former CIO of PayPal and SpaceX who founded his own company in April of 2012. The company graduated from the Silicon Valley Founder Institute and won the 12th Founder Showcase pitch competition. It seeks to address the “top security threat of 2013” by making it more difficult to hack into web browsers. Jed Katz of Javelin Venture Partners led this round. Read the announcement.

[aditude-amp id="medium3" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":610315,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"entrepreneur,","session":"C"}']

Who says following the rules can’t be fun? True Office. 

You can gamify anything these days. True Office, which gamifies regulatory and compliance training, has raised $3 million. All businesses need to make sure their operations are in line with policies and laws, but there are so many, it is not a simple thing to do. True Office attempts to make this challenge more fun, as well as effective. For this, Rho Ventures, Partnership for New York City Fund, and Contour Venture Partners pulled out their check books. True Office participated in the 2012 FinTech Innovation Lab and is based in New York City, with offices in Boston. Read the press release.

YC health startup closes seed round to assess patient eligibility (not for dating)

Health startup eligible is proving itself an extremely eligible for investment. This startup which graduated from Y-Combinator’s Summer 2012 class has pulled in a total of $2 million in seed funding. Eligible’s API makes it easier for medical practitioners and insurance companies to assess patient eligibility. As it stands, this is an arduous process. This technology makes it much easier, and it already processing more than 10,000 transactions per day for major health partners like ZocDoc, Cathay Health, Kareo.com, Nevada Medicare, and Passport Health Communications. A majority of this investment was raised on AngelList, through the new “online fundraising” feature. Investors include SV Angel’s David Lee, Andreessen Horowitz, and strategic investors. Read more on VentureBeat. 

[aditude-amp id="medium4" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":610315,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"entrepreneur,","session":"C"}']