Funding Daily: March 20, 2014

Take a look at today’s funding deals:

Silicon Valley giant Accel Partners raises nearly $1.5B — key partner Jim Breyer steps back

Prominent venture capital firm Accel Partners, famed for its early investments in companies like Facebook and Dropbox, has raised capital for two new funds, totaling $1.475 billion. In the midst of this news, Partner Jim Breyer announced he will step away from his role to focus on his own fund. With two new funds, Accel has set aside $475 million for early-stage startups and $1 billion for late-stage companies. Compared to Accel’s previous late-stage fund of $875 million, the new fund is 12 percent larger. Read more on VentureBeat.

Coupa’s fundraising blitz draws $40M

Does the prospect of streamlining your invoicing process sound sexy enough for tens of millions in funding to you? It did for investors of Coupa, a corporate procurement company that just closed a fundraising blitz with $40 million in its fifth round funding after just 48 hours. Founded in 2006, the company provides a cloud-based system to streamline and cut down on corporate waste by making it easier to track expenses, invoicing, and other payroll processes by enabling employees to enter data through their mobile phones. Read more on VentureBeat.

Gigwalk and its half-million ‘Gigwalkers’ land $10 million

Five hundred thousand “Gigwalkers” are roaming the Earth. That’s according to Gigwalk chief executive Bob Bahramipour, whose San Francisco-based software enterprise startup pulled in $10 million in venture funding today in a Series B round led by investors including Nokia Growth Partners and Randstad Holdings. Read more on VentureBeat.

Saffron pulls in $7M to process data like a super-speedy human

IBM is dropping tall stacks of money on “cognitive” software for speed-reading huge loads of information, which means it’s the perfect time for other companies to pop up with cognitive-computing solutions. To wit, here comes Saffron Technology, based in Cary, N.C., but planning to open an office in Silicon Valley now that it’s raised $7 million in funding. Read more on VentureBeat.

Pley gets $6.5M for lego rental service

If you’re like me and your kids are a little past the Lego stage, you might have five or six boxes of bricks hanging around the attic or basement or stuffed under a bed somewhere. But if you’re just starting out with Junior, you might be facing a $500-$600 bill to get all of the original Maker-style toys they will eventually want. Enter Pley stage left, a “Netflix for Legos” startup that will rent you bricks by the month. Read more on VentureBeat.

Binary Fountain raised $5.7M to make customer management more intelligent

Binary Fountain, the SaaS based social intelligence company, announced it has secured $5.7 million in funding led by Pioneer Venture Partners. This is the first round of funding for the company and will be used to further accelerate the company’s growth, customer acquisition and technology development. Read more in the press release.

MachineShop comes out of stealth and grabs $3M to help you talk to machines

While many of us are preoccupied with texting apps and anonymous messaging apps, a little known company named MachineShop is focused on how devices and machines communicate. Yep, machines. MachineShop, a Boston-based company aiming to take the Internet-of-things by storm, is today emerging out of stealth and announcing $3 million in its first institutional funding round. Read more on VentureBeat.

Gigas raises $2.7M to push a cloud hosting service from Spain

Gigas, a fast-growing Spain-based company that sells cloud-based infrastructure for hosting websites, announced today a $2.7 million round of funding from Bonsai Venture Capital, Cabiedes & Partners, and Caixa Capital Risc. Gigas is no public-cloud behemoth like Amazon Web Services, but it does have some more than 3,000 business customers, including Walmart and the United Nations, and it offers features like autoscaling and load balancing. The service runs on the KVM hypervisor. Revenues last year grew 300 percent over the previous year, a spokesman said. The company started in November 2011, and it has now raised about $9.5 million, Diego Cabezudo wrote in an email to VentureBeat. Amazon’s cloud is probably Gigas’ biggest competitor, Cabezudo wrote. Read more on PR Newswire.

Upverter scoops up $2.3M to improve collaboration in hardware design

Upverter announced today that it has raised a $2.3 million seed round to further advance the world’s only collaborative engineering platform. The round was lead by Version One Ventures with participation from Tom McInerney, Carl Bass, Amol Sarva, David Lerner, and Golden Venture Partners, said the company in a press release.