Funding Daily: The one where none of the company names made any sense

QUICK! Let’s play “Startup or Klingon.”

Berg!

Paxata!

Ranku!

(I hate my job.)*

*Kidding, boss!

IfOnly seals a $12M deal

Our best friend in the whole wide world, Kara Swisher, reports today on AllThingsD that IfOnly, a startup that describes itself as an “experience marketplace,” has raised $12 million from a string of fancy people: Marc Benioff, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yuri Milner, etc. The premise is one of the douchiest we’ve heard yet: Customers pay ridiculous amounts of money to do stuff with famous people. On the other side of that marketplace, famous people are basically whoring themselves out a bit more. Oh, America.

Stratoscale nabs $10M

One of Israel’s most successful entrepreneurs is back with a stealthy new startup, dubbed Stratoscale, that is building new software for large data centers. Ariel Maislos spent a decade in the Israeli army developing data virtualization technologies before starting several companies. One of these startups, Anobit, was bought by Apple for nearly half a billion dollars in late 2011, one of its largest acquisitions to date. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Paxata gets $8M

Paxata wants to help data scientists avoid getting bogged down in prep work and move right to analysis. The startup, which provides its offering as a cloud service, sees itself as the missing link between data management systems like Hadoop and analytics applications. It promises to remove most of the painful, manual steps associated with data preparation, minimizing spreadsheets and general chaos. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Altia Systems grabs $6.7

Video-collaboration startup Altia Systems writes to us today that it’s taken a $6.7 million round of funding. This Cupertino, Calif.-based company was founded in 2011; its funding comes from new firm Naya Ventures.The startup’s product is called PanaCast, a video collaboration app “with a full 200 degree field of view, which allows remote participants to see the full human panoramic perspective with individual control, just as if they were there.”

Berg raises $1.3M

Love it or hate it, the Little Printer just won’t die. Berg, the company who designed the novelty gadget, announced today that it has raised $1.3 million in funding from Connect Ventures, Initial Capital, and Index Ventures. The company is officially launching its “Berg Cloud” connected tech platform to the public, and it’s also transitioning away from its design firm roots. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Ranku raises $351K

In a modest deal, startup Ranku collected $351,000. The New York-based company is dedicated to rating and ranking online degree programs from “America’s best colleges” — a term that’s always up for debate. Ranku’s founders are Kim Taylor and Cecilia Retelle. Read the full SEC filing.