By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor
Today’s early-stage startup funding and acquisitions news:
Privy, which offers a local marketing platform for small-and medium-sized businesses, has raised $1.5 million in Seed funding. Investors include Atlas Venture, 500 Startups and Angel investors. The Boston-based startup was founded in 2011 by Ben Jabbawy. Privy’s focus is to make it easy for local merchants to offer in-store promotions on the web that customers can redeem at their locations with their mobile phones—presumably allowing local businesses to enhance local visibility and better target deals to consumers. It is a graduate of 500 Startups’ fifth accelerator class, which demoed this past February.
Vital Stats:
Website: www.privy.com
HQ: Boston
Founder: Ben Jabbawy (CEO)
Year Founded: 2011
Investors: Atlas Venture, 500 Startups, Sierra Maya Ventures, Genie Bottle Ventures; Angels: John Dais (VP Finance at Wildfire), Mike Volpe (CMO of Hubspot), Justin Kitch (founder of Homestead), Ralph James (former COO at First Marblehead), Jere Doyle (founder of Eversave), John Goscha (founder of IdeaPaint).
Innovation: Local marketing platform that targets local consumers with deals that can be redeemed via mobile phone.
Funding: $1.5 million (Seed)
(Sources: Privy company blog, TechCrunch)
More funding and acquisitions news…
TrustRadius Secures $5 Million in Series A Financing from Mayfield Fund to Transform The Way Businesses Buy Enterprise Software (via company blog/press release)
Web Operations Uniter Opbeat Raises $2.7M From Instagram’s Mike Krieger and Others (via AllThingsD)
Judo Payments Secures $5M For Its Mobile-Focused Card Processing Platform (via TechCrunch)
Codeanywhere raises $600,000 to boost its ‘Google Docs for developers’ service (via The Next Web)
Taxibeat Raises $2M And Rides Into Mexico To Start The Meter On Rocket Internet’s Easy Taxi (via TechCrunch)
Automattic Acqui-Hires Lean Domain Search To Improve Its Domain Registration Service (via TechCrunch)
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