Today’s early-stage startup funding and acquisitions news:
Mobile
Whisper, which has built a mobile app that allows you to share secrets, has raised $3 million in Series A funding. Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures. User posts are essentially photos with text overlays that allow anonymous confessions (most of them seem pretty innocent), and there is also a private messaging function. The idea has caught on with investors, at least. Here’s more on the funding, from TechCrunch.
Healthcare
Seattle, Washington-based EveryMove has landed $3.5 million for its healthy lifestyle incentives program for employees. The service basically incentivizes healthy choices like going to a gym or making healthy food choices with the goal of cutting health care costs, and joins a sector that has been garnering increased investor attention recently. This is the company’s first round of funding. Investors include BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Sandbox Industries, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska. More on the funding from the EveryMove company blog.
Commerce
Fashion-focused sites continue to get big-time love from investors, the latest example being Myntra’s purchase of virtual fitting room startup Fitiquette for an as yet undisclosed sum. The Bangalore–based Myntra is an Indian ecommerce giant and, according to TechCrunch, made the purchase to gain a foothold in San Francisco where it plans to establish a new ‘innovation lab’ in the city. Fitiquette was founded in 2010 and was a TC Disrupt finalist in 2012.
Stealth
SecondLife founder Philip Rosedale’s under-the-radar startup High Fidelity, which is building a ‘distributed development’ system, has raised $2.4 million in new funding. According to TechCrunch, this is part of a larger $3.4 million round. An SEC filing for the funding says that investors include Rosedale, Freddy Heiberger, and Ryan Karpf (Heiberger and Karpf are fellow co-founders of Rosedale’s last startup, Coffee and Power).
More funding news today…
DFJ Esprit To Close Another Fund Of Up To $15M For UK/Euro Angel Investments (via TechCrunch)
Flexiant raises $5.7M to push its cloud orchestration tools into the U.S. (via GigaOm)
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