Funding

Social media aggregator RebelMouse recently raised $10.25 million in Series A funding led by Oak Investment Partners, SoftBank, Sterling Investment Partners and Michael Lazerow in a move that will help the firm power clients sites to better engage their audiences and nab in more clients.

It can be a confusing world to seek funding when you’re just starting out and Silicon Beach Fest (#SBF) was a great place to learn what investors are looking for, meet investors of all levels in a collaborative environment, network with like-minded entrepreneurs, and develop relationships to further your dream and business.

ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists, has raised a $35 million series C investment from Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital with participation from Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, and the company’s existing investors Benchmark and Founders Fund.

Once you have a VC on the hook, you’ll want to negotiate the best deal in terms of valuation and deal terms. Once you’ve reached an agreement, you’re done…or not!
Far from the end, receiving funding is actually just the beginning of a whole new stage for you and for your company —a stage full of financial statements, board meetings with VCs and more. A lot is about to change…

Not just a new film, “The Cosmonaut” is a labor of love four years in the making, crowdsourced and created with a plan to test the boundaries of transmedia content distribution worldwide. The project was started by a group of young Spanish digerati called Riot Cinema Collective. Using the power of the Internet’s connected tools they are proposing a new film model from financing, distribution, production and user participation by fostering a hardcore community under a Share-alike Creative Commons license.

On the road to “cashflow positive,” there are many obstacles. I see startups sabotaging themselves all the time. By not really understanding and monitoring your cashflow, you may be inadvertently creating serious cashflow problems. And a serious cashflow problem leads to a failed business…

A traffic jam of expensive cars lined up to pull into the packed parking lot of MuckerLab for its second graduating class demo day. The large gathering of top investors spilled out of the office into the surrounding sidewalk and swelled with buzz and speculation of what the 10 newly formed companies had to offer. Some flew in from overseas, different states and from Silicon Valley to attend.

LA based CapLinked, a cloud-based business transaction platform yesterday raised $1.6 million in a new round of financing from Peter Thiel, FF Angel, Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, Andrej Henkler (former Bertelsmann executive), and Alexsis de Raadt-St. James (chairman of the Althea Foundation) and appointed Adam Sroka as Senior Vice President of Technology in a move to make business transactions simple and secure.

During the past twelve months we’ve seen (and heard) a great deal of conservation around crowdfunding and what it has brought to an exploding entrepreneurship community. As it’s brought life to numerous new projects while offering entrepreneurs an additional outlet for receiving funding.

We covered ResearchGate here on TechZulu sometime back. To give you a quick refresher ResearceGate is a professional network for scientists. And they have news that they are expanding.