Casper, a startup selling mattresses online, has closed a $55 million Series B investment round led by Institutional Venture Partners. Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Adam Levine, Scooter Braun, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital also participated. The company previously raised funds in June 2014 and has now received $69.95 million to date. “Casper’s meteoric rise is the direct result of its exceptional ability to hit a nerve with alienated consumers,” says Dennis Phelps, General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners, who as part of the investment, has joined Casper’s board of directors as an observer. “Casper is already conquering the US mattress market with its category-owning brand, and is poised to meet the overwhelming demand for international disruption of this industry.”
Cloud data warehousing company Snowflake has announced a $45 million Series C funding round led by Altimeter Capital. Previous backers Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures also participated in the latest round. “Data warehousing is ripe for disruptive innovation driven by the shift to cloud computing and the explosion of customer interest in data insights,” said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake. “The overwhelmingly positive market reception to the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse has validated our vision of reimagining the data warehouse for the cloud era with a completely new product built from the cloud up that doesn’t require retooling and retraining. This funding will support further innovation made possible by the product’s unique architecture, as well as accelerate our customer and revenue growth.”
Audio advertising platform Jelli has raised $21 million in Series B financing. Investors included Relay Ventures, Intel Capital, First Round Capital, iHeartMedia and Universal Music Group. The company has now raised $37.6 million to date. “Programmatic advertising is surging across the entire advertising landscape, and by powering iHeartMedia and Katz Media Group’s networks, we are enabling broadcast radio to participate and make buying an audio ad as easy as buying a digital ad,” said Mike Dougherty, Chief Executive Officer of Jelli.
U.K. international payments company Currency Cloud has raised $18 million, as it prepares to expand in the U.S. Sapphire Ventures led the investment round, with participation coming from Rakuten FinTech Fund and existing investors Atlas Ventures and Notion Capital.