Series A
Invoice2go, the company behind a mobile app for small business owners to manage invoicing and expense tracking, has secured a $35 million investment from Ribbit Capital and Accel Partners. Founded in 2002, Invoice2go is used to manage billions of dollars in invoices each year. The company is based in Australia.
The peer-to-peer Chinese car rental service Uuzuche.com has raised $10 million from Lightspeed China Partners, China Renaissance K2 Partners, and Wang Gang, an angel investor. “Private car sharing platforms like uuzuche.com not only can help to optimize a city’s vehicle resources and help create a well-structured environment, but also can help with the remission of traffic and encouraging greener driving patterns,” said Han Yan, a partner at Lightspeed China Partners through a press release.
Jared Leto, Snoop Dogg, and Box CEO Aaron Levie are among the investors in the $13 million Series A round of Robinhood, a fee-free mobile app for trading stocks. The round was led by Index Ventures. “We’re making investing accessible to young people,” co-founder Vlad Tenev told TechCrunch. Robinhood’s seed round involved participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
Series B
Qualtrics, an online survey company based in Provo, UT, has raised a staggering $150 million in Series B funding from Insight Venture Partners and existing backers Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. Qualtrics has 6,000 enterprise customers, including half of the Fortune 100 and 99 of America’s 100 leading business schools, who collect information from 2.1 million surveys per day on average. With the latest round of financing, Qualtrics joins SurveyMonkey as online survey companies with $1 billion valuations. “All a survey is…[is] a form with an analytics component,” Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith told Businessweek, before adding, “We have the best form.” Founded in 2002, Qualtrics waited ten years before first raising venture funding.
Series C
Udacity, the massively open online courses (MOOCs) platform created by GoogleX Lab founder Sebastian Thrun, has raised $35 million to expand its nanodegree program. Drive Capital, a Columbus, OH-based firm founded by two former Sequoia partners, led the round. It was joined by repeat backers Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Peter Levine, and George Zachary, with additional participation coming from media, HR, and investment firms from Germany, Japan, and Brazil respectively. The company announced its nanodegree program, which provides job-specific training crafted by employers for $400 a month, through a partnership with AT&T earlier this year. Udacity classes are taught by industry professionals and focus on computer programming skills in particular. Thrun and his company are targeting underemployed 24-34 year olds, but some fear that the model represents an attack on the traditional four-year American collegiate system.