Get ready for a whole lot more Pebble. The smartwatch company just announced several software enhancements for the Pebble and a $15M Series A led by Charles River Ventures. Pebble is not going to sit around, scared of iWatch rumors. They’re plowing forward on their own accord and committed to providing the best platform possible for developers and consumers.

“We are pledging to support the developers hacking on Pebble,” stated Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told me in an interview. “We want to make the Pebble the go-to place for developers.” And with that the company released its first SDK last month and is following it up today with several big improvements.

The cash injection will be used to increase the company’s software engineering team’s headcount and allow the company to scale to meet still-growing customer demand. CVS’ Partner George Zachery is joining Pebble’s board of directors, a move that excites Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky.

“George is the one that shared our vision of wearable computing,” Eric told me in a chat this morning. Several angels also participated in the round, but Eric indicated that Charles River Ventures funded the majority of the Series A. This round of funding joins the $375k the company previously received from four angel investors, including Paul Buchheit, a partner at Y Combinator, and Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And don’t forget about the $10.3M Pebble raised on Kickstarter.

“The tremendous response we received from Kickstarter backers validated our belief in the value of a smartwatch as a wearable computer, but also in the value an open platform brings to truly personalizing the watch to their daily activities”, said Migicovsky, Pebble’s founder in a released statement today. “This new investment will help us build out the Pebble development ecosystem and deliver on Pebble’s extraordinary potential.”

Pebble is still working on fulfilling the 85,000 orders placed on Kickstater. To date 70,000 have reached early supporters. “It’s pretty crazy thinking there are 70,000 Pebbles out there,” Eric told me proudly. “Tens of thousands” of additional orders have been placed, Eric said.

The company is aiming for retail availability in four to six months.

Pebble also announced several software enhancements for its smartwatch today. The SDK, which the company appropriately calls the PebbleKit, enables third party apps to send and receive data from the smartwatch.

This two-way communication is a huge step forward for the smartwatch, allowing the watch to display a large variety of information including weather and sports scores or even act as a remote control for the phone itself. Until now, apps were limited to basic functions like just display a watch face or displaying a simple game of snake.

Pebble also released the Pebble Sports API, enabling developers to build GPS-enabled smartwatch apps similar to the RunKeeper app announced a couple of weeks back.

Since releasing its initial SDK back in April, Pebble states the kit was downloaded over 8,000 times, resulting in over 5,000 unique watchapps with 300,000 installs during the last month. Owners are clearly hungry for more Pebble features.

The Pebble was supposed to usher in a new era of productivity by strapping a communication device to our wrist, but the initial feature set was limited even with the first SDK release. However, Pebble is keeping at it and today’s funding announcement and software development release should result in a big harvest of fresh apps.

“Everyone is talking about wearable devices,” Eric explained. “We’re very happy that Pebble is a platform people can build on today.”

Wearables is the next big thing. There’s no denying that. Even if Apple skips the iWatch device, Google Glass and others are pushing forward the thought of wearable computing. But the Pebble is here today and developers have latched onto the platform, outing custom watch faces, games, and apps. With the Pebble, the future is here now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’d been hearing whispers as of late that Twilio is meeting with VCs to raise another round, and I just got the good word from a very, very solid source.

I’m told that Twilio is in the process of raising a Series D, with a goal of raising around $50 million.

The talks are still rather early on. In fact, when I first got wind of the round last week, the first folks I asked were shocked that we’d already heard about it. At this point, it sounds like Twilio is aiming to close the round within the next 2 to 3 weeks. The total amount raised might change by then, but $50M is the current target.

Wondering what the heck a Twilio is? Twilio lets developers easily build things that require phone functionality. Want to build a customer service line with menus narrated by Morgan Freeman? Sure (note: bring your own Morgan Freeman. Also, someone please do this. I’ll totally write about it.) Want to build a tool that’ll text you the second Netflix’s Arrested Development revival season goes live? Already done. If you need to programmatically do something that goes down over the phone — be it SMS, voice calls, or VoIP — Twilio can probably do most of the leg work with just a few lines of code.

Twilio is actually one of my favorite companies in the valley right now, for at least two reasons: they make a damned cool product that in turn enables other damned cool products to be made, and very few people seem to realize how well they’re doing. While their CEO Jeff Lawson seems to prefer keeping their financials hush, every whisper I hear about the company suggests that they’re quietly kicking ass.

Amongst other good signs: the company is hiring like mad, to the point that they just (as in, this week) had to move into a much bigger office. They actually couldn’t find a ready-to-go office in SOMA with enough space for their growing team, so they spent the better part of the last year retrofitting a spot on Harrison Street that once served as a paper/textile factory.

Twilio has raised $33.5M to date, having most recently closed a $17M Series C at the end of 2011. If they successfully raise $50M, it’d be an injection roughly 1.5x larger than everything they’ve raised so far.

When I first started digging around this story, no one I spoke to could seem to agree on which VC firms were involved. Turns out, Twilio is just talking to a lot of firms. Two names that seem quite certain to be in talks at this point are Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners — which makes sense, as USV has been re-upping with Twilio since their Series A, and Bessemer has supported them since their Series B.

Keep an eye on these guys, if you’re not already. If things keep going as they are, I’d bet on them going public within the next year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA. Lenny focuses his practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas. He specializes in developing IP strategy for young technology companies and blogs on this topic at StartupsIP. Follow Lenny on Twitter @lkravets.

One of the fundamental problems in intellectual property (IP) litigation is the lack of information available to both plaintiffs and defendants. The identity of the plaintiff and the defendant, the district(s), judge(s), and lawyers involved in a particular case, have a significant impact on the outcome of a litigation, including whether a particular litigation will proceed at all. While legal professionals have anecdotal and scholarly information on individual districts and judges, granular data on lawyers, courts, judges, and districts can be invaluable in litigation decision making.

Lex Machina, which just announced that it has raised a $4.8 million Series A funding round led by Boston-based Cue Ball Capital, aims to provide this information. As the number of lawsuits and verdict amounts increase to all-time highs, the information is becoming increasingly valuable. The company claims that total patent litigation cases filed have increased more than 100 percent in the last three years, and three verdicts over $1 billion for patent infringement have been awarded in the last eight months, while median damages awards in patent cases now exceed $4 million. Existing investors XSeed Capital, Costanoa Venture Capital, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang also participated in the round. According to Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina, Cue Ball found Lex Machina through AngelList.

The participation of Cue Ball as an investor in the round is noteworthy because the fund’s Chairman and General Partner, Richard Harrington, served as CEO of Thomson for over a decade, leading its transformation into one of the world’s leading information services businesses. The fund therefore has a deep understanding of legal information businesses, and Lex Machina believes that the participation of Cue Ball will be instrumental in validating and growing the company. To that end, Cue Ball partner John Hamel and former Thomson executive Roy Martin, who also participated in the round, are joining Lex Machina’s board.

Lex Machina, whose clients include eBay, Microsoft, and Shire Pharmaceuticals, plans to use the funds to add new product features and to expand its sales team to serve corporate law firm demand for its IP litigation data and analytics. While the core of Lex Machina’s machine learning and a natural language processing (NLP) legal text classification system, which aggregates and normalizes court electronic records from PACER, was previously covered, some of Lex Machina’s features are worth highlighting.

In addition to litigation decision information useful to judges, lawyers and company decision makers, Becker explained that the company is focusing on tools for outside counsel selection and management, peer company benchmarking, and patent portfolio analytics. To help with outside counsel selection, companies can use Lex Machina’s data to review performance of particular law firms and attorneys in previous litigations. This performance data can be drilled down to particular districts, and even judges to show which attorneys are most effective.

Companies can use Lex Machina data to compare their performance in IP litigation against the performance of their competitors in similar litigations. Since many patent litigations involve multiple defendants, this can be a powerful tool not only for competitive intelligence, but also to identify strategic alliances and to coordinate defense efforts with other defendants. Of course, the data can also be useful to non-practicing entities (“NPE”) to identify potentially easy targets for assertion campaigns.

Finally, Lex Machina’s litigation data can be useful in patent portfolio evaluation. According to Becker, Lex Machina’s technology can help identify similar patents that have been enforced in order to show how those patents did in litigation, and to help establish patent value.

Of course, while it is not Lex Machina’s goal, the data can also be useful to non practicing entities to identify potentially easy targets for assertion campaigns.

For example, competitive intelligence information can help identify target companies that do not have particularly good results in litigation.  In addition, because Lex Machina uses PACER records, it requires an actual litigation to be filed. Therefore, asserting entities can “avoid being seen” by focusing on out-of-court practice, such as the mailing of demand letters. Unfortunately, because of the private nature of such demand letters, companies dealing with them are still largely left to fend for themselves.

So while Lex Machina’s IP litigation analytics appear to be very valuable for high-stakes disputes, a lot remains to be done for the smaller targets of patent enforcement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

DailyWorth, an online community for financially minded women, is closing another strong round of funding by raising a Series A2 of $1 million. This round comes sixteen months after raising $2 million in their Series A last January.

This round was led by DFJ Gotham, while additional investors include Gabriel Investments, 500 Startups, Robinhood Ventures, Investors’ Circle, Bullet Time Ventures, Patient Capital Collaborative, Joanne Wilson, Rebecca Saeger, Carol Chow, Diego Canoso, and Mark Censits.

The money raised in their Series A2 will be used for “growth and key hires” as DailyWorth continues to expand their readership.

DailyWorth was founded in 2009 as a daily email newsletter geared towards women, offering tips and advice on money management and investment. Their newsletter quickly amassed more than 55,000 subscribers within two years of launch, and in January last year that number ballooned to 250,000 subscribers. DailyWorth estimates that their site will hit two to three million monthly readers by the end of 2013.

DailyWorth’s website is populated with editorial content from their writing staff, which is helmed by MP Dunleavey, a former contributor and columnist for Money Magazine and the New York Times. In addition to their editorial content, DailyWorth has begun to offer an assortment of online courses called “Money Clarity”, which provides a four week program with YouTube videos and online workbooks that teach their registrants how to better manage their money.

DailyWorth also recently scored partnerships with Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Nestwise, in addition to their preexisting partnerships with ING and H&R Block.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video conferencing continues to catch on as a way for enterprises to do business, and is becoming increasingly important to certain verticals like healthcare and education. At the same time, video conferencing continues to be expensive to implement, especially for organizations which try to put in room-based systems. It’s that market video conferencing company Vidyo is trying to take on, with a lower-priced software solution to hardware-based incumbents.

And to do that, Vidyo has raised yet another round of funding, this time $17 million. That brings total funding since the company was founded in 2005 to $116 million, with the financing coming from inside and outside investors. Triangle Peak Partners was the lead new investor in the round, joining previous investors such as Juniper Networks, QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Capital Partners, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group.

Vidyo’s year-over-year billings grew 68 percent in 2012, driven by strong enterprise sales, but also by rapid growth in a few important verticals. Sales were up 77 percent in both the healthcare and education verticals, and Vidyo expects more sales in those markets as time goes on. In fact, it just struck a deal with education consortium Internet2, which should help get its video conferencing software and equipment even more widely adopted in universities and partnering K-12 public schools throughout the U.S.

The idea behind Vidyo is not just to enable new organizations to build off of its video conferencing equipment, but also to allow them to use existing hardware to connect with others. Since its technology is software-based, it can enable customers to use Cisco, Polycom, and Lifesize, as well as other H.323 and SIP-based room systems, Microsoft Lync clients, and the iPhone, iPad, or other mobile devices to connect with one another. Earlier this year, it also rolled out a virtualized video conferencing product which will enable customers to turn up video conferencing on off-the-shelf equipment.

Vidyo has more than 250 employees now, with 13 offices around the world. It also has a bunch of patents — 26 issued and 56 pending — behind its video conferencing technology. With the new round of funding, it plans to continue growing its tech team and expanding worldwide.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last month, we posted a bit of a rumor: that Finland’s Supercell — likely the most lucrative iOS gaming company in the world — had raised about $100 million in funding in a round led by Index Ventures, Atomico Partners and Institutional Venture Partners.

Now we have confirmation today that the deal did happen, according to a flashy Forbes feature.

The tiny Helsinki-based company, which is about 100-people strong, did in fact raise $130 million on a $770 million valuation from Index, Atomico and IVP. Like we said, the round was secondary: all shareholders, including early investor Accel Partners, sold 16.7 percent of their holdings in the company to the newer investors. Index took $52.5 million of the round.

Not only that, Supercell shared some revenue figures, (and holy crap, are they bigger than I thought they would be). Last quarter, Supercell made $179 million and netted $104 million of that after expenses and Apple’s 30 percent cut. Last year, they grossed $100 million.

Today, they’re making $2.4 million a day — which is about double the rumor figures I had heard from numerous sources in the industry. They also have about 8.5 million daily active users, which is actually lower than comparable companies like King or Zynga.
So they monetize their existing players well.

Why share these numbers now? It’s likely because Finland has some unusual rules around financial disclosures for privately held companies. Even privately-backed companies have to share the the split of their equity holdings. Angry Birds-maker Rovio reported earnings a few weeks ago, saying they doubled revenue and made about $195 million last year.

Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen said in the Forbes story that they took the funding to give early shareholders a payout, give a “thank you” to employees and avoid pressure to go public.

Finnish business magazine Talouselämä has more details on how the round was structured. Apparently, all shareholders, including employees, were given the choice to sell 16.7 percent of the holdings, and all did. It’s equitable of them, in the sense that it wasn’t just executives that got to take cash off the table.

Clearly, Supercell didn’t need the capital. But $770 million is a steep bar to clear and they’ll now have pressure to prove that they’re worth several times that.

As for Index, which is effectively betting that Supercell will become a multi-billion dollar gaming company, one of their partners, Neil Rimer, posted an explanation of the deal earlier today. They were enamored of Supercell’s culture:

The founders had witnessed the downfall of too many companies that had turned into bloated, bureaucratic behemoths with many design studios in multiple time zones requiring massive management overhead and crushing hierarchies and to coordinate.

As its name implies, Supercell is organized as a collection of small, independent teams called cells tasked with developing new games or building new deep features for existing games. Cells are given complete autonomy in terms of how they organize themselves, prioritize ideas, distribute work and determine what they ultimately produce. Describing himself as the “world’s least powerful CEO”, Ilkka encourages cells to exercise extreme independence and prides himself on having no creative control over them once they are constituted. The company as a whole is merely an aggregation of these cells; a Supercell.

With only 100 employees compared to 3000 at Zynga and almost 10,000 at EA, Supercell offers a radically new model for agile content development that has made it the highest grossing iOS game developer with only 2 game titles (versus EA’s 970).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last June, online portfolio startup Pathbrite announced that it had raised $2.5 million in Series A financing led by Rethink Education, alongside a strategic investment from ACT, the college and career readiness assessment company.

Now, these investors are ready to double down on the startup’s approach to next-gen online portfolio management, as Pathbrite announced today that it has raised $4 million in series A2 financing — the second tranche of the round it completed in June. This time, ACT opted to lead the round, backed by participation from ReThink, Serious Change’s Joshua Mailman and a handful of angel investors.

With its new capital, the startup has now raised just over $8 million in total to date from investors including those above, as well as Ben and Jerry’s Ben Cohen and Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler. Pathbrite plans to use its additional funding to continue its product development and focus on expanding its reach (and customer acquisition strategy) within higher education as well as K-12 and beyond.

As competition grows at colleges and among those looking for jobs, students and graduates alike are looking for new, better ways to stand out from the crowd. As online education becomes increasingly popular, academic credentials themselves (and the value they represent) are changing. Traditionally, resumes and diplomas have held the most water among institutions and employers, but today, those with diplomas and LinkedIn profiles are no longer in the minority.

The key to finding employment in a competitive workforce is being able to show prospective employers what makes you unique, whether that be in the skills you’ve learned, the projects you’ve completed or the hacks that have landed you on Hacker News. But, again, one line on a sheet of paper or a blurb on your LinkedIn profile no longer seems the most effective way to showcase your skills and accomplishments and communicate what makes you unique.

That’s why we’re beginning to witness the rise of the digital portfolio, which is, as it sounds, an online collection of your personal, academic and professional projects and accolades — a place to present your writing, presentations, hacks, certificates, diplomas and everything in between. For engineers and developers, one of the most popular examples would be GitHub. In an increasingly digital world, online portfolios can present the best opportunity to showcase your talents, representing an evolution of the About.me brand of personal homepages and business cards.

Pathbrite launched publicly last summer to become the go-to destination to create digital portfolios by offering anyone and everyone the chance to use its simple templates to create more robust online records of their personal and professional accomplishments. From the beginning, Pathbrite has catered expressly to college and high school students, but, over time, its scope has broadened, and today its portfolio creation tools can be used by anyone looking to build a three-dimensional, digital resume.

The platform allows users to include content from a variety of media — whether it be content from YouTube, Google Drive, LinkedIn, Khan Academy badges or Coursera certificates — enabling them to quickly add and/or import that content from their hard drive or from the Web. Once added, users can include descriptions for each particular element of your portfolio, and so on, with the goal being to enable a digital identify that is deeper and more descriptive than those offered by existing platforms.

In January, as reported by The Journal, Pathbrite added “Portfolios for Educators” to its platform, a tool that essentially allows teachers to help their students create their digital portfolios (and to create portfolios of portfolios in order to organize student work for review).

The new offering lets teachers create a course on Pathbrite’s platform, choose how to pay for the portfolio — whether that be by having students pay the startup’s annual fee or by using a school-purchased license — then enter class info, course name and subject, as well as invite other teachers and students to join directly. Students can then store that portfolio next to their existing work and import and add content as they would for their own personal portfolio.

As part of launching this new option for teachers, Pathbrite announced a deal with Pearson that would see the publisher integrate the startup’s portfolio platform into its cloud-based LMS for online courses, called LearningStudio, according to The Journal. CEO Heather Hiles and company have been hard at work securing partnerships with other institutions and education companies that will allow the startup to increase its footprint, expand distribution and create monetization opportunities, like its strategic partnership with ACT, McGraw-Hill Stanford University’s registrar, for example.

Presently, Pathbrite’s platform is free for teachers and faculty, while students pay $10/year for access. Going forward, the startup wants to ensure that students and teachers can manage their portfolios from any device and platform, mobile or desktop. While it already enables that to a degree via storage in the cloud and web-based access, the startup will be looking to release its own native mobile apps at some point in the near future — and add to its base of 100 colleges and universities.

For more, find Pathbrite at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has officially shut down registrations for its #ifihadglass round of Google Glass pre-orders/applications.

The competition was first announced on February 20, alongside a video asking prospective Google Glass buyers to take to Twitter or Google+ using the #ifihadglass hashtag to explain why they deserve one of the first-ever Google Glass Explorer Editions. Along with the social post, users also filled out an application here.

Today, however, the window has closed.

Google didn’t say just how many sets of Google Glass would go out in this round, but the slow and steady approach makes sense for a product like Glass. Rather than let anyone get a try, Google is ensuring that only the most die-hard Glassholes get the device, which is still in its developer/beta phase.

With more people using the product, Google buys itself a bigger test base and lures in developers without disappointing anyone. The company timed the competition nicely, letting The Verge’s Joshua Toposlky go hands-on with Google Glass on Feb. 22.

What’s it like to use Glass? @joshuatopolsky of @verge goes behind the scenes w/ @projectglass goo.gl/zjCUg #ifihadglass

— A Googler (@google) February 26, 2013

There were some pretty interesting submissions made via Twitter, which you can browse here. This is one of my favorites, considering that Google Glass was spotted on eBay earlier this week, and has been subsequently removed.

#ifihadglass I would sell it on Ebay because enough foolish people overvalue and overestimate its usefulness.

— Matt (@matttk) February 28, 2013

In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait for Google to open up another round of pre-orders.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) platform StackMob is expanding upon its earlier launch of a marketplace for third-party services, with the debut of a marketplace targeted toward enterprise customers. Through a series of partnerships, the marketplace allows StackMob to promote its integrations with other software and platforms-as-a-service companies, API infrastructure providers and more, initially including services from AT&T, Alfresco, Box, Braintree, GoodData, Mashery, Mulesoft, New Relic and Rackspace.

The move signals StackMob’s goal of attracting more enterprise customers to its platform. That’s a customer base that CEO Ty Amell describes as “small” today. Currently, there are around 15 to 20 enterprise companies working with StackMob on apps, ranging from those in the proof-of-concept phase to those which are in active development. StackMob is under NDA with these enterprise customers, so Amell can’t provide names, but says all apps are what you could characterize as “mission-critical.”

“It’s not these one-off marketing apps; it’s not a game for an enterprise company,” he explains. “That’s a really interesting shift, because it shows that the enterprise is really starting to trust StackMob in this space,” he adds. “Until now, if you looked at most of the other MBaaS providers, you might see some enterprise, but it’s usually through an agency, and it’s usually not mission-critical.”

Servicing the enterprise has always been on StackMob’s long-term roadmap, but in the near-term, the company was hearing the same questions from the enterprise over and over, Amell tells us. For example, “how do I securely connect you to my legacy system?” “How do I get this third-party API integrated?” “How do I control when it’s internal data versus external data?” “How do I do payment processing?” etc. The idea was to centralize all the things that StackMob can do for the enterprise under one umbrella.

While the previously launched and developer-focused StackMob Marketplace offers clickable modules for adding services from partners like Apsalar, Kontrol.io, Crittercism, PubNub, SendGrib, Urban Airship, UserVoice and others, the Enterprise Marketplace is different, as it’s not about one-click integrations. If anything, it’s more about advertising StackMob’s enterprise capabilities and partnerships than it is about providing sign-up flows and deals.

Amell also notes, though, that the cost to enterprise customers is cheaper than if they went out to the various services individually. Still, the only “action” that’s possible in the marketplace today is the ability to fill out a form requesting that someone from StackMob call back. It’s very lead gen.

The push into the enterprise is important, because in this over-saturated market of MBaaS companies, there will end up only being a few survivors, as the herd is thinned. Smaller players will likely bite the dust over the next year or two.

Unlike StackMob’s competitor Y Combinator-backed Parse, Amell declined to share hard metrics illustrating StackMob’s traction. Instead he simply says, “we have revenue; we’ll have to raise another round.” He says the round would be needed to grow the sales team and expand faster. “The dirty secret with backends-as-a-service is that it takes a lot of time and money, especially when you’re talking about enterprise. It takes a lot of time to become profitable,” he says. “We’re on a nice path there, but we’re not revenue-positive.”

Amell also refers to StackMob as a founding company in this space, which is true – as a three-year old company, it was among the first. And he touts that StackMob is ahead in some areas. ”Every time we do something, the others follow suit,” Amell claims. He even specifically calls out Parse’s third-party integrations (called “cloud modules”), saying that at Parse, they don’t provision the accounts for users and they don’t do all the things that make it a marketplace versus the StackMob Marketplace (though not necessarily this Enterprise version, it seems). Plus, he adds that StackMob has been doing custom code “forever,” as opposed to Parse’s more recent support.

Yet, as everyone knows, “first” doesn’t always translate to last man standing. And Parse and StackMob have been fighting for developer mind share. In October, Parse had 40,000 developers and just about the same number of apps. Today it has 60,000 apps and around the same number of developers. StackMob in November had 15,000 developers and 40,000 apps, and those are still roughly the same. All that being said, both companies are operating freemium services, so at the end of the day, it comes down not to raw numbers, but who’s paying and how much. And these are figures that neither disclose.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

360Buy, the quick-delivery shopping site once described as the Chinese mashup of Amazon and Fresh Direct, announced $700 million USD in funding on Friday. While this gives the company, China’s second largest e-tailer after Alibaba, enough cash to delay its much-anticipated IPO, one of its investors, Kingdom Holding Company, a Saudi Arabia firm, focuses on companies that will make a public offering within three years.

In a release, Kingdom’s executive director Ahmed Halawani said the deal is “in line with Kingdom Holding’s private equity investment strategy through selecting high growth companies potentially seeking to be listed in one of the international capital markets within three years.”

Halawani added: “This deal is also in line with Kingdom Holding’s private equity investment strategy through selecting high growth companies potentially seeking to be listed in one of the international capital markets within three years. The deal also reflects international companies’ confidence in Kingdom Holding and the strategic role it plays in adding real value to their shareholders base.”

Beijing-based 360Buy’s CEO Richard Liu wrote in a companywide email that the funds will be used to continue strategic investments. According to First Financial Daily (link via Google Translate), this funding round increases 360Buy’s valuation by about 20 percent to $7.25 billion USD from $6 billion USD. 360Buy has focused on building its coffers recently-just three months ago it raised $400 million in funding. In his staff email, Liu said the company’s current cash flow following this round of funding is 15 billion yuan.

Despite the size of the latest round, Liu brushed off its significance in his company email. “Financing is not technology, there’s nothing to celebrate,” he wrote, adding that 360Buy’s main focus is still profit. But the money can help 360Buy become a stronger rival to Alibaba. 360Buy will use the cash to make strategic investments, including in IT, its cloud-computing network and, importantly, logistics. Last month the Alibaba Group announced that it and its partners will spend 100 billion yuan ($16.08 billion USD) in the first phase of investment to build a countrywide logistics network. Over the next decade, Alibaba plans to complete a network that will allow the delivery of products across China within 24 hours, supporting annual online sales of 10 trillion yuan.

Investors are also eagerly awaiting the first public offering of Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company. Rumors of an IPO were fueled after founder Jack Ma announced in January that he will step down as CEO on May 10. His announcement came after a management restructuring and the June delisting of a Hong Kong unit.

In addition to Kingdom Holding Company, 360Buy’s investors in its latest round of fundraising includes the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, one of Canada’s largest institutional investors, which invested about $300 million USD, a 4.1% stake in the company. Kingdom Holding Company invested $400 million, or a 5.6 percent stake. After this round of financing, 360Buy’s management stake of 9.7% will be reduced.

Earlier investors in the company include Capitol Today, Bull Capital, Pak-to Leung, Digital Sky Technologies (DST) and Tiger Fund.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch