SEO Werkt!

Looks like electronic signature company DocuSign wasn’t quite finished with its fundraising when its Series D was revealed last month — today it’s announcing a new investor.

The funding was first disclosed through a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, with the company then confirming that it had raised $47.5 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with Kleiner partner Mary Meeker joining the board. Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures, and “a large global institutional investor” also participated.

Raising money from Kleiner is already pretty impressive, but DocuSign has added another big-name investor — Google Ventures, whose investment increases the round’s total size to $57.5 million.

The company has now raised a total of about $114 million. When the round was first announced, CEO Keith Krach told me that it would be spent on research and development, expanding into new industries, and international growth.

Today, we journey to the far flung reaches of the galaxy and back again. Computers really are taking over the world and companies are making millions of dollars help them do it. Join me, the Yoda of technology investment news, as I explore the depths of funding universe.

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Chinese company with Arabic name needs $8B to escape from dystopian brutes

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is raising more than $8 billion in a new round of funding. $7.1 billion of this hot pot will go towards buying back 20% of its shares from Yahoo, which currently holds a 40% stake.

The amount will come from borrowing nearly $4 billion, along with sales of $2.6 billion common shares and $1.5 billion in preferred stock. Among those financing the $8 billion in Alibaba are the sovereign wealth fund China Investment Group and the China Development Bank. The investment comes as Alibaba earned $1.8 billion in revenue during the first half of 2012. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Box takes $125 to grow to infinity and beyond!

Box furthers its expansion towards universal hegemony with $125 million in new funding. The money will be used to grow the company globally before its anticipated IPO next year. The round is captained by General Atlantic, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and new investor Social+Capital Partnership

With that kind of cash, it should be able to do more than just store data for enterprise. It should turn that data into a renewable energy source strong enough to power star (cloud) fleets. Driven by robots. Read more on VentureBeat.

SeoPult stockpiles $10M to help businesses with online marketing… and perhaps space exploration

Online marketing platform SeoPult amassed $10 million in funding from comrade iTech Capital to infiltrate the world market with its internet e-advertising automation technology.

SeoPult’s services enables small and medium businesses without internet marketing know-how to wage more effective campaigns. It helps companies manage search engine optimization techniques and social media tools, and provides data analytics to help them leverage their efforts into improved results. To put it in terms you can grok, it helps strangers in a strange land find their way to success.

Tonara invents artificial intelligence assistant for musicians (otherwise known as an iPad app)

In the future, live music may be obsolete. Who needs symphonies when you have Spotify? That said, there are still a few fifth graders, senior citizens, and French aristocrats holding on to the bastion of musicianship.

Tonara sends sheet music across the screen like comets zooming past the windows of Battlestar Galactica. For those willing to forsake sheet music for iPads, Tonara’s announcement of $4 million in financing is almost as exciting as the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. With the investment, the company will continue to develop artificial intelligence that can play the cello. But not the piano, because that is crazy talk. Read more on VentureBeat.

Instacanvas brings in $1.7M to challenge the metaphysical universe 

Instagram print shop Instacanvas grabbed insta-funding of $1.7 million. Instacanvas’s core concept is simple: photographers can display and sell their filtered photos as printed canvases.

What is not simple, however, are the philosophical implications.

First, an Instagram photographer captures a digital image of the real world and sends it off into the cyberland. People anywhere can see the picture and with the simple click of a button, receive a tangible manifestation of the virtual image of the sensory universe.

Maybe I am over thinking this. Let me put this into insta-terms. Yet another Instagram keepsake retailer got money from Founders Fund, First Round Capital, Bullpen Capital, and Scott Banister, and included participation from 15 additional angel investors. Read more on VentureBeat.

Pinfluencer breaks out of cocoon, unleashes Pinterest data analytics on the earth

Pinfluencer emerged out of public beta today like an alien shedding its skin to help brands take advantage of their presence on Pinterest.

This startup applies data analytics to Pinterest so brands can drive content, track metrics, spot trends, and connect with their enthusiastic fans. Even before launching, dozens of companies like 1-800-FLOWERS.com, GNC, HauteLook, Piperlime, and Rent the Runway have adopted the early version.

The company also revealed that it has raised $1.4M in seed/evil spawn money from Freestyle Capital and Baseline Ventures as well as angel investors.

Matrixx Software gets funding to blur line between dreams, reality, and telecommunications

Matrixx Software (with a name that makes the whole Sci Fi theme blissfully easy) reported in an SEC filing that it has raised $12.6 million of a $13 million round of funding.

The company provides telecommunications companies with a solution to adapt to the changing industry. As communication becomes less about actual talking and more about messaging and online sharing, cell phone networks and landline, cable, and satellite businesses can struggle to keep up.

The details of the funding have not been disclosed, although there is a distinct possibility that all the fundraising happened in a virtual reality and was led by sentient machines.

May the force be with you.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Enterprise cloud storage provider Box has raised $125 million in a new monster round of funding, one that will be focused on global expansion before a potential IPO next year.

Box helps businesses with their cloud storage and collaboration needs. It faces stiff competition from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Egnyte, Nirvanix, and more, but it has still attracted more than 11 million users across 120,000 businesses. While Box hasn’t disclosed overall revenue figures, it claims its sales have increased 200 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2012.

Box did not disclose its valuation, but a report on July 25 about the impending funding mentioned a valuation of $1.2 billion. All Things D reports today that this valuation is “right on target.”

“The confluence of cloud, mobile and social technology is transforming how every enterprise and individual manages information today,” Box CEO Aaron Levie said in a statement. “This new funding allows us to invest aggressively in the talent, technology and global expansion efforts required for Box to sit at the center of this shift and define the next generation of enterprise software.”

The round is being led by General Atlantic, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and new investor Social+Capital Partnership. General Atlantic operating partner Gary Reiner will join Box’s board.

Box’s Aaron Levie at MobileBeat 2012: Michael O’Donnell/Flickr

Filed under: cloud, deals

Hacking, viruses, megabreaches and other cybercriminal activity are on the increase, and cybersecurity specialists Bit9 has today announced a significant round of funding to help fight it.

Bit9, which works with 30 of the Fortune 100 companies, Raised its biggest round yet, a $34.5 million Series D led by new investor Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors Atlas Venture, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and .406 Ventures.

The growth of cybercrime has massively increased the need for companies to protect their data, and that is giving rise to a number of new approaches for how to do that most effectively. Bit9′s approach plays on a new trend among cybersecurity companies: traditional protection is based around the concept of a blacklist of forbidden sites, but Patrick Morley, the CEO of Bit9, explains that his company turns this on its head to focus not on what shouldn’t be allowed in, but only on what should — the so-called “whitelist” approach to the problem.

The idea, he says, is to trust only sites that are known, rather than trying to account for the ones that are not. The reason for this, he says, is because viruses, worms and the people who create them are regularly changing what they are doing, so to try to account for all that is bad and new is virtually impossible. “The challenge with security is that it is hard because to create new threats is so easy that they pass right through” an existing blacklist security wall, he tells me.

Think of the old approach as a flu shot: these tend to only account for the most common strains of influenza, and so that means you can still catch a flu if it’s a new variation that hasn’t been included in the seasonal shot.

Up to now, this approach to cybersecurity has given Bit9 some significant accolades.

Morley notes that Bit9 — which says it works with some 700 organizations in total (although it doesn’t name any of them) and says it’s growing at 100 percent annually in terms of business — was the only company in the world to date that has been able to stop the Flame virus (or at least publicly state that it has…), and it was the only one that stopped the RSA breach.

On Flame, Morley notes that the block was almost inadvertent. It simply was not on its whitelist for a particular customer: “We stopped it not because it was Flame, but because it was not trustworthy,” he says.

Morley says that the changes in cybersecurity have really started to take place in the last 24 months — not just in terms of attacks being ramped up, but also because enterprises have become much more aware of the issue of breaches. He says that these days the conversation is happening at board level, with companies increasingly aware of “how risky things are.”

As we heard earlier this year in Verizon’s big cyber security report, the biggest threats today, he confirms, come from organized crime, nation states looking for IP from other countries and hacktivists like Anonymous. The nation state, which includes acts attacking not just governments but international attacks on businesses based a particular country, may perhaps be the biggest threat of all.

Going forward, Morley says that Bit9 plans to extend its whitelist approach to cover more platforms than it does today, with some of those developments to come in the next two quarters. He says the company already sees success covering security on laptops and desktops, as well as data centers and infrastructure, “but if you think about it the move to mobile, bring your own device and cloud” are also becoming increasingly significant areas, he says. These are also areas that Bit9 will seek to further incorporate into its support.

The cost for cybercrime attacks — according to the Ponemon Institute, which interviewed 50 companies — is now at $5.9 million, with the highest now $36.4 million.

To date, Bit9 has now raised $72.8 million in funding.

Another big round of funding in the currently-chic area of online retail and fashion: JustFab, the online shoe/fashion brand and styling platform with six million members, has raised $76 million, funding that it will use to go big on international expansion. The C-Round was led by new investor Rho Ventures, with participation from existing backers Matrix Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) and Intelligent Beauty, JustFab’s parent company, which incubated and launched the startup in 2010. The total amount of money now raised by JustFab is $139 million.

After a launch in Germany earlier this year that went “significantly better than we expected,” co-CEO Adam Goldenberg tells me that the main priority right now is to continue that international expansion to one of the biggest fashion markets in Europe. “We are launching in the UK in September,” he tells me, with more markets to be added by the first quarter of 2013. Currently, he says, JustFab is adding half a million users every month, and is on track to make $100 million in revenue this year — a big leap on the $28 million of 2011 — on a business model that mixes a subscription-based user-base with other users buying a la carte.

The subscription model, Goldenberg says, has been serving JustFab very well indeed: the VIP program, as it’s called, requires users to spend a minimum of $39.95 each month on items in the store (that’s the flat price for every item as well). He says that what happens is that users visit on average much more frequently, between 25 and 30 times each year. “Every time they ‘walk’ in the door [of the site], we remerchandize the store,” he says, which drives people to buy more. The a la carte model involves users not required to make purchases, but in these cases the items cost between $49 and $79.

Shoes are where JustFab got its start — the styles are geared at the “fast fashion” category of footwear, more Nine West and Steve Madden than Louboutin — and he says this is what has remained most popular. JustFab currently puts in orders for some 4-5 million pairs of shoes annually, and scaling up the business will only improve the financials for this. Manufacturers, he says, tend to require minimum runs of 300,000 on footwear.

But he also adds that some of the $76 million will go towards widening its product base well beyond the shoe category that helped JustFab make its name. “We want to go beyond shoes, bags and jewellery to better compete against the H&Ms and Zaras,” he said. While it will continue to focus on the Just Fab brand, one area that will be a focus are “capsule” collections working with specific designers to create seasonal, temporary lines of clothes. This is an area that has sold very well for H&M and others in the fast fashion retail category.

Another area that JustFab just might see some potential is in the area of acquisitions. Right now growth will be more organic, says Goldenberg. But he’s also aware of the other route, as evidenced by well-funded fashion and design brand Fab, which has made several acquisitions in Europe (most recently Llustre in the UK), to quickly pick up customers and infrastructure.

That’s partly because in Europe there haven’t really emerged competitors offering the same kind of subscription-based business model and around the same kind of fast fashion offering. That’s not the case in JustFab’s home market of the U.S., where it competes against companies like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint (that’s another reason for the international landgrab).

One last category that JustFab has not really touched is mobile: the company still has yet to launch dedicated native apps for users — a surprise given how so many other online fashion brands have closely linked themselves to the platform, and the fact that JustFab itself has already seen a large part of activity on its site come from mobile devices. “It’s a big opportunity,” he admits, adding that native apps will be released later this year.

As part of the funding, Mark Leschly, managing partner at Rho Ventures, will join the board.

Some good souls raised money in funding land today. Ticketfly raised a third round to help people’s assaulted ears listen to better music, and Meteor brought in money to support stressed web developers everywhere. GiveForward received investment for its platform helps people crowdfund medical expenses, and EcoScraps took money for a composting scheme that cuts down on waste and greenhouse emissions. And let’s not forget GoodData, which is mainly good because it has the word in its name.

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

GoodData racks up $25 million in a third round of funding for its big data analytics service

GoodData offers operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools in a single platform. Since the company was founded, over 6,000 customers  have adopted GoodData, and the company has seen dramatic revenue growth of 500% year over year.

The round was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners. The company received $15 million in 2011 and has raised $53.5 million in total investment. Read more on VentureBeat. 

I just wanna’ TicketFly (put your arms around me, VCs)

Online ticketing website Ticketfly today announced raising $22 million in the startup’s third round of institutional funding. Ticketfly offers its customers (promoters and event venues) ticket-selling microsites and online marketing tools. It has around 300 affiliate partners and has experienced dramatic growth during 2012.

The new money comes from SAP Ventures, which led the round. Northgate Capital, Cross Creek Capital, and second-round lead investor Mohr Davidow Ventures also participated. With $15 million in previous rounds, this brings Ticketfly’s total VC bill to $37 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

Meteor shoots across the Silicon Valley sky with $11.2M

Meteor Development Group has pulled in $11.2 million in funding to make building client-side web apps super easy and super fast. This is the group’s first institutional funding round. Meteor is open-sourced (under the MIT license) and JavaScript-centric. Meteor apps run in the browser rather than on a web server, and they grab data from cloud services as they run. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Matrix Partners and a few others. Read more on VentureBeat.

NEA hoards the world’s money, raises fund larger than 2x the population of China

New Enterprise Associates has raised one of the largest venture capital funds ever with the closing of its $2.6 billion fund. The raise of the firm’s 14th fund brings NEA’s total committed capital to more than $13 billion. This is the third consecutive time NEA has raised more than $2.5 billion for a single fund. Read more in VentureBeat.

Backblaze at long last accepts $5M in venture capital fuel

Storage startup wild child Backblaze rebelled against itself today and announced it has raised $5 million in funding. Backblaze is an extremely easy-to-use, cheap storage service that keeps data safe by continuously and automatically backing it up to the cloud.

The company notoriously bootstrapped for years in an effort to fuel innovation and efficiency. Despite being profitable, Backblaze has pivoted its no-venture-capital policy to pursue its goal of making unlimited backup available to all PCs and Macs. The investment came from British firm TMT Investments and will be given in two equal distributions. Read more on VentureBeat.

Revinate takes $14.5M to empower the hospitality industry against angry social media attacks

Revinate is doing something interesting for the hospitality industry: it’s gathering up reviews from all over the web — Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, places where we might not even know we’re writing a “review” — and letting hoteliers and retaurateurs sort and analyze the information in really useful ways.

The startup just took a great big Series A of $14.5 million from Benchmark Capital, which led the round, and relatively new VC firm Formation 8. The funding will be used to bring Revinate to more chains, corporate groups, hotels, and restaurants around the world. The company previously reported a $500,000 seed or angel round to the SEC; this brings the startup’s total venture capital fundraising to $15 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

GiveForward raises $2M to pay for kidneys, chemo, and Klonopin

Medical fundraising platform GiveForward closed $2 million in investment for its unique application of the crowdfunding craze. It’s like Kickstarter for medical expenses. People can use the site to seek money for friends or loved ones who have to pay out of pocket for expensive procedures or treatments. The company has 3,000+ active fundraisers on the site and is currently working with 200 health organizations and hospitals across the country to help families in times of need. The round was led by Founder Collective and First Round Capital.

GiveForward graduated from Chicago’s Excelerate Labs in 2010 and has been striving ever since to help the 72 million Americans who take on medical debt every year. Read the press release.

EcoScraps makes millions by selling stores their own garbage

Scrappy startup EcoScraps is doing its part to save the earth. The company announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in its first round of funding, which will enable the team to expand operations into more stores and regions across the United States. The concept behind EcoScraps is simple: The company takes leftover food from retail stores, turns it into compost, and sells it. The money came from KickStart Seed Fund, DBL Investors, and Peterson Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat.

Peter Thiel puts $1.2M ‘on the barbie’ for ScriptRock 

Australian enterprise software provider ScriptRock today announced that Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technology investor Peter Thiel has lead the startup’s seed investment round of $1.2M. This is Thiel’s first investment in an Australian company.

ScriptRock’s technology allows companies to test complicated system configurations, (basically test how the applications are working) in an easier way. The investment will be used to grow the team and establish a US presence. It represents yet another example of venture capitalists looking beyond US borders for investment opportunities and the potential of technology markets emerging abroad. Read the press release.

Filed under: deals

GoodData racked up $25 million in a third round of funding for its big data analytics service.

GoodData offers operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools in a single platform. The company focuses on user experience, so all the tricky, technical elements of big data are comprehensible to people outside of IT teams.

“Big data is a very fragmented enterprise space with a lot of noise, but we are different from everyone else,” said CEO Roman Stanck in an interview with VentureBeat. “We sell business solutions to business people. We offer an end-to-end solution and we tailor to consumers, rather than selling infrastructure to techies.”

Stanck emphasized that GoodData also sells marketing and sales services, so companies do not have to source business intelligence solutions from multiple vendors. The technology is embedded into the browser and run on a pay-as-you-go system, which benefits startups that lack the ability to shell out for expensive infrastructure or are hesitant to pay a large-up front fee.

Since the company was founded, over 6,000 customers  have adopted GoodData, and the company has seen dramatic revenue growth of 500% year over year.

“The beauty of business intelligence is it is extremely horizontal, every company needs analytics,” Stanck said. “But we are not selling horizontal technology. We are investing in additional domains like enterprise and retail.”

The latest round of funding will go towards building sales and marketing. It was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners. The company received $15 million in 2011 and has raised $53.5 million in total investment. It was founded in the Czech Republic in 2007 and is now based in San Francisco. It has 180 employees.

Filed under: deals, enterprise

Well, look at this – only yesterday, API management platform Mashery announced its close of an additional $10 million in Series D funding, and today competitor Apigee is announcing a $20 million round led by new investor Focus Ventures. Also participating in the round were existing investors Bay Partners, Northwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures. This API business? It’s hot.

Apigee has been busy this year, acquiring mobile cloud platform Usergrid in January, and just last week picking up the assets and personnel behind the operator-backed Wholesale Applications Community (WAC). It’s also powering that new “print to Walgreens” feature popping up in mobile photo-sharing apps.

The acquisitions point to Apigee’s increased focus on mobile. With a trillion mobile devices soon to be connected to the Internet, Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor says that now “every business – from technology startups to brick-and-mortar giants, needs an API to compete.”

In a recent interview, we asked Kapoor to talk more about his company’s strategy towards mobile. “‘Mobile first’ is what we’re seeing happen in the market, whether it’s for a small two-person shop in San Francisco, or whether it’s for large enterprises,” he told us. “If you’re building a new application, it’s going to be a mobile app. That’s the number one driver for APIs. As websites disintegrate, APIs become the point of control,” he added.

“We’re going to do a lot more to help developers build mobile apps. Our expertise is on the backend, to create very scalable backends. We’ll continue to add things – by the WAC acquisition, we added settlement and customer care,” he says. “We’ll add things like that moving forward, which will be generally available across developer domains, as well as enterprise verticals.”

One of the things Apigee is adding soon is analytics. “That’s a keen interest to us,” Kapoor says. “As people start running their businesses, or measuring their businesses…it’s going to be very important for Apigee to provide what’s going on at the edge of the enterprises,” he says. The new product should debut this summer.

The company is also planning expansion into new markets, ramping up sales and marketing efforts outside the U.S., in Europe and Asia in particular, and opening up offices. This is why Focus Ventures was chosen as lead investor, says Kapoor – because of its ability to help on that front.

It’s been a big 24 hours for Fab.com. The design-oriented e-commerce site just closed on $105 million in new funding at a reported $600 million valuation — a funding round that has been several months in the making. It’s news that CEO and founder Jason Goldberg likes to joke has given him “105 million new reasons to smile” today. But as Goldberg also acknowledges, it’s a serious time too: Big money brings big responsibility.

So we were pleased to have Goldberg give us a call via Skype from Fab’s New York City headquarters to talk all about the new raise and what it means for Fab’s strategy. You can watch our full interview in the video embedded above, and below are a few of his key points.

Growing Globally Through Building And Buying

A huge focus for Fab going forward will be scaling out its international operations, an effort that will be aided by its new investor London-based VC firm Atomico Ventures. I asked Goldberg if any of its new funding will be put toward acquiring international flash sales companies rather than building them in-house, and he said that while M&A will continue to be an option for Fab it won’t be something it spends its cash on:

“We made two acquisitions already for international expansion… both of those acquisitions were stock transactions, and they were based in equity not based in cash. I would expect to the extent that we do acquisitions in the future, we would still follow that, and be more along the lines of that kind of model.

We invest our cash in building the teams, and investing in teams and the resources the teams need to succeed. But we will look at a build versus buy based on the team. if we feel there is a good team in a market that could become Fab then we will look at it. But we’re not just looking to buy our way in. We’re just as comfortable with building teams as well.”

A Company To Settle Down With

Fab is the only company that has been able to make Goldberg, a longtime serial entrepreneur, feel ready to settle down. And with the new funding, Goldberg says that he’s looking to make Fab a giant brand on par with the IKEAs of the world:

“As a serial entrepreneur I’ve been starting companies for the last ten years. And until six months ago, I had spent basically most of the past ten years thinking about what company I might be starting next. This is the first time in my life, in my career, that the only thing I think about is this. I’m doing my absolute dream job, and I could see building Fab for 10, 20, 30 years.

I also think we have a special opportunity to build a really significant brand. I always say we’re not building a company, we’re building a brand. We think there’s an opportunity for Fab to be the one of the next great brands on the scale of an IKEA, a Google, a Facebook, an eBay. A brand that people know all around the world.”

Managing Culture Amid Crazy Growth

Goldberg also talked about retaining a uniform company vibe amidst its booming growth, which is something on which he spends a significant amount of his own time and energy:

“We were 25 people here in New York at this time last year, and we have 400 people globally working on Fab now. The biggest thing for us is, Fab is Fab is Fab, everywhere we operate. That’s the culture, the team, the products on the website, the look and feel, the operations, the customer service.

…Getting this culture right is key to getting the brand right. Our number one thing at Fab is, it’s gotta be real, it’s gotta be authentic. What we say is what we do.”

Edmodo‘s campaign to bring collaborative, social media tools to the classroom was bolstered today with a $25 million funding round led by new investor, New Enterprise Associate’s Tony Florence.

The digital education startup uses a social network to connect students, teachers, and classrooms around the world. K-12 classes can privately log-in via a smartphone or web browser to a social network to receive helpful homework advice, grades, discuss classroom topics, and view school notices. Schools and districts can establish their own Edmodo URLs to access management and analytic tools within a completely private and secure network.

I caught up with Crystal Hutter, Edmodo’s chief operations officer, shortly after the funding announcement to discuss the growth of the education technology space. “It’s an exciting time to be involved in both Higher Ed and K-12,” she said on a phone call, adding that the company’s success getting into so many classrooms bodes well for edtech in general.

Hutter told me that Edmodo would use the funding to expand its global network of teachers, the “heart and soul” of Edmodo. “We will continue to do what we’ve always done,” she said. Feedback from teachers and students has always informed the development of the product. For instance, when several teachers suggested quizzes and badges to keep students engaged in homework assignments, both features were promptly incorporated.

Edmodo has grown to eight million registered users and is the technology of choice for 85 of the largest 100 U.S. school districts. The free service has spread by word of mouth from teacher to teacher, and parent to parent, eventually making its way to 90 countries around the world. Hutter told me that Edmodo built the technology so that it could be adopted across diverse set of classrooms, including schools in emerging nations.

Silicon Valley-based investor NEA is not alone in taking a clear bet on edtech, but this is the second time this week we’ve heard the firm’s name associated with the space. The firm recently poured millions in funding into online education platform Coursera, which has raised $22 million to date. Read more about Coursera’s global expansion plans here.

“As a firm, we’re very active in the education technology arena, and Edmodo is far and away the most impressive social learning network in K12 education,” said Florence, General Partner at NEA, in a statement.

Most interesting, perhaps, to investors is that Edmodo recently opened its API to third-party publishers and developers to create educational apps that integrate directly with Edmodo. Apps built for the Edmodo platform will be available to teachers across the US for the 2012-2013 school year.

Edmodo has experimented in the past with new digital services and tools for the classroom. In November, VentureBeat covered the company’s move into hosting live webinar events. To kickstart the initiative, Edmodo teamed up with Polar Bears International for a series of live conferences about the creatures to bring together kids and scientists.

Edmodo raised $25 million just months after its $15 million series B round led by Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman and Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler. With this round of financing, Edmodo has raised $47.5 million to date.

Image courtesy of SpecialKRB

Filed under: VentureBeat