Genetics testing, mobile Pokemon, government technology and startups of many different stripes raised a bunch of money this past week. Here are the details:
Capital Gains: 23andMe Hits the $1 Billion Mark, Nintendo’s Bet on Mobile and More
The gene-testing company raised $115 million.
Todd Bernard
- Startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has only made early-stage investments up until this point, raised $700 million for a new fund that’s focused on late-stage and growth investments. The fund will be managed by former Twitter COO Ali Rowghani (The New York Times).
- 23andMe, a company that lets consumers test their own genes to trace their lineage and other information, has raised a $115 million Series E round led by Fidelity, with participation from Google Ventures, NEA, Casdin Capital and WuXi Healthcare Ventures. The funding sets the company’s value at around $1.1 billion (Bloomberg Business).
- The cloud-based encrypted messaging startup Symphony raised $100 million from a group of investors that includes Google, UBS, Lakestar, Natixis and Société Générale. The service is mostly geared for financial communications, which is why there are so many banks putting money in it; earlier investors include Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and others.
- Ex-Googler-founded Optimizely, which does A/B testing for Internet companies, raised $58 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Benchmark, Bain Capital Ventures and others (San Francisco Business Times).
- SteelBrick, a sales technology startup, raised $48 million in Series C funding led by Institutional Venture Partners. The company has brought in over $78 million in the last 18 months (Fortune).
- Government cloud technology startup OpenGov raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and other investors. Marc Andreessen is joining the OpenGov board.
- Niantic Labs, the startup that’s working on a Pokemon smartphone game (and used to be a part of Google), raised $20 million from Nintendo and Google, with the opportunity to get $10 million more if it meets certain performance goals.
- Smartphones let you watch stuff in virtual reality, but smartphone cameras can’t capture video in VR. Emergent VR, a startup that wants to make that possible, raised $2.2 million in seed investment from Accel Partners, Google Ventures and Rothenberg Ventures (TechCrunch).
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
