Here’s where the money was flowing this week in tech:
Capital Gains: Knock, Knock. Who’s There? Smart Doorbells.
Plus: Competition for Twitch, better DNA sequencing for academia and small business loans for veterans.
Todd Bernard
- Smart doorbell company Ring, also known as Bot Home Automation, raised a $61.2 million Series C led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company is also launching a new “pro” version of its doorbell with a 1080p camera and swappable faceplates (TechCrunch).
- Douyu TV, a Chinese competitor to Amazon-owned video game streaming site Twitch, is now valued at more than $1 billion after a $100 million round led by Tencent. China has an estimated 443.6 million gamers (DealStreetAsia).
- Database company Couchbase took a down round of $30 million to get cash-flow positive ahead of a planned IPO. The company’s share price has dropped 41 percent since it last raised money in June 2014 (Wall Street Journal).
- Alphabet’s Google Ventures led a $30 million round for Skyport Systems, a server company that adds additional layers of encryption to data that comes from unsecured sources. The security technology is said to be able to stop some of the more aggressive hacker attacks (Silicon Angle).
- DNA sequencing company 10x Genomics, founded by ex-23andMe architect Serge Saxonov in 2012, has raised a $55 million Series C. Unlike 23andMe, the company focuses on academic customers and claims it can catch critical DNA information that other tests fail to spot (San Francisco Business Times).
- Menlo Ventures Managing Director Matt Murphy will join Ben Horowitz on the board of Seattle-based Usermind after the startup raised $14.5 million in new funding. The company makes a business operations platform to connect sales, finance and marketing departments (Puget Sound Business Journal).
- Bucking a general trend of aversion to online lenders in 2016, StreetShares began raising its Series A with a $4.5 million equity round led by Fenway Summer. Most of the small businesses StreetShares counts among its customers are run by veterans of the military (Wall Street Journal).
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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