Ride-hailing in Asia, teen-friendly messaging and flash sales were all in the startup funding headlines this week. Here’s the gist:
Capital Gains: Tencent Invests in Kik, Zulily Gets Bought and More
Virtual reality, digital media and other news on the funding front.
Todd Bernard
- In what would be the largest e-commerce acquisition ever, media conglomerate Liberty Interactive agreed to buy the flash sale site Zulily for $2.4 billion in cash and stock. Liberty owns the TV shopping channel QVC and reportedly plans to figure out how to make the two work together.
- GrabTaxi, a major competitor of Uber in Southeast Asia, raised $350 million from a group of investors that included the Chinese government’s sovereign wealth fund and Didi Kuaidi, another Uber rival.
- Confirming an earlier Re/code report, NBCUniversal and BuzzFeed announced the former’s $200 million investment in the latter. Interesting detail: They’ll be partnering on Olympics coverage, presumably in time for next year’s Rio de Janeiro games.
- 3-D printer technology company Carbon3D raised $100 million in a Series C funding round led by Google Ventures. Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake Kraftwerk, Yuri Milner and others also participated.
- Security management tech provider AlienVault raised a $52 million Series E funding round, led by Institutional Venture Partners, with participation from Trident Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (eWeek).
- The messaging service Kik, which has an adolescent-heavy 240 million registered users, landed a $50 million investment from Tencent, the Chinese owner of another popular messaging service, WeChat. The deal values Kik at $1 billion.
- Electric battery maker StoreDot scored $18 million from Roman Abramovich and the investment arm of Samsung. This gives the company $66 million in total funding (Fortune).
- Gaming-focused augmented and virtual reality startup CastAR raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Android co-founder Andy Rubin’s Playground Global Ventures.
- Milwaukee-based Bright Cellars, a “wine of the month club” type of service that emerged from MIT, raised $1.8 million from a group of investors (Milwaukee Business Journal).
- Enterprise communications startup OneMob raised $900,000 from Salesforce Ventures and other investors (Wall Street Journal).
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
