Regular visitors to the Xconomy website may have noticed that we recently killed off the “News Xpress” box at the top of each city’s home page. The news that formerly appeared there—mostly notices of venture investments, mergers & acquisitions, and the like—will now show up in the main news stream, alongside our regular features. But here in San Francisco, my plan isn’t to pepper the main story flow with lots of small news items. Rather, I’ll be gathering them up as warranted into short roundups—starting with this one.
—Lanyrd, a UK-based event-finder startup that emerged from the Winter 2011 term at the Y Combinator seed accelerator, announced in an e-mail to users today that it has closed a $1.4 million round of seed funding. Index Seed and PROfounders Capital led the round, which also included individual investors Joi Ito, Esther Dyson, Joshua Schachter, Matt Biddulph, Blaine Cook, Matt Haughey, Tim Cederman-Haysom, and William Burks Spencer. The startup previously raised money from Y Combinator and Start Fund. Lanyrd said that the closing is “really great news” that means the startup can now “focus on creating a team and building new features for Lanyrd.”
—San Francisco-based Mashape, c0-founded by Augusto Marietti, Marco Palladino, and Mike Zonca, said today that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding for its online marketplace for cloud APIs. APIs, or application programming interfaces, are software connectors that developers can use to integrate their apps with existing services; Salesforce.com, for example, provides numerous APIs that help channel business to the provider of sales automation systems. Mashape’s seed round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation by Index Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Ignition Partners, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors as well as individual investors Jeff Bezos, Erik Rannala, Russell Seigelman, and Rick Webb. Mashape’s service is still in private beta testing but will launch “soon,” according to today’s announcement.
—Solar industry financing and services startup Clean Power Finance of San Francisco, CA, said Friday that it has raised $25 million in new funding from a group of new and existing investors. The newcomers included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s Green Growth Fund and Google Ventures, and the existing investors included Claremont Creek Ventures, Clean Pacific Ventures, and Sand Hill Angels. The company also announced that it has picked a new CEO, SunRun co-founder Robert Kreamer.
