Before you head off for one of the last good weekends of summer, here are a few tidbits of fundraising action culled from the week’s filings with the SEC. They’re pretty light on the details, but worth noting.
—Seattle connected-car software provider Airbiquity has raised about $10.4 million in an equity offering that could grow to about $19 million, according to federal paperwork. Airbiquity declined to comment on the financing, which could indicate that the company expects to sell more shares before closing the round. Previous investors in Airbiquity are Bellevue, WA-based Acorn Ventures, Ignition Partners, Kirnaf Ltd., and Shell Internet Ventures.
Seattle is a national center for connected-car technologies, which help automakers incorporate Internet-enabled goodies like advanced navigation, search, and music. Airbiquity supplies software and platform services, with previous customers like Ford, OnStar, and BMW. The company was founded in 1997.
—WebTuner Corp. of Redmond, WA has filed paperwork for an equity financing of about $7.4 million. There’s not much of a presence for WebTuner online, so we have to turn mostly to past press coverage. TechFlash first covered the company in 2010, when it raised some money, and the execs were still very quiet about their idea.
Notable people involved in the company include CEO Bernee Strom, a dot-com era executive at InfoSpace. The company’s description on LinkedIn says that it “supplies software infrastructure for the next generation video distribution networks.” Its listed website, webtuner.tv, turns up a completely blank page, which you don’t see that often.
—Lockerz, the social-commerce startup that recently saw founding CEO Kathy Savitt depart for the marketing chief job at Yahoo, has sold about $675,000 worth of stock to one investor.
My guess is that this could be the “personal investment” that Lockerz said Savitt was making as she left the CEO’s job to work for Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, but Lockerz declined to comment on the SEC filing. Savitt remains chairwoman of the Lockerz board. She was replaced as CEO by Mark Stabingas, a former business development and finance executive at Amazon and Pepsi.
The company has raised around $75 million in venture capital, a huge haul for a Seattle-area startup. It’s acquired several other small companies as it tries to build a social network that rewards users with points for posting photos and sharing things with friends online. The points can be used to get discounts on real-life goods.
