Accel leads $ 10. Round 5 m Birchbox cosmetics Discovery platform

Leena Rao is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school of the Medill School of journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007 she helped lead efforts for advocacy and community relationships Congressman Carloyn Maloney in New York. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003 where it was ... ? Read More

Birchbox, which serves as a platform for retail detection makeup, raised $ 10.5 million in series a round of funding led by Accel Partners with first round capital, Harrison metal Forerunner enterprises, enterprises Lehrer, Sam Lessin, Counsellor, Gary Vaynerchuck, Dave Morin, Stanford University Endowment and Andy Dunn, participated in the round.

Like Foodzie, Blissmobox, BeachMint and Babbaco; Birchbox adopted the subscription box model of the month, where members receive curator makeup and beauty products. Each month users get at least four awards samples of cosmetics, sent to their homes of more than 80 high beauty retailer as Kiehl, Laura Mercier, Smashbox, NARS and goods.

Web site complements the monthly packages, providing appropriate advice and training materials on its Web site to the featured designs. If a user wants to buy a full-sized version, they can buy at Birchbox, which will bring them points for future discounts (inviting new members will also help increase the points). Idea to help consumers discover new brands and products at an affordable price, as well as stimulation of sales.

One of the unique aspects of the Birchbox is that it offers personalized set of products each month that are configured for the user profiles and settings. Each user fills out a survey of beauty and create a profile which is then used to fetch the priest for each individual client.

Birchbox, which was founded in the Harvard Business School grads Hayley Barna and Kate Beauchamp, launched almost a year ago and already has a subscriber base of 45 000 clients (all of whom paid up to $ 10 a month apiece or $ 110 per year). And subscribers up to 50 per cent of the month for the past eleven months.

Accel partner Theresia Gouw Ranzetta said, "the team has established partnerships with some of the leading cosmetic brands to give consumers experience sampling fun monthly beauty in the world. We believe Birchbox has many opportunities for further growth, and we look forward to assisting their success ".

Beauchamp tells us that the site strives to be a combination of niche and the most famous products. In the end, she explained that Birchbox was trying to make cosmetics sales process easier for women and help get production in the hands of the consumer brands.

Beauchamp said that the new funding will be used to further the development of products and hiring. And the company is considering expanding to other verticals.

While many retailers seem to have jumped on the bandwagon of the month box, cosmetics industry is especially suitable for sampling experience. And Birchbox was one of the pioneers in the field model of the month. Many women (including me) want to try beauty products (irrespective of the price), whether makeup, shampoo, milk or cream; Before investing in them. Birchbox not only performs but also helps women discover new products and adds the element of an editorial nature.

BirchBox is a monthly subscription service, which provides beauty product samples for users on a monthly basis. The site offers relevant editorial content and e-commerce site.

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Andreessen Horowitz leads $ 15 M round in GoodData cloud Business Intelligence platform

Leena Rao is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school of the Medill School of journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007 she helped lead efforts for advocacy and community relationships Congressman Carloyn Maloney in New York. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003 where it was ... ? Read More

GoodData startup company that provides a platform for cloud-based business intelligence (BI) raised $ 15 million in financing led by Andreessen Horowitz with existing investors General Catalyst partners, fidelity growth partners and Windcrest, also contributes to the round. This investment brings total financing GoodData to $ 28.5 million. The company also added two new members of the Board of Directors: John O'Farrell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. In addition it marks Andreessen Horowitz fourth GoodData investments (including two seed investment and 2010).

Founded by serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek, GoodData offers cloud-based data analytics solution that is more economically efficient than similar products from IBM, SAP and Oracle. The company mainly GoodData can connect product in their own cloud-based SaaS (i.e. Salesforce, Zendesk) and then access to operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data storage.

In addition to the just structuring data, GoodData also gives the company best practices and actionable insights based on data, add a layer of intelligence. The company has a number of Analytics apps for SaaS products, including the Zendesk, Twilio, Pardot and get satisfaction, which offers these companies additional reporting. The company currently offers 20 application and will expand more SaaS platform with new funding. The company plans to add another 30 applications by the end of the year.

Stanek tells us that GoodData is disrupting BI $ 25 billion and storage space, because the earlier data intelligence used to be a complex process. But as more companies rely on cloud applications to business functions such as sales, customer service and much more, access and understanding of this huge amount of data on the basis of the cloud became simplified process that took minutes, he explains.

And GoodData sacrificed seeing traction in the enterprise space. Over 2500 companies, including Software AG, Time Warner Cable, Capgemini and Pandora media, relied on data intelligence, GoodData products. The company saw a 500% increase in the overall use of the platform in the 2011 alone and currently manages more than 6500 customers data Mark. And more than 2 million records were executed on a platform of BI cloud GoodData in July this year.

Add the main Enterprise Google, Girouard, the Council is quite a significant vote of confidence to launch. Girouard, who will advise the company to develop products, services and sales cloud, said: "GoodData GoodData is an amazing opportunity to build a huge business. Cloud computing and Analytics is a killer and GoodData provides unique and promising approach to lead in this market. "

O'Farrell Andreessen Horowitz also bullish on GoodData, tells us that he sees run to become the company billions of dollars. He explains that because the mass market continued to move to the cloud, there's still so much more potential for cloud-based business as GoodData that extract valuable information from the data cloud. "This is what business will spend a lot of money on," said O'Farrell.

O'Farrell also made an interesting point about the business intelligence space as a whole. He said there was a low barrier of entry in the space, but GoodData goes beyond just providing charts and data visualization tools offers a powerful platform, actually gives companies actionable insight from all of their business data. This, he said, creates a high barrier to entry, and be able help GoodData.

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After the auction, Dropbox is close to the choice of investors — Round put in $ 10 billion

MG Siegler wrote to TechCrunch since 2009. It covers web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, in fact all. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, mg attended the University of Michigan. He had previously lived in Los Angeles, where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where ... ? Read More

We are known for a week now, Dropbox has been talking to investors about the new mega round of financing. The company, which just raised $ 7.2 million in seed and series a round in 2007, aspires to something between $ 200 million and $ 300 million, we have heard. But now we know a little more. And we have heard something from one source, which is nothing short of shocking.

Dropbox auction last week, during which investors made their requests to participate in the new round, numerous sources tell us. This week, Dropbox, met with the VCs who bets and collect term sheets. All they have to make that decision now.

Here's the really crazy stuff: one of the proposals under consideration could push the Dropbox score post-money $ 10 billion , one source tells us. Another source said that was inaccurate and considered the final evaluation will settle towards the bottom of the value of $ 5 to $ 10 billion we reported last month.

Score from 10 billion dollars would be amazing for a number of reasons. But consider this: Pandora and LinkedIn, two companies recently became public, have market caps of $ 2.16 billion and $ 8.63 billion, respectively. Yes, start with just 65 staff members may be worth more money on paper than these two public darlings.

Also consider: Yahoo has a Capitalization of $ 15 billion. And our parents, AOL, capitalization of only $ 1.72 billion.

Dropbox has 25 million users (many of whom are paying) downloading files 200 million a day.

More to come soon.

Dropbox was founded in 2007, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated when working with multiple computers, drew was inspired to create a service that will bring people ...

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Rival Chegg CampusBookRentals.com closes $ 20 million round of financing

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but the most important champion of the full launch. He lives and works in Belgium, a small country in Europe. He can often be found work from their home or ... ? Read More

CampusBookRentals.com, a company that allows customers of the approximately 5600 campus Rent textbooks online, in the morning, announced a series of fully funding growth equity and credit facilities, raised more than $ 20 million.

The company, which competes with the company-Chegg and BookRenter.com, among others, said he is growing like gangbusters, recently moved to a new object of the 57 000 square feet to support its growth in more than 100 current staff (compared to 30 a year ago).

CampusBookRentals.com, which was started from Director Alan Martin basement back in 2007, said that it was profitable, since shortly after its creation and that he enjoys triple digital growth recently. The company recently added Scott Klossner, COO & financial director at Backcountry.com, to its Board of Directors.

CampusBookRentals.com allows the student book search ISBN, title, author or keyword, and offers free shipping and from their home or college dorm. Delightfully for every book rented, the company donates a portion of their proceeds to operation smile, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing cleft lip surgeries for children in need of correction.

Funding round was led by the level of equity capital and five ELMS Cherokee & Walker.

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