FUNDING FUN. Who is surviving the seed stage slaughter? General Assembly, obviously, which raised $4.25 million from some Russian billionaire and other folks. Crowdtap, the on-demand user testing service, just raised a $7 million Series A financing round led by the Foundry Group. “The funds will be used to help continue the rapid growth we have experienced in our first couple years and continue to build a world class platform to help brands connect to, manage and market with their influential consumers.” AppFirst, the “next generation application problem resolution system for the application performance management market,” announced it closed its Series A for $4 million, led by Javelin Venture Partners. “FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital, original backers of AppFirst, also participated in the financing agreement.”
STEALTH RUMBLINGS. Philip Kaplan, a.k.a. Pud of FuckedCompany.com, just sold his startup TinyLetter to MailChimp and is banging away at another, Fandalism, which is some kind of tool for musicians of all types. Fandalism has 197 fans on Facebook, but when’s it coming out? “Within the next 4 weeks-ish, hopefully. Sorry for the delay.”
FEATUREFUL. Onepager, the About.me for businesses, is now freezy. As the startup announced last night at New York Tech Meetup, among other features: “We got rid of the 14 day free trial. Users now can make their own Onepager site for free and keep it indefinitely. We now have a dashboard for users that will allow them to see their visitor analytics. These analytics include views, sources, and keywords. Small business owners now have the ability to add a ‘subscribe’ area on their website to collect email addresses. The owners may then send newsletters out directly to their subscribers from the Onepager dashboard.”
RESTART. Reddit became a startup again, spinning out from under Conde Nast, and has some big things planned.
STILL HERE. KeyWifi, the bootstrapped wifi-sharing startup, continues to send newsletters, which seems like a good sign for an extremely ambitious startup. And they have some news: “We’re providing wireless services for the Contact Summit in October. We’re also supporting the efforts of a new collaborative community, NYC Shared Squared.”
TO DO. New Work City is ramping up on events. Check out the Instagram meetup tonight, aided by new NWC member Snapr. “Five up-and-coming Instagramers on the NYC scene (mostly street photography, architecture, cityscapes) will be presenting 5 photos, discuss the story behind them, technique, etc, then have a Q&A.” Then, of course, head to a bar. That’s how NWC does. Don’t forget Video Hack Day at General Assembly on Saturday.
