Altruik has raised $4.7M in Series A funding from DFJ Gotham, First Round Capital, Greenhill SAVP, Javelin Partners and Zelkova Ventures. Although this is the first round, Altruik has been around a while - having been founded in February 2006. The NYC-based startup automates search engine optimization (SE) steps. CEO and founder Thomas Kwan previously founded DMIND as a multilingual content management systems which has says was used by 700+ websites. It is not clear what technology Altruik has which sets it apart. They claim to make a site's content visible to search engines and to package it better but any number of consultants can do that for you. Full story...
Solar investors probably tossed and turned in their beds last night after reading the quarterly reports for Evergreen Solar (ESLR:NASDAQ) and Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) (ENER:NASDAQ).
Petra Solar out of South Plainfield, NJ has raised $40M in 2nd-round funding. Craton Equity Partners and Espírito Santo Ventures co-led the round and were joined by return backers Element Partners, Blue Run Ventures, OnPoint Technologies and Kuwait's National Technology Enterprises Company.
Play Media, out of Somerville, MA, has secured $450K of a $600K seed funding round. 3Play works on transcription, captioning, and audio search.
Ithaca,NY-based Aero Farm Systems has raised $500K in seed funding from The Quercus Trust and 21Ventures.
With solar industry still facing a cash crunch, solar cells and panels manufacturer SunPower Corp. (SPWRA, SPWRB: NASDAQ) should be expanding its project portfolio of more than 550 solar systems installed.
AMEE, a company that provides technology for enterprises to calculate greenhouse emissions, has raised $5.
Shopping club Brands4friends.de, based in Berlin, has made an investment in similar site SecretSale, although they are not disclosing.
Angel-backed EventVue has closed its doors. The startup has set-up a business to add some functions of offline events to the online world.
LA-based Ranker has raised $750K in a seed investment round and plans to tack on another $250K to the seed round.
Many of the residents of Marin County California will soon have a choice as to whom they want providing their electricity.