gWallet, one of the newest monetization services for social applications, announced a new round of funding today, which brings the total amount of funding raised to $12.5 million. The service is run by Gurbaksh Chahal, who previously sold two startups at the peak of the internet bubble (at only 16 years old), and has also been featured on the Oprah Whinfrey show, making him a relatively high profile Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
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wooga, the company behind the popular Brain Buddies application, announced today that they have secured $7.5 million from Balderton Capital as a follow-up to the first round of funding from Holtzbrink Ventures we covered earlier this year. Since August, Brain Buddies has surpassed Playfish’s popular “Who Has The Biggest Brain?” application. With Playfish’s $400 million sale to Electronic Arts earlier this week, it’s not surprising to see additional signs of investor confidence in the social gaming space.
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Today at the fbFund REV demo day, Thread.com (formerly “Frinto”) announced that they have received funding from a number of well known valley investors. Thread.com leverages Facebook Connect to create a site for social dating via friendly introductions. While Facebook has a number of large dating applications, none of them work quite as smoothly as this one.
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Zoosk, the online dating community that launched in 2007 as a Facebook application, has raised an additional $6 million in funding. This is the third round of funding for Zoosk, and was led by existing investor Canaan Partners. The funding will go towards pushing Zoosk’s market share on a global scale, as well as adding to its team and roll out new products.
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In the book “Founders at Work”, there’s an interesting interview during which Paul Graham is asked by Jessica Livingston about what worried him the most while at Viaweb. He states his biggest concern was “Running out of money. That was the big worry. Running out of money and having to go and get more funding. Getting funding is very painful. It’s so much harder than actually making a successful company.”
For Facebook that appears to be the case as well as the company has begun considering new term sheets according to Techcrunch and Venturebeat. The meat of the story is that Facebook received an offer at somewhere between $2 and $4 billion. The rest of the story is essentially rehashed news which is that the company is on track to generate $400 to $500 million in revenue this year.
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According to Nicholas Carlson, Accel partners, one of the initial investors in Facebook, just close a $1 billion round, $480 million of which is going toward a new “Growth Fund”, for late-stage companies. While Facebook says that they have plenty of money in the bank, many have been speculating about the company’s cash position stating that the cost of growth has been extremely costly forcing them to raise another round.
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