Capital Gains: Toyota teams up with Uber, Snapchat adds nearly $2B to its Series F and a new unicorn emerges
Volkswagen also jumps into the ride-hailing game.
Uber found an automaker to help it develop self-driving cars, and Wi-Fi device maker Eero struck a deal with Best Buy and raised a bunch of new cash. Here are the rest of the funding headlines from Silicon Valley this past week:
- Toyota said that it is making a strategic investment in Uber, but it's not saying how much it's putting into the ride-hailing behemoth. The deal has a lot to do with a partnership for self-driving car technology.
- Snapchat added $1.8 billion to its Series F funding round, and is telling investors it expects to make between $500 million and $1 billion in revenue in 2017. It's aiming for between $250 million and $350 million in revenue this year.
- Volkswagen Group is investing $300 million in the ride-hailing service Gett, becoming the latest major automaker to get in bed with a ride-hailing company (like GM and Lyft, for example).
- Menlo Ventures, alongside Shasta Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital and Playground Global, led a $50 million investment in the Wi-Fi device company Eero. The company also announced that it had struck a deal to make its home networking equipment available in Best Buy stores.
- Security startup vArmour, which primarily works on protecting data centers, raised $41 million in Series D funding from Redline Capital, Australian telco Telstra, Highland Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, Citi Ventures and others (Fortune).
- Transferwise, a British money transfer service, raised $26 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. The funding came from Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Sir Richard Branson and others (TechCrunch).
- Password management startup Dashlane picked up $22.5 million in a Series C round, led by TransUnion, with participation from Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners (TechCrunch).
- Berlin startup Contentful, which is working on a content management system optimized for devices that aren't PCs, raised $13 million in a round led by Benchmark Capital, with participation from Trinity Ventures, Balderton Capital and Point Nine Capital (VentureBeat).
- Molekule, a startup that aims to produce "the world’s first molecular air purifier," raised $3.25 million in funding from SoftTech VC, Crosslink Capital, and CSC Upshot, plus grants from the Environmental Protection Agency (VentureBeat).