News Byte

Warby Parker Is Seeing Green After New $60 Million Investment

Warby Parker, the eyewear startup that has built a cult following in a short time, has raised a new $60 million investment led by its biggest investor, Tiger Global Management, as was first reported by Fortune. Existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Spark Capital and First Round Capital also contributed to the Series C round, which brings Warby’s total funding to about $115 million.

Vox Media Spends Some of Its Giant Funding Round on Lockhart Steele’s Curbed Network

A blogging pioneer sells his company to a blogging powerhouse.

News Byte

Socratic Is Creating a Textbook for the World, One Teacher Video at a Time

Socratic today announced that it has raised $1.5 million from Spark Capital, Betaworks, John Maloney, Terrapin Bale, Chris Dixon and David Tisch. The company (formerly known as Vespr) aggregates and organizes video lessons (first, high school and college content; today, just chemistry and physics) so teachers and students can use them as resources.

File Under #Finally: Twitter Unveils $1 Billion IPO, Showing Growing Revenue but No Profits

Not even a government shutdown could stop Twitter from its appointed public offering.

News Byte

Trading Platform Quantopian Raises $6.7 Million

Quantopian, a browser-based trading platform for quantitative analysts, announced on Wednesday that it raised $6.7 million in a series A financing round. Khosla Ventures and existing investor Spark Capital participated in the round, bringing the total amount of funds raised to $8.8 million.

News Byte

Spark Capital, Google Ventures, Homebrew Invest in Plaid, Maker of an API for Banking Data

Plaid, a startup that is working to clean up banking data for developers, has raised $2.8 million from Spark Capital, Google Ventures and Homebrew. The investment is the first to be announced from Homebrew, a seed-stage firm launched recently by Google vets Hunter Walk and Satya Patel.

Upworthy Raises $8 Million for Clickbait With a Mission

What if BuzzFeed had a political agenda? Upworthy does, and it’s doing well.
upworthy

News Byte

Confirmed: Oculus VR Raises $16 Million Series A for Virtual Reality Gaming

Irvine, Calif.-based Oculus VR has closed a $16 million series A funding round co-led by Spark Capital and Matrix Partners, the company confirmed today. Leaked news of the round was first reported by PandoDaily. Oculus VR is the maker of the Oculus Rift, a forthcoming consumer-priced virtual gaming headset. Prototype “dev kit” versions of the headset are currently being sold to software developers for $300 apiece. A price and release date for the first consumer version has not yet been announced.

Yahoo Tumblrs for Cool: Board Approves $1.1 Billion Deal as Expected

Done (just like we said).