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Paris' Solairdirect Raises €20M

Solairedirect out of Paris has raised €20M in new VC funding from Demeter Partners, Schneider Electric Ventures, TechFund, MACIF, AGPM, UMR and Ofivalmo Partenaires. The startup was founded in 2006 and counts a few startups state-side that emulate its model.. The company develops and operates infrastructure from rooftop to ground-mounted and does everything for commercial or home buyers who want design and engineering, installation and construction, financing, operation and maintenance.

Solairdirect says it has 150 employees, 1 500 customers and over 300 megawatts of solar parks under development. One of the very first solar parks in France (4.2 megawatts) is now being built in Vinon-sur-Verdon in Southeastern France.

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London's LiveRail Raises Funds After Expating To San Fran

We covered then London-based LiveRail back in July 2007 when it launched. Today we catch up the video ad network and learn that it has re-located to San Francisco and has raised $500 in Series A funding led by Pond Venture Partners.

LiveRail launched in a croweded market for video ad services but has more recently focused on a less crowded niche with the launch of LiveRail for the iPhone. This is an ad platform that allows iPhone app developers to embed video advertisements into their apps, which play immediately after launching an apps.

LiveRail is led by Mark Trefgarne as CEO who was Managing Director of London-based internet strategy consultancy firm Cleartide. Seed funding was provided by private investors including Cleartide.

Before iPhone

LiveRail iPhone AdManager from LiveRail Inc. on Vimeo.
After iPhone

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Belgium's Happenr Raises €100K For Event Search. On Hunt For More.

TechCrunch scribe Robin Wauters gets in touch to flag the launch and funding of a European events site called Happenr. Based in Ghent, Belgium, Happenr says it has raised €50K from Belgian innovation support agency, plus the founders put in €50K. Moreover, they say they are closing a first round of funding to finance expansion beyond their launch phase in Germany, Ireland and Belgium.

The site is slow for us, but hey we are in California. It does seem to be chock full of events. Generally, these sites in the US are driven by both ticket sales and and sponsorship revenue. We currently don't see any ads. The nice thing is that these local, ad-driven sites tend to get high CPMs.

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Berkshire's Casual Collective Raises $1M

Berkshire, England-based social gaming site Casual Collective has raised $1M in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners with Jeremy Liu jumping on the board. At first blush we suspected that perhaps Casual Collective was jumping into competition with the likes of Kongregate. However, Kongregate is a top distribution point for games developed by Casual Collective, as well as other sites like Addicting Games, Newgrounds, and I-Am-Bored.com.

The company was founded by game developers Paul Preece and David Scott who built Desktop Tower Defense and Flash Element TD. $1M isn't a huge amount but the team here is not comprised of people who left EA or some major studio - the usual suspect who get gaming investment.

How do they make money? The games are monetized through in-game ads served by Mochi Media.

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Munich Dating Service Be2 Raises €15M

Munich, Germany-based matchmaking services Be2 has raised €15M from the Index Ventures' Growth Fund. Angel investors and Banexi Ventures were the company’s initial investors.

The startup says it has 12M member and has been cash flow positive despite a headcount of 225 employees.

What have they done right? First, the dating business is not ad supported - they charge credit cards for the service. It also seems that they have targeted under-served markets first of all. Secondly, they target an older age group - 25 to 69 year olds.

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Ireland's Movidia Raises £8M For Mobile Video Editing Semiconductors

Ireland's Movidia has raised $14M (£8M) in Series A funding led by Celtic House Venture Partners and Capital-E. Movidia also says it will launch a working prototype silicon for its first product. The semiconductor startup has developed video editing and post production capabilities for the creation of user generated content for mobile social networking. The sell here is that people are creating videos on their phones and want to be able to do basic edits without having to export these videos to their PCs.

This seems like bleading edge stuff to us. We see few people cutting videos on their cell phones but we buy-in to the notion that this is the future.

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London's MyThings Raises $5M For Online Product Purchase Tracking

MyThings wants to organize your online purchases and receipts. The London-based firm has raised $5M in Series B funding co-led by Dotcorp Asset Management and GP Bullhound Sidecar. MyThings raised an $8M series A round in 2006.

We feel this is wasted money. Sitting on a panel today we heard a seasoned CEO say that if a startup has not broken out in 18 months it is curtains. After 2 years, the broad base of consumers doesn't know that MyThings exists and the reason why is that it's not clearly valuable. MyThings allows you to keep track of online purchases while providing access to information about product recalls, manuals, and insurance.

MyThings is popular among the Web 2.0 review sites but as an investment this isn't going to work out.

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France's White Label Data Storage's Steek Buys Teen SocNet Amiz.fr

This deal seems a bit odd. France's data storage firm Steek has about Amiz.fr for an undisclosed amount. The game plan seems to be to push Steek data storage to Amiz.fr users. But couldn't you do that with a partnership? Why marry two startups that have little to do with each other, other than that they are both French.

Last July, Steek raises $8M in 2nd round funding led by AGF Private Equity along with prior investor Innovacom. That followed a $4M A round in mid-2006.

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Pub-finder Qype Raises €8M

London's Qype has raised €8M from Wellington Partners, Advent Venture Partners and Partech International. Qype plans to increase its geographical coverage to five new countries. Qype sells ads (Adsense mostly for now) on user-generated reviews of services like shops, bars and restaurants, plumbers, hairdressers and gigs. Think of this as Yelp in the US or Trusted Places Europe.

Qype was founded in Hamburg in 2005 by Stephan Uhrenbacher. It says it gets more than 5M unique users per month across UK, Germany, France, Ireland, Austria and Switzerland.

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Slovenian Blogger's Friend Zemanta Funded

Slovenia and London-based Zementa has raised seed funding from Union Square Ventures along with Eden Ventures and The Accelerator Group. The startup has raised $1.5M to date.

Zemanta makes tools for bloggers such as a spell checker and additional reading suggestions. A blog, an article or a web page is feed it into its system which then recognizes the content and returns suggested images, smart links, keywords and relevant related stories from the Internet.

Union Square Ventures has proven to be fairly adept at finding startups that seem to us to be small stories without business models and yet fairly often those startups end up finding buyers who like their reach. Still, we don't get the business model that Zemanta is chasing.

Zemanta Tour

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French Flash Games Startup Mobitween Bought By Spain's Zed

London and Madrid-based mobile content firm Zed has bought a rival called Mobitween. With its HQ in Paris, France, Mobitween has developed Adobe Flash technology for mobile phones including more than 100 in-house titles and claims agreements with carriers in Europe and the US. Mobitween's games portals can be found at UgenGames and at Mobigamz.

ugenGames, launched September 2007 and allows players can customize the whole game and share it with their friends.

Zed had taken out a a €92.5M ($143.8M) loan in August to fund M&A.

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Stockholm's NYX Raises €5M For Wagering Tech

We haven't seen much action in the wagering field for some time. But here's one from Scandinavia. NYX Interactive has raised €5M from Nordic Venture Partners. The firm makes software for all the fun stuff: bingo, lottery, keno, casino, poker and other betting games. NYC has done deals with the government-owned lottery company in Sweden.

Bingo!

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Euro Venture Investing Declines

Venture capital firms in Europe invested in 167 young companies in the second quarter, 42% fewer than in the period last year. Venture dollars invested declined 35%, to $1.3B. The quarter was the worst since at least 2000, when VentureSource started tracking European data.

But yes there are optimists. Mark Tluszcz, co-founder of Mangrove Capital Partners, told the New York Times "The slowdown was a short-term phenomenon. “As I look for deals and talk to people, I have never seen a time in Europe when there are so many good, young companies being started,” he said. “I’m not overly worried.”

Read - Europeans Retreat on Venture Investing

Helskinki's Supponor Gets EUR6M For Sports Advertising Platform

Supponor out of Helsinki, Finland has raised EUR6M in Series A led by Northzone Ventures with return backer Conor Venture Partners.

The product is simple. You use video technology to digitally swap out a billboards at an athletic center for say Pepsi and replace it with one for Schwab. So just as you get variety on TV program so you get it at sports venues. The sales pitch here is to sport team owners, leagues, venues, etc. that they can increase ad revenue in live sports broadcasts with over 50% growth potential.

They plan to bring the product not only to the rest of Europe but also to The US. The company acknowledges that there are other comparable offerings out there - and we have seen some - but the startup says that it alone can fit new ads perfectly within the boundaries of a physical billboard.

The startup is led by CEO Juha Ruohonen who was a Partner at Conor Venture Partners and has had startup operational experience. BTW - he was educated at Turun kauppakorkeakoulu (Finnish is impossible for the non-Scandinavian).

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UK's Pub Supplier Barbox Bought By Amphire Solutions

Redwood City-based software-as-a-service startup Amphire Solutions is buying Barbox, a joint venture between Coors Brewers and Scottish & Newcastle. Amphire did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

U.K.-based Barbox is an online ordering service for the beer, wines and spirits trade while Amphire has focused on food service and hospitality.

Barbox says it sees over £8M in orders placed online every week with about 15K pubs placing orders. The combined business says it will have an annual order book worth in excess of £1B.

It sounds like an impressive business, even if the margins are not tremendous.

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