[marothisu]

Cameo lands $50 million in deal led by Kleiner Perkins

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/john...leiner-perkins

Kleiner Perkins is betting Cameo’s appearance on the media-tech scene will be anything but fleeting.

The Chicago-based tech company, which built a marketplace that allows consumers to pay athletes and other celebrities to give video shoutouts to the recipients of their choice, raised another $50 million from investors led by Kleiner, one of the most prestigious venture funds in Silicon Valley.

It’s one more sign that the improbable business—which started out connecting D-list celebrities with the masses for a few bucks each—has caught fire.

The two-year-old company says 275,000 shoutouts have been completed on the platform. Cameo raised $12.5 million in November led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and it was growing faster than expected.


On average, customers are paying $62 per video, nearly triple the amount just 12 months ago. Cameo keeps 25 percent. The list of celebrities is about 15,000. Recent additions include Snoop Dogg (who also is an investor in the company), Antonio Brown, Tony Hawk and Charlie Sheen, who joined a stable of stars that includes Brett Favre, Brian Urlacher, Mark Messier and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

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Cameo has grown from 22 employees at the beginning of this year to more than 100 and could hit 150 by year-end.

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ReviewTrackers raises $10M Series B to hire over 100 people in Chicago

https://www.builtinchicago.org/2019/...eries-b-hiring

On Tuesday, ReviewTrackers announced that it closed a $10 million Series B funding round. That brings the company’s total funding to $17.6 million.

Chris Campbell, the CEO of ReviewTrackers, told Built In that the next step for the company is rapid growth.

Right now, over 65,000 businesses use ReviewTrackers, but the company expects to pass 100,000 this year. It’s also looking to expand its product to use predictive capabilities and deep text analysis to give businesses advice on how to improve based off of aggregated reviews.

And the company is ramping up hiring. ReviewTrackers currently has 55 employees and is looking to nearly triple in the next year, hiring over 100 people for its Chicago office. The hiring will help ReviewTracker expand its sales, engineering, product and customer success teams, as well as grow the company across the board.

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Showpad Raises $70M, Plans to Add 35 Chicago Jobs

https://www.americaninno.com/chicago...-chicago-jobs/

Showpad, the Belgium-based sales enablement tech company that has a large Chicago presence, just raised a new round of funding as it looks to add jobs to its seven offices across the globe.

The company announced Tuesday that it raised $70 million in debt and equity in a Series D round of funding.

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With the new financing, Showpad said it will develop new products and add more than 200 new jobs across its global workforce, 35 of which will be in Chicago.

Showpad’s software helps companies in a swath of industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, technology and financial services, increase the size of their sales deals by improving buyer engagement.