San Jose, CA-based Listia, an online swap service that helps users give away things they don’t want in return for credits that they can use to bid on stuff they do want, said today that it has raised $1.75 million from a group of investors led by Andreessen Horowitz. Also contributing to the round were SV Angel, Founder Collective, High Line Venture Partners, Max Levchin, Naval Ravikant, Alex Zubillaga, and James Hong. The company also introduced a free iPhone app that lets users snap pictures of items they want to post for trading.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Pivot, a New Jersey-based maker of software for trading and financial applications, has raised $3.5 million in debt financing from Wellington Financial. Pivot has an office in Cambridge, MA, and was formerly headquartered there. The new money will be used to support Pivot’s growth as it tries to sign up more trading desks, where its software can be used to make communications, collaboration, and liquidity management more efficient. The company was founded in 2004 and is venture-backed by Boldcap Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Gotham Ventures, EPIC Ventures, Eze Castle Integration, Hudson Ventures, and Softbank Capital.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

[Updated 2:30 pm 6/21/10 (see bottom).] Score one for Boston innovation—and MIT startups in particular. Cambridge, MA-based peerTransfer, an online money transfer and global payments company spun out of MIT, has won the 20,000-Euro prize for the most promising early-stage startup in the HIT Global Entrepreneurship Competition. The award was given late last week as part of the HIT Barcelona World Innovation Summit.

The competition involved 23 companies from around the globe, and is one of the most prestigious programs of its kind. The 37 judges included top investors from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund, CMEA Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Flagship Ventures, corporate VC groups, and European venture groups. The second and third prizes went to CaptchaAd, a German video advertising startup, and Gold-i, a U.K.-based maker of software for the trading marketplace.

peerTransfer has created a new kind of global money transfer network that tries to help individuals and small businesses save money compared to traditional banking. The idea is to match up the transactions going between two countries—money flowing from the U.S. to the U.K. and vice versa, for example—so as to figure out the net flow between customers, and to keep the money effectively moving only within each country. That way customers save money on international transfer fees and bad exchange rates. The company was incorporated in July 2009.

“We are really excited about taking this company to the next level, and this award is a big step in the right direction,” said Iker Marcaide, peerTransfer’s founder and CEO, in a statement. Marcaide, a native of Spain, is a former management consultant with The Boston Consulting Group in Europe. He got his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and is an engineer by schooling.

Reached by phone, Marcaide said one crucial thing he soaked up at MIT was “the atmosphere that enables you to take risks—the idea that ‘I can do this, and launch something.’ That’s very powerful.” He added that the startup teams partied on the beach in Barcelona on Thursday night into the early hours of Friday—and then all went back to work in the morning. “Entrepreneurs as usual,” he said.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Woburn, MA-based Redline Trading Solutions, a maker of software that delivers financial market data to trading applications at high speed, has raised a $7.45 million round of equity-based funding from five investors, according to an SEC filing. The document reveals that $730,249 of the round will go to repurchasing 55,280 shares of common stock held by company president Mark Skalabrin. The filing also lists two Redline directors in addition to Skalabrin: Darren Cohen of Goldman Sachs, and James Bertelli.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Interactive Data Corporation (NYSE: IDC), the Bedford, MA-based market data provider, announced today that it will acquire 7ticks, a 42-employee firm in Chicago that provides customers with high-speed access to derivatives, options, and commodities exchanges such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and EuroNext. Interactive Data said in a statement that the acquisition “represents an important element in Interactive Data’s strategy to address the latency sensitive trading needs of its institutional customers.” Financial details of the transaction, which is expected to close in 2010, were not revealed.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Portland, OR-based RNA Networks, a memory virtualization software startup, announced it has raised $7 million in Series A funding, led by Menlo Ventures. RNA (which has a pretty deceptive name) aims to make networked memory in servers and data centers cheaper and faster for business applications like financial services, trading, content delivery, and online gaming.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

The Nasdaq market halted trading in Artes Medical this morning, with the last price of the company’s stock at 3 cents a share. In a short statement, Nasdaq said trading will remain halted until Artes has fully satisfied the electronic market’s request for additional information. Nasdaq did not describe the information it’s requested. As Ryan reported last week, Artes has filed for bankruptcy liquidation. The company, which makes injectible filler for smoothing skin wrinkles, cited the downturn in the economy and a lack of consumer spending on its cosmetic treatment.

Comments | Reprints | Share: