msoftnews

Tweet 7-Eleven isn’t exactly known for investing in tech startups, but the convenience store chain is making an exception for Belly, a Chicago startup with an increasingly digital loyalty and rewards platform. 7-Eleven’s new venture capital arm 7-Ventures joined Andreessen Horowitz, Lightbank, New Enterprise Associates, DAG Ventures and Cisco Systems in a $ 12.1 million funding round, Belly announced Wednesday. Belly initially focused on small, local businesses that didn’t have…

Tweet FireHost, the cloud hosting company that gained fame by offering its services to ace-hacker-turned-security-consultant Kevin Mitnick to prove its security model, now has $ 12 million in new funding. This Series D round was led by a previous backer, Stephens Group LLC – and brings total investment to about $ 34 million. One priority will be to boost marketing and raise FireHost’s profile to make itself more of a familiar name, CEO…

Tweet The founders of startup N3twork, which officially launched on Wednesday night, say they’re trying to do no less than reinvent the way that people consume web content on their devices. The problem is, it’s pretty hard to judge just how revolutionary that type of simple-sounding app could be without seeing the product in action — the actual app comes out later this year. But what we do know about…

Tweet Phone power supply maker Quantance has raised another $ 12 million in funding,  which the company plans to put to use commercializing its battery-saving envelope tracking technology. Envelope tracking might sound like a certified mail service, but it’s really a technology used to tame LTE’s normally power hungry ways. LTE is unique among cellular technologies in that its power levels rise and dip dramatically throughout the course of a…

Tweet It was only a few months ago that network optimization startup Vasona Networks came out of stealth mode, and now it’s closing a $ 12 billion funding around. The company’s Form D popped up at the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday (spotted first by VentureBeat) revealing the Series B funding, and the company confirmed with GigaOM that existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners led the round with participation by…