Netflix star and organizing consultant Marie Kondo is looking to get $40M in venture capital funding

Marie Kondo might be a familiar name to you now because of her Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. But before that, it started out as books and a personal brand for the Japanese personality. Now, her company is in talks to raise up to $40 million in venture capital funding to scale her business KonMari, which is behind all her ventures. This isn’t the first time KonMari had venture investment. It had closed a small funding round led by top-tier VC fund Sequoia Capital last year. Kondo is looking to fundraise again for plans involving building an e-commerce platform.

Source: TechCrunch

SoundCloud gets fresh round of funding to keep it going

Musicians and creators are going to be at the heart of SoundCloud moving forward, we'll probably see more improvements to features like this stats page

A new round of investment into SoundCloud is keeping the music streaming service going for the foreseeable future. As part of the deal, SoundCloud Chief Executive Officer and founder Alex Ljung will be stepping aside and former Vimeo head Kerry Trainor will be the new CEO. Another former exec from Vimeo, Mike Weissman, will be coming in to serve as SoundCloud's chief operating officer. Ljung will act as chairman and will stay on for the long term. His co-founder Eric Wahlforss will stay on with the company as chief product officer. The Raine Group, a boutique merchant bank, together with Singapore-based investment company Temasek, led the US$169.5 million investment to give SoundCloud the much-needed cash. 

Trainor wants to put greater emphasis on developing tools for musicians and other creators, including a "more robust creative toolkit" for them via the Pro Unlimited subscription. The service is used by a lot of artists to do things like public collaborations, promote new songs, or get private feedback before a track is released to the world. Trainor claims this is what gives SoundCloud a unique brand in the digital music arena. He tells Billboard, "SoundCloud is the largest open audio platform in the world. Millions of creators choose these tools to share their work with the world—that will remain at the focus and center of the company." 

Toronto-based Bitstrips secures $ 3 Million investment

By now, we've all seen the Bitstrips web comics on Facebook and other social media websites. Well, the Toronto-based startup that invented the DIY comics just received a $3 million investment from Horizon Ventures of Hong Kong. The 17-man group is expecting to grow the business organically, slowly building staff up while improving on their product. To date, 30 million avatars have been built, which proves that Bitstrips have some momentum going for them.