Twitter Closing $800M Funding Round at $8 Billion Valuation [REPORT]

Twitter is in the process of completing an $800 million funding round that will value the company at approximately $8 billion, as well as cash out some of the company’s early employees and investors.

According to All Things Digital, the funding will be a two-stage deal. The first $400 million will go toward the company itself, while the second $400 million will be set aside for cashing out employees and existing investors. This is similar to what Facebook did in 2009 with its $200 million in funding from Digital Sky Technologies.

In fact, DST, which also has stakes in Groupon and Zynga, is participating in the deal. J.P. Morgan is also reportedly participating in the round through its digital-growth fund. The company has raised more than $350 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and a host of angel investors, including Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Chris Sacca and Kevin Rose.

The deal, which is expected to close in the next two weeks, will value the company at $8 billion. This is the number The New York Times reported earlier this month. It also means that Twitter’s valuation will have doubled from its $200 million round in January 2011.

Unlike Zynga and Facebook, Twitter is still experimenting with business models and isn’t cash flow positive. It intends to place Promoted Tweets in user timelines sometime in the next month and a half.

Kaltura Raises $20M for Open-Source Video Technologies

by Jolie O'Dell

Today, open-source video platform Kaltura announced a $20 million round of funding led by new investors Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Intel Capital, existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures, and technology lender Silicon Valley Bank.
Altogether, the company has raised $27.5 million since its 2007 Series A.
Currently, the startup says it serves more than 100,000 publishers, including media companies, enterprises, educational institutions and service providers.
Its users include such big-name entities as Fox, Paramount, HBO, Warner Brothers, Best Buy, Texas Instruments, Coldwell Banker, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, NYU, Columbia University and Siemens. These clients use the platform to enhance their web-based and mobile offerings with custom multimedia features.
The company hosts an app and plugin marketplace called the Kaltura Exchange, and its HTML5 media library has also been a recent focus.
The startup’s CEO, Ron Yekutiel, said in a release that the company’s open-source mission isn’t at all at odds with its capitalistic goals — something other open-source entrepreneurs such as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg are also quick to point out in interviews.
Yekutiel said, “Kaltura is disrupting the online video space in a similar way to how open-source Red Hat and MySQL have disrupted their fields of operating systems and databases. We are honored to have gained the support of Intel Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, who have played an important role in the success of these two open-source giants.
“Kaltura’s financial success and the premium investors that it attracts demonstrate once again that there is indeed no dissonance between doing good and doing well.”