It must be great, you just started your business, and the investors are fighting for a piece of the cake. A couple of examples of young companies that raised finance recently:

ZAARLY

Less than a year old, and investment from top investors is easy. Here comes Zaarly, it's like a Craigslist with a mobile focus and a commitment to encouraging real-time transactions. With online marketplaces and classified sites looking like a saturated space, Zaarly's concentration on mobile is sensible. The other thing the firm has going for it is it backers. Its USD14.1m funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with new Hewlett-Packard CEO and former eBay head Meg Whitman joining its board of directors. Where it will potentially face challenges is in the competition. Sites like Craiglist will naturally be looking to move into mobile and while it plans to move into the online rentals space and compete with the likes of Airbnb, these are companies with heavyweight financial backing and a sense of momentum at the moment.

DROPBOX

Less than 4 years old and worth a lot of money: USD4bn to be exact. Cloud storage site Dropbox just had a huge USD250m round of recent funding from the likes of Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. Reports that the new round of funding would value the firm at as much as USD10bn were wide of the mark. Although Dropbox wants to use new funding the finance acquisitions, strategic partnerships and staff expansion, this round was reportedly more about attracting new specific investors such as Benchmark, Goldman and Greylock, rather than raising as much cash as possible. This means there's probably money around for similar offerings. Rival Box recently raised USD81m and there are a lot of similar, competing services to Dropbox out there. What marks out Dropbox is its early mover advantage in this space and its user base. It now claims an embedded user base of 45m across 175 countries, storing some 1bn files every three days. With this cloud storage space only set for more growth, Dropbox looks in a very strong position.

COUPONCABIN.COM

Indeed, this one is already a whole 8 years old, ( adn has 500 million in sales..) The online coupons space is getting a lot of investor attention at the moment. The newspaper coupon model is growing outmoded and startups like CouponCabin.com are both helping to turn this into an online activity and take advantage of the migration of bargain hunters from the printed product to the internet. JMI Equity led the USD54m round into CouponCabin.com, with recent investments in the likes of Coupons.com and CouponTrade helping illustrate a more general trend. Of course, part of the online coupon phenomenon and investor appetite for the space is an offshoot of the daily deals craze. What is likely to differentiate the online coupon companies are their partnerships. Exclusive coupon partnerships with the right merchants could prove compelling with consumers. With tie-ups with Dell, Target and BestBuy CouponCabin.com looks well positioned at the moment.

OPENSKY

Two years old: Claiming it is more akin to Twitter than eBay or Amazon, OpenSky is a six-month-old e-commerce site that lets shoppers personalise their shopping by receiving recommendations from experts and celebrities. Various American celebs push supposedly relevant products to OpenSky's 600,000 members, with the company predicting it will do USD1m in sales this month. OpenSky plans to use its USD30m in fresh funding to build out its business by adding more shopping selections to its site and involving more celebrities and experts. While there might appear a certain faddishness to linking shopping and celebrities in this way, neither shopping or celebrities are going away and e-commerce is certainly evolving. This is something Open Sky hopes to capaitalise on.

JIVE SOFTWARE

Finally, 10 years old but already looking at an IPO. Jive Software, which provides social media tools for enterprises, has raised USD40m in funding. Though it's still to post a profit, the indications are that it is getting closer. Its Q3 revenues increased by nearly 70% year on year and its USD7.6m loss in Q3 was a significant improvement on the USD16.1m it lost in the previous quarter. It's not entirely clear what Jive Software plans to do with its USD40m, but it'll make the startup's bank balance look more healthy having made a significant USD23.3m strategic acquisition of OffiSync in May this year with the plan of leveraging the asset to make Microsoft Office products more social.

Source: Strategy Eye