Full Disclosure: I am an angel investor in Bitnami.

In a regulatory filing Shapeways, the marketplace for 3D printing, revealed the company has raised $30M in a new round of venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures and Lux Capital. The round was lead by a16z and Chris Dixon has joined the Shapeways board of directors.

The company enables anyone to design and produce one-of-a-kind bespoke products using 3D printing.

Turns out this was already covered by TechCrunch back in April — oh well! — Shapeways is such a cool company why not write it up again? I personally can’t wait to see what comes next from the New York based company who, according to LinkedIn, now have 70-80 employees. In fact, I’m buying this incredible iPhone 5 “Sweater” case right now.

I still remember the first time I saw one of the products made by them a few years back at SXSW when they were just getting started, and I thought it was a cool thing for hobbyists but didn’t completely understand how it would get big. Turns out things that hobbyists love (ahem Twilio, computers, etc.) can be embraced by a much larger audience, and it looks like Shapeways has figured out how to crack the code and now boasts a marketplace of more than 10,000 stores on their site.

Cool Things Made with Shapeways

Image Credit: Fragatory

Image Credit: Adafruit

Image Credit: http://www.markflorquin.be

Image Credit: retrocactus on Flickr

Image Credit: Shapeways

According to a regulatory filing HealthFleet, a Boston-based health technology startup, is raising up to $3M in venture capital. The company previously raised a $1.1M Series A in August 2012.

HealthFleet’s platform connects patients with counselors (nurses, nutritionists and other caregivers) and health management content to help manage their health beyond the hospital or doctor’s office.

Founder and CEO Bill Van Wyck has quite a track record for founding companies and taking the public. According to the HealthFleeet about page:

Prior to founding HealthFleet, Mr. Van Wyck founded RedRoller, the ‘Travelocity for shipping packages’ where in 2007 he grew it to a public company (OTCBB:RROL) with over 10,000 users. Prior to RedRoller, Mr. Van Wyck successfully built, operated and sold CSI, a technology integrator, to Elcom International, one of the first ecommerce solution companies. Mr. Van Wyck grew Elcom’s same-region sales from $13MM to $110MM in two years, during which time Elcom completed its IPO (Nasdaq:ELCO). An experienced entrepreneur, Mr. Van Wyck has both public and private company operating experience.

Investors in this and the previous round were not revealed in the funding documents.

This morning Clustrix announced they have raised $16.5M in a Series C round from Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, ATA Ventures and Don Listwin. They are one of the earliest Y Combinator companies, founded in 2005 with nearly $47 million raised to date. Clustrix was ranked #5 on our Y Combinator Index for April.

The Benefits of MySQL Without the Scaling Limitations

Clustrix scales MySQL databases as engineering operations needs increase, simply by adding more nodes on Amazon Web Services. The company solves parallel processing challenges associated with applications that have a large quantity of data transactions, and is also used by dev ops to get realtime reporting on database performance an automatically scale up our down the number of nodes in use.

Before Clustrix an entirely different kind of datastore, such as MongoDB, would be used. This requires developers to split up their data across multiple servers and use a map reduce algorithm in order to query across all the data. However, developers using Clustrix save time because they can use their existing application code and MySQL connectors and don’t have to deal with sharding.

Possible IPO In Sight?

A PEHub article covering the announcement says:

CEO Robin Purohit told peHUB that the company will likely raise more funding in the next year to bring it to cash-flow positive. “And then we’ll see where the public markets are,” he said.

We’ll certainly keep an eye out for the next REG D to cross the SEC wire from Clustrix, and keep you posted on their monthly momentum and overall progress in the Startup Index.

Photo Credit: Clustrix Facebook page

These zombie stories just won’t die.

Last week Kirchner Group and Crestline Partners announced a joint effort to give limited partners (LPs) liquidity:

There is an estimated $100 billion in private equity assets managed by funds past their investment periods, according to industry estimates. Many of these so-called “zombie funds” have serious issues of alignment between the general partner and limited partners. As a result, an increasing number of institutional investors are looking for creative and effective ways to restructure these funds and rationalize their private equity portfolios.

Meet the Bobs of Private Equity

The announcement goes on to explain its areas of focus, which include supporting or replacing general partners, managing or even restructuring troubled funds, providing portfolio follow-on capital and even company level follow-on investment, and finding other opportunities for exits to give LPs liquidity and maximize value.

According to PEhub Kirchner Group has already has some success with this model:

Kirchner Group has made a name for itself as a specialist in zombie deals. It took over management of the Brantley Partners V LP from Brantley Partners and renamed it Emerald Partners V LP fund, which it continues to run.

What’s In Store for Venture Capital?

VC investing is a subcategory of private equity, accounting for $30B invested by venture capitalists in portfolio companies in 2012, according to the North American Venture Capital Association. This is roughly 10% of the private equity industry’s annual global investment, so I suspect the lowest hanging fruit for this kind of restructuring are among huge private equity firms but I certainly wouldn’t rule out some restructuring of larger zombie VC funds.

We are at the beginning of an industry transformation for traditional venture capital that has been a long time coming, and the chronicling of this shift began with the May 2012 report from the Kauffman Foundation, one of the largest investors in venture capital firms and an entrepreneurship think tank, on venture capital as an asset class. According to their findings:

Venture capital (VC) has delivered poor returns for more than a decade. VC returns haven’t significantly outperformed the public market since the late 1990s, and, since 1997, less cash has been returned to investors than has been invested in VC. Speculation among industry insiders is that the VC model is broken, despite occasional high-profile successes like Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Facebook in recent years.

You can read the full report here.

We will be watching to see which LPs take this route to liquidity for their venture capital portfolio, and looking to determine what those restructuring deals and partnership changes could mean for the entrepreneurs within their portfolio companies.