Capital Gains: Lyft and Palantir Go for Uber-Sized Rounds, Higher Valuations

For Christmas this year, some people got coal, some people got normal presents and some people got venture capital. Here are the big headlines on who got funding this past week:

• Uber rival Lyft has filed to raise another $1 billion at a $4.5 billion pre-money valuation, and it also landed a $250 million investment last week from Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, among other undisclosed investors (Bloomberg Business).
• Palantir, the large, secretive data and surveillance technology company with close ties to the U.S. Department of Defense, has raised $880 million at a $20 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable privately held tech companies in the world. BuzzFeed first reported about the round back in June; investors include Bridgewater Associates, Tiger Global Management and Morgan Stanley (New York Times).
• Building design software startup Flux Factory, which began its life as a Google X moonshot project, raised a $29 million Series B led by Temasek and Surbana Jurong Private Limited, with participation from Far East Ventures, South Park Ventures, DFJ, Borealis Ventures and Ev Williams’s Obvious Ventures (Silicon Valley Business Journal).
• On-demand Indian bus service Shuttl landed $20 million from a group of investors led by Lightspeed Ventures, featuring participation from Sequoia Capital and India media conglomerate Times Internet (Economic Times).
• Speech technology startup Semantic Machines raised $12.3 million in a new round, according to SEC filings. Investors from General Catalyst Partners and Bain Capital Ventures were named in the documents (VentureBeat).
• MapAnything, which makes location technology tools for Salesforce CRM software, raised a $7.3 million round led by Greycroft Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and other investors (SiliconAngle).

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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