Optoro Inc., a cloud-based technology company that enables retailers and manufacturers to increase their revenue from returned and excess inventory, closed a $50 million Series C funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and joined by Generation Investment Management with participation from existing investors.  Roughly 15 percent of all goods are either returned or become excess - totaling $500 billion annually in the U.S. and creating a costly logistical and environmental challenge.  Read more. 

Validic announced at the mHealth Summit that its platform for aggregating digital health data now reaches over 100 million lives.  Recent new clients include WebMD, Everyday Health and UPMC.  Read More.

In a sign of growing consumer awareness and appetite for mobile device trade-ins, Hyla Mobile announced that the company secured 1.6 million device trade-ins during a month, representing a 75 percent increase over the previous year.  Read more.

Aiming to help customers that would like to take advantage of demand response energy savings, EnTouch Controls announced that its EnTouch360 product is OpenADR compliant.  Read more.  EnTouch's value to groups like Corner Bakery was recently highlighted in this CSA article.

Living Earth, one of the nation's largest organic recyclers and a producer of 2.5 million cubic yards of compost per year, was recently featured by the industry's leading journal.  Read more.

In honor of Veteran's Day and in support of its charitable donations program, Think Through Learning matched all donations made by participating students and classes to the Wounded Warrior Project between November 5th and November 11th, up to $10,000.  Points for math lessons completed in the evening and over the weekend were included in this special matching program.  Read more.

Jonathan Mendez, CEO of Yieldbot, summarized the the company's fast growth in 2014 in a year-end post citing a team increase from 29 to 62 individuals and a revenue jump of 650%.  The company ran over 1,500 advertising campaigns across 400 premium publisher partners, processing over 50 billion real-time decisions in 2014.  Read more.

SJF Ventures is seeking an energetic and analytical person interesting in impact investing and venture capital to serve as a Data Analyst in the firm's Durham, NC office at one day per week.   See job description.

SJF welcomes Felix Anthony and Corky Ellis to its Expert Network.  Felix has been responsible for a number of operations at Amazon, including Kindle Software, Fulfillment and Logistics.  Corky is the Chairman and Founder of Kepware, a software for industrial automation, serving the manufacturing, energy and power sectors.  See all of SJF's Expert Network.

SJF Ventures Co-Founder Rick Defieux was profiled by Citi in a piece that discusses impact investing's response to the call for driving environmental and social change while delivering powerful profits.  Read article.