Remitly, a US-based provider of online money transfer services between America and the rest of the world, has raised $2.6m.
Venture capital firm Trilogy Equity Partners, set up by founded by former T-Mobile USA and Western Wireless’s chief executive John Stanton, led the Remitly round and was joined by Bezos Expeditions, the family office of online retailer Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and TomorrowVentures, the investment company of search engine provider Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt.
Amazon had previously bought in 2008 Shelfari, a virtual bookshelf set up by Josh Hug, co-founder of Remitly with Matthew Oppenheimer.
The compliance officer for Remitly is Hilton Hewitt, who previously had the same role at Amazon’s global payments systems.
Separately, Madrona Venture Group, an early investor in Amazon, has led the $4.2m series B round for 2nd Watch, a cloud-based provider of applications for enterprise clients.
2nd Watch has been since November an Amazon Web Services Premier Partner to help shift applications into the cloud.
The company raised its A round in November 2011 from Bighorn Ventures, KickStart – an angel fund associated with the Spokane Angel Alliance and other angel investors, and local disaster fecovery firm IT Lifeline.
Madrona has also joined the $5m round for Cheezburger Network, a US-based media group, alongside Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures.