Trending in the news this week: Audax Group, Canopy Financial, Chamath Palihapitiya, Eric Schmidt, Henry Ellenbogen, Identified, Indiana Public Retirement System, KPS Capital Partners, SecureNet, Sterling Partners, T. Rowe Price and Bill and Tim Draper.

San Francisco-based startup Rounds has added $3 million in financing to expand its interactive “live hangout” platform. Verizon Investments Inc. led the round, with additional funding from Rhodium and Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder Tim Draper.

Tim Draper, the founder and a managing director of venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has invested in Clearbridge Accelerator, the Singapore incubation arm of Asian venture firm Clearbridge Partners. The incubator works with local and overseas research institutions to commercialize various technologies in sectors including biomedical devices, nanotechnology, advanced material sciences and computational algorithms, the company said. Terms of the investment were not released.

Late last year, the alternative trading platform Xpert Financial made much of its approval from the SEC and FINRA to automate the business of providing liquidity to startups. It kind of had to. It had entered into direct competition with SecondMarket and Sharespost, both now 800-pound gorillas in the world of private placements. At the [...]

TOA Technologies, a provider of mobile workforce management software for businesses, has closed on $17.2 million in Series D financing. Sutter Hill Ventures led the round, which includes existing investors Intel Capital and Draper Triangle Ventures. Additional new shareholders include Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder Tim Draper and Fort Washington Capital Partners Group. Andy Sheehan, a managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, will join the company’s board. TOA Technologies is based in Cleveland.

(Reuters) – A group of Facebook shareholders is seeking to offload $1 billion worth of shares on the secondary market, a sale that would value the company at more than $70 billion, according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation. It would represent one of the largest transactions of Facebook shares to date [...]

Salt Lake City-based Instructure Canvas, a provider of a cloud-based learning management systems, plans to announce on Friday that it has raised $8 million in Series B funding from OpenView Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, TomorrowVentures and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurveston. As part of the funding, Firas Raouf from OpenView has joined the board. [...]

If you counted the number of times William Draper III used the word “cooperation” at a public event last week…well, you might not think you were in Silicon Valley. But there you were – right at the heart of it – at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road, next to where venture firms syndicate [...]

Late last month, having received the blessing of the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the highly anticipated startup Xpert Financial emerged from stealth mode capable of automating the business of providing liquidity to startups. The question now for the San Mateo-based alternative trading platform is: who cares?

In addition to having to compete with supercharged competitors like SecondMarket and SharesPost, skepticism over its mission abounds, including from one prominent San Francisco-based investment banker, who privately observed to me last week: “Each process is highly customized and securities issues are unique, making it very difficult to execute these processes on a uniform basis. If it were easy, people would do it on eBay.”

Xpert Financial Inc., with high-profile backer Tim Draper behind it, is to unveil its private company stock exchange on Friday with a vow to revolutionize the secondary market. The San Mateo company, which changed its name this month from XChange, says it won approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to operate an online electronic trading [...]