Funding News: Smilebox Raises $7M, Bahu Gets $1M

Smilebox, a site where you can create a variety of media presentations (such slideshows, ecards, scrapbooks, photobooks, and postcards) by loading your own amateur photos and videos into designer templates, has raised $7M in Series B financing. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Frazier Technology Ventures.

The company says that it has garnered 1.8M users since its launch in June 2006, and that it experiences over 1.3M unique users monthly. Smilebox has recently been improved to allow for integration of music from media players like iTunes and automatic posting of creations to Facebook. The company has also partnered with several companies for distribution including Six Apart (creator of Vox) and Corel.

In unrelated news, European social network for young students Bahu has raised $1M in its first round of funding, led by theLightspeed-Gemini Internet Lab (LGiLab). The company says that Bahu differentiates itself from other social networks by focusing on users’ talents and helping to showcase them.

In addition to raising some money, Bahu has also appointed Ouriel Ohayon (editor of TechCrunch France) to its board of directors. Bahu was launched in July and claims to already have over 300,000 international users and to have experienced 15M page views in November.