Perhaps as part of an effort to keep up with Groupon, number-two group buying site LivingSocial has just finished raising $400 million in new funding.
LivingSocial confirmed the amount to PCMag, but would not reveal the names of participating investors.
A spokesperson said the daily deals site will use the money to "accelerate [its] already aggressive growth both internationally and domestically." She said that LivingSocial will focus specifically on emphasizing LivingSocial Instant Deals, which gives real-time offers via smartphone apps or on the mobile Web.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the company will also use the fresh funds to hire more staffers and make new acquisitions.
The WSJ said the funds were raised by Lightspeed Venture Parterners and Amazon.com, existing LivingSocial investors. It's not the first investment Amazon has made in the deal-offering company. Amazon confirmed at the end of December that it had invested $175 million in LivingSocial. Venture Partners is one of the new investors to add LivingSocial to its portfolio this round.
LivingSocial is "highly profitable" and growing quickly, Venture Partners' Tim Chaffee told the Journal.
"It is the largest investment we've ever made in our history," he said, although he would not disclose exactly how much his company invested.
However, according to Chaffee, the gap between LivingSocial and Groupon is quickly narrowing, with the former adding around 1.5 million new users every week. He also said the site has around 26 million members spread across 250 markets in 12 different countries.
As far as financials go, at the end of last year, LivingSocial reported that it was raking in $1 million a day on average, and predicted that it would generate at least half a billion in revenue this year. But according to the WSJ, those numbers might have been underestimated. After this funding round, the three-year-old LivingSocial is valued at around $3 billion, and it could generate as much as $1 billion in revenue in 2011.