By Wailin Wong |
The competition between daily-deal Web sites continues to heat up, as Washington D.C.-based LivingSocial said Thursday it has raised $25 million in funding and launched in Chicago.

The leader in the daily-deal space is Chicago-based Groupon, which secured $30 million in funding in December and is active in nearly 40 cities. A number of competitors have sprung up over recent months. Many of them modeled their deals after Groupon, which requires a minimum amount of people to participate in an offer before it’s activated.

LivingSocial launched Thursday in Chicago, Denver,
Raleigh-Durham and San Diego. The site is now active in 13 markets, the
company said in a press release, and plans to be in “dozens of cities”
by the end of the year. In addition to the daily deal site, LivingSocial
also makes Facebook applications such as Visual Bookshelf.

LivingSocial’s main investor for the latest round of funding was U.S.
Venture Partners. Other backers included Grotech Ventures and Revolution
LLC, a company founded by Steve Case, the co-founder and former chief
executive of AOL.