VentureBeat

Cast Iron Systems, a Mountain View, Calif. company that sells “application integration appliances,” has raised $16 million in a fifth round of capital.

The funding is notable because it continues a surprising trend of co-investing between Sequoia Capital — one of the most respected, but secretive venture firms in Silicon Valley — and an obscure hedge fund called Artis Capital.

The two companies have declined comment on the relationship. But it’s widely known that David Lamond, the son of a well-known Sequoia partner Pierre Lamond has worked at Artis. Artis was allowed to invest alongside Sequoia in video-sharing company YouTube, and went on to make a killing when YouTube was sold to Google for $1.6 billion. Normally, you’d chalk this up to coincidence, because family ties exist in every industry. However, Artis’ involvement is unusual because hedge funds rarely participate in early-stage investments of technology start-ups. Most firms would consider it a big privilege to invest alongside Sequoia, because it sees some of the best deals. Indeed, one of Artis’ partners, Stuart Peterson raised eyebrows shortly after the YouTube sale by paying $20 million to buy Andre Agassi’s Tiburon, Calif. estate after the YouTube sale.

The Cast Iron funding was first reported by PEHub two weeks ago.

Lehman Brothers Venture Capital led the round, which included return backers Sequoia Capital, Artis Capital Management, Norwest Venture Partners and Invesco Private Capital.

Cast Iron has now raised about $60 million in funding since 2001.

VentureWire followed up with a story this morning. Here’s a good description of what Cast Iron does:

Cast Iron Systems’ appliances integrate information from one application into another, saving its customers the time and expense of developing a homegrown solution or entering the information manually…

Although its products work with a wide range of applications, Cast Iron Systems works closely with certain software vendors such as Salesforce.com Inc., SAP AG and Oracle Corp. to make products geared at integrating software from those companies, in an effort to get people to begin using the product to integrate those applications and then up-selling later when a customer wants to expand the number of endpoints the appliance connects…Cast Iron faces competition from software-based application integration products such as Red Hat Inc.’s JBoss and Tibco Software Inc.

The latest roundup of the action happening in Silicon Valley:

First evidence of YouTube wealth — What do you do with your money, when you get it? One way is to spend $20 million to buy Andre Agassi’s Tiburon estate. That’s what Stuart Peterson, of Artis Capital Management, an investor in YouTube, did, as PE Week’s Alex Haislip reports. Or you can invest it into night clubs, as some Web entrepreneurs have done.

Google Answers shuts down, while Yahoo Answers booms — This is one more confirmation that Google does best with automation. It started its answering service before Yahoo did, yet was blown away by Yahoo. Google is not adept at the messy business of getting humans involved. Yahoo claims 60 million unique users of Yahoo Answers. It just signed a deal with Answers.com, too. This is a rare victory for Yahoo, and should encourage it to stay focused on its relative advantage at implementing “community”-oriented projects.

Allow comments anywhere on your site — There are some places on blogs or web sites where comments aren’t enabled by the site’s software. So Lev Walkin, a Cisco Security Engineer out of Santa Clara, has come up with a way to let you place them pretty much anywhere, called JS-Kit (via Techcrunch).

Will U.S. Supreme Court brake global warming action? — The future of many clean-tech start-ups here in Silicon Valley depends in part on Washington. The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether California can move ahead with strict pollution controls. In European, meanwhile, the opposite is happening. Brussels is forcing stricter controls on member states, rather than braking.

Danger raises $10.3 million from Sharp –This deal makes sense, because Sharp is building a Danger “hiptop” device, similar to the one distributed by T-Mobile, to run Danger’s software. Also, in case you missed it, see the update on our recent snarky post about Danger and its IPO. Hank Nothhaft took exception, and we clarified some facts. He says the company’s valuation has increased, which is a good sign.

Fuddy U.S. companies on London’s AIM — Now the Brits are suddenly asking why the U.S. companies going public on the London alternative stock market AIM are doing so poorly. Two thirds of them are losing money for investors. Could the reason be that the only reason U.S. companies listing on AIM is because 1) they couldn’t do it in the U.S., or 2) they couldn’t raise money from private equity investors (or venture capitalists) at a time when it is very easy to raise money?

Presto launches the photo service for elderly or tech-phobic — We wrote about Silicon Valley company Presto’s product a while back. Presto has $10M from venture firm Kleiner Perkins and others.