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Openlane, an Internet company that helps auction off automobiles, is just the latest old “B2B” company starting to thrive after struggling in the wake of the first Internet boom.

The company saw 60 percent growth in revenues last year, for a total of more than $60 million, and that growth is accelerating — according to its executives. So the company has just taken $25 million in financing to help maintain momentum.

Openlane is one of those early Internet “back-end” companies, serving businesses that do transactions with each other. Specifically, Openlane acts as the middle-man in selling cars that are no longer used by car rental companies, or by other companies with large leased fleets such as Ford, Chrysler and Chase Bank. Those partners use Openlane to sell cars in bulk to dealerships around the country, leaving the shipping and financing arrangements for Openlane.

This so-called “wholesale used-auto market” in the United States is around 21 million vehicles, according to Openlane’s CEO, Roger Butterwick. Of that total, Openlane has gotten about a two percent market share.

The Menlo Park, Calif.; year-over-year growth was 60 percent in 2007, Butterwick says, and the growth rate has continued rising in the first quarter of this year.

That’s a big change from a a few years ago when, after the first Internet bubble burst, fewer people trusted Internet companies to do B2B.

Another survivor that emerged in the past few years as viable businesses is MFG.com, which sources parts.

To date the company has taken seven fundings for a total of $66.5 million. That included the current $25 million round, which was led by Meritech Capital Partners, with previous investors August Capital, RPM Ventures and Zilkha Venture Partners participating. Openlane employs about 450 people.

AOL execs add oddly, allege examiners — Eight AOL executives are facing fraud charges at the conclusion of a six-year long investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into alleged revenue overstatement of $1 billion during the company’s merger with Time Warner. Four of the men have already settled. Given the company’s historic performance, it’s surprising the remaining four haven’t gotten away with pleading incompetence. More at the WSJ.

MetroFi municipal WiFi throws in the towel — It’s the end of the road for MetroFi, one of several startups that envisioned free municipal WiFi around the nation. The company is looking for a buyer in the nine cities in which it still operates networks. The company had raised some $15 million from August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, Western Technology and individual investors.

Mobile fingerprint companies point fingers at each other — Following a suit brought by AuthenTec (NASDAQ: AUTH) alleging patent infringement, Atrua Technologies has turned around and counter-sued, with one exec telling VentureWire, “Some information came to light that it was a frivolous suit, intended to harm our business.” Mobile authentication is a rapidly growing business, which has led to plenty of in-fighting in the courts; just last month, AuthenTec won a judgement against Atmel, a third company in the space that had sued it. We also recently reported a $4 million funding for Atrua.

Bay Area tech immigrants headed home as conditions improve — Bay Area Vietnamese American immigrants are returning to that country in growing numbers as the standard of living rises, as described in a pair of San Jose Merc articles here and here. As one happily remarks on suddenly being able to afford maid service six days a week, “You’ve got to have your first IPO in the U.S. before you get that.” Though Vietnam is a relatively small source of immigrants, if the same happens down the road with Chinese and Indian transplants, the Bay Area may find its talent pool significantly drained.

Advanced Equities set to pour $5B each year into late-stage venture — Advanced Equities Financial has opened an online market for large-stage venture investors, according to VentureWire. The firm brings together groups of investors on a deal-by-deal basis to put money into companies already backed by high-profile, early-stage venture outfits. It says it’s gearing up to put $5 billion yearly into the category.

DuPont and Schott wade into the thin-film game — The thin-film solar cell game is already crowded with multiple well-funded startups, and still only accounts for a miniscule portion of the solar cells actually sold each year. That isn’t preventing industry giants DuPont and Schott Solar from wading in. DuPont will have an R&D facility in Hong Kong and thin-film silicon plant in Shenzhen, China, while Schott is splitting off a separate production facility and business arm in Jena and Putzbrunn, Germany.

Thin-film solar startup Solyndra says goodbye to several founders — Three high-level members of the original technical team of thin-film CIGS startup Solyndra have headed to greener pastures, according to Green Light. The departures may indicate that Solyndra, like other CIGS manufacturers, has run into some developmental difficulties.

Trulia launches real estate ad network — Real estate startup Trulia, which we reported last month is booming amid the housing bust, has launched the Trulia Ad Network to sell targeted ads across sites including Oodle, Homes & Land and The Savvy Source. The press release is here.

Corrected

Mimosa Systems, a startup that helps companies archive emails and other files, has raised a $17 million fourth round of funding. Mimosa calls the latest financing a “mezzanine round,” meaning it should be the last round before an IPO.

The kind of comprehensive archiving that Mimosa offers is necessary for the “eDiscovery” process — namely, the process of searching through a company’s electronic records. With the growing number of legal requirements for corporate record-keeping, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, there’s been a lot of money entering this field. Last June, for example, Automatic acquired market leader Zantaz for $375 million (although the startup’s founder and early investors didn’t see much of a payoff). Correction: The company that acquired Zantaz was Autonomy.

When we wrote about Mimosa a year ago, we portrayed the company as playing second fiddle to Zantaz, but the Santa Clara, Calif. startup seems to be doing pretty well for itself. It has raised a total of $51 million and has offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, China, Australia and India. Mimosa recently moved beyond emails, attachments, instant messages and backup tapes and now says it can archive any file. Even more interesting, chief executive T.M. Ravi says Mimosa will make its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to third-party applications later this year.

The recent funding was led by Focus Ventures, with participation from existing backers August Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners, JAFCO Ventures and the Mayfield Fund.

Adchemy, which uses “predictive algorithms” to help companies place online ads more efficiently, said it has raised $19 million in a third round of funding.

Adchemy is a relatively quiet Silicon Valley company that has been studying what makes ads more effective. It has built a library of data that shows how things like ad size, ad keyword structures, genre of web site, and the anchor text of a page all affect how well an advertisement performs. It has found, for example, that ads for universities don’t do very well on career sites, but do better on weather or astrology sites.

Moreover, the company tracks data not only on how many people click through on ads, but how many actually follow through and buy something. Finally, by tracking action over time, the company says it can tell what sort of leads are likely to be more lucrative than others. So the company can charge different prices per lead, depending on whether they are promising or not.

To begin with, the company has focused on two industries, career/education and financial services. CEO Murthy Nukala is keeping the ingredients of his secret sauce to himself, but said his approach is much more helpful to advertisers than that of competitors. For example, Quinstreet, one of the larger players in the online career/education advertising market, uses few of these measurable approaches, he said.

The Redwood City, Calif., company has ambitious plans for 2008, Nukala told VentureBeat, which will likely include the unveiling of new products and a doubling or tripling of its workforce.

Customers like Charter One and The Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s online division hire Adchemy to identify the most effective types of ads and the best locations for them. According to Adchemy, the company’s customers receive an average return of two to five times their investment.

Nukala founded the company 2004, and has now raised a total of $27 million.

Nukala likes to compare his scientific approach to Google’s focus on technology. “We’re the only company in the market that has what we call a high science approach,” Nukala said.

Comparing Adchemy to Google seems pretty grandiose, but Nukala didn’t pull it entirely from thin air: Stanford Prof. Rajeev Motwani, who co-authored the PageRank paper laying the foundation for Google’s search engine, is on Adchemy’s board, Nukala noted.

Leading the recent round of investment is the Mayfield Fund of Menlo Park, with additional investments from Hellman & Friedman and August Capital.

Adchemy has 70 employees, up from 50 in just a month, said Nukala. The company will be announcing more products later this year, but he said it’s too early to offer any details.

Splunk, a San Francisco company that offers a search engine for IT data across corporate networks, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding.

Company IT professionals benefit from the search engine, because it scours technical data across a business operatings, from hardware to software, letting them track logs, messages and other data.

It comes at a time when competitors are entering this area, including Network Chemistry, which two months ago said it was throwing its resources into a new search engine that does something similar.

The funding was led by Ignition Partners, and included existing investors August Capital, JK&B Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds. Unconfirmed reports put the company’s valuation at $120 million.

Splunk offers a free download for its service, which has helped it grow. In 18 months since the formal launch of its first product, the company has added 450 customers, including Visa and the U.S. Department of Justice, it says. It claims more than 100,000 user downloads.

This funding round follows Series A investment of $5 million in December 2004 from August Capital and Sevin Rosen, and $10 million Series B in January 2006 led by JK&B Capital.

Jaxtr, a service for dodging international calling fees using your phone, has raised $10 million in series A round led by August Capital.

It says it has doubled in size in the last month to a million users.

The Menlo Park, Calif. company (more detail from our past coverage here and here [update: first comment below]) allows you to make free phone calls over the web or your mobile and landline phones, including low local rates for international calls.

When you sign up and make your first call on the web, you get a unique Jaxtr phone number and web address, such as www.jaxtr.com/mattmarshall.

People who want to call you can simply click on the web address link and get directed to your current phone number, as you have it pre-selected on Jaxtr — without you having to reveal your real number.

The company also lets you embed its widget on web pages so you can make or receive calls, say, on your Myspace account; it also launched a Facebook app in late May, but it only has a little over 12,000 users three months later.

Jaxtr has between 70 and 80 percent of its total users making and receiving calls from mobile phones simply because a Jaxtr number can be entered into a mobile address book like any other number, chief executive Konstantin Guericke tells us.

While Skype, Jajah and other internet-based phone services also provide ways to make free international calls, Guericke says this alternative phone number is more convenient for mobile users because they don’t need to download a mobile application, like Skype, or access a web browser, like Jajah. It’s similar to GrandCentral, the company bought by Google, which provides a single number you can use anywhere — although it gives you a single URL instead.

Eighty percent of total Jaxtr users live in 220 countries outside of the US, although Guericke says US users are three times as active, overall.

More than 16,000 users are now registering per day, the company says, with nearly three quarters of users in their 20’s.

Jaxtr was almost acquired recently, Dave Hornik of August Capital tells us — from another private company headed to an IPO (but not Facebook), he says.

While the offer would have been a good return for Jaxtr and its investors, Guericke says Jaxtr took the funding to try to replace the multi-billion dollar industry of selling calling cards with minutes for making international calls.

Jaxtr plans to make money by charging people who use more than their allotted 100 minutes per month; he hopes to get 20 million users in the next twelve months and is planning for only around one percent of these users to pay for additional minutes.

Other returning investors include the Mayfield Fund, The Founder’s Fund and three early Skype backers: Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mangrove Capital.

Devicescape releases a software today that connects any of your WiFi devices automatically to a WiFi hotspot or muni network.

This is significant, because more cellphones are being equipped with WiFi, as the cost of WiFI chips hit bottom rates of $2. And by accessing WiFi with a Skype or other Internet (VoIP) phone, you can make cheap calls.

The service, a software download, automatically detects when there’s a Wifi network nearby; you can set the phone to vibrate, for example, to alert you when you’re near one. Phones, music players, or any other WiFi device can use the service. The device can also download subscribed information from Wifi hotspots, without you having to do anything.

The company has just raised an undisclosed amount of “millions” in a third round of capital, it told VentureBeat. This follows $12.2 millon it raised in January 2005 from firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, JAFCO Ventures, August Capital and Applied Materials.

Glenn Flinchbaugh, the company’s VP of products, said 300 cities across the U.S. are at some stage of deploying WiFi systems, and there are thousands of other hotspot providers, both free and paid. Devicescape lets your device communicate with even paid hotspots, but you have to pay to access it. Both the downloadable and pre-installed versions of the software interact with the Devicescape server to enable things like automatic hotspot login.

Devicescape’s chief competitor is Boingo, which aggregates WiFi networks for subscribers. Like Devicescape, Boingo has realized the promise of increasingly popular dual-mode phones, which work on GSM or WiFi (and thus make free Internet calls). However, Devicescape’s software is smaller, at 35KB, because it updates via communication with the Devicescape server. This gives it an advantage over Boingo’s MB-sized software, which has to store all of Boingo’s network information on the phone, which makes it not merely bulky, but costlier.

Devicescape hopes to make money by licensing its software to device manufaucturers. It will also strike partnerships with hotspot providers, getting a cut if it brings them more customers, said Flinchbaugh.

There will be more than 1 billion WiFi devices by 2010, according to Merrill Lynch.