VentureBeat

Lijit, a startup whose widget allows blog readers to search across multiple sites and accounts, is planning to launch an ad network on top of its search tool, and has raised $7.1 million to make it happen.

The Boulder, Colo. company offers basic search services, but its most interesting feature is a tool that lets bloggers tie all of their accounts into a Lijit search. So if you’re just dying to follow not only my VentureBeat posts, but also my every move online — say the sites I bookmark on Delicious or the photos I share on Flickr — Lijit makes it possible to search through all of that in one place. Okay, so I don’t actually use either of those services, but Lijit says it can support any URL or RSS feed. There are a lot of companies that try to tie all your online identities together (social aggregator FriendFeed being a prominent example); Lijit is the service that implements this idea as a blog search.

According to the numbers that Lijit is sharing, it’s an approach that pays off, too. The Lijit search widget was enabled on all the blogs in the b5media network, and reportedly drew three times as much search traffic as the standard search box. The Lijit service is free, but the company is ready to make some money from those results by selling ads alongside them.

This is the startup’s third round of venture funding, and it was led by new investor the Foundry Group, with existing investors Boulder Ventures and High Country Venture’s Colorado Fund I also participating. Lijit has now raised around $11.3 million.

Lijit, a provider of a more extensive search service for blogs, has said it raised a $3.3M second round of funding.

Lijit, of Louisville, Colorado, doesn’t limit readers to searching blog posts. It also provides them results from the host blogger’s own accounts at Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and any other place online they store information. Blogging is a cult-like sport, and this is one more way for readers to find out more about their favorite scribes. A blogger provides the info by providing Lijit with their login data for these services. Lijit then pulls the information and delivers it through an embedded Lijit widget on their site. See below, for an example of what the widget looks like for investor Paul Kedrosky’s blog. A profile on Lijit shows the precise services he is letting you search, which include his Flickr photos.

By aggregating this blogger-specific content, Lijit seeks to differentiate itself from Google Co-op and other site-specific search products.

It also provides bloggers with analytics about what readers are searching for — potentially letting them serve their readers better by giving them more of what they want.

According to CEO Todd Vernon, Lijit had been experiencing “exponential growth.” He didn’t released actual numbers, but did say the widget has been displayed eight million times over the past month. This latest round of funding will help double the number of employees and expand Lijit’s infrastructure, he said

In January, Lijit raised $900K in seed capital. This latest round, led by Boulder Ventures, brings Lijit’s total financing to $4.2M.

BaroFold, a Boulder, Colo., biotech raised $12 million in a first round of funding. The company is developing PreEMT, a technology that uses high levels of fluid pressure to “unclump” biotech-drug proteins that have stuck together and to force proteins that have folded up incorrectly to unfold and refold into a proper configuration. The technology may be useful in boosting production yields of recombinant, or genetically engineered, proteins, which form the basis of many biotech drugs.

The financing was led by HBM BioVentures (Cayman)and Boulder Ventures, joined by the Peierls Foundation and other seed round investors. The round’s proceeds will fund the development of the company’s drug pipeline, including an experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis.

The company’s release is here (PDF).