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Widget distribution network Gigya raked in $11 million in third round funding to continue building out two existing products of its own called Wildfire and Socialize.

They serve different but related purposes: Wildfire provides a platform for other widget developers to post and share their creations with a broader audience, while Socialize provides any website with the tools it needs to incorporate social networking features (things like a newsfeed that tracks friend activity, and a panel for sharing interesting content).

Even though Wildfire already serves 1,000 widget makers and is bringing in some revenue by circulating branded widgets from big names like Disney and Kimberly-Clark, Gigya predicts that Socialize will soon surpass it in value as more sites join the social-networking fray. Already, the app is able to aggregate friend data from sites like Facebook and MySpace, giving it an edge over competitor Google Friend Connect, which has not yet landed the support of the two networking giants. Socialize is also unique in that its open API allows sites to engineer their own social networking features to meet their specific needs, whereas Google’s service offers only pre-made plug and play features.

Notably, Gigya’s chief rival, San Francisco-based Widgetbox Inc., has been ahead in the valuation game — it’s unclear whether Gigya has caught up in this round. After Widgetbox’s second round of financing in January, it had an estimated $61.9 million value. Gigya was valued at $26 million after its last round in March, according to VCExperts.com. Interestingly, Gigya receives more “company friendly” money (as opposed to “investor friendly” money) than Widgetbox. In other words, its funding comes with more flexible terms, and will be less expensive for the company in the long run, which could give it a significant leg up in the faltering economy.

DAG Ventures led the round, followed by previous investors Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital and the Mayfield Fund. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has raised $23.5M since its inception in 2006.

Coming on the heels of our post yesterday morning about BitTorrent’s new partnerships, it has emerged that the company has taken on $17 million in new financing, according to a filing ferreted out by peHUB.

The funding is a surprise, because BitTorrent’s business hasn’t been growing as strongly as the company anticipated. While CEO Doug Walker expected strong business from video companies, who need to distribute their content, demand for BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer sharing platform has been low outside of game distributors.

BitTorrent hasn’t responded so far to inquiries about the funding, but it’s worth returning to the arguments they previously made to me. As I noted before, the company says it can subsist off revenue from game companies, but subsistence a good reason for a big round of venture funding. To justify its investors’ bet, it needs another source of income, which may be video, or another type of content.

The failure (so far) of Joost has given the best example yet of why video isn’t working for P2P startups: Users don’t like to download the plug-ins or applications that P2P sharing requires. Benefitting from that state of affairs are content delivery networks (CDNs), who send out data from centralized servers rather than swarms of users, as BitTorrent does.

Co-founder Ashwin Navin, whom I talked to a few days ago about BitTorrent, suggested that its P2P service will eventually be “more akin to Amazon S3 than Akamai”. By that he probably meant that it will aim to store data over time and deliver it on demand. But unlike either CDNs or S3, Navin said that BitTorrent will move to a subscription model, and away from metered data usage.

That could be a big benefit to companies that want to keep their bandwidth bills low; companies like PeerApp have been funded for a similar business. Furthermore, the service could be used for any type of content, including video.

However, video definitely isn’t off the plate for BitTorrent. The company is counting on its downloadable PC client to create a user base that content distributors will want to tap into. However, it may need to grow to hundreds of millions of active users to provide an attractive enough platform for anyone to concentrate on.

A final possibility is that BitTorrent is counting on some innovative new features to spruce up its offerings. Another company, PPLive, is innovating by helping to deliver Flash videos (like those on YouTube), and may be a good example of the possibilities left in P2P. However, Navin seemed to be implying that most of BitTorrent’s innovation would be in how to sell its platform.

The funding came from DCM, Accel and DAG Ventures. To date, BitTorrent has raised almost $50 million. The company is based in San Francisco

[Update: I've reached a partner at the fund, who requested anonymity because of securities laws governing public statements while fundraising, but he says the PEHub story is bogus. "We've never talked to anyone about an $800 million fund, in print or verbally." Instead, VentureBeat has learned the firm may eventually raise a fund, but the amount will be much smaller than that. I've made an update below, clarifying the record on DAG's investments. ]

DAG Ventures, the venture capital firm that became the butt of jokes a few years ago for its strategy of investing in companies that had previously gotten funding from top-tier venture firms, is reportedly raising an $800 million fund to make new investments.

The news, broken by PEHub, is surprising because DAG raised a large $700 million fund as recently last last year, which followed a $325 million fund in 2006. Usually, venture firms take a few years to breathe before raising their next fund.

I’m trying to reach DAG for more information. But the Palo Alto, Calif., DAG Ventures has been on a tear, pouring money into companies after they have previously been backed by top firms like Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel and Benchmark (recent investments include Friendster recently, Pacific Biosciences, ODesk, SearchMe, Pelago). This is all after DAG started with a small $60.3 million venture fund just four years ago. In other words, it’s engaged in a huge ramp up in size, at a time when most other Silicon Valley venture firms are feeling queasy about the investment climate.

It’s easy to scoff at DAG’s strategy of following other firms (it gained the nickname “Coattail Ventures”), especially in proud Silicon Valley, where the tradition among VCs is to try to foster an image of being able to discover and then anoint promising entrepreneurs. The strategy is somewhat unique. Following means DAG has to invest in companies that are more mature, and thus it pays a higher valuation (not such a good deal for DAG). On the other hand, gradually, the firm has won some respect among its peers, in part because it has been able to access some of the best companies, and has had the appearance of a steady focus at a time when some other firms have fallen apart. And despite appearances, we’re hearing DAG has not blindly followed these other firms; it has in fact passed on several deals brought to it by the top-tier firms, in cases where the deals didn’t look attractive.

PEHub suggests the firm’s successes so far haven’t exactly been home runs.

In 2005, SanDisk acquired 3D integrated circuit maker Matrix Semiconductor in a deal valued at $250 million; Matrix had raised $175 million from eight firms, including DAG and Benchmark Capital. DAG also made out well when online video-sharing site Grouper sold to Sony Corp. for $65 million in 2006. Grouper had raised $3.75 million from DAG and another firm after raising $1.5 million in angel funding. And earlier in 2006, Verisign paid $30 million net of cash to purchase CallVision, an Internet billing and customer relationship management company that had raised $5.8 million from DAG along with three other investment firms.

Update: PEHub appears to have missed some others: DAG invested in Zimbra, which was sold for a considerable profit to Yahoo for $350 million, after only $30.5 million in. It also made money on the following deals: Oakley Networks, which was bought by Raytheon for $193 million; Plaxo, which was bought by Comcast for a reported $150-$170 million; and Trapeze, which was bought by Belden for $133 million (DAG made money because it invested preferred capital, with a multiple liquidation preference, meaning it got its money back, and then some, even though other, earlier investors lost money). In addition, keep in mind that the firm only started investing four years ago. Any good venture firm avoids trying to sell its best companies early, since those are likely to emerge into large profitable deals where waiting five or six years is best. Google, for example, is a good example of a company — albeit not a DAG investment — that was held back, but which eventually produced an enormous exit.)

Friendster, the formative social network of the modern web era that became a verb for rollercoaster failure and then took over large chunks of the Asian market, has some good news this evening.

It has raised $20 million and plucked Richard Kimber, Google’s regional managing director for South Asia, to be its new chief executive.

IDG Ventures led the round, with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Founders Fund participating.

While Friendster is the largest social network in countries like Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and other countries, it is — like most of its rivals — still figuring out how to be a big business. Kimber has experience making money for Google in South Asia. It’s not clear if that includes Orkut, Google’s social network that’s popular in India (and Brazil) or other social Google properties.

ComScore stats on Friendster, from June:

22.1 billion page views per month

215 minutes per visitor per month

37.1 million per month, 33 million of which were in Asia

[Photo via ABC.]

Representing a potential medical quantum leap similar to, but even more important than the commercialization of X-ray imaging, Pacific BioSciences has taken a whopping $100 million to make it possible to affordably map out an individual’s entire genome in a matter of minutes, and for under $1,000 dollars.

While several startups, including 23andMe and deCODEme, are already offering cheap genetic testing for individuals, the technology Pacific Bio is looking at is about as different from those as looking at a satellite image of a town is to walking through it. The company is working on a system to “read” each DNA letter in a person’s genetic makeup, providing an in-depth view of every factor affecting a given person’s health.

The idea sounds fairly simple: Individial DNA molecules are captured in tiny holes on a chip, where they are pulled apart and rebuilt with enzymes identical to those present in the body, but with the addition of chemical markers. A type of digital camera takes a picture of the process, identifying the specific fragment being looked at. We covered the technology in more depth when it was first revealed, and have mentioned various competitors, most notably Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix, who want to do sequencing for under $100.

In practice, of course, operating at such tiny scales is difficult, and accurately sequencing thousands of genes at once seems nearly impossible. But the company says it will be ready to commercialize by 2010, a Herculean feat if it can pull it off. The new funding indicates that it is at least gaining the confidence of venture capitalists.

If and when that happens, it will be time for early investors including Alloy Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Mohr Davidow Ventures — who collectively plowed more than $70 million into Pacific Bio over four previous rounds — to rake in the money.

However, it will just be the beginning for a whole new field of medical technology centered around finding uses for all the new information in individuals that becomes available. Preventative medicine is the obvious use, but others, like data mining for new cures and information on diseases, are also possible. Laws regulating the use (and misuse) of such information by insurers, employers and others will also have to be formulated.

A passel of new investors joined the funding, starting with co-leads Deerfield Management and Intel Capital. Also in were Morgan Stanley, Redmile Group, T. Rowe Price, and an unnamed “large financial institution.” Other previous investors Maverick Capital, AllianceBernstein, DAG Ventures and Teachers’ Private Capital also participated.

Updated

Outsourcing technology startup oDesk has raised a $15 million third round of funding led by DAG Ventures.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based oDesk allows companies to hire technology “providers” like programmers and web designers, and it provides companies with the technology to monitor those remote employees. Chief executive Gary Swart says the need for such a site is growing, as the number of companies looking to outsource some tech work and the number of workers tempted by the flexibility of remote, outsourced employment are both on the rise.

ODesk is best-situated to take advantage of that growing interest, Swart says, because it’s the only company whose service handles the hiring, management and even the payment of outsourced employees. Sites like Rentacoder.com and Elance function more like marketplaces without the management or payment components. [Update: Actually, Elance has been adding some management features.] That works for small, fixed projects, but creates problems for more long-term hiring or when you want to integrate the outsourced employees into your team. Swart offered some pretty compelling evidence, too — comparing the highest-paying jobs on Rentacoder, Elance and oDesk (in oDesk’s case, the numbers are presented through a cool feature called oConomy), it’s pretty clear that the top end of oDesk jobs offer more money.

This round was actually unsolicited, Swart says, because oDesk still had around $3 million of its $8 million second round in the bank. (In fact, oDesk controls costs by using its own technology to manage 41 contractors.) But DAG’s offer, along with the fact that the venture firm didn’t insist on taking a seat on oDesk’s board, was too good to pass up, he says, and it will mean that the startup doesn’t have to look for funding later this year or early next year, freeing it to continue focusing on building its customer base and improving the product.

Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and Sigma Partners also participated in the new round.

Like many people, I assume that Google is going to keep on taking over the search market. Not to be deterred, however, visual search company SearchMe has raised another $12.6 million on top of previous funding totalling $31 million, from some pretty interesting investors.

Venture firms participating in this round include Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Deepfork Capital and Lehvan Brothers Venture Capital. Meanwhile, angels investors include Lachlan Murdoch — the elder son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch — along with Randy Adams, Thomas Banahan and Mark Kvamme.

Why do such big-name investors keep pumping money into the company when Google continues to take over search? One obvious reason is that talented and envious technologists of all stripes continue to eye Google’s enormous profitability, and imagine themselves getting even just one percent of it through a rival search engine. Even if their quest is near-impossible, the reward is proven and huge. That’s more than can be said about many segments of internet industries, like social networks or video-sharing sites.

Why SearchMe? Well, as we’ve covered, the company is run by repeat entrepreneurs who have played pivotal roles in Silicon Valley. Sequoia and these other investors love betting on a great team in a big market.

And SearchMe, in particular, is nice as far as non-Google search engines go, especially if you’re the visual type. You can scroll through a 3-D interface of search results, quickly flipping across result preview pages to find what you’re looking for by dragging the scroll tab at the bottom of the screen or using your keyboard arrow keys. Each result window comes with an excerpt that you can click on to go to the page. The interface, similar to the Cover Flow style on iTunes other Apple products, gives you more granularity into an individual search result than the list style of a Google result page.

Personally, though, I’m the impatient type. Google searches are fast, and it’s simple to scan search results for pages of interest, or try out fast new searches. Who am I to say, though. For visual searchers, another one to look at is SpaceTime, which you can read more about here.

As to the most important aspect of search, the accuracy, I haven’t found SearchMe to be noticeably better, although I haven’t used it enough to have a strong opinion.

That’s the thing. I’m stuck in my Google-y ways.

Social networks built around location are a hot item, and getting hotter.

It’s one thing to have a group of contacts which you can update with words from a mobile device (think the micro-messaging service Twitter). It’s another to be able to quickly update your exact location on a map and have others see it. Add to that the ability to review places (think: Yelp) as well as tag places you would like to go, and you have a general idea of Whrrl, a location-based social network.

Several other services including BrightKite and Yahoo’s FireEagle, are exploring similar usage of location for networks, but with this new round of funding, Whrrl gets an important ally: T-Mobile. Deutsche Telekom’s venture capital arm, T-Mobile Venture Fund led this latest Series B round.

T-Mobile’s support validates the service, said Jeff Holden, chief executive and co-founder of Pelago, Whrrl’s parent. T-Mobile and Indian venture fund Reliance Technology Ventures (RTVL), which also participated in the round, will be important in helping the service expand globally, Holden said.

This location-based network arena will only get hotter as newer technologies and newer phones come into the market. While Google’s Android is still a little ways off, Apple’s 3G iPhone is expected to be just around the corner, and is expected to add GPS technology. Whrrl has already spoken on its blog about its excitement about building a native application for the device with the software development kit (SDK).

Pelago was the first company in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers‘ portfolio to join Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, the $100 million fund which the firm set up to spur iPhone application development. Kleiner Perkins participated in both Pelago’s Series A round as well as this latest round. Other return investors include Trilogy Equity Partners and Bezos Expeditions. DAG Ventures is a new investor.

Loopt is yet another company doing something similar to whrrl, using GPS to update your friends’ location on a map. Loopt is backed by Kleiner rival, Sequoia.

As more and more phones add GPS capabilities, the ability to update Whrrl will get easier and easier. In fact, a user could use the service to send out updates of their location to friends without having to touch the device.

The Seattle, WA-based Pelago previously raised $7.4 million in 2006. We wrote about Whrrl in November.

updated

Since its launch in 2006, software from a Seattle startup called Wetpaint has been used to build nearly a million wikis where a company’s customers and fans create the content. That’s pretty impressive, but Wetpaint chief executive Ben Elowitz says some companies weren’t satisfied — it would be even better if they didn’t have to create the wiki on a separate site.

Wetpaint addresses that need with its new release, dubbed Wetpaint Injected, which does exactly what the name says — it injects wiki functionality into any webpage. So rather than creating a separate page for, say, a VentureBeat fan community (hey, it could happen), we could allow our readers to update our stories by adding wiki-style entries to the main page. And that, Elowitz says, improves traffic and search engine optimization to our main site, rather than pulling users to another page. (See screenshot of Wetpaint Injected at the game site IGN, below.)

When we wrote about Wetpaint more than a year ago, we were most impressed with its convenience — it was just really easy to set up a new wiki. The company has carried that approach over to its new product; Elowitz says the new functions can be added by just pasting a short snippet of code to a webpage. At the same time, the user-generated content’s look and format is customizable and should blend in with the rest of the page.

This is a smart move, and should further help Wetpaint stand out from competitors like PBWiki. As more and more sites add features — wikis, comments, polls — that allow them to interact with their readers, it makes sense to integrate those features as directly into the main browsing experience as possible. And the ability to add wiki capabilities to any page with just a few lines of code is totally unique, Elowitz says.

Companies should also be attracted by the fact that the feature is free for up to 100,000 impressions per month, and then charges based on a revenue-sharing model.

Elowitz says Wetpaint’s approach has already started paying off, with 925,000 websites built on the company’s platform and 20 percent growth in recent months. But he also says it’s time for the company to start growing more aggressively, which is why he’s raised a $25 million third round of funding, bringing Wetpaint’s total financing to $40 million. That’s a hefty sum, particularly when you recall that we were already startled by the size of Wetpaint’s $9.5 million second round. But Elowitz says the funding matches the company’s ambitious plans to “wikify” every page on the web.

The round was led by DAG Ventures and an undisclosed investor, with participation from existing backers Accel Partners, Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures.

Update: Kara Swisher reports on yet another investor, Fidelity Investments (perhaps that “undisclosed” lead investor that Wetpaint mentioned?). Fidelity is the same major institutional backer that invested big bucks into Slide. And in the comments below, PBWiki’s Chris Yeh notes that his startup offers a similar feature, but hasn’t emphasized it.

SpikeSource, a startup that helps companies build, test and integrate software, is partnering with Intel to launch the SpikeSource Solutions Factory Platform. For SpikeSource, it’s a big strategy change — instead of partnering with independent software vendors, the startup will now provide its technology to major players like Intel so they can certify products in their ISV networks.

The new platform could catapult SpikeSource into the big leagues. When SpikeSource launches a new product, it normally signs up around 30 ISV customers, says Dominic Sartorio, SpikeSource’s senior director of product management. With the Intel deal, the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup hopes to reach 200 customers in the next few months, then hold a bigger launch and reach out to the full pool of 12,000 ISVs that’s already registered with Intel.

To help SpikeSource meet the increased demand, the company has raised a new round of funding. Intel’s investment branch Intel Capital contributed $10 million, while Kleiner Perkins, Fidelity Ventures, CMEA Ventures and DAG Ventures — who are all prior investors — also contributed undisclosed amounts.

Sartorio says SpikeSource’s platform allows ISVs (namely, companies making software, usually niche software) to assemble, test, package and update their products automatically. It combines the different offerings that SpikeSource has developed since it was founded in 2003, and creates a single package that Intel — and, eventually, other big vendors — can use to give its seal of approval to new software.

Each of the platform’s components (security, inventory, updating, etc.) faces real competition, but Sartorio says SpikeSource is the first company to bring everything together in a commercial product. The only real competitors are do-it-yourself, in-house solutions developed by big tech companies, he says.

The new approach should help software vendors to get their products to market, because the platform makes it easy for them to use Intel’s branding and distribution network. Sartorio hopes to eventually sell the platform to enterprise IT departments and to the developer community as well, although the company is still figuring out the details.

SpikeSource first made a name for itself as an open source company, but the new platform is compatible with proprietary and hybrid software, Sartorio says. At the same time, it still serves open source developers, and parts of the platform are open source too.

The startup has a high-profile chief executive — Kim Polese, who was the original product manager of Java, and who was declared “the web’s 1997 It Girl” by Time Magazine.

Read our previous coverage of the company here.

This new funding should be SpikeSource’s last before it becomes profitable or makes an exit, Sartorio says.

[This article is expanded from a VentureBeat Wire story posted earlier today.]

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• OptiMedica takes in $16M for eye-treatment lasers (release)
• Genome analyzer BioNanomatrix raises $5M (release)
• Heart diagnostic startup Aviir gets another $1.5M (VBLS exclusive)
• Pharmaca, integrative-pharmacy chain, draws $20M (release)
• LifeWatch, cardiac-monitoring device maker, withdraws IPO (IPOhome)
• Jerry DeVries, Steven Whitlock join PTV Sciences as venture partners (VentureWire)

OptiMedica takes in $16M for eye-treatment lasers – OptiMedica, a Santa Clara, Calif., medical-device maker, raised $16 million in a third funding round. Investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Alloy Ventures and DAG Ventures.

The startup makes and sells an eye-treatment laser system called Pascal — the acronym stands for “pattern scan laser” — which is approved for treating of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and other conditions involving the abnormal growth of blood vessels that can leak and obscure vision. The laser works by “photocoagulation,” which simply means it burns and fuses tissue at the point of focus — sealing off blood vessels, for instance, healing tears in the retina or even reattaching a retina that’s come loose.

Genome analyzer BioNanomatrix raises $5M – This item is now a standalone post here.

Heart diagnostic startup Aviir gets another $1.5M – Palo Alto, Calif.-based Aviir, a biotech focused on heart diagnostics, raised an additional $1.5 million as a follow-on to its second funding round, the company’s chief operating officer, Avi Kulkarni, said. The money is an equity investment related to a still-undisclosed partnership with a large pharmaceutical company, he told me.

Aviir is still in stealth mode, as we noted last year when we first wrote about its use of Stanford technology for detection and monitoring of cardiovascular disease. Kulkarni did offer a few additional details, telling me, for instance, that the company’s name is actually an acronym that stands for “atherosclerotic venous inflammation and insulin resistance.”

That, plus the fact that Aviir is working on what Kulkarni said is a “multiple biomarker panel assay” for heart disease, suggests to me that the company plans on measuring the levels of various proteins, probably from blood, in order to get a more precise picture of stressors such as inflammation and insulin resistance that might lead to heart problems. (”Insulin resistance” is an interesting choice, since that’s the cause — or the effect, perhaps — of type 2 diabetes, which is also linked to heart trouble.)

Aviir raised $11.5 million of a planned $25 million round last September, it disclosed in an SEC form now available online (PDF link) via the California Department of Corporations. The remainder of that round will become available when the company hits unspecified milestones.

For a look at the sort of thing Aviir is probably working on, check out this 2007 paper from Physiological Genomics, in which a research team from Stanford and Aviir detail the use of inflammatory proteins known as chemokines to identify patients with atherosclerosis. On the more whimsical side, a self-described friend of the company’s founders describes what he knows about Aviir on his blog, and also posts a odd homemade video “commercial” that suggests the company will be predicting lifetime disease risks for infants.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Oorja Protonics, a Sequoia Capital-backed Silicon Valley company developing an alcohol-based fuel cell technology for several years.

Today, Oorja is finally pulling off the wraps on its first application, a fuel cell for commercial and construction vehicles the company calls “ultra-powerful” in comparison to older technologies.

Oorja’s cell will power the electrical systems of vehicles like the pallet loaders used in large warehouses. The cells can be used in new vehicles, but also for retrofitting older vehicles.

It’s easy to see the benefit of using a fuel cell: Rather than having to stop operation to charge the cell, you just put in more of whatever fuels it — in Oorja’s case, methanol, which is a type of alcohol. Fuel cells burn their contents without moving parts like a combustion engine, giving them added reliability.

For the most part, though, the technology is unproven. Hydrogen fuel cells have been touted for their potential use in automobiles like Honda’s FCX, but you won’t see any hydrogen-powered cars on the roads anytime soon. Using an alcohol-based cell offers less power, but the fuel is much simpler to obtain.

Part of Oorja’s strategy is target the non-automotive vehicle market, because it’s hard to change buying habits and production standards the car market. If it can prove its technology in a low-level application, Oorja should be able to expand into other markets more easily later.

The company has taken just over $20 million to date from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Artis Capital. It’s based in Fremont, Calif.

SearchMe is another search startup that wants to take on Google.

It is a visual search engine, that shows you results in a series of revolving panes, with each pane featuring a search result. In iTunes, this format is used to feature the covers of albums, not search results.

SearchMe also has other potentially useful features. It offers categories to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly. For example, if you type in “labrador puppies,” as seen in the demo video below, you can then additionally click on an icon for puppies to clarify that you’re not looking for information about a province of the Canadian government. If you want a list of SearchMe search results instead of the visual interface, you can drag open the list from the bottom of the screen.

I haven’t had a chance to test it out myself (the site is in private beta, you can sign up on its homepage), but Kara Swisher has a more in-depth look, here. She also notes that Google is experimenting with a similar project in its labs.

Here’s the company’s video demo:

This is the latest search product from the Mountain View company — it has raised $31 million from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Lehman Brothers, to date, so it has some room to experiment. VentureBeat readers may remember it first surfacing under the name Kavam, in early 2006 (our coverage), then launching a search engine for Wiki pages that was underwhelming compared to Google’s ability to search wiki pages (our coverage).

From my outside-the-private-beta perspective, the best thing the company has going for it is the experience of the founding team — which is probably the rationale behind the large amount of funding the company has received over the years. Specifically, chief executive and co-founder Randy Adams (LinkedIn profile here) has already founded and sold a number of successful companies including Emerald City Software, bought by Adobe Systems; the Internet Shopping Network, bought by the Home Shopping Network; Navitel Communications, bought by Spyglass, Inc.; and more. In fact, Sequoia owes him one — he helped introduce Sequoia to Yahoo, which led to the firm’s initial investment in the company. Then he served on Yahoo’s board of directors during the first year of its operation. Some more details here.

Local review site Yelp has raised $15 million from DAG Ventures. The rumor first popped up on Epicenter, last Friday, as a $30 million round at a $200 million valuation, but that valuation hasn’t been confirmed by the company.

This round comes as San Francisco-based Yelp continues to grow. The company launched its site in early 2005, and hit the one million review mark in May last year. It’s accelerating: Since May, it has gained another 1.3 million reviews. Traffic is correspondingly picking up. It had 8.3 million unique visitors in the past 30 days, it claims.

The company started in San Francisco and in its early days spread through word-of-mouth, but it has also featured high in search results when you look for restaurants on Google. It has opened up in other cities, and once a city gets enough active users Yelp will hire a city community manager, who does things like put on events for local Yelpers, as they’re called.

In-person events have been a part of the company’s strategy since it launched, but it doesn’t track how significant these efforts have been in generating traffic.

The company promotes a sense of competition among reviewers, for example to be the first to review a restaurant. If you’re first, you might get featured on the site and in its email newsletter to users.

The funding will be used for more sales team hires, a new office in New York, and presumably more community managers. The company faces competition from InsiderPages, which was bought by local search engine CitySearch a year ago (our coverage), along with other startups, and local information efforts by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Yelp seems to have established itself as the place for reviews: many competitors I’ve seen have Yelp reviews somehow integrated into their own interfaces.

The company previously raised money from Bessemer Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital and angel investor Max Levchin, for a total of $31 million to date.

Sample review screenshot:

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• InSound Medical raises $11M for “invisible” hearing aids (VBLS exclusive)
• Corventis takes in $20M for heart-failure therapy (VBLS exclusive)
• Molecular diagnostics user AssureRx raises $1M (Cincinnati Enquirer)
• Arresto Biosciences, cancer-drug developer, raises funds (VentureWire)
• San Diego’s Obalon raises $4.7M for drug discovery (peHUB)

InSound Medical raises $11M for “invisible” hearing aids – This item is a standalone post here.

Corventis takes in $20M for heart-failure therapy – San Jose, Calif.-based Corventis, a startup working on ways to monitor the vital signs of heart-failure patients, raised $19.9 million in a second funding round, according to Dana Mead, a Corventis board member and VC at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Investors in the round included Kleiner Perkins, Mohr Davidow Ventures and DAG Ventures, Mead said.

Mead declined to further describe Corventis, which remains in stealth mode. The startup, however, is sponsoring a clinical trial (see its registration in the federal clinical-trials database) in which it intends to monitor heart-failure patients with some kind of “multi-sensor” device it calls the MUSE Clinical System.

While MUSE isn’t described in detail, it appears to be a non-invasive monitor of some kind designed to measure various aspects of the heart’s function, presumably including ejection fraction (a measure of how well the heart is pumping blood) and blood pressure within the heart, two measures that generally require doctors to thread sensors through a patient’s veins into the heart itself. The Corventis trial isn’t yet enrolling patients. (UPDATE: In a subsequent email, Mead said the trial has begun enrolling patients.)

Molecular diagnostics user AssureRx raises $1M – AssureRx, a Mason, Ohio, startup working on new molecular diagnostics for personalized medicine, raised more than $1 million in new funding, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Blue Chip Venture Co., CincyTech USA and several individual investors provided the funding.

AssureRx is developing a new test licensed from Children’s Hospital and the Mayo Clinic intended to help doctors determine the best doses of antidepressants and other drugs for individual patients. The Enquirer story didn’t go into much detail, but it sounds as though the company may be measuring variation in genes that influence how quickly the body breaks down, or metabolizes, drugs, such as cytochrome P450.

UPDATE: Belatedly — as in a full week later — AssureRx put out this release on the funding. The only additional news seems to be that the startup’s tests look at several genes, not just one.

Arresto Biosciences, cancer-drug developer, raises funds – Arresto BioSciences, a Palo Alto, Calif., biotech developing a new class of cancer drugs, has raised an undisclosed sum in two funding rounds since last May, VentureWire reports. Investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and HealthCare Ventures.

Arresto is developing drugs that attack the “extracellular matrix,” a tissue layer that provides structural support to cells. Under certain conditions, changes in the extracellular matrix appear to play a role in the development of cancer, as well as “fibrotic” disease such as cirrhosis and pulmonary fibrosis.

San Diego’s Obalon raises $4.7M for drug discovery – Obalon, a stealthy San Diego drug developer, raised $4.7 million of an anticipated $7.7 million first funding round, peHUB reports. Investors included Domain Associates, Okapi Ventures and Phagia Technology.