VentureBeat

Usually, venture capital firms have funds that last for ten years, and so by and large they are immune from the mess on Wall Street. That’s good for technology start-ups, who count on VC firms to back them.

However, large financial institutions, many of them in Wall Street, are among those that provide venture capital firms their money. And if those investors get hurt, so could their commitments to the venture firms.

Take an extreme case, FTVentures. Founded in 1998, FTVentures is a venture capital firm that invests solely into technologies that serve the financial industry.

But it also relies on 40 banks and pension funds to supply its entire capital (see partial list here).

In April, we reported how the firm, with offices in San Francisco and New York, finished raising a fresh $512 million in new funds from those financial investors. However, those funds weren’t deposited immediately into FTVentures’ accounts. The funds typically remain with the investors until FTVentures calls down the money, which means the funds may be evaporating in many cases as banks like Lehman Brothers and WaMu go under.

FT has now got to be sweating pretty badly, because among its investors are not only WaMu and Lehman, but other failed or struggling institutions, such as AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia and National City.

Once a certain number of LPs don’t meet their calls, the fund could be endangered.

I reached the firm’s managing director Karren Gilbert for comment. She said the firm had managed to draw down a “significant” portion of the funds. She said negotiations continue with the troubled banks, and that she’s hopeful that Barclays (which bought parts of Lehman) and JP Morgan (which bought parts of WaMu) might make good on the commitments to FTVentures. She said it was too early to know the exact impact on the firm, but did say that she felt it is diversified enough — with investments from places like the State of New York — that it will do just fine. “We don’t anticipate any defaults,” she said. She provided few other details.

To some degree the fund might be cushioned by those public pension funds brought in for the new fund - but they might be in bad shape too, and unwilling to meet their calls — and quite happy to tip the balance over the line in terms of the fund needing to shut, if it came to that. Also, not all LPs invest the same amount, i.e, one bank might have invested $30 million and another only $5 million - but its hard to know whether this works for or against FT at this stage.

For now, though, the firm insists it’s not in trouble.

As for FTVentures’ own investments into companies, they include OpenSpan, Mu Sigma and Welton Street and many more.

The full list of FTVentures investors is after the jump.

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Coremetrics, one of many analytics companies trying to help website owners understand and market to their visitors, has raised $60 million in a fifth round of financing.

Back in 2006, we said there was some real demand in this area, but probably not enough to support all the companies that were springing up. Coremetrics, however, seems to be getting some real traction, which chief executive Joe Davis attributes to building sophisticated marketing tools — such as search engine bid marketing, email marketing and cross sell applications — on top of the basic analytics features.

Most analytics services, such as Omniture, are really designed to aggregate data about the overall patterns of site behavior. Coremetrics, on the other hand, functions as a “data warehouse” of information about each visitor, and helps you market to those visitors, Davis says. Using Coremetrics’ default package, companies can find out everything they want to know about an individual. If companies want that kind of data from the competition they have to constantly formulate and reformulate their queries — and with Coremetrics’ competition, the data collection starts anew each time, Davis adds. There is also some data that competitors just can’t get, such as a visitor’s behavior across multiple sessions.

For example, Davis says, most analytics companies will tell you that say, 20 percent of your customers put an item in their shopping cart and then abandoned it. Coremetrics can tell you who those 20 percent of people are, by gathering that information from email addresses, for example. Companies can use that information to market similar products to those customers later.

The analytics field has been winnowed down since we last took a close look, Davis says: Omniture is doing well with its paid service, and Google Analytics is popular on the free end, but most other companies — such as Webtrends — are struggling or have disappeared. Davis says Google Analytics actually functions as marketing for Coremetrics, because Google users understand the importance of analytics, but also see its limitations and are often ready to pay for additional tools.

Coremetrics’ customer base grew by 46 percent in 2007, and the company achieved profitability at the end of the year, Davis says. The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup was gearing up for an IPO when the market (and the economy as a whole) started struggling. Now the company is focused on growth instead, and may make some acquisitions in behavioral marketing and multivariate testing to expand its offerings. With the planned expansion, Coremetrics will go back into the red and likely stay there for the rest of the year, Davis says.

The round was led by the 3i Group, a new investor, and existing investors Accel Partners, FTVentures and Highland Capital Partners.