FirstRain, a service that scrapes the web to deliver relevant research to investors, has brought in $7.3 million of an anticipated $8.8 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Mateo, Calif., the company has raised $20.9 million to date and is backed by Oak Investment Partners, DiamondHead Ventures and Ampersand Ventures.

Companies: Ampersand Ventures, Diamondhead Ventures, Firstrain, Oak INvestment Partners

TellaPal, a new social network and recommendation engine in one, has raised $1.6 million of a targeted $5 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Francisco, the startup allows users to write recommendations for products or services, and then share their comments virally via instant message, e-mail, blogs and social networking sites (like Facebook, hi5, MaySpace) all at once. TellaPal allows users to include special offers with their recommendations, so their personal networks can benefit from the service. At the same time, recommenders can earn rewards for evangelizing for various products and services.

TellaPal previously raised $750 million in a seed round in April 2009. The company is backed by a handful of angel investors, including Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg, co-founders of social marketing agency Reprise Media.

Companies: TellaPal

People: Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg

Updated

Dalton Caldwell, co-founder and former chief executive of music startup Imeem, appears to be working on a new company called Mixed Media Labs. And he has raised $370,000 of a targeted $600,000 in debt financing to get started, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Despite getting off to a promising start, Imeem struggled to make its business work, and was acquired and shut down by MySpace last year. Most of its staff was laid off, while Caldwell and other executives were kept on only as consultants to help with the transition. So it’s not surprising that Caldwell is moving on to another startup. The filing also lists Imeem’s former chief operating officer Ali Aydar as a director at the new company.

I haven’t been able to find any information about Mixed Media Labs online. There’s a web site, but it’s completely blank. Unfortunately, we don’t have any personal contact info for Caldwell, so I had to resort to Twitter to try to reach him. I’ll update this post if I hear back.

UpdateCaldwell emailed me: “I am not currently in a position to talk about my new company.”

Companies: Mixed Media Labs

People: Ali Aydar, Dalton Caldwell

ServerEngines, maker of chips used for various enterprise applications, including data storage, has brought in $2.2 million in a new round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., the stealthy startup makes products to better manage servers and multimedia as well.

Companies: ServerEngines

eXo, provider of services that accelerate Java web sites and applications in cloud environments, has brought in $6 million in a first round of funding. Based in San Francisco, Calif., the company is backed by Auriga Partners and XAnge Capital. It plans to use the new financing to expand its sales and marketing operations in North America. It already has a strong-presence in France.

Companies: Auriga Partners, eXo, XAnge Capital

As the Internet is getting faster, with everything coming and going in real-time, advertising is playing catch-up. DataXu (said like “data zoo”), an advertising startup that optimizes ads in real time, today announced $11 million in funding to continue doing just that.

DataXu’s mission is to optimize the placement of ads on the Web, in real time. Its algorithm considers more than 100 factors for every single impression an ad gets, from time of day to context, and from buyer intent to ideal ad size. By selling individually optimized impressions, DataXu thinks it can create a higher return on investment for advertisers.

Whether advertisers are looking for buys, clicks, or some other action, DataXu optimizes ad placements for them. Companies provide information to DataXu to inform how DataXu places their ad initially, but the longer the ad runs, the more information DataXu gets to operate. If an ad for your shampoo gets more clicks on a women’s blog in mid-afternoon on a Sunday, DataXu starts to push your ad to similar sites in a similar way.

Pricing is similarly fluid: as an ad space becomes more valuable to you, you pay more for it. The flip side, of course, is that advertisers are no longer overpaying for the ads that bring no return, because DataXu filters those out. DataXu also provides reports for advertisers of the factors that most influenced the performance of their ad, which is potentially invaluable information for companies looking to continue to advertise on various media.

DataXu works with the biggest advertising platforms –- Google and Yahoo –- as well as a number of other providers. That means companies that already use one or more ad networks don’t have to switch, but can just plug DataXu into their existing stream. Other advertising startups have followed a similar model, like Clickable, but DataXu’s goal is more robust, working across the entire Web rather than just in search results.

The trouble with advertising, whether online or elsewhere, is that the effect is so hard to measure -– you spend millions to get a Super Bowl ad, and who knows if it worked or not? DataXu, newly flush with cash, is definitely trying to find out.

DataXu is based in Boston, MA, and launched at TechCrunch50 in 2009. The new round was led by Menlo Ventures.

Companies: Dataxu, Menlo Ventures

Chip maker Tilera, whose multicore products have as many as 100 computing “brains” on one chip, today announced it’s closed a $25 million third round of financing.

New investors in this latest, oversubscribed, round are communications chip maker Broadcom, contract manufacturer Quanta Computer and Japan-based NTT Financing Corp. This brings the total amount of venture capital in the six year old, San Jose, Calif.-based company to $64 million.

Tilera’s TILE family of products includes the TILE64 and TILEPro lines. The TILE-Gx line, due out later this year, is the world’s first 100-core processor, the company said. Tilera’s processors are based on its iMesh architecture that scales to hundreds of RISC-based cores on a single chip.

When we wrote about the introduction of the TILE-Gx last fall, we noted that the new chip will have 10 times the performance per watt consumed as Intel’s fastest Nehalem-class server microprocessors. Since it’s difficult for programmers to write software that can keep all the cores busy, the current Intel chips max out at eight cores and many computer scientists say core efficiency maxes out at 32.

But Tilera has come up with a unique programming model with tools that make the process of creating software to run on Tilera’s chips much easier, such as an ANSI C/C++ compiler, GNU tools and the open source Eclipse integrated development environment.

The TILE 64 and TILE Pro products are shipping to customers in the networking, wireless infrastructure, communications and cloud computing markets.

Tilera also announced today that Nariman Yousefi, senior vice president of infrastructure technologies at Broadcom, will take a seat on Tilera’s board.

Tilera said it’ll invest the proceeds of this final VC round into broadening its product portfolio and for the expansion of sales activities.

“We have grown revenues, design wins, and market momentum in one of the toughest years the industry has seen,” said Omid Tahernia, CEO of Tilera, in a prepared statement. “The closure of this investment round is another sign of Tilera’s growing success.”

Companies: Tilera

Citysearch, a directory of local stores and services, today announced a strategic partnership and investment in OrangeSoda, an online search marketing service, to offer customers a more complete local online advertising service called CityGrid Complete.

Citysearch, a property of web giant IAC, recently launched CityGrid, a network of local business listings and advertising available through a set of APIs that can be used on websites or mobile devices. The network includes 15 million local business and 500 thousand paying advertisers reaching 140 million unique visitors, according to the company’s announcement.

The new CityGrid Complete takes the service to the next level by offering local businesses the ability to develop pay-per-click advertising, drive search engine optimization from major search engines, and access to an analytics dashboard for tracking.

Popular local listings site Yelp offers a similar set of APIs for enhancing websites and mobile devices though it hasn’t called on a special marketing firm to help its customers with search engine optimization marketing. MerchantCircle also has a similar network of nearly 15 million local businesses. Its business model is slightly different as it creates profiles for any business it can find and then gives them the option to pay to control it. The company signed its one millionth customer in January.

Citysearch also announced it has invested an undisclosed amount into OrangeSoda. OrangeSoda, launched in 2006, specializes in search engine optimization for small businesses and large companies local outlets, including Remax and Jiffy Lube. In 2008, the company secured a first round of funding for $5 million.

Companies: Citysearch, OrangeSoda

Posterous, a company that wants to make it super-easy for anyone to publish their own blog, has raised $4.4 million in its first round of institutional funding.

The San Francisco company’s big selling point is its simplicity — just send an email with the title, text, and media that you want to post@posterous.com, and Posterous handles everything else. If it’s your first time using the site, Posterous even creates your blog for you. Its closest competitor is Tumblr, but Posterous has found an audience of its own, and told TechCrunch it now has 12 million unique monthly visitors.

The funding was led by Redpoint Ventures, where Posterous already had a connection, since Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj already backed the company as an angel investor. Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital, Brian Pokorny, Aydin Senkut, and XG Ventures also participated in the funding. (Senkut is also an investor in VentureBeat.)

Posterous has now raised about $5.1 million in funding. It was incubated by Y Combinator, and in fact Y Combinator runs a blog on Posterous.

Companies: Posterous, Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures

People: Satish Dharmaraj

Google announced today that it’s acquiring DocVerse, a startup that helps users collaborate in Microsoft Office.

This confirms a report from TechCrunch back in December that acquisition talks were underway, with the deal price of $25 million. A source also told the Wall Street Journal today that Google has agreed to pay $25 million.

When the rumor first surfaced, Google executives were talking up 2010 as the year new features will help Google Docs become a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, so a DocVerse acquisition seemed to fit into that strategy. In the announcement, Google Apps Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle said the deal should help Google Docs integrate with Office and perhaps other desktop software:

We recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.
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For example, we recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that you have on your computer, not just the ones you create online. Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: We have acquired DocVerse.

DocVerse’s co-founders previously worked as managers for Microsoft’s collaboration service Sharepoint. The San Francisco company raised $1.3 million from Baseline Ventures, Michael Dearing and undisclosed angel investors.

Companies: DocVerse, Google