More than ever before, venture capitalists are digging in. To stay competitive and top-of-mind, VC’s are no longer loaning their advice and their capital, but actual “core” services that portfolio companies need. This shift isn’t necessarily new. For example, top VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Greylock play a hands-on role in helping recruit talent. Recently, we’ve seen firms roll up their sleeves for another core competency: public relations.

More often, I’ll be pitched on a story on a startup by the in-house PR rep for an investment firm that has invested in the said startup. Traditionally, either the startup or an outside PR agency tends to do the outreach when it comes to launches, trend pieces, financings or other news items. And the rise in pitches from the VC firms themselves (as opposed to the startups) got me thinking about the evolution of the role of the VC, specifically in the context of PR. But in the past year or so, we’ve seen a rise in the addition of top PR and communications talent to these firms, specifically to help work with portfolio companies on PR strategy.

One of the first major hires in the industry was the addition of PR honcho Margit Wennmachers, co-founder of one of the largest technology and media PR firms OutCast Communications, to Andreessen Horowitz as a partner. At the time, Marc Andreessen told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher that Wennmachers’ brand building and PR experience would be a valuable asset to the firm and its portfolio. Mind you, Andreessen Horowitz wisely realized only a year after launching the firm that building a VC powerhouse would be more than just writing checks, but also a consultancy of sorts.

David Krane, Google’s former Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, and one the company’s first PR reps back when it was just a startup, wears two hats at Google Ventures, where he is now a partner. He invests in startups but also helps Google Ventures portfolio companies with PR strategy as well.

in April 2010, Sand Hill VC Kleiner Perkins nabbed former head of communications for Hulu (and previous PR/marketing employee at Amazon and Microsoft) Christina Lee to head marketing and PR for the firm. Last fall, PR guru Kiersten Hollars (formerly of Outcast, Yahoo, Digg, and AOL) joined Wennmachers’ team at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on scaling the marketing and PR efforts for the then 80 companies in the firm’s portfolio. And most recently we saw Google senior manager in PR Andrew Kovacs jump to Sequoia to help the firm’s marketing partner, Mark Dempster with PR and communications duties for the firm’s companies in the U.S. and Israel.

Clearly some of the brightest and most well-regarded talent in the technology PR industry are no longer just at agencies or in-house. As Emily Mendell, VP of communications for the National Venture Capital Association, tells me, the VC market is extremely competitive for deal flow. “There are a lot of firms chasing for deals in the hottest, early stage startups, and PR representation and communications strategy is just another service these firms can offer while at the negotiating table,” she says.

And technology PR is not an easy task—to do the job well, it requires a technical understanding of the product and the ability to digest and relay this information in a communicable way. Startups realize that having this on-hand at their investment firm is an asset to them, Mendell explains.

And many of the pr execs mentioned above are solely focused on helping portfolio companies as opposed to doing in-house communications for the firms themselves. Lee tells me that part of the trend of more VC firms bringing on PR talent is a reflection of how the role of communications is changing in the tech industry in general.

“Now smart entrepreneurs understand the value in being transparent with consumers, and the role of communications has risen to a strategic level,” she says. “PR is expected to play a big part in building brands and more and more startups are thinking about PR and branding at an earlier stage.”

Kleiner, specifically, is taking a holistic approach to company building, and part of this is providing communications and PR help to startups and companies, she explains.

Of course, there are a range of different ways which VC PR reps can help entrepreneurs and companies from simple tasks such as introductions to technology journalists to actually spearheading PR efforts for a product launch, to coaching companies on branding and messaging strategy to drafting press releases.

Another industry source tells me that while some firms are bringing on PR talent for the use of portfolio companies, others are trying to use PR to boost their own images, and promote their VCs to the press.

One factor that I believe is pushing the trend of building reps and even mini-agencies in-house is the rise in seed stage investing by these VC firms and the competitive market at this level. There are no shortage of VCs and angels that are willing to write checks at the seed level nowadays. Many firms can’t just get deal flow based on reputation alone. But the VC firms ability to be a ‘full-service’ agency can be a factor entrepreneurs consider when sitting down at the table. This is especially important for early-stage companies, who may not have the kind of money to hire a top-tier PR firm to handle PR, says one industry insider.

As mentioned above, part of this full-service package also includes recruiting, which is a trend that has been happening for some time now. Kleiner Perkins partner Juliet de Baubigny has been helping portfolio companies with human capital and recruiting for the past ten years. Greylock recently created a dedicated talent team to help its portfolio companies recruit effectively. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia are also aggressively working to help startups network and recruit talent.

Interestingly, this ‘full service’ model has been offered by incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars and 500 Startups though both in-house talent as well as through mentorship. While it’s a stretch to call the VC firms mentioned above incubators, it’s certainly interesting to see the overall functionality of these large firms evolve with the current state of investing.

As firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others create these full-service VC funds that not only dole out cash but come with in-house PR agencies, marketing resource and talent recruiter, there’s no doubt that this trend will filter down to smaller firms and funds.

Mu Sigma, a startup that provides ‘decision sciences’ and analytics services to help companies make business decisions based on ‘big data’, has secured $25 million in Series C financing from Sequoia Capital.

Mu Sigma in a press statement says it currently employs some 1,200 analysts (and growing), mostly based in India, in an effort to build the world’s “largest applied math lab”.

Shailendra Singh, Managing Director at Sequoia, posits that Mu Sigma offers ‘the most impressive analytics service’ of any company the investment firm has met with over the years.

Headquartered in Chicago, Mu Sigma raised its first institutional venture money from FTV Capital back in 2008.

Early on in the conversation, Arrington asked Botha if Sequoia partners have a lot of internal pressure to perform, or if the firm is patient with investments. Botha says that the firm is indeed patient, but that there’s an internal motto: “you’re only as good as your next investment”, and that partners are always staying hungry.

Next, the conversation turned toward the broad array of companies that Botha is involved in — he’s on the board of Square, Tumblr, Evernote, Meebo, Eventbrite, Unity and other consumer-facing companies. But he’s also involved in bioinformatics companies like Gene Security Network (GSN) and AssureRx.

GSN helps patients who are going through in-vitro fertilization select the healthiest possible embryo they can — one cell is removed from the embryo and then compared to the genes of the parents to look for chromosomal defects and disease (if this sounds familiar, they do something vaguely similar in GATTACA).

AssureRX involves the drugs that are used to treat psychiatric illness. There are around two dozen drugs commonly used to treat mental illness, and two patients with identical conditions can react very differently to drugs depending on their genetic profile. AssureRX looks to help doctors figure out which drugs will work best for which patients.

Obviously both companies are pretty different from, say, Tumblr, but Botha says he’ll continue to make investments in both bioinformatics and consumer-facing companies.

Asked about the startup valuations and whether or not there’s a bubble, Botha said that he is indeed worried about valuations, as they have definitely crept up. But Sequoia isn’t going to stop making investments — in 1999, when the industry was completely ridiculous, Sequoia made investments in Google and Paypal, which have obviously worked out for them.

Regarding Sequoia’s R.I.P. Good Times slide-deck that leaked just as the recession started in 2008, Botha says that he doesn’t think Sequoia was being overly alarmist. Many of Sequoia’s portfolio companies trimmed some fat, and a lot of companies that could have gone by the wayside because of bad timing managed to tough it out. Sometimes companies raise money they don’t need early because they don’t know what the market will look like down the line — this was sort of the inverse.

The conversation then turned Sequoia’s investment strategy. Botha called out a few opportunities that they missed, including Twitter and Zynga. Asked if it’s a bigger problem to miss a winner versus investing in too many losers, he said that it’s by far the former. Because of the way the model works, returns are very asymmetric — a failed company will lose 1x, but a home run could get 50x or 100x upside. He quoted fellow Sequoia parter Doug Leone: “When it doubt, lean forward”.

And finally, a question that many entrepreneurs ask themselves: how does one go about contacting a Sequoia partner? Botha says that the partners actually read the emails that people send, and that while there is a lot of noise, they do read them. He says that Sequoia funded a company that’s now earning $200M in revenue and is planning an IPO — and that the initial pitch was from a random email to a partner.

Sequoia Capital has invested ‘multiple millions of dollars’ in Milanoo.com, a China-based online retailer and wholesaler with a “passion for fashion”.

The proceeds of the financing rounds will be used to strengthen Milanoo’s product supply system, optimize its online shopping platform, allow it to lower its prices and to hire more people.

Launched in July of 2008, Milanoo.com says it has managed to consecutively increase its revenue by 600 percent each year that the company has been in business.

Currently, the ecommerce company serves customers with fashion apparel and related products in over 180 countries around the world, in seven languages (including English, Spanish and French).

U.S. venture capital firms raised more money last quarter than in any period since 2001. The total raised for new funds was $7.7 billion, according to Dow Jones LP Source. The capital going into VC funds was up 97 percent from a year ago, when they raised $3.9 billion. (Venture capital funds benefited from an overall influx of money into U.S. private equity funds overall, which attracted a total of $31.6 billion in the quarter, up from $13.5 billion a year ago).

Institutional investors and limited partners are putting more money into ventre capital, but are concentrating their bets in fewer, higher-quality funds. The money from limited partners, however, was not spread willy-nilly. Only 25 funds tracked by Dow Jones were able to raise money, the smallest number since 2003.

A few, well-known firms were able to raise substantial amounts. Bessemer closed a $1.6 billion fund, Sequoia closed a $1.3 billion fund, and Greylock added a $1 billion fund.

Early-stage funds attracted the most new capital, accounting for $3.9 billion of the total, up from $736 million a year ago. Later-stage funds collected only $1.5 billion, and multi-stage funds raised $2.3 billion.

European VC funds didn’t do so well, raising only $653 million across five funds, down from $1.3 billion a year ago across 13 funds.

Messaging apps that let you use your smartphone to text or chat with your friends or even large groups of people, often free of charge, are red hot. We’ve heard from a reliable source that one of the companies making waves in the space, WhatsApp, has just secured $8 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, and possibly other investors.

WhatsApp enables users of iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia Symbian60 devices to exchange text messages, images, audio and even video messages with one another.

I have no idea how many users or downloads WhatsApp has attracted to date, as the company prefers to keep a low profile, but I’ve heard the name of the app drop in several conversations I’ve had about the mobile messaging space.

I was actually quite surprised to find that they weren’t funded yet, especially with the track record of their co-founders, who established the company back in 2009.

WhatsApp was founded by Jan Koum, who formerly managed the Platform Operations team responsible for the critical internal pieces of Yahoo’s infrastructure, and Yahoo’s former VP of Engineering Brian Acton.

Another former Yahoo exec, the company’s ex-Senior Engineering Manager Charles Kung describes himself as an investor and advisor to the company on LinkedIn.

Some signs that the app has already gotten some traction on the market: its iPhone app has received 28,040 ratings and hundreds of reviews on iTunes, while its Blackberry app has garnered 4,050 reviews.

Sequoia recently participated in a $10 million round of funding for Bubble Motion, which offers a popular Twitter-like voice blogging service in India, Japan, and Indonesia, and has also invested in mobile communications company Clickatell.

Other developers of similar mobile messaging apps have received funding in the past: Kik Interactive raised $8 million from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures, while GroupMe secured over $11 million in funding from investors like Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Betaworks and SV Angel, and textPlus raised $15 million from GRP Partners, Matrix, and Kleiner Perkins.

Other contenders include Fast Society, which has raised $275,000 in seed financing from ENIAC Ventures and Quest Venture Partners, and GroupFlier, which has secured $500,000 in seed funding from Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

Last month, another group messaging service named Beluga was acquired by Facebook.

And let’s not forget that Google has a group texting app as well, called Disco.

In other words, this space is heating up fast, and investors are keen to ride the wave. I haven’t yet confirmed the Sequoia financing deal with WhatsApp, I should note, as I’ve been unable to reach them all day, although our sources say the deal is done and has already been communicated to WhatsApp employees.

We’ll update if and when we get confirmation.

People. Colors. Apps. Cats. Bacon. Organic. Bieber. Mobile. Social. Local. Pivot.

That’s the key slide in a faux-deck making the rounds this morning on the web. The subject of the ridicule? Color, the just-launched social sharing mobile app. Why such animosity towards a new player in a crowded space? Well, there are 41 million reasons.

The most fascinating aspect about Color right now isn’t the product at all, it’s the intense backlash occurring on Twitter and the tech blogosphere. And what’s fascinating about the backlash is that the vast majority of it also has nothing to do with the product itself. Instead, it’s about the $41 million in funding that Color raised pre-launch. (For some context, that’s more than the price Yahoo paid for Flickr in 2005.) The general tone of the backlash seems to range from the all-too-predictable “BUBBLE!” to the oddly spiteful “how dare they”. Again, fascinating.

But let’s take a step back for a moment.

Currently, everyone is trying to figure out why and how Color could raise so much money before they even launched. This morning, Business Insider suggested that it was simply one of the VC firms, Bain Capital, paying a crazy amount of money to get their name alongside Sequoia in the deal. Interesting theory. But completely bogus. The truth is that it is Sequoia that put in the vast majority of the money — $25 million of the $41 million to be exact (compared to Bain’s $9 million). Venture Capital Dispatch has the full details on the breakdown.

Also in that report is quite a bit of insight as to why the round ballooned to $41 million — and that’s exactly what happened, it ballooned. Color was all set to take $14 million, Ty McMahan reports. That’s still a ton of money for a service with zero users, but much more reasonable than the reverse of the number. But then Sequoia caught wind of what Color was doing and wanted in. And when Sequoia wants in, they tend to get in. And they apparently wanted in bad.

“They told us that every 10 years or so a company and a marketplace and an opportunity come together that’s transformative. They told us, ‘Not since Google have we seen this.’,” McMahan quotes Color co-founder Bill Nguyen as saying. Whether that sounds like total BS to you or not, Sequoia clearly put their money where their mouths are. They doubled the $12.5 million investment they made in Google.

So are they insane?

Well, they’re making a bet. It’s a very big bet, but it’s not as insane of a bet as it may seem on the surface.

Sequoia saw the product and talked to the founders about their vision for it. They also saw Nguyen, a founder who just about everyone you ask will tell you is a genius with excellent foresight. And they saw the rest of the founding team and the extended team, most of which are ex-Apple or ex-Google. As Mathew Ingram implies on GigaOm this morning, it’s very likely that the team alone is worth $41 million to a would-be acquirer (though the true valuation has to be north of $100 million now). Hell, Google offered to buy Path for over $100 million just a few months post-launch for that very reason.

But that’s just one standpoint, and undoubtedly not the exit Sequoia would be looking for here. Instead, they seem to see the concept and technology behind Color as the future of social networking. It’s the biggest step yet towards the next phase of the web, a location-based phase that creates implicit social graphs and blurs the line of online and offline.

On paper, Twitter, and blogs, that again may sound like total BS. A $41 million sham. But think about the larger concept for a second. It’s an idea that could add a truly new layer to the world — and augment reality in a meaningful way. Isn’t that an idea worth betting on?

It may sound creepy now, or stupid. But remember, so did Twitter, Facebook, and just about every other big idea that has come around in the Internet age. A game-changing idea, by its nature, can’t be so obvious. Or else someone would have done it already.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Color will succeed. In fact, such big ideas are more prone to failure. But that’s also why the $41 million is so important. Most startups raise a small amount of money, enough to get off the ground, first. Then they go back for more. And then more. And so on — if they can. Sequoia just gave Color two years worth of time not to have to worry about that. They can simply focus on the product. Again, a bet, but a very entrepreneur-friendly concept (albeit one for a massive stake in the company). Two things seem certain: Color has at least two years to prove themselves and Sequoia felt like they were going to invest down the road anyway.

Scoble’s arguing that first impressions are all that matter and that they’ve already failed at that. But that’s myopic in the bigger picture concept. He’s talking about a first impression that a few thousand people saw yesterday and that a few thousand more will see today and so on. Color will not be a success without tens of millions of users. And the entire concept won’t be without hundreds of millions of users.

At the same time, Color does have a massive chicken-and-egg problem. It’s a service that is only useful when a lot of people around you are using it. If they’re not, it’s absolutely pointless (as I learned alongside most people last night). In that regard, I do agree that Color somewhat flubbed their launch opportunity — they really should have launched this thing at SXSW, it would have been so natural (instead I found myself using Beluga with friends for similar photo-sharing in packs).

But another Scoble point speaks to why it may not matter: the App Store. Getting featured on the App Store is vital for an app’s viral spread — much more so than being featured on any blog. If any app has the right connections to get App Store love, it’s Color. Again, not saying that will ultimately make it a success — the app still has to be good and the execution flawless here — but it’s why the first impression may not matter so much.

So is the appearance of Color and its massive funding proof of Bubble 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever bubble pundits have us in now? In some sense, maybe. But in the truly meaningful sense, no.

This is a company working on a big idea that got a large amount of funding to work on that big idea uninterrupted for a couple of years. Again, it’s a bet — and a big one — but all investments are. Sequoia has the money to make such a bet. And if it fails, it’s on them. Your parents are not going to lose their house because Color got $41 million in funding and blew it. Instead, if that happens, the Sequoia partners may lose a golf lesson. But probably not.

Having said that, there is something to be said for this putting pressure on both the startup community and the investor community. Prices are rising. Color can now afford many more top-tier developers than startup X can. That can be troubling and it will pressure others to raise more money too. The overall affect of that may well end up not being good for the ecosystem short term. But again, big picture. This will succeed or it will fail. And investments will adjust accordingly — in either direction.

But here’s the most disturbing thing about this story behind the story of Color: the underpinnings of much of the investment-related backlash seem to hinge on the hope that this will fail. Shouldn’t we be rooting for it to succeed? Ultimately, wouldn’t that be better for everyone across the board? The startups, the investors, and the users?

Of course. But these days everyone wants to be the first one to call a failure a failure. Why? Well, it’s a lot easier than predicting a winner.

The bottom line is that we’re not even one day into the story of Color. And $41 million doesn’t ultimately mean anything other than Sequoia is a believer. Big time.

The real story will be what magic Color can make with that money. It’s in the way that you use it.

More: The Color Of Envy And Rooting Against Goliath

Kvamme joined Sequoia in 1999 and led early investments in LinkedIn, MarkLogic, Funny or Die, StrongMail and CastIron Systems (acquired by IBM). Prior to joining Sequoia he was CEO of advertising agency CKS Group.

Kvamme says he has big ideas about driving economic growth, noting that there aren’t a lot of people in government today with good business acumen. “Decisions are made with billions of dollars that lead to unsustainable solutions,” he said by phone yesterday. “I want to get Ohio back on track and drive people and businesses to the state.”

He says he has a specific blueprint for change that he’ll be sharing in the next few weeks. Sequoia is naming him their first “Special Limited Partner” and he will continue in a limited role with the firm.

Kvamme was also an early champion of UJAM, which placed second in the TechCrunch Disrupt: New York startup battlefield competition.

While much of Silicon Valley spent the last two weeks skiing or otherwise reveling in all that money made this year from acquisitions, partial liquidations and secondary deals, Square founder Jack Dorsey was apparently hard at work. TechCrunch has learned that Square is in the process of closing a large round of funding. The company is being valued, we hear from multiple sources, at somewhere close to $200 million.

We don’t have confirmation on who did it, but we hear that Sequoia Capital was in the mix to lead this round, along with previous investor Khosla Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Our sources say Sequoia ended up on top and will lead the round.

A strategic investor is also likely to invest, sources say. Someone like Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.

Sequoia would be a seemingly strange fit. It’s not a firm known for doing later stage deals or for paying up on valuations. But lately the firm has deviated from that playbook with deals like Evernote and Tumblr.

We hear Square’s funding was a competitive round, but have also heard that several of the top firms we expected to be in the running had some concerns about the steep valuation relative to Square’s traction, despite admiration for Dorsey and the team. Payment companies are hard to build, with fraudsters trying to exploit it and big competitors trying to run you out of the market. Square has become a media darling and has attracted an enviable team — including Keith Rabois who went through all this with PayPal– but market traction has been more elusive. It could still be a company that is so transformative it moves America’s GDP as Newsweek breathlessly anticipated a year ago, but there’s a lot of work to do first.

Still, Square is processing millions of dollars a week in transactions, and we hear they’re closing in on a million dollars a day.

This has the earmarks of one of those deal that VCs look back on in ten years and say “I told you so!”– we just don’t which side of the debate will have the bragging rights.

iYogi, an independent remote consumer tech support company based in India and New York, this morning announced that is has secured $30 million in a fresh round of financing, led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors Canaan, SVB Capital Partners, SAP Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson participating.

The round comes less than a year after investors injected $15 million into the company – iYogo has raised a total of $57.6 million to date.

iYogi says it plans to use the proceeds to expand its on-demand remote tech support services outside the existing consumer market and the Windows OS platform, and to address the growing need for supporting mobile consumer devices.

iYogi’s planned roll-out to new geographies include launching its tech support services in Europe, the Middle East and India, in addition to its existing services in North America, Canada, the UK and Australia.

The company says it has solved more than 2 million tech problems for consumers since its inception – it claims 300 percent growth for its premium annual subscription service in the past 12 months alone. To support its growth, iYogi this year increased its force of “Global Tech Experts” from 1,200 to more than 5,000, across eight new centers in multiple geographies.

Next up, an IPO in the United States?

One route was to comb the earth for mutated humans and exploit their gift, but Taykey took the other route – algorithms. Watch out, Agatha.

Taykey spent the first two years of its life developing algorithms that crunch extraordinary amounts of user-stream data, to determine trends, before they happen. The company is founded by Israeli intelligence corps graduates so rest assured that there’s true trending analysis and prediction technology inside. Also, Sequoia’s investment implies to me a diligence process that looked beyond vaporware and buzzwords and found real IP instead.

Before Taykey starts analyzing and predicting, it must first collect user-generated-data from across the web. It does this by monitoring real-time stream sources like Twitter’s and MySpace’s data hoses, diggs, items publicly posted, liked and shared on Facebook, location data through check-ins, what users are watching on YouTube, and Wikipedia updates. It also keeps tabs on what it deems to be ‘leading blogs,’ and news sources to see what’s new and what people are commenting about. All of this is fully automated and happens continuously, in realtime.

At this point a ‘Privacy’ flag should be popping-up in your head. In this respect it’s important to note that Taykey neither ‘cookies’ users, nor does it save any personal data. It says it cares exclusively for the public data, with no significance as to which individual contributed what.

Here’s how Taykey forecasts a trend before it actually happens: data such as videos being posted on YouTube, Likes and Tweets about something called ‘Susan Boyle,’ all flow into Taykey. Within a matter of minutes, their algorithms determine that there’s something new going on—an object—called ‘Susan Boyle”.

Taykey then analyzes and employs mathematical matching history upon the volume, the destinations and the duration between each engagement with this new object. Doing so allows it to tell just how big this ‘Susan Boyle’ trend will become, which demographics are and will be engaging with it, and that it’s related, in this case, to music.

And this is where the commercial side of things become really interesting. Taykey includes granularity for micro-trend forecasting. Let’s say you’re a fashion retailer and want to target 16 year olds. Taykey knows that right now this demographic is talking about Justin Bieber so it would place a first set of ads along side such mentions in order to create a psychological association.

However, Taykey already knows that, in five hours, users in this very same demographic will be talking about Lady Gaga and it would then show a second set of ads next to Lady Gaga mentions. Think about this for a moment: Taykey basically claims to be aware of what the user will be talking about before the user does.

Taykey’s reporting includes benchmarking, enabling advertisers to constantly quantify the lift it provides by running a trend-based ad vs. an “old-fashioned” demographics-based ad.

From a business model stand point, Taykey is basically a Demand Side Platform (DSP). When it recognizes a trend, it goes out and buys the relevant audience for the relevant amount of time. It then charges advertisers a premium CPM to deliver the ads, and uses arbitrage to maximize its cut.

All this talk about forecasting makes me wonder… Can Taykey forecast the future success of its own technology? Might want to call back Agatha for that.

Memory enhancement service Evernote is loved by many, including, it appears, venture capitalists. This morning, the startup is announcing that it has raised its third institutional round of funding, and it’s a whopper:

Sequoia Capital and previous backers are injecting $20 million into the company – that’s on top of the $25.5 million the company raised earlier.

Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia, will join the Evernote board as an observer.

Evernote, which is billed as a service that “helps the world remember everything”, says it has attracted close to 5 million users worldwide in less than two and a half years (up from 4 million mid-August 2010).

These users are given the choice of thirteen different desktop, mobile and browser options for capturing things to remember (think meeting notes, wine labels, shopping lists and whatnot).

In a statement, Evernote CEO Phil Libin says users can expect “more of everything” now that the funding round is all done and signed, and that the company will explore new markets and opportunities in addition.

In a blog post, Libin speaks more candidly about the company’s ambitious growth plans, although he declines to go into too many details about Evernote’s roadmap for the future:

We’ll build more features, fix more bugs, add more devices, expand into more countries, and make Evernote indispensable to more types of users (including corporate and educational folk). We’ll take this $20 million, combine it with the more than $9 million that we still have from last year’s “B” round, and put it all back into the product.

According to the chief executive, Evernote has signed up more than 10,000 new users every day in the past two months, released major new updates to most of our clients, added more than a dozen new partners and increased revenue from Premium subscriptions to the point where it can fund all of the startup’s day-to-day operations.

Libin also blogs that Evernote, in time, will grow from a solution that helps you remember everything to the “global platform for human memory” and to become “the trusted, permanent and ubiquitous destination for all of your lifetime memories” – a lofty goal if I’ve ever heard one. Good thing we’re big fans of lofty goals around here.

The full list of investors for Evernote’s $20 million Series C round: Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Troika Dialog and DOCOMO Capital.

Chief executive David Ulevitch (see this SFGate profile for more about the man) tells me there wasn’t really a need for more venture capital – the business has been running profitably for a while now – but that OpenDNS had the chance to be “opportunistic”.

OpenDNS essentially delivers a free, fast, ad-supported DNS resolution service with features like typo correction, phishing protection, and optional content filtering alongside more robust paid offerings for enterprises. Ulevitch tells me the company continues to grow like a weed and that they can definitely use the extra funding to ramp up hiring and product development.

Back in March, OpenDNS announced that over one percent of the world’s Internet users were using its services. Ulevitch says it’s even more now, though he declined to put a specific percentage on it. Either way, OpenDNS is clearly getting big, fast.

The company boasts 32 employees today, and Ulevitch is hoping to grow to 40 by year’s end.

Search engine marketing startup KENSHOO has secured an undisclosed late-stage round of funding from Sequoia’s Growth Fund, the Israeli company announced this morning.

This marks the fourth time Sequoia Capital has injected capital into the company, which claims it is now profitable and has doubled in valuation since 2009.

KENSHOO offers search marketing campaign management and optimization tools (KENSHOO Search and KENSHOO Local are its flagship products) and provide automation solutions for advertisers’ online demand generation needs across channels like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, AOL, Baidu, and Yandex.

It’s a very crowded market, but with lots of room for growth left, particularly geographically speaking.

KENSHOO currently already operates from nine locations on four continents, including a recently added office in Sydney, Australia. Armed with fresh funds from the famous Silicon Valley VC firm, the company will be opening two new offices in Europe (in Paris and an unnamed city in Germany) and also look at way to expand its presence in Asia.

The new funding will also enable KENSHOO to enter into additional domains such as new social media advertising channels, and enable the development of re-targeting technologies.

Exclusive – Snaptu, the company that aims to bring a smartphone-like experience to regular handsets, hit an important milestone today: 10 million registered users.

Coincidentally, the announcement comes at a time when the startup is disclosing that it has secured $6 million in Series B funding in a round led by Carmel Ventures and joined by early backer Sequoia Capital.

As a result of the funding deal, Carmel partner Rina Shainski will join the Snaptu board.

Snaptu is in essence a mobile application company that targets users of regular phones rather than high-end handsets like the iPhone, DROID and Nexus One that get much more attention from the press but boast much smaller numbers in worldwide usage.

The startup’s service incorporates a suite of popular social networking, news, informational and sports applications, including Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and Flickr. The app, which can be downloaded by visiting m.snaptu.com, works on any data-capable phone that can run Java – some 2,500 different phone models according to the Israeli company.

In addition, the company has agreements with mobile operators around the world to ensure compatibility with their “app store for phones that don’t have their own app store”. Just two months ago, the startup struck a deal with AT&T to make sure that the mobile application works nicely with the carrier.

You can see it in action here:

Highly unusually, Mike Moritz, Sequoia Capital Partner and former board member of PayPal, Google and Yahoo, will join the Klarna board. This is significant as this is the first time ever that Moritz has joined a European company’s board.

Clearly Klarna now plans to expand across Europe. The Swedish comany launched in 2005 and plans to create new ways for consumers and Internet stores to reduce fraud and the risk involved in e-commerce and Internet payments.

Using Klarna’s system, consumers pay for products they order online after they have been delivered. This plus a choice of invoice of mobile payment is pushed as one of its USPs, explained here.

A provider of invoice based payments for the e-commerce sector operating in the Nordics, Holland and Germany, it has about 4500 merchants and handled 500 million Euro worth of transactions last year.

Highly unusually, Mike Moritz, Sequoia Capital Partner and former board member of PayPal, Google and Yahoo, will join the Klarna board. This is significant as this is the first time ever that Moritz has joined a European company’s board.

Service-now.com has raised $41M of a $66M funding round, the company disclosed in an SEC filing today. The company was founded by Fred Luddy in 2004 to provide on-demand Enterprise IT services and 2009 has been a boom year for the company. Service-now.com specializes in cloud-based Software as a Service (Saas) IT service management solutions. They cover everything from licensing compliance to the service desk all with a built in analytics system.

On July 21 of this year a company press release detailed some of the company’s accomplishments including: recurring revenue of more than $28 million, 105 percent growth in recurring revenue and a variety of accolades. We’re awaiting word from Service-now.com about the funding. In the meantime we can deduce that some of the funding is probably from Sequoia Capital. Douglas Leone, who may have already been an investor, has become a director and the page of Partner Patrick Grady has been updated to reflect a new involvement with Service-now.com (Nov 30 and now).

Interestingly, the company did not gain much capital from the funding. The SEC filing notes that $37M of the funding was used to repurchase shares of the Service-now.com’s common stock held by its CEO Frederic Luddy and CFO Andrew Chedrick. That is ~90% of the money received in the tranche and over 55% of the total round. From time to time discussion flares up about the idea of founders taking money off the table in funding rounds. It appears investors Sequoia Capital and JMI Equity were okay with it in a big way this time around.

Update: We’ve just received word from CEO Fred Luddy confirming that Sequoia led the investment and that the entire round went towards buying employee stock, not just his own and his CFO’s. He sounds excited about the involvement of Sequoia and Douglas Leone.

Unity combines a development platform with a 3D game engine in a software package that enables high performance 3D interactive content for Web, Mac, PC, iPhone and Nintendo Wii games. The platform is currently used in games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online by ElA, the Quest for R2D2 by LEGO and FusionFall by Cartoon Networks.

Earlier this year, Unity for iPhone was released and the company says more than 325 games are using its engine to power their iPhone games today.

The company has recently moved its home base from Copenhagen, where it has been operating for years, to San Francisco, though its core development team is still in Copenhagen.

Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital, and Greene will be joining the board of directors.

The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and individual investors.

Wall Street Journal blog Digits broke the news earlier this morning, and reported that DailyBooth has secured ‘roughly’ $1 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Betaworks, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

In an interview with DailyBooth co-founders Ryan Amos and Jon Wheatley, we learn that its users use the site like real-time poster child Twitter only with webcam-shot photos, which they say is in line with current trends of more personalization in short-form online communication means. The company says it’s currently receiving about six million monthly unique visitors, a number that’s reportedly still growing by about 35% a month. Talk about swift adoption and viralness.

The two men also went into the demographics a little, saying that the majority of its user base is located in the United Stated and other English-speaking countries such as the UK and Canada (which makes all the sense in the world, since the service isn’t multi-lingual yet). The majority of its users are 15-to-25 years old women, they add.

DailyBooth says it will use the extra cash to help them scale the service first and think about making money later on – currently they’re thinking in the direction of media-based businesses, premium offerings and offline distribution like photo-printing.

In conclusion: DailyBooth is growing fast, has gotten the attention and money from some of the nation’s most prolific and well-connected investors in real-time Internet startups and doesn’t appear to be all too worried with monetizing the service just yet.

Its co-founders were right: it is very much like Twitter.

Update: A couple more angels to announce: Former Googler and current Twitter advisor Chris Sacca and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia.