Bill.com has raised $8.5 million from August Capital, DCM, and Emergence Capital recently.  David Hornik of August Capital will be joining the Bill.com Board of Directors as part of this round of funding.  Thus far, Bill.com has raised a total of $17 million.    Bill.com acts as a collaborative online bill payment for businesses.

Bill.com has software that encourages businesses to eliminate filing bill paper documentation.  Large businesses usually have to managers approve large bills and then the finance department has to approve of them.  Bill.com software makes this whole process available online.  Bill.com accepts faxed bills and then they scan them and e-mail it to people that need to approve the documentation.

Bill.com also uses OCR to enable searching for documentation later on.  The base fee of one user for Bill.com is $24.99 and each user after that is $9.99.  Each check payment has a small fee attached for Bill.com as well.  According to Bill.com’s VP of Marketing Jeff Schultz, businesses are saving as much  as 50% in the amount of time taken to pay bills.

René Lacerte founded Bill.com in 2007.  The company presented at the DEMO conference and won the DEMOgod award.  The company was originally called CashView.  Lacerte had previously built a company called PayCycle, which was bought out for $170 million by Intuit last month.

Pixazza.com is service that connects advertising to images.  The company released a press statement about their $5.75 million in funding earlier this week.  Investors include Google Inc., August Capital, and CMEA Capital.

Let’s say that you find a picture of a celebrity, Pixazza places a price tag icon on the apparel that they are wearing.  Putting your mouse over the price tag reveals an ad that tells you where you can find that product online.

Like.com has a very similar feature where you upload a picture and it e-mails you the place that you can find similar products.  Like.com used to be called Riya and it was rumored that Google wanted to acquire that company a couple of years ago.

“Pixazza hopes to do for images what Google’s AdSense did for web pages,” stated Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza. “We are excited about the potential our technology holds for delivering an engaging user experience that creates incremental revenue for web publishers.”

Pixazza’s angel investors consist of Ron Conway, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu.  The company was started by James Everingham.  He brought together a team of people that worked on Netscape in the 1990’s to put together Pixazza.  The company is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Dave Sifry’s blog search platform, Technorati has come a long way since it’s inception.  In 2006, Technorati won numerous awards including the Best Technical Achievement and Best of Show at South by Southwest and was also nominated for a 2006 Webby award.

Sifry launched Technorati in 2002.  The name, Technorati is based on the fusion of the words technology and literati (intellectuals).  Technorati allows users to search for blogs, photos, and other media.  Technorati redesigned their platform in 2007 to gain the attention of bloggers, Internet startups, entrepreneurs, and mainstream media.

In the first three rounds of investment, Technorati brought in $21.6 million.  Today the company announced that they have raised $7.5 million out of a targeted $10 million Series D round.  Montgomery & Co. is working on brokering an acquisition of the blog search engine company.

Previous investors in Technorati include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, August Capital, and Mobius Venture Capital.  In this round, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation participated.

Upon visiting the Technorati homepage I noticed that at the top it says, “what’s percolating in blogs now.”  The frontpage consists of stories in the media that many blogs are commenting on and linking to.  This approach is very similar to Techmeme and Digg.

Technorati has a feature called Authority and Ranks individual blogs.  The more a blog gets linked to, the more authority and ranking it receives. The top 100 blogs on Technorati are available at: http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/.

Technorati will be making an official announcement next week about the funding and will be announcing a business strategy initiative.  Look for additional Technorati news next week.

Information Sources:
[1] paidContent: More Cash For Technorati: Blog Searcher Gets $7.5 Million Of $10 Million Fourth Round by Joseph Weisenthal
[2] TechCrunch: Technorati Confirms New Financing; New Business Focus Coming by Michael Arrington

Google Inc. [a.k.a. Earchsay Engineway Uggernautjay (Pig Latin for "search engine juggernaut")] will be acquiring web communication security company, Postini Inc.  The amount paid for the company is $625 million.

Postini’s services will be a valuable add-on for Google Apps.  As 1,000 small businesses are signing up for Google Apps per day, Postini will most likely be used to protect the information transferring between these businesses.

“Larger enterprises, however, face a challenge: though they want to deliver simple, useful hosted applications to their employees, they’re also required to support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues. In effect, many businesses use legacy systems not because they are the best for their users, but because they are able to support complex business rules. This isn’t a tradeoff that any business should have to make,” stated Dave Girouard, VP & GM of Google Enterprise on the official Google Blog.

“We realized that we needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community. That’s why we’re excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Postini.”

Postini is a private, San Carlos, Calif.-based company.  August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mobius Venture Capital, Pacifica Fund, Summit Partners and Sun Microsystems Inc. are all investors in Postini who will potentially see a nice return on investment.

Postini intends on using Google technologies to develop a new suite of products.  The synergy created through this acquisition also aligns Google’s partnership with Salesforce.com.

References:
[1]  Reuters: Google to buy Web security co Postini for $625 mln (via Yahoo! News)
[2] The Official Google Blog: Welcome, Postini team
[3] Pulse 2.0: Google AdWords Officially Merging Into Salesforce.com Apps