Game developer Kixeye, formerly The Casual Collective, has raised $18 million in new funding. The investment comes from Jafco Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Kixeye also boasts two additions to the company’s board: Jafco partner Joe Horowitz and Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader. [TechCrunch]

Taulia is an invoicing company that has raised $8.5 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures. Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures also participated in this round. Taulia has now raised a total of $12 million in funding.

StackMob is a cloud platform for mobile developers that was built into Heroku. StackMob has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Trinity Ventures. StackMob allows mobile developers easy build a back-end cloud platform that allows them to manage their applications.

DotCloud is a platform-as-a-service company that has raised $10 million in Series A. Ron Conway and Chris Sacca was the company’s angel investors. Investors in the Series A round includes Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. Jerry Yang (Yahoo! co-founder), Marc Varstaen (Apple engineering manager), Peter Fenton (Benchmark Capital), Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures) will be joining DotCloud’s board of directors. DotCloud allows developers to build applications through custom components.

CrowdFlower is a company that designed data categorization tools used by e-commerce companies that has raised $7 million in funding led by Harmony Partners. Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners participated in this round. CrowdFlower has raised a total of $12 million thus far.

BeachMint.com is a social commerce company that has raised $10 million in funding. The investment was led by Trinity Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Anthem Ventures, and Stanford University. BeachMint was founded by MySpace co-founder Josh Berman. Diego Berdakin is the other co-founder of BeachMint. Below is the full press release:

gWallet is an offer-based ad network company that focuses on virtual goods and online games. gWallet raised $12.5 million from Adams Street Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Stanford University. The funding will go towards opening an office in London and in New York City.

gWallet plans to avoid some of the same scams that Zynga accepted as ad deals by offering a “transparent” platform. This means that game developers and social networks choose what ads to accept.

Gurbaksh Chahal is the founder of gWallet and he has experience in selling advertising companies. Chahal founded and sold ClickAgents to ValueClick and then BlueLithium to Yahoo! BlueLithium was bought by Yahoo! for $300 million. Although I admire Chahal for his entrepreneurial spirit, I thought his reality show Secret Millionaire was terrible.

Yen Lee, former General Manager of Yahoo! Travel has raised $10 million in Series B funding for his start-up.  His start-up is called UpTake.com and the funding was led by Trinity Ventures and Shasta Ventures.  The first round of funding was $4 million in December 2007.  UpTake.com is a travel search engine that grabs data from multiple sites at once.  This includes websites: TripAdvisor.com, Expedia.com, Fodors, goCityKids, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel. 

With this round of funding, UpTake plans to expand into Lodging, Things To Do, Restaurants, and Beaches features.  UpTake will continue to invest in it’s own search engine technology.  UpTake works with BedandBreakfast.com, Restauranti.ca, OpenTable, La Quinta Inn & Suites, Away.com, and FriendCommunications for RV and campground reviews.

“We looked at dozens of investment opportunities in the online travel industry for several years before deciding to invest in UpTake,” stated Patricia Nakache, general partner of Trinity Ventures. “UpTake has a distinct approach that addresses a big search and discovery gap in the travel market and is run by a proven CEO and team.”

UpTake has aggregated and organized about 20 million traveler reviews, ratings, and articles.  UpTake is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has engineering units in Beijing and Moscow.