Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

Joyus, the video shopping platform startup led by former top Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, said it had raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding, led by InterWest Partners and Time Warner Investments. Existing investors Accel Partners and Harrison Metal also participated.

In related news, Joyus said that Ido Leffler, co-founder of natural beauty brand Yes To, would join its board.

The San Francisco-based Joyus has now raised total capital of $19 million to push its efforts to combine video with retailing online. Along with the funding news, the company underscored the efficacy of its approach in a study it also released that it says shows “fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands can directly monetize video through direct response product sales.”

Using premium video content to flack its wares, Joyus said that it converts at 5.15 times the rate of visitors who only browse product listings on the site and that its viewers buy 4.9 times more than those who don’t watch the product videos.

“Every time someone watches a video, Joyus can measure the resulting sales revenue, creating the first ever metrics for return on investment (ROI) using online video to drive product sales,” said Joyus, which noted that on a half-dozen product areas that the average revenue per video (RPV) view ranges from 47 cents to 93 cents, meaning every thousand views of video on Joyus produces between $470 and $930 in direct sales revenue. Joyus shares a cut of the sales on its site with its merchants and provides the purchasing tools.

While others might dispute this performance and many online retailers have added video to their sales processes, Joyus CEO and founder Cassidy said in an interview that online retail has to shift from a focus on engagement statistics and monetization via brand advertising to direct product sales results.

“The data on video shopping needs to be aimed at a return on the investment rather than on just brand recognition,” she said. “We think by providing an informative and entertaining experience, where you can make purchases right away, consumers buy and that this is the direction online commerce is moving.”

As I noted in a previous post about Joyus when it launched in mid-2011: “If you think about a link-laden infomercial, you’ll get a general idea of what is being created by Joyus.”

While Cassidy did note that a comparison could be made to television shopping networks like HSN, which shows elaborate demos of its products, Joyus has its own tech stack and video platform that allows shoppers to watch in a non-linear way that is preferable online and also on mobile.

“We are aimed at those customers who are bred and born on digital, so the merchandising formula is different,” said Cassidy. “This is a shopper from 30 to 50 who wants entertainment and commerce together in a format that is convenient.”

Accel Partners has added longtime tech exec Rob Solomon — who was most recently president and CEO of Groupon — as a venture partner. The high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm said Solomon will focus on early stage and growth equity opportunities and focus on “operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions.”

Said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia in a statement: “[Solomon] has been at the helm of some of the most high profile consumer internet brands and has demonstrated a unique ability to inspire and lead teams through both rapid growth and challenging times.”

Indeed, Solomon has had a long Silicon Valley career, including as an top exec at Yahoo, running its e-commerce efforts. He was also CEO of SideStep, a real-time vertical search engine in the travel sector that was later sold to Kayak and is also on several boards, including HomeAway.

But Solomon is best known for his stint as the No. 2 exec at the Chicago-based Groupon, the once high-flying daily deals site. But, for a variety of reasons, including wanting to be located in California, he left the company two years ago.

Solomon emailed me last night to explain why he decided to take a job as a VC at Accel and here’s what he wrote:

“I love the tactics and strategies associated with scaling up Internet companies. Nothing is more exciting then digging deep into a space and then figuring out which companies stand the best chance to create new markets and become iconic category defining companies. I was lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best founders, technologists and executives at Yahoo and that experience taught me what is possible in a very short span of time. I’ve joined Accel because they have an incredible global platform to find, nurture, fund and grow the next generation of global iconic Internet companies and nothing could be more exciting to me for my next career adventure.”

In a very brief press release, Dell said Breyer notified the company that he doesn’t intend to stand for reelection at the meeting.

That’s when Dell shareholders will be voting on a controversial $24.4 billion plan hatched by CEO Michael Dell and the private equity firm Silver Lake to take the company private in a leveraged buyout. Breyer’s vote on the matter will likely be among his final acts as a Dell director. Breyer had served on Dell’s board since 2009.

“Dell and its stockholders have benefitted greatly from the leadership and perspective Jim has provided during his tenure on the Dell board,” Michael Dell said in the statment. “We’re grateful for his guidance and we wish him well in all his future endeavors.”

This is Breyer’s third resignation from a high-profile director’s seat in recent days. Only three days ago, Facebook said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Breyer would be stepping down from its board, a position he has held since 2005. And last week, Walmart announced that Breyer would “rotate off the board in accordance with our corporate governance guidelines” after June 7.

He still sits on the boards of video company Brightcove and also of News Corp. (which is, of course, the parent company of AllThingsD.)

“It has been a genuine honor to serve as an investor and board member since April 2005 as Facebook has grown from an emerging social network for U.S. college students to a global service that connects over a billion people,” Breyer said in a statement.

“After over eight years of board service, it’s time to step aside in light of my other responsibilities, including my recent election to the Harvard University Corporation Board. I will leave the board knowing that Facebook is a global Internet leader with exceptional leadership within the company and on the board,” he said.

Breyer will continue to sit on the board until the date of the annual directors’ meeting, the filing said, which will occur on June 11 this year.

“Jim made many, many important contributions during his long tenure on the board and we were well-served by his presence,” Facebook said in a statement. “We will continue to have a strong relationship with Jim and going forward, we’re thankful we can continue to rely upon the tremendous depth and expertise of our recently expanded board.”

Breyer has served on Facebook’s board of directors since 2005, and has been a partner at Accel, a venture capital firm, since 1987. He currently sits on the board of Brightcove, Dell, News Corp. (which, disclosure, is the parent company of AllThingsD) and Walmart.

At its annual shareholder meeting in June, Facebook will ask its shareholders to reelect the eight currently sitting board members (not counting Breyer), including Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, the recently named Susan D. Desmond-Hellmann of UCSF, Don Graham of the Washington Post, Reed Hastings of Netflix, current COO Sheryl Sandberg (who was also named to the board relatively recently), early investor and long-time adviser Peter Thiel and, of course, CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Kennelly is the latest executive from a publicly traded company to join the board of Nimble. In July, Frank Calderoni, CFO at networking giant Cisco Systems, joined Nimble’s board, as well. Also on its board are Kirk Bowman, a former executive at Dell unit EqualLogic and also of VMware, Ping Li of Accel and Jim Goetz of Sequoia.

Nimble last fall closed a $40.7 million mezzanine round of venture capital funding led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, and has raised a combined $98 million. Other investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Artis Capital Management and GGV Capital. The implied valuation is said by people familiar with the matter to be between $650 million and $700 million. I doubt it will be long before people start whispering about IPO plans, if they aren’t already.

The company said in February that it had reached a $100 million run rate in bookings for the fiscal year ended Jan. 31.

Nimble is seen right now as one of the important up-and-coming storage companies to watch among the people I talk to who follow these things. I talked last week with CEO Suresh Vasudevan, who told me that Nimble asks a pretty fundamental question about enterprise storage: Why keep backup storage separated from other storage? Every time you move your data to another storage medium, there’s an extra step, one that Vasudevan argues isn’t necessary.

The company builds storage arrays that use a unique architecture called CASL, or Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout. I won’t go into the technical weeds, but the basic idea is that the arrays use integrated flash memory not as a separate tier to speed things up, but as part of the basic design. It’s essentially a hybrid that brings together flash and spinning hard disks, and takes advantage of the unique properties of both. The end result is that many customers are able to reduce the amount they invest in storage hardware. It has so far shipped 2,000 systems, and has more than 1,100 customers.

Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com

Even customer service has started a shift to the cloud, and a company that specializes in precisely that is Parature. I first encountered Parature in 2011. The basic idea with its cloud-based software is to reduce the cost and time commitment required to answer the same support questions over and over. Simple as that.

Well, building on a partnership first established two years ago, Parature is about to announce that it is teaming up with Microsoft, the maker of Dynamics CRM software.

The new integration will give Dynamics users a platform from which to engage with customers on the Web, via live chat session, on their mobile devices or through social networks.

Key features include a self-service part that creates a knowledge base customers can use to get quick answers to regular questions on their own. Repeated questions tend to eat up a lot of time and attention that could be better spent elsewhere.

There’s also a chat service, so your service agents can be right there in real time. And there’s a social component as well, including Parature for Facebook and support for Twitter. Yes, customer support happens there, too.

The point of the integration is to get customer data that lives in the CRM application all in the same place as records of support calls and help requests. Logical, right?

Anyway, Parature has come a long way since I last looked in on it. It has been used to support approximately 55 million end users worldwide, and its customers include IBM and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It’s backed by about $30 million in VC investments from Accel Partners, Valhalla Partners and Sierra Ventures.

Image: Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com

OpenX Software said it had raised $22.5 million in a Series E funding round, with Samsung Venture Investment Corporation as lead investor.

All told, the Los Angeles-based online advertising technology company has raised $70 million. Along with Samsung, existing investors — Accel Partners, Index
Ventures, SAP Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc. and Presidio Ventures — were also part of the new round.

“We have been building the company to continue to grow,” said OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan, who noted that the company had doubled its size and revenue in the last year. The company now has 260 employees.

He said that OpenX had a partnership with Samsung that it evolved into a financial arrangement to bring the Korean electronics giant “a little closer to the company.”

Cadogan said the new funding would be used for acquisitions and other expansion, especially into mobile, as it competes with rivals such as search giant Google.

“We are building a truly viable revenue program that goes across screens,” he said, pointing to two recent strategic acquisitions — LiftDNA and JumpTime.

Samsung’s Brannon Lacey said the company invested in OpenX because it was pioneering in the space. “As an investor, it is a fragmented market and there will be consolidation,” he said. “And OpenX is best positioned for that.”

OpenX said that it had grown its transactions from one trillion to four trillion from 2011 to 2012.

Now it has another $103 million in the bank, courtesy of Accel Partners, Spectrum Equity and Meritech Capital Partners.

Why now? “We’re finally at the place where we can leverage outside funding,” said Lynda.com CEO Eric Robison.

Investors had been wanting a stake in the company for quite some time, Robison said; in fact, for the past four years Lynda.com had been sending its private financial results with the investors it ultimately chose.

Lynda, which offers software, creative and business courses, is currently all about video — 83,000 of them in 1,500 courses — with little focus on organized classes and community. That’s in contrast to some of its newly famous online learning brethren, like MOOC providers Udacity and Coursera.

Instead, a big benefit of Lynda for its $25-per-month subscribers is the fact that they can search for chunks of lessons that correspond specifically to something they need to get done in that moment. “We have members who use us exclusively as a reference,” Robison said.

Besides personal customers, Lynda also sells to companies, schools and the U.S. government, which it says includes “all branches of the U.S. military and all cabinet-level departments of the U.S. federal government.”

The company employs 400 people and runs its own studio in Carpinteria, Calif. Robison said he expects to apply some of the new funding to localizing videos so it can expand internationally. He’s also interested in different business models, like a freemium offering.

What he doesn’t see on the horizon — despite the new outside funding — is an IPO. “These investors are long-term focused,” Robison said.

Venture capitalists like online learning companies these days. Lynda competitor Pluralsight also just raised a large round of funding, which was also its first-ever outside investment.

This morning, the New York-based company handed out pink slips to about 25 employees, or about 35 percent of its staff, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Lot18 will now employ 46, half as many as it did a year ago.

It is the second layoff in the past year for the startup, which started selling wine online in November 2010.

The first round was tied to the discontinuation of its travel and food businesses, which it had expanded into shortly before raising $30 million in venture capital in late 2011. Investors include Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates and FirstMark Capital.

This time, the layoffs are connected to a shift in strategy. Rather than exclusively operate as a flash sales company, which sells bottles of wine at a discount to a free membership base, it will also try to sell wine through a subscription model.

The model is already well established by others in the industry, such as Global Wine Company, which runs the New York Times Wine Club, for instance, and Direct Wines, which operates a wine club for The Wall Street Journal.

The recurring revenue stream is far more predictable than getting members to return to the site and pay for single orders. As it stands right now, Lot18 is a marketplace, so it does not own any inventory or warehouses. Instead, the company’s headcount is a considerable expense, as are its marketing costs to get new members — just like other sites, including Groupon. In addition, it subsidizes shipping, since wine is so heavy and fragile.

According to a spokesperson, the new initiative is allowing the company to scale back on the time and attention that the flash sales business requires. However, not all employees will be let go immediately and Lot18 plans to do select hiring for the new business.

In a statement, CEO Jay Sung said: “The team we have — and many of the excellent people who left the company today — worked incredibly hard to make Lot18 strong, but we need to resource according to our new business model and operate the existing business more efficiently with considerably less burn.”

The cuts impacted all parts of the company’s business, including marketing, procurement and merchandising. Andrew Koch, the company’s VP of product, left the company recently, and we are hearing that Barbara Anderson, the company’s chief counsel, is leaving voluntarily. Lot18’s founder, Philip James, remains with the company and is leading the launch of the new subscription business.

In the fourth quarter, the company tested two new subscription services. Customers could either sign up to receive six bottles for $99 a month, or 12 bottles for $149 a month (the first month cost $49 and $79, respectively).

Since its launch, the current club has exceeded its growth targets, the spokesperson said. A new product launch will occur in early 2013.

The London-based company is poised to close a $30 million in Series B funding, according to multiple sources close to the situation, with the likely lead investor being Fred Wilson of NYC-based Union Square Ventures.

Hailo has been hailed as one of the most promising European start-ups, and had raised $17 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners, Atomico and Wellington Partners earlier this year. The app helps iPhone and Android users secure yellow cab rides on the go, and pay for them automatically with a credit card.

The new round values Hailo at about $140 million, sources said. That’s a discount from competitor Uber, which was valued at more than double that amount when it raised funding a year ago.

After finding early success in Dublin, London and Toronto, Hailo launched its first U.S. city, Boston, in October, and then hit Chicago in November. Now, like many other smartphone ride apps, it’s gearing up to address the New York City market once e-hailing becomes legal there.

New York regulators cleared the way for e-hailing with a vote in December, and their revised policies are expected to hit the streets in February 2013. That makes it crunch time for Hailo, Uber, Flywheel (formerly Cabulous), GetTaxi, and other competitors, especially considering that drivers are likely to be permitted to work with only one provider. Plus, given that there’s so much competition, the cost of marketing has become significant.

Hailo is already spending heavily in that effort. Said one competitor: “In New York, at the regulatory meetings at the end of November, there were probably 50 people there, and 25 of them were in Hailo T-shirts.”

Hailo did not return requests for comment.

Hadoop has become a big thing, and in fact there are numerous flavors of it and numerous companies offering their own version of it, while others are building things to work with it.

The biggest and best known company in the Hadoop world is Cloudera. Started in 2008 by a trio of engineers from Facebook, Google and Yahoo (Jeff Hammerbacher, Christophe Bisciglia and Amr Awadallah) plus CEO Mike Olson, a former Oracle exec, it has in four years gone from the start-up that few really understood to the company you have to talk to if you want to stand a chance wrestling your data challenges to the ground.

Today, the company will take a significant step forward. AllThingsD has learned that Cloudera has landed a $65 million Series E round of venture capital funding. The funding round is being led by Accel Partners. Accel is not a new investor in Cloudera — it led its $5 million Series A round in 2009 — and it is leading a round that includes all repeat investors, including Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners.

The round brings Cloudera’s total capital raised to about $140 million. And according to sources familiar with the terms, this deal values Cloudera at about $700 million.

The round was to be announced after a closed meeting of Cloudera employees at its Palo Alto headquarters led by CEO Mike Olson and other senior executives. The meeting was scheduled to take place at noon PT.

The company also said it plans to expand its European operations with the opening of new offices in the United Kingdom in the first quarter of 2013.

Coming as it does on the heels of Cloudera’s hiring of a new CFO — Jim Frankola, the former CFO of Yodlee and Ariba who started his career at IBM, joined on Oct. 3 — the questions about a possible public offering of Cloudera shares will begin to increase.

I asked Olson and Frankola about it in an interview Monday. They both said they’re interested in the long-term future for Cloudera, and if that includes an IPO, then great. “From the very beginning we’ve seen the opportunity here that is big enough to create a long-term business,” Olson said. “You don’t often get a chance to step up to the plate in a ballpark that is as exciting as this one,” Olson told me.

Frankola hearkened back to his days in corporate finance at Big Blue. “At IBM we got to make really big, multibillion dollar bets, and then you go to smaller companies and you sometimes have to play it safe. But the space that we’re playing in is one of the biggest bets there is in technology.”

I also talked with Accel Partner Ping Li, who has long been a Cloudera fan and created Accel’s Big Data Fund in part to fund companies doing interesting things with Hadoop. “These guys pretty much created the big data wave when they decided to take Hadoop out of the bowels of the data center and into the enterprise,” he said. “They really created the idea that there’s all this data and Hadoop is a really critical layer in the stack.”

How’s the business doing? No one would say exactly, though Frankola said Cloudera has been seeing its revenue and number of customers roughly doubling every year. Li put it this way: “You don’t see this type of growth in software and infrastructure companies that often.”

When you consider that four years ago people sort of scratched their heads and wondered what they would actually use Hadoop for, the list of companies that are Cloudera customers is impressive. It includes AOL, CBS, eBay, Expedia, J.P. Morgan Chase, Monsanto, Nokia, Research In Motion and the Walt Disney Company.

Cloudera is sometimes compared — not inaccurately, but perhaps imprecisely — to Red Hat, which built a business on helping companies deploy and manage the free Linux operating system. Like Linux, Hadoop is technically free, and any company can go out and download it for free. The trick comes in knowing what to do with it, and managing it, and getting value out of it. And that’s where Cloudera’s money-making value comes into play. It sells its own software that runs on top of Hadoop, plus it also distributes its own flavor of Hadoop that it supports and helps its customers manage on a subscription basis.

They include Palantir, SurveyMonkey, GitHub, Square, ZocDoc, Zulily, LegalZoom, Twitter, Warby Parker and others.

CB Insights calls the report “The Tech IPO Pipeline” — which is perhaps a bit generous given its cutoff was a $100 million valuation, and especially considering the problems some newly public Internet companies have faced in the past year.

But still, it’s an interesting slice of the industry, with some observations about who and what is creating value in tech.

For instance, it isn’t cheap to be considered a potential IPO candidate. The average company worth at least $100 million — though many on the list are valued at more than that — has raised $84.7 million, with 90 percent of them in the Series C stage or later.

The 472 companies have raised a total of $40 billion.

Only 20 percent of the companies on the list target consumers, with the remainder selling to enterprises or small and medium businesses.

By breaking down who’s investing in these 472 companies, CB Insights was able to get a real-time tally on which VCs seem to be most effective at finding and helping strong start-ups. Sequoia Capital and Intel Capital both had 35 companies on the list, and Sequoia and Accel Partners have been the best at finding these companies early in their lives, at the seed or Series A round.

The full report is here.

Managing systems logs is one of the more unglamorous tasks that come with managing IT infrastructure — not that there’s much glamour in the first place — but today is the sort of day when it takes on a cooler sheen.

Today, a fascinating and fast-growing start-up called Sumo Logic announced that it has taken a $30 million Series C round of venture capital funding led by Accel Partners. It is the latest investment by Accel’s Big Data fund, led by partner Ping Li.

The round brings Sumo Logic’s total capital raised to $50.5 million. Prior investors include Greylock Partners — Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri sits on the board — and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Sumo Logic’s approach to handling logs is to treat them like any other big-data problem. It uses cloud-based software to analyze, monitor and visualize data generated by machines in real time. System logs are just another one of those collections of data that used to be considered disposable or difficult to sort through. Sumo aims to make them a key source of insight into how well — or not — IT infrastructure is running.

Sumo often gets mentioned in the same breath as Splunk, the analytics company that specializes in machine-generated data and which had a successful IPO earlier this year. Splunk even spun off a company called Loggly that specializes in log management.

I talked with Sumo Logic’s CEO Vance Loiselle on Monday. He said that companies have been looking for years for a good way to easily make use of their log files. “In the last couple of years, we’ve seen more and more companies are generating tons of log data, but also all kinds of unstructured data,” Loiselle said. “That could be for servers that are or are not running well, or applications that you need to know specific analytic data about its performance, what your customers are using, and what kind of performance they’re seeing.”

Companies have been looking for a way to get ahold of that data and do a deep dive on the patterns that can be found in it, in order to decide if changes need to be made or to see how different parts of the business are performing. Doing that analytics work in the cloud, and thus saving on the purchase of extra storage hardware plus software, is sort of a no-brainer, but up to now that’s how this work has tended to be done.

The company launched only this February. More than 800 companies have tried the free service, and already more than 40 have traded up to the paid service. Among them are Netflix, Ooyala and Limelight Networks.

When you’re rolling out a new application, the last thing you need is some weird error cropping up somewhere in the chain of servers or on the network and getting in the way. Sumo Logic’s engine quickly crunches through the log data and can be used to pinpoint exactly where the problems are so they can be corrected, Loiselle said. It also works with log files generated by virtual machines.

Loiselle said the investment will help the company grow its sales and marketing operation, but also to do some of the heavy lifting needed to build up some new core features. “We need to bring in as many high-caliber inside and outside sales people as we can because the opportunity before us is so big. First we’ll scale up in North America, and then we’ll start thinking about what we’re going to do in Europe.” There’s also a huge need to hire more engineers, he said. “We’ve doubled the size of the engineering team over the last six months, and basically we have to double it again.”

The Library of Virginia

The payments company said the cash would go toward developing new payment capabilities and international expansion. In total, it has now raised $70 million in capital.

Braintree is not the only one after PayPal’s multibillion dollar business. Another start-up vying for a chunk of the business is San Francisco’s Stripe. The general claim by these newbies is that Stripe can provide a much more streamlined process for accepting payments for retailers and consumers — at least compared to the 14-year-old incumbent.

In the case of Braintree, it claims it is processing more than $5 billion in payments annually for more than 3,000 mobile and online merchants, including Uber, Fab, Airbnb and HotelTonight. It charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, and works in more than 30 countries and accepts 130-plus currencies. In a statement, NEA general partner Ravi Viswanathan said the investment reflects the firm’s confidence in the company’s technology: “We believe Braintree has the strengths to challenge all the incumbents in the payment space, including Paypal.”

Earlier this year, Braintree acquired mobile payments start-up Venmo for about $26 million to add another PayPal feature to its service: Digital wallet and person-to-person payment capabilities.

Previously, she was CFO at CBS Interactive for two years; prior to that, she was CFO at PayPal. Hentges will start at the Walnut Creek, Calif.-based company on Oct. 1.

In the past year, YapStone’s revenues have jumped by 50 percent, and profits have more than doubled. Sites that it operates include rentpayment.com, utility-payment.com and vacationrentpayment.com. The company’s growth was fueled by a $50 million investment by Accel Partners. The company has plans to expand into new verticals and internationally.

During her seven years at PayPal, Hentges helped grow the company’s revenue to $2.6 billion.

Here’s the full release:

YAPSTONE HIRES PAYPAL VETERAN MARY HENTGES AS CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER

Accel-backed YapStone hires CFO from CBS Interactive and PayPal to lead its finance team and drive its rapid global growth in online and mobile payments

WALNUT CREEK, CA (September 21, 2012) — YapStone, a leading global provider of Web and mobile payment solutions and processing for targeted vertical markets, has hired high-profile Chief Financial Officer, Mary Hentges. In her new role, Hentges will lead the company’s global financial operations and work closely with the management team on the creation and execution of its business strategy, operating plan and corporate development activities.

Hentges has been CFO at CBS Interactive for two years, and prior to that held the position of CFO at PayPal. In her 7-year tenure as CFO at PayPal, she grew revenue ten-fold to $2.6 billion. Hentges will join the YapStone team beginning October 1.

“I have been fortunate to work with some of the leading interactive media and payment companies. With Yapstone’s lead in vertically-focused payment solutions, I look forward to augmenting the company’s success in this new role,” said Hentges.

Recently, Yapstone rolled out new Web and mobile bill pay products in several new vertical markets and the company also has plans to expand globally. In the past year alone, YapStone’s revenue is up 50%, profits have gone up over 100%, and Accel Partners led a $50 million minority investment in the company.

“I’m confident that Mary will have a profound impact on the future of YapStone as we are entering the most exciting time in the company’s history,” said Tom Villante, Chairman and Co-founder of Yapstone. “Mary will be more than our senior-most finance executive – she has the ability and experience to help YapStone disrupt and innovate payment markets around the world. She’s one of very few who have done it before.”

Angel investor Peter Thiel and venture-capital firm Accel Partners are among early backers who are sitting on sizable paper gains, even with the company’s stock down 43 percent from its $38 offering price. Mr. Thiel and Accel, for example, bought into the company when it was valued at less than $1 billion. Today, its market capitalization is about $60 billion.

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Porrini’s LinkedIn profile confirms the move, and shows that he has taken a job as general counsel and secretary at YuMe, a company that provides video advertising software and services. The company is backed by investments from Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Intel Capital.

HP’s legal office has seen a lot of changes recently, since former CEO Mark Hurd left, ultimately to take a job as President of Oracle. Last December, general counsel Michael Holston, who had previously been seen as a key Hurd aide, left the company. His departure came about three months after the ouster of former CEO Léo Apotheker, and Meg Whitman’s taking over as CEO last year.

In April, HP named John Schultz as general counsel, replacing David Healy, who had the job on an interim basis after Holston.

Porrini (pictured from his LinkedIn profile) had been at HP since 2001. Before that, he worked at Bluestone Software, which HP acquired in 2000. Earlier, he was a partner at the law firm of Pepper Hamilton; before that, he worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.