Accel Partners, an early investor in Facebook Inc., Groupon Inc. and other white-hot companies, has led a $35 million Series A investment in graphic design marketplace 99designs Pty. Ltd., marking the firm’s third deal in an Australian tech company in the past nine months.

“We’re looking more closely at Australia,” said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia, confirming that conversations to fund more Australian companies are ongoing although no new deals have been signed. Accel previously invested undisclosed amounts in software company Atlassian Software Pty. Ltd. and foreign currency exchange service OzForex Pty. Ltd.

“Australia has a lot of opportunity and promise,” he said.

Now, with Accel’s cash and cachet, Melbourne-based 99designs is poised to capitalize on that opportunity right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

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Another day, another giant venture funding.

Today it is $38.5 million to Squarespace–which lets you make blogs, Web sites, mobile apps, social networking widgets and other such oversharing digital tools–from Index Ventures and Accel Partners.

Squarespace is from New York. Index is in London. Accel is in Silicon Valley. It’s very global!

BoomTown will admit it–these big fundings are starting to bleed into each other.

And here I thought VCs were running out of scratch!

Nope.

Thus, the inevitable press release about the start-up, which competes with WordPress and Six Apart:

Index and Accel back Squarespace–Industry leading web publishing platform

NEW YORK, NY–July 14th, 2010–Squarespace, an industry leading web publishing platform, today announced that it closed a $38.5M minority growth investment led by Index Ventures and Accel Partners. This is the first outside capital that Squarespace has raised since its founding in 2003.

As part of this transaction, joining Squarespace’s newly formed board will be Dominique Vidal, of Index Ventures’ growth team, Andrew Braccia, from Accel’s investment team, and Jonathan Klein, Founder and CEO of Getty Images. Founder Anthony Casalena will remain the company’s largest shareholder.

Squarespace was founded by Anthony Casalena with the goal of redefining publishing on the Web. Today, Squarespace’s SaaS platform powers tens of thousands of websites worldwide. Businesses, bloggers, web developers and artists use Squarespace to quickly and easily create and maintain professional, high quality websites. Squarespace’s product is differentiated by its intense focus on design, integration and scalability. Notable customers include Marc Ecko, Porter Novelli, Bob Woodruff, Kevin Pollak, and Don Imus.

“Squarespace has created a powerful product used by web developers, bloggers, and consumers around the world to build beautiful, functional and flexible websites,” said Dom Vidal, partner, Index Ventures. “We believe in the team, the technology, and the market potential, and are excited to be a part of such a fast growing business.”

The size of the round will enable Squarespace to significantly expand operations as they seek to solve the problem of content management at its core, and allow its new partners to contribute to and participate in Squarespace’s continued success.

“Squarespace has been a profitable business since its first year of operation. This investment will not change that, but it will allow us to be much more aggressive in our quest to both create an incredible product and bring that product to market,” said Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s founder.

With the Squarespace web publishing platform, you can:

• Quickly publish and manage a highly functional web site, including a blog and portfolio.
• Host on an expandable grid infrastructure that can manage sites of any size across the globe.
• Access hand designed templates and customizable photo galleries.
• Aggregate data from across various social networks completely within the Squarespace environment, without needing 3rd party scripts.
• Use the iPhone app to check your site, post to your blog, manage blog posts, and see site traffic, while on the go.
• Easily import images, posts, and links from existing blogging platforms.
• Track visitors and usage patterns of a site with powerful analytics tools.

“There are a lot of tools on the market that allow people to set up simple blogs for free. At Squarespace, we offer something different–a high quality, professional, reliable platform, designed from the ground up by us to work in a very streamlined way,” said Casalena. “The addition of Index, Accel and Jonathan Klein to the Squarespace team will help us achieve further growth and cement our position as a clear leader in this space.”

Squarespace packages are sold on www.squarespace.com and start at $8 per month.

Another former Yahoo exec has landed at a Silicon Valley venture firm. This time, well-regarded serial entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj will become a partner at Redpoint Ventures, according to sources.

The move of Dharmaraj is interesting, given that he is not starting a new company or taking a post as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm, as many operating execs do after leaving a company.

Dharmaraj left Yahoo (YHOO) in late January, as was reported here.

He worked there after one of the companies he founded, open-source email start-up Zimbra, was bought by the Internet giant for $350 million in late 2007.

Zimbra’s technology has been an important part of the effort to turbocharge Yahoo’s powerful communications properties as competitors like Google (GOOG) have become more aggressive.

Sources close to the situation said Dharmaraj would focus on business software, the enterprise arena and infrastructure at Redpoint.

Other former Yahoo execs who have gone to VC firms over the last year in a variety of roles include David Goldberg, Jeff Weiner (who has since become president of LinkedIn) and Andrew Braccia.

Here is a video interview I did with Dhamaraj last year after Yahoo bought Zimbra:

Yet another departed Yahoo executive has landed at a well-known venture capital firm–this time with its former music head David Goldberg’s new stint as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Earlier this week, Andrew Braccia, Yahoo’s vice president for consumer Web search, left the company to become a principal at Accel Partners.

The warm embrace of a plush VC office has always been an attractive option for entrepreneurs, either permanently or in the kind of deal Goldberg has, where he can ruminate on his next move in comfort. In an email he sent around yesterday, he wrote, “I will be looking at opportunities in consumer media and assisting Benchmark portfolio companies.”

Goldberg, 39, announced he was leaving Yahoo in February, but actually left this past week. He came to Yahoo six years ago, when it bought the online music site he co-founded in 1994 called Launch Media, which became Yahoo Music, one of the biggest music destinations on the Web. Goldberg and his Launch execs also started Yahoo’s subscription service two years ago.

Goldberg said he left to “get back to his entrepreneurial roots” and was excited about all the activity he sees percolating in the digital media space. “I am going to start a new company or I am going to buy one,” he said. “I have a bunch of different ideas and I want to think about them for a bit.”

He might not restrict himself to the music space this time, because he said the entire consumer media space is being impacted by digital technologies as never before. “A lot of traditional media businesses still need to be transformed … because a lot of them cannot get out of their own way even now,” said Goldberg. “But they have great assets, even if they are being underutilized, and that’s a real opportunity.”

Braccia should have enough experience to be a VC, given that he worked all over Yahoo, starting in business development when it was run by Ellen Siminoff and shifting through its Marketplaces division under top executive Jeff Weiner. He ended up running all the business and operations for the part of Yahoo the public knows best and was involved with some of its better acquisitions, including Del.icio.us and Flickr.

Braccia is not inclined to want to ruminate on why he is leaving Yahoo, save for the usual reasons (“I have been there a long time and it was time to try something different,” he said. “I am passionate about entrepreneurialism.”), nor to slam the company on his way out (“They have amazing assets and a great future.”). But he did have some cogent thoughts on what he is going to focus on at Accel, which has some interesting investments in companies like Facebook and BitTorrent.

In the search arena, Braccia thinks there is still a lot of growth for all and lots of money to be made, despite the dominance of Google. “Search is still the axis” on which the Web spins, he said, although he noted that niche areas like social (as in consumer discovery sites like Digg) and vertical search could become more important in time. He’s also interested in the digital-media arena, specifically the aggregation of niche content.

And, like everyone, he likes the online ad space, noting that advertisers still do not advertise at the same levels as the time consumers spend engaged in the medium. This is a topic for a bigger debate, of course: Why is the audience more interested than advertisers? “There is going to be an eventual equilibrium between consumer engagement and advertiser engagement,” predicted Braccia.

At Accel, he will help with its current portfolio, while also focusing on his own bets in early-stage companies, with investments in the single millions, looking to fund those that are built for the long term. “Look at the last two years at companies like YouTube and Facebook, which are so dynamic,” said Braccia. “I think there are some real opportunities.”

In other words, Braccia will not be helping fund start-ups built to flip to acquisitive execs at companies like Yahoo (like Braccia), which have been giving money-laden VCs (like Braccia) a run for their money.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.