New investors Singapore’s EDBI, SingTel Innov8, and Motorola Solutions Venture Capital join a handful of existing investors, including Alloy Ventures, Citi Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, DFJ Gotham, First Data, Miven Ventures, Motorola Mobility, Nokia Growth Partners and NCR.

To date, the company has raised $90 million.

ViVOtech’s near field communication technology is being used by Google to enable Android users to tap their phones at registers to make a payment.

Google unveiled its mobile payments and offers initiative last month, and since then a lot of interest has poured into the space, with other companies, such as Square, American Express, Visa and others coming up with several alternatives.

The 10-year-old Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is providing the NFC-enabled point of sale readers to merchants also participating in Google Wallet. So far, the company has shipped more than 600,000 readers in the U.S., which are all capable of accepting Google Wallet payments.

The new funding will be used to expand internationally beyond the 35 countries it serves today.

The difference here? Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg really, really wanted to work with Drop.io founder Sam Lessin. That’s why Facebook not only gave Lessin’s investors a return on their money, but paid for the deal with Facebook stock instead of cash.

People familiar with the transaction tell me that Drop.io’s investors–primarily DFJ Gotham and RRE Ventures–ended up with something close to double the $10 million they put into the company over the past two years, and that they were paid out in common stock.

At one point in Facebook’s history, that wouldn’t have been remarkable. But as Facebook has shot up in usage, employee size and valuation, its managers have become loath to hand out shares in advance of an IPO.

For instance, after the company bought Hot Potato and founder Justin Shaffer this summer, there was some sotto voce grumbling from investors that only Shaffer received Facebook equity, while his backers got cash.

With the exception of the payment, the Drop.io deal looks very similar. Like Shaffer, Lessin will move from Brooklyn to Palo Alto to work at Facebook headquarters. And like Hot Potato, Drop.io will be shut down.

So what makes Lessin worth precious Facebook shares?

We know that Lessin and Zuckerberg have been tight since they met at Harvard ( Caroline McCarthy has more on that here). Perhaps as important: I’m told that prior to the deal Drop.io had begun work on a new product that was meant to supplant its consumer-facing storage service. (UPDATE: Samuel Clay, via Twitter, suggests that Drop.io was working on a “a wrapper for [content delivery networks]. Auction-style bidding for lowest cost delivery of content.”. That synchs up with what I’ve heard. But if true, not sure it explains Zuckerberg’s interest.)

Love to know more, but Facebook and Lessin are staying mum for now.

Latest example: A $6 million B round for Medialets, a two-year-old New York company best known for making “in-app” ads for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone platform, as well as for Google’s (GOOG) Android, etc.

Existing investor Foundry Group, which led a $4 million A round a year ago, leads this one as well. DFJ Gotham is also in again, and new money includes Dave McClure’s 500 Startups incubator and Chris Saridakis, who until recently was Gannett’s (GCI) chief digital officer.

A good chunk of this deal already closed months ago and leaked out via a Series D filing; I assume that new investors have joined the round since then, but I don’t have details.

August 10, 2010: NEW YORK, NY – Medialets, the most widely deployed cross-platform rich media advertising provider for mobile, today announced the closing of a $6 million Series B financing round led by investor Foundry Group, with participation from DFJ Gotham, 500 Startups and Chris Saridakis. Medialets will use the funds to expand the capabilities of its mobile rich media ad platform and supporting tools in order to bring rich media ads to the broadest range of advertisers possible.

“Medialets was founded in 2008 on the understanding that mobile would unleash a powerful engagement opportunity for advertisers,” said Medialets CEO Eric Litman. “Since then, not only has Medialets enabled the industry’s most compelling mobile rich media for premier publishers, agencies and brands, we’ve also built out a one-of-a-kind cross-platform infrastructure that brings greater efficiency and scale to mobile rich media campaigns. This Series B funding allows us to continue to evolve the Medialets’ platform to meet the phenomenal demand for high-value mobile rich media.”

Since its inception in June 2008, Medialets has pioneered the creation, delivery and measurement of the most highly engaging rich media ad formats for mobile. In 2009, Medialets created and served the world’s first rich media ad for mobile apps. Earlier this year Medialets followed up on the release of its Universal SDK for iPhone and iPad with the launch of Android advertising support, making Medialets the first provider of cross-platform rich media ads for mobile apps. More recently, Medialets introduced Medialets Enrichä, a partner program that significantly reduces the complexity of mobile advertising for buyers by enabling them to deliver and measure the same creative campaign on different mobile platforms and across Medialets’ partner ad networks, mediators and ad servers.

“Medialets has set the standard for creative and technological innovation in mobile rich media,” said Seth Levine, Managing Director of Foundry Group, Medialets lead investor. “By providing a scalable platform that uniquely addresses the challenges of mobile for both publishers and brands, Medialets has staked out its position as market leader early in the game and will continue to be a driving force in the rapidly growing mobile advertising market.”

A world-class executive team, assembled within the past year, has spearheaded Medialets’ tremendous growth. Keith Gelles, co-founder of PointRoll, joined Medialets as Chief Technology Officer joined the team in July and Aaron Mittman, a former executive at Panther Express and DoubleClick, joined the team in September as Vice President, Global Sales. More recently, Andrew Eisele, formerly of TargetSpot, joined Medialets as the company’s first Chief Financial Officer. The executive team is supported by an advisory board that includes Greg Tagaris, former CIO DoubleClick, Andy Ellenthal, CEO Peer39, Ari Paparo, VP Digital at Nielsen and former Group Director of Advertiser Products at Google, Shervin Pishevar, Chairman SGN, and Colin Crawford, former CEO MacWorld/PC World.

Top-tier funds like Union Square Ventures, Spark and First Round Capital are showing up at AOL’s (AOL) New York headquarters in a couple weeks for what they’re dubbing a “VC Demo Day,” aimed at start-ups looking for seed money. The signup page for the event explains the conceit efficiently: “This will be just like every other Demo Day, only the VCs will be pitching their funds to entrepreneurs looking to raise capital. We’ll have a keg of beer and food available.”

What to make of this? We’re certainly not back in 2000, when Kurt Andersen famously declared that raising money is as “easy as getting laid in 1969.”

But the event, hosted by AOL Ventures and Betaworks, is a good reminder that we’re well past Sequoia’s 2008 “Good Times RIP” admonition. For a certain kind of start-up, there’s a long list of early round investors now clamoring to give you money. Another less visible sign: The prevalence of convertible debt in early round deals, which is supposed to favor entrepreneurs at the expense of investors.

Other VC Demo Day participants: RRE Ventures; Metamorphic Ventures; True Ventures; Venrock; IA Capital Partners; Lerer Ventures; DFJ Gotham.

Not entirely on topic, but this is my favorite pitch scene of all time:

That’s more or less the logic behind Medialets, a start-up that serves up ads on Apple’s (AAPL) mobile applications, and to a lesser degree, programs designed for Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile platform. The New York-based company, founded last June, is announcing a $4 million Series A round led by Foundry Group. DFJ Gotham and angel investor Bobby Yazdani also participated.

Medialets also provides free analytics services for mobile applications. But its revenue comes from its mobile ad platform, which specializes in serving up iPhone and Android app users.

Given that mobile ads in general are in their infancy, this is a nascent market at best. Medialets CEO Eric Litman figures that the market for mobile display ads tops out at perhaps $300 million, and that ads for iPhone and Android apps can’t be more than $100 million.

But he figures that number will shoot up rapidly, of course, and perhaps hit $400 million within four years. He’s also betting that the majority of apps, and the majority of apps downloaded, will be free, advertising-supported ones.

In order for that to happen, both apps and the ads that run on them will have to move past the novelty stage. This Medialets-produced ad for Dockers, shown here running on SGN’s iBowl game, is sort of interesting. But it seems more like a proof of concept than anything else.

Still, it’s a start: