But despite the round’s petite figure, especially in today’s healthy venture market, make no mistake that the Los Angeles-based company has blockbuster-sized ambitions and a valuation to match.

The round was revealed in a regulatory document filed today, but from what we are hearing from people close to the situation, it will put the company’s valuation in the low hundreds of millions. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

The financing is from existing investors, Redpoint and MK Capital, and brings the company’s total to about $20 million, including a small line of credit. It will give the company the cash it needs to fuel additional growth without requiring the executive team to lose focus by kicking off a gigantic fundraising effort. From what we are hearing, the latest round is not a reflection of the company’s growth, but it will help it stay on track.

Its YouTube channel is quickly becoming the destination for hardcore game fans to watch videos. Trust us when we say the demographic is as far from those playing FarmVille as you can get. It’s often adrenaline-pumping action filled with violence and profanity. In other words, it’s the top shelf of entertainment for most males aged 18 to 34.

While the niche sounds small, it isn’t.

In 2010, Machinima’s YouTube channel attracted 2.3 billion page views. Last month alone, it attracted 575 million page views and 67 million unique visitors. It’s seeing between 15 and 20 percent growth every month. The funding will allow it to keep growing and to expand to other platforms.

The growth is not that hard to understand. In fact, it’s probably the same trend that propelled Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Black Ops to hit $1 billion in sales after slightly more than one month–the equivalent of a blockbuster movie release.

According to the company’s Web site, the word “Machinima” is basically a mash-up of the words “machine” and “cinema,” which is used to describe the process of “creating real-time animation by manipulating a videogame’s engine and assets.”

The company is essentially building a destination for videogame fans to watch a ton of its own editorial content, but also allows players to upload their own videos. Often, the video is a recording of someone playing a video game and providing their own play-by-play soundtrack as they achieve some great accomplishment.

By creating content and attracting fans, Machinima can generate buzz for videogames long after their initial launch dates. Users who continue to play games may buy additional downloadable content, which leads to incremental revenues for the game maker. In essence, Machinima is an advertising network, and it has worked on projects with all of the major gaming companies and film studios.

In a recent example, Machinima teamed up with Warner Bros. Digital Distribution to produce an original online series to promote Mortal Kombat. The nine-episode series, which has the quality of a feature-length film, debuted on April 12. In the first five days, the first episode got more than 5.5 million views.

Here’s that video [for mature audiences only!]:

Thirty-six U.S. venture-capital funds raised more than $7 billion in the first quarter of 2011. That’s up 76 percent, by dollar commitments, compared with the first quarter of 2010, which saw 44 funds raise $4 billion, according to Thomson Reuters and the NVCA.

Bessemer Venture Partners VIII raised $1.6 billion during the quarter, while Sequoia Capital 2010 raised $1.3 billion and J.P. Morgan’s (JPM 46.97, +0.13, +0.28%) Digital Growth Fund raised $1.2 billion.

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Groupon has officially completed the raising of half of a $950 million funding, getting $500 million from a range of top-drawer investors, said sources close to the situation.

Those investors include Russia’s DST Global, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Capital Group and Morgan Stanley.

It’s unclear how much each investor has put in and who will make up the next tranche of funding, which will also close imminently.

The New York Times previously reported on the regulatory filing related to the funding, as well as investments from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley.

Now completed, the investments value the Chicago-based social buying service at $4.75 billion, which is less than the $6 billion Google offered to buy Groupon.

Those acquisition talks failed. But Groupon is still attracting interest from other possible buyers.

For now, though, it’s just talking a pile of money–probably the right strategy–to keep growing its explosive business. A big chunk will also go to some Groupon execs and early investors.

Groupon has competitors, of course, such as LivingSocial, but has established itself as the leader in the local online discounting space.

Allen & Co. is advising Groupon on the fundraising.

A Groupon spokeswoman declined to comment.

Yesterday, star venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins forked over $150 million in funding to Twitter.

At at $3.7 billion valuation, that got him a big chunk of the San Francisco microblogging site.

But what it didn’t get him was a seat on the board of Twitter, which many figured he would be given for after handing over so much moolah.

According to sources familiar with the situation, that’s due to Doerr’s being a director on another board: Google.

Several sources who BoomTown spoke to, after breaking news of the massive funding, said that his being on the board of the search giant was seen as too much of a conflict of interest.

A conflict because Google has plans to wade deeply into the social space. And also, of course, because it is the No. 1 potential acquirer of Twitter, as the Silicon Valley company seeks to gather more tools to fight its latest rival, Facebook.

Doerr has very deep ties at Google, having been on its board since mid-1999.

He got that seat, along with Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz, after he ponied up a critical $25 million equity round for Google in June of that year.

Interestingly, no other Kleiner partner was named to a Twitter board seat either.

But, some speculate, it might make sense for Mary Meeker–who just joined Kleiner to head up digital investing efforts, after a long-time stint as a Wall Street analyst for Morgan Stanley–to eventually become a Twitter director.

Meeker has, of course, deep IPO and M&A experience.

And, frankly, after adding Flipboard’s Mike McCue and former DoubleClick exec David Rosenblatt yesterday and former Netscape exec Peter Currie recently to its all-boy board band, a woman director might be a good idea to consider.

Other directors at Twitter include Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

I reached out to Doerr for a comment, but he has not yet replied; Twitter declined to comment.

Even more interesting to consider is what Kleiner will invest in next after this mega-funding, given how aggressively many sources said Doerr had pushed to lead the Twitter round.

And, in fact, sources said that Kleiner is looking closely at new funding rounds for both the Spotify music streaming service and Groupon, the social buying start-up that recently decided to turn down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and an earlier $3 billion one from Yahoo.

Groupon is now seeking more funds to remain independent and hold onto its lead in the fast-growing local discounting market, sources said.

(Bloomberg also reported on Groupon’s new fundraising efforts, although it was written about after it turned down the Google offer.)

And Spotify, which is hugely popular outside the U.S., is trying to enter this market, but needs more funding to expand and perhaps strike better deals with music labels.

Both are the just the kind of companies Doerr has targeted in what looks like a serious effort to compete with other firms–especially Andreessen Horowitz and Russia’s DST Global.

They have garnered the heat Kleiner used to have, largely by backing more of the top entrepreneurs recently.

Doerr has already put money into social gaming phenom Zynga and also started an sFund for social-focused investments.

Add Twitter to the pile and you can see where this is headed: Except for the board seat, John Doerr will no longer be denied.

“Ongoing economic uncertainty has kept many limited partners and venture capital firms on the fundraising sidelines in 2010 and this hesitation is likely to continue for the remainder of the year,” NVCA President Mark Heesen said in a statement.

Certainly looks that way. Consider the chart below (click to enlarge).

Quite the downward trend, yeah? What is it that Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often says? “The best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks.” Hmm. Something like that…

Since it launched almost exactly a year ago with a $300 million fund, the venture firm of Andreessen Horowitz has cut a rather high-profile path through the Silicon Valley investing community.

And it’s clear the firm has been aiming to make a big splash in the sector–from its involvement in the fractious fight over the spin-off of Skype to its funding of a series of high-profile start-ups (Zynga, Asana, Kno and Rockmelt) to its most recent aggressive moves to finally win the top spot in investing in hot social location site Foursquare.

Now, according to sources and after spending about half its kitty, Andreessen Horowitz is poised to begin another round of fundraising to further bolster its clout.

While it is unclear how much the VC firm will raise, sources expect it to be much more than its first fund.

In its last go-round, the firm had a quick completion of the fund raising, in the midst of a national econalypse. So many assume the next try will be a lot easier, especially given its knack for grabbing hot deals.

A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment on future fundraising plans.

The firm is going to need the money as it expands its partners and ambitions to change the venture landscape, as iconic entrepreneur Marc Andreessen noted when he founded the firm with his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz in July of 2009.

Andreessen said then that he was essentially professionalizing the active angel investing that he and Horowitz had been doing.

Over the last several years, either together or apart, the pair have invested in a large variety of innovative start-ups, such as Twitter, Aliph, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.

Andreessen is on the board of Facebook and an adviser to Twitter too.

In an interview with me last year, Andreessen said that unlike many VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz will invest in companies at any stage of life–from early stage to late–and of any size and in any kind of digital sector and will focus on companies led by tech-savvy founders.

He also expressed a disdain for the way the venture business was run.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen at the time, in a joke about VCs being like Darth Vader.

At the time, he also noted that money talked. “It’s important to have more capital,” he said. “Sometimes having a huge checkbook is a great thing.”

Well, we’ll see if Andreessen Horowitz can make that checkbook even larger.

Until then, here is a tally of investments that Andreessen Horowitz has made so far, sourced from the firm, split up into categories and size of investment round the firm participated in with other investors. The firm declined to provide the exact amount of their participation in each investment.

It should be noted that Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s previous individual investments in some of these companies are not identified here:

Board

Kno: tablet device for students; $7.5 million
Nicira: cloud infrastructure software; $13 million
Okta: cloud app management; $750,000
Proferi: analytic applications; $2 million
Rockmelt; desktop browser for Facebook; unknown funding
Skype: Web telephony; $50 million

Passive

Apptio: IT cost transparency solutions; $14 million
Asana: enterprise collaboration; $9 million
Boku: mobile online payments; unknown funding
Digg: social media and content; unknown funding
Foursquare: social location; $20 million
Fusion I/O: enterprise I/O solutions; $45 million
Tiny Speck: social gaming; $5 million
Zynga: social gaming; $180 million

Seed

Burbn; social location; $500,000
Canvas Networks: image boards; $625,000
Factual: structured data; $1 million
GoodData: cloud-based collaborative analytics; $2.5 million
Quantifind; enterprise; unknown funding
RethinkDB: database storage; $1.2 million
Mixed Media Labs: photo sharing; $370,000
SnapLogic: open-source enterprise data integration; $2.3 million
TopProspect: social recruiting; unknown funding
Vikkii: user-generated subtitling; unknown funding
Ze Frank Games: online gaming; unknown funding

And here are video interviews BoomTown has done with both Andreessen and Horowitz in the last year on their investing theories:

Software companies including SAP AG (SAP), Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) have recently raised several billion dollars by selling debt for the first time in their histories. The moves follow similar offerings over the past year from cash-rich giants like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which had $25 billion in cash when it took on debt for the first time last May.

The decision to take on debt breaks from tradition in tech, where companies have typically preferred to raise money by selling stock. Debt has become a more attractive fundraising option largely because interest rates are low.

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The new fund is unusual in this day and age amid a tough fundraising environment brought on by the recession. What’s more, many venture capitalists argue that funds need to be smaller to get back to the basics, especially since venture capital isn’t an industry that necessarily scales upwards.

Here’s what Promod Haque, NVP’s managing partner, had to say about all this:

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We consider Jill Sobule to be the musical muse of ATD–which we desperately need since we are obviously way, way too jacked into the matrix.

That’s precisely why we have the gifted singer-songwriter appear annually at our D: All Things Digital conference–to kick off each day’s sessions with one of her songs and, more to the point, add a lot of much-needed levity and nontechie soul to the proceedings.

And tomorrow, Sobule’s Internet-funded album, “California Years,” produced by the legendary Don Was, debuts. I urge everyone to click the link here and get a copy–online, of course.

And by Internet-funded, I mean that the $75,000 needed to produce the album was raised entirely through an innovative Web initiative Sobule ginned up in late 2007 via a site called Jill’s Next Record.

Sobule wrote about the effort several times in our Voices section, where you can read about her asking for ideas here, launching her fund-raising site here and, finally, talking about the result here.

Sobule (pictured here in cartoon form)–whose big mainstream hit a few years ago was a much-better-than-hopelessly-dopey-Katy-Perry “I Kissed a Girl”–had worked her way through four record labels (she was dropped by two and two went belly-up) with six CDs.

Sick and tired of the way musical artists had their work funded, she essentially asked her fans to become her record label, writing on her site: “It would be a sort of patronage thing, where you guys are the Medici family, except I give you prizes for donations of certain amounts.”

The $1,000 “platinum” level, for example, got the donor a theme song and the $5,000 “diamond” level got a house concert by Sobule.

And what her fans are getting now in the completed album is superb–a sometimes funny, sometimes sad and always moving work. (My young sons cannot stop singing her perfect song, “San Francisco,” for example.)

As Sobule writes:

“‘California Years’ was written over the last three years, following my move to the West Coast. It was influenced by the sights and sounds of the Golden State, especially the seductive, but not always sunny Los Angeles. Maybe the next record will be ‘The Utah Month’ or ‘Back to Brooklyn.’

“The whole thing was made possible by a small but mighty fan base. They gave me the love, encouragement and the dough to do this. I was truly surprised and so very grateful. This record is for them.”

Let’s cheer on efforts like Sobule’s and hope for a hit. Because hers is indeed a small but mighty effort, as all kinds of content creators try to figure out businesses in the new digital age, unafraid of the changes inevitably coming (AP might want to take notes about this).

Here is Sobule in a long interview on NPR last week (which you cannot embed, bad NPR!) and another video below on CNN about her digital project:

And here are two videos I did with her about the effort. The first has one of the songs on the new album, called “Nothing to Prove,” and the other an update on what she wants to do next, digitally and musically speaking:

Facebook CFO Gideon Yu (pictured here) is leaving Facebook, as the company announced internally today that it was replacing him and searching for a new CFO on the path to an eventual IPO.

The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the huge social-networking start-up was looking for a CFO with “public company experience.”

But several sources within the company said the departure was more due to an increasingly strained relationship between Yu and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over strategic disagreements about a wide range of issues, from increasing advertising revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.

“At Facebook, you’re either with Mark or you’re not,” said one source at the 800-person company, located in Palo Alto, Calif., and founded five years ago. “And, if you’re not, you leave.”

As a sign of that, Yu was out of the company HQ immediately today after a meeting, said several sources.

Facebook confirmed the move in a statement, focusing instead on its hope for an IPO sometime in the future:

“Facebook confirms that CFO Gideon Yu will be leaving the company. Gideon has played an important role in helping us achieve our financial success, building a strong finance team and establishing the core financial operations of our company. We are grateful to Gideon for his contributions to Facebook and what we are trying to accomplish. Despite the poor economic climate, we are pleased that our financial performance is strong and we are well positioned for the next stage of our growth. We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience.”

In addition, trying to stanch the rumors of its financial weakness and need to raise more funds, Facebook said in its internal memo to staff that it was on the path toward a public offering soon, with revenue growth up 70 percent in 2009 and EBITDA profitability this year, and that it would be cash-flow positive in 2010.

The memo also painted Yu’s departure as another step toward its much anticipated IPO, although it is clearly an ouster of much more complex internal reasons about how Facebook is run.

Facebook has had a lot of those in its short history.

From come-and-then-gone Google tech exec Ben Ling to former COO Owen Van Natta to the pair who started Facebook with Zuckerberg, the fast-growing start-up has seen more executive turnover and turmoil than most big companies.

In fact, Yu–who was an exec at both Yahoo (YHOO) and YouTube and integral to its sale to Google–replaced former CFO Mike Sheridan in 2007, in another case of a key exec being replaced.

Some inside and outside the company were quick to blame COO Sheryl Sandberg for Yu’s departure–probably due to the fact that the pair’s relationship was initially tense when the well-known Google exec arrived a year ago. That has been much less so of late, sources said.

And while Facebook can be a highly political place, with an unusual level of passive-aggressive infighting among execs, it is also a place where Zuckerberg and his wishes firmly hold sway.

And those wishes included the fact that Zuckerberg has long and publicly maintained that Facebook’s growth was paramount over a focus on monetization of the service.

Yu is known internally to be more conservative fiscally, pushing on Zuckerberg to ramp ad revenue more quickly and to consider a range of options outside of IPO, including selling the company.

Many current and former execs had hoped the company would IPO, a process that has been dragged out due to the weaker economy. But–barring that–many had also hoped it would sell to a larger company like Google (GOOG) or Microsoft (MSFT).

In fact, Microsoft has expressed interest in buying Facebook many times, and it was Yu and Van Natta who were key to getting the software giant to outbid Google to invest in the company at an astounding $15 billion valuation.

After raising more than $500 million previously, Yu has more recently been busy working with top execs on the best way to raise more funds for Facebook, in order to allow it grow faster and give it a deeper financial cushion.

High user growth has blown past Facebook’s internal projections, which is both an audience blessing and a cost curse.

But that fund raising has been at a much lower valuation and in a very weak economic climate, adding to stress internally at Facebook, many said.

Yu has held a number of meetings with investors, many of whom have told me they have asked him consistently about the monetization issues at Facebook and exactly when Zuckerberg would turn on the ad spigot at the service.

Yu has also has been involved in some recent debt financing of equipment, which is not as unusual for a fast-growing company as some recent reports have portrayed it, although that might also have been a source of tensions.

How to answer prospective new investors has probably been at the heart of his problems with Zuckerberg, who has been known to run hot and cold on top managers, especially with those who disagree with him too much.

That was clearly the case with Yu.

But, said many execs at the company, Zuckerberg’s conviction that growth is key over all other concerns–about which the company today is taking the edge off by noting sunnier financial results in the internal document–has been the correct one.

Currently, Facebook is veering in on 200 million users, which represents an astounding accomplishment.

But how it is going to take those numbers and make Facebook into a revenue-rich company on par with its increasing power on the Web is the question it will face until, of course, it does.

Besides the current drama over Yu today, Facebook has also recently been embroiled in unhappiness about its recent redesign and separately, about onerous changes to its Terms of Service.

Facebook has since backtracked on both issues, likely adding to the level of pressure on Zuckerberg and top execs.

And that is not even mentioning the curse of the Winklevii–it seems the fun never stops at Facebook HQ!

On an actually more amusing note, I once nicknamed Yu “Death Cat.”

As I wrote in mid-2007:

“Like that cat named Oscar who can detect death, Yu seems to have an amazing ability to get a sweet job at the hot Web company of the moment at just the right time. Case in point: He left Yahoo as its treasurer and went to YouTube as its CFO just a month before it sold to Google for $1.6 billion, a deal in which Yu apparently played a key role. Then, on his way to a spot as a junior partner at also-hot VC firm Sequoia Capital, he grabbed the Facebook CFO job in July. I say we watch where Yu goes and follow stealthily behind so as not to be detected.”

It’s more than likely Yu will pop up again soon in Silicon Valley in another prominent CFO job or as a venture investor. Although, after today’s events, this digital cat has definitely lost one life.