Today, Birst will announce that it has taken a $26 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. It is Birst’s fourth round of funding, and existing investors including Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures are also participating, but it’s not a traditional Series D. Sequoia is investing with its Growth Fund, and that creates a slightly different investment dynamic, Doug Leone, a Sequoia Capital partner, told me.

Here’s what happened: Sequoia had already invested in Birst with its Venture fund. But over the last year or so, Leone started seeing something interesting. Companies that Leone is involved with, either as an investor or as a director — specifically Aruba Networks and Rackspace — had selected Birst after a business-intelligence bake-off versus other vendors. As a director of those two companies, he was able to see the close-up evaluation they did in making their selection.

On top of that, Leone noticed that Birst kept bringing in more customers per quarter, and that those customers were putting ever more dollars on the table. “We decided to make a preemptive offer with our Growth Equity Fund,” Leone told AllThingsD yesterday. “We saw what we thought was the knee of the curve. We saw quite clearly that we were at the beginning of a phase of hypergrowth for this company.”

The main difference between the venture-capital and growth-equity investments is that growth investments are made in companies that have growing revenue and a proven business model, whereas VC investments are made in start-ups that are just getting off the ground. It’s sort of a statement of faith in where Birst appears to be going. “It’s like a later-stage investment. It’s the last money the company is going to need.”

It’s not a small statement, either. This $26 million round is bigger than its previous three rounds combined, and brings its total capital raised to $46 million.

So what’s it going to do with all that money? CEO Brad Peters said he’s seeing a significant acceleration. Customers like the flexibility of a cloud-type BI solution, even if it’s running on-premise. “We need to get Birst out there. We need to build our sales organization, we need to build our distribution channel.” He also said a big announcement around infrastructure is pending, in order to better help Birst — his words — “catch the big-data wave.”

And will it join the parade of companies going public after Facebook? Not right away, Peters said. “We’re on that trajectory, but it won’t happen this year, or probably next. Maybe just after that,” he told me. “We’re building this to be a standalone, independent company.”

The textbook case for BI is comparing data on marketing spend to deals. If you find you’re spending a lot of money on one type of marketing campaign that seems not to be generating leads and deals, and not enough on one that seems to be working better, you can see the pattern and make needed changes. It’s all about synthesizing raw data and turning it into information you can make a decision on, Peters told me last year.

There’s a lot of venture-capital money flowing into young BI companies. Both Good Data and Domo have raised a lot on their own, and there are probably other companies I haven’t thought of, not to mention the large software players like Oracle and SAP, who do business intelligence, and IBM, which tends to favor the word “analytics” over “business intelligence.” Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy business unit could also arguably be considered a business-intelligence outfit. Given all that activity, it just might be intelligent to to keep watching this business.

That was July. Wednesday, Domo will announce that it has raised another batch of money, and is bringing in a new investor. The company has closed a $20 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

IVP, which had invested in Omniture and so has a history with James, is joining an all-star cast of investors including Benchmark Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel; and Hummer Winblad, plus a bunch of personal investments. The round — which is being described as an A-1 round, brings Domo’s total capital raised to date to $63 million.

IVP general partner Todd Chaffee said Domo is an example of a dynamic management team going after a high-growth market. “We know Josh has the experience to build Domo into a disruptive and dominant player in a growing $10 billion market,” he said in a statement. Aside from Omniture, IVP has backed HomeAway, MySQL, Twitter and Zynga.

James wouldn’t tell me the implied valuation, but he did concede that it’s upward of “a couple hundred million.” And if that’s not surprising enough, what’s equally surprising is one possible use for the money: Acquisitions. Well, maybe.

“Let’s just suppose, and this is 100 percent supposition,” he told me over the phone Tuesday, “that we want to buy someone. We’ve thought about it. We’ve had potential targets cross the email threads. It’s not the right time to do that stuff just yet. But it’s nice to know we have the flexibility when the time comes.”

So where’s Domo, the business intelligence software-as-service play he was building? It’s running as a demonstration with a few early customers, he says. And he’ll have more to say about it publicly in about three to four months.

“We have a few thousand people who say they want to see a demo, and we’re working through that list,” James says. “The feedback has been more positive and at a higher rate than I would have thought possible. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do a lot of installations all at once.”

That’s what we call a good problem to have.

Facebook said the deal was a talent acquisition — meaning it didn’t commit to continuing Strobe’s products and didn’t buy its technology — and that it looked forward to Jolley and some others from Strobe joining its mobile engineering team.

Strobe had launched a developer preview only two months ago as a way to simultaneously build and launch Web and native apps for Android and iOS.

Jolley wrote in a blog post today, “Strobe was founded on the belief that HTML5 can transform the way average people use their mobile phones through apps that are available everywhere, anytime, on any device. Now we’re joining the talented people at Facebook to help develop innovative mobile experiences for their users around the world.”

The 18-month-old Strobe was backed with $2.5 million by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. It was competitive with Sencha, which by contrast has raised something like $30 million.