In closing the fund, the Menlo Park, Calif., firm is bucking two prevailing trends in the venture-capital industry, including an anemic fund-raising environment that has winnowed the number of venture firms that can raise large pools of capital.

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Previously on AllThingsD: What Bad Economy? Three Big Silicon Valley VCs Poised to Haul in $2B in New Fund Raising.

The funding came from new investors Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures along with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bill Campbell, First Round Capital and Ron Conway, and brings Accel’s Jim Breyer and Khosla of Khosla Ventures in as board observers.

RockMelt has been especially embraced by young users, said CEO Eric Vishria. Fifty-six percent of active RockMelt users are age 24 and younger, and most of them use the browser’s chat feature on a daily basis.

Rockmelt has for most of its short life been known as a “social browser,” given its deep sharing and chat integration, especially with Facebook. But the company’s ambitions are broader than that, Andreessen — co-creator of the first Web browser — said in an interview.

“When we created the browser 15 to 20 years ago we had no idea what the killer apps would be,” Andreessen said. “Had we known about these things we would have built it very differently.”

The first killer app for the browser — for function — was search, Andreessen said. I asked Andreessen if he thinks the current ubiquitous browser business model — revenue sharing from search toolbars — will change if user activity becomes less about search and information retrieval.

“I think search continues to be very important,” Andreessen said. “Google had a billion uniques last month. But social is next.”

After search and social, Andreessen said, he envisions a half dozen more killer apps for the browser — basically, all the stuff we do online all day. Some examples might be daily deals and phone calls. “How much better could it be if that were built straight in?” Andreessen asked.

But back to RockMelt’s other challenges: What about the not-so-little issue of competition from other browsers? Khosla said in a separate interview, “When a browser changes from an information retrieval tool to a social media tool it’s probably some new company that’s going to figure it out … When shifts happen I sincerely believe start-ups are the best at entering the new market.”

Facebook and RockMelt recently worked together to create a custom Facebook experience when the site is visited from the browser. As for potential competition if Facebook were to build its own social browser, both Andreessen and Khosla shrugged it off. Khosla’s take: “These things [browsers] are not easy to do.” Andreessen’s: “I’m in a conflicted situation as a Facebook director so don’t want to speak on Facebook’s behalf. But as a RockMelt director, RockMelt is thrilled with our relationship with Facebook.”

Vishria said the new funding will be used for marketing, business development and hiring. Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt employs 40 people now, which he expects to double within the next year.

RockMelt’s first round of funding came in September 2009, just over a year before it put out a product.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Vinod Khosla said in a phone interview that he was particularly interested in Meebo’s plans to make Web sites social through its Meebo Bar, which will soon include ways for users to virtually “check-in” to Web sites. And secondly, he was impressed by the company’s success with brand advertisers.

“I think very few things are so broad that they reach most of the users on the Internet and this is one of those,” Khosla said. (Meebo currently reaches 180 million uniques, double what it had a year ago, so it’s not quite at “most” of the Internet, but it’s growing fast.)

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg said 87 percent of the company’s advertisers in 2009 returned in 2010, on average doubling their budgets. He said the Meebo Bar has a 1 percent click-through rate.

That relatively high effectiveness is in part because the Meebo Bar is always visible on the pages of its 8,000-plus publisher partners. Sternberg said that by the time users click on the ad, they’ve often spent a good amount of time on the page, so it’s not just an errant click–they’re actually interested in the brand.

The average Meebo user spends 60 seconds with an ad, longer than the canonical television commercial.

Sternberg said Meebo preferred a smaller venture round to the jumbo later-stage deals companies like Yelp, Facebook and Groupon have taken, because he doesn’t want to significantly change the culture of his company. $25 million is the same amount Meebo raised the last time it took funding, in spring 2008.

Mr. Khosla said the partnership means he can pick up the phone and “ask Tony for advice” in areas such as environmental policy. He added, “Tony’s going to help us in many areas that techie nerds in Silicon Valley like us don’t understand.”

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The 55-year-old, who co-founded Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA) and was a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, now runs his own firm investing in clean-tech companies.

Last September, Mr. Khosla announced that his firm, Khosla Ventures, had raised two new funds that totaled more than $1 billion, giving him ammunition to nurture clean-technology start-ups.

In a recent conversation at his offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park–widely known as venture-capital row–Mr. Khosla discussed the competition to be the nation’s clean-tech center, how Silicon Valley stacks up in that race, and what green products he uses himself.

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David Weiden, one of Khosla’s partners who concentrates specifically in tech investments, said the firm is allotting more money towards clean tech because that sector boasts “a lot of opportunity where there’s relatively little competition relative to the size of the market.” In the crowded tech field, meanwhile, opportunities can be “somewhat harder to come by,” he said.

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Khosla, a legendary venture capitalist and one of the most active investors in cleantech through his firm Khosla Ventures, said some of the books that have helped generate buzz were “probably written by English majors who could not get a real job,” he said onstage at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford University.

The industry is far more scientifically dense and difficult to predict than many seem to believe, he said, so almost everything being about cleantech today should be taken with a grain of salt.

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Writing about however many millions of dollars go to however many frivolous widget companies is about as interesting as watching Robert Scoble’s blog video lectures. (Sorry, Bob!)

So it is nice to see a good (and good-for-you) charity site like DonorsChoose get some money and, hopefully, attention.

The site, which lets teachers upload proposals for resources and projects–from books to playgrounds–they need funding for and matches them with donors, has to be limited in geography. But today, it will open its services to every public school in the U.S. to allow teachers nationwide to get their wish lists fulfilled online.

With the national expansion, the nonprofit hopes be on track to becoming 100% self-sustaining, according to its founder, a former Bronx schoolteacher named Charles Best.

That’s due to $11 million in possible funding from a panoply of big Web players. EBay Founder Pierre Omidyar has promised to pony up $6 million, with Yahoo’s David Filo, longtime VC Vinod Khosla and Netflix’s Reed Hastings adding in the rest. (Khosla was an early supporter, allowing the site to expand to the San Francisco area from its New York base.)

The catch for the funding? Omidyar will release the bulk of his commitment only if DonorsChoose completes the round by Nov. 30.

It seems like a pretty good investment to me, using the Internet to clarify and amplify the donating process. Sort of like eBay meets Match.com meets Amazon. So far, the site has given away $14.5 million to projects.

Best says DonorsChoose authenticates every project proposal before posting it. Then it purchases the resources when a project is funded and sends the goods off to teachers, with some donors also adding in more money to pay for fulfillment costs.

That will now be a lot cheaper and more efficient due to a donation by Ariba of fulfillment software and services to DonorsChoose that the site values at over $2 million. That follows a donation by Filo, said Best, of five Yahoo engineers who were lent to DonorsChoose full-time for five months to rewrite its code base.

But Best is more articulate than I can be, so here is a video of him talking about his site:

Yesterday brought news that Om Malik was going all Al Gore on us with his new Earth2Tech, a blog site “devoted to the business of clean technologies, its innovations and everything else.”

We like what we have read so far (avoid soy biodiesel IPOs, as if they were Pets.com reincarnated–DONE!) and it looks great (nice digital leaf).

Not to be outdone, we made acquaintance with writer Charles Runnette and his veggie Mercedes, whilst on a run to the most excellent Baby Blue Bar-B-Q in Venice, Calif., last night (which was deliciously oily, too).

The car, which has been converted to run on vegetable oil by Lovecraft Bio-Fuels, a popular company that converts diesel cars in the shaggy Silver Lake area of Los Angeles.

I once visited an even shaggier commune right next door to Lovecraft and can still recall the pungent Thai food smell that perpetually wafted out of the place, as its workers toiled at making the world gasoline-free. Mighty tasty, too!

Here’s my video: