More Money for Twitter Apps: TweetDeck Raises Another $3 Million

Remember last month, when everyone was convinced that Twitter was going to cut off the oxygen to all the start-ups that had built up around the service?

I talked to TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth at the time, and he seemed reasonably confident that Twitter wasn’t going to crush his small app company into pulp. His argument: We serve a specific niche of Twitter users, and Twitter is happy to let us do that. We’ll be fine.

Others seem to be buying in. TweetDeck got a big push yesterday from Google (GOOG), which gave it a slot during its I/O developer conference. And today, the company has announced that it raised another $3 million in a Series B round. It has now raised about $5 million in less than two years.

This is an inside round, with all the previous investors, led by Betaworks, participating. So if you want to be a skeptic, you might wonder why the company didn’t get new money this time.

But regardless, it’s a vote of confidence that there’s plenty of growth left for companies–at least, some companies–that want to service Twitter users.

There’s also a new version of TweetDeck out now. Here’s a preview video of the upgrade: