Zetta is in the business of buying patents from failed start-ups, but its strategy is different from other firms in that field. Most others will hoard as many patents as they can in the hopes that a few will be valuable or that the combined weight of many can be used to coerce a company into licensing their patents. 

Instead, Zetta finds start-ups that have potentially valuable patents and enlists the help of the inventors to continue developing them. Rather than relying on litigation and threats, it seeks to sell the portfolio to a big technology company once the timing is right. 

The firm enlists the help of the inventors because many of a start-up’s patent applications have yet to be granted, meaning that there’s more work to do with the patent office. Also, there’s often an opportunity to file additional patents based on the start-up’s work, said Come Lague, Zetta’s chief executive. 

It’s also helpful to have the inventors on board because they know the start-up’s history and can help Zetta make sure that it has a free and clear title to those patents– something that’s very important when selling them to big companies, Lague said. 

When it gets control of the patents, Zetta sets up a separate business entity and hands out equity to the inventors and patent attorneys that work on the deal. It also gives a stake to lenders or investors, depending on the circumstances. When they need additional capital to get the patents or develop them, the firm has a network of “very seasoned” individual investors, Lague said. 

Its first such deal came when OQO, a handheld-computer start-up, collapsed in 2009. Though the company wasn’t successful, it held many patents that are relevant to smartphones and tablet computers. 

Lague had spent some time as OQO’s chief financial officer and Joe Betts-Lacroix, now Zetta’s chief IP officer, had been OQO’s chief technology officer and the inventor of many of its patents. 

Lague and his partners picked up the patents out of a general assignment in 2010, after the company closed, and put to work “an army of people” to catch up on a backlog of paperwork for its patents that had been neglected as OQO shut down. 

A little over a year later, the patents sold for a “very good outcome,” Lague said. He declined to disclose the buyer or price, citing a non-disclosure agreement, but filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show the patents were sold to Google. 

“When you’re trying to sell the IP when the company’s closing, that’s the worst time to sell,” Lague said. Using this model, a start-up can reap some return by waiting to sell the patents, rather than selling them as the business runs out of cash, he said. 

In trying to sell the OQO patents, the firm got several calls from companies asking if they had other patents, which made Lague and his partners decide there was an opportunity to do more similar deals. Lague says that by taking litigation off the table, Zetta is able to reach more buyers than if they started a conversation with threats. 

Some of its other deals include patents from VoloMedia, a maker of advertising software, and Krypton Search Technology, holding company for a sole inventor’s patents around search interfaces and semantic Web technologies.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Zetta is backed by Foundation Capital and Sigma Partners.

-By Scott Denne; 212-416-2028; scott.denne@dowjones.com; Twitter: @scottdenne

Inerjys is raising a $1 billion fund that will combine a venture-capital-style investment strategy with a power project development arm, aiming to fund both development and commercialization of clean technologies.

Shah was previously chief executive of the Carbon War Room, a climate-change-fighting initiative founded by Richard Branson. Branson, who has served as an informal adviser to Inerjys, had introduced Shah to the firm, according to Raphael Bouskila, an associate at Inerjys. Shah has also served as president of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, an industry association that has been fighting against tariffs on Chinese solar panels in the U.S.

Before the Carbon War Room, Shah founded and served as chief executive of SunEdison, a pioneer in commercial solar power sales in the U.S. that had been acquired by MEMC Electronic Materials Inc. in 2009.

Shah will be developing Inerjys’ international renewable energy project strategy.

Pullan was previously founder and director of New Energy and Clean Technology Ventures group at Nomura International PLC, a subsidiary of Japan’s Nomura Holdings, an investment firm with about an $11.87 billion market capitalization.

Pullan will lead growth equity investments in clean tech for Inerjys.

Before Nomura, Pullan led venture capital investments for the Carbon Trust, a fund backed by the U.K. government.

The new members of Inerjys’ team add more clean-technology industry experience to the firm, founded last year by Stephan Ouaknine, an entrepreneur who has built his career outside of clean-tech.

“Let’s not do what venture capitalists do, which is to give companies too much money so they inevitably feel artificially rich and they raise their burn rates,” said Ouaknine in an earlier interview about his firm’s strategy. “Let’s give them revenue.”

Inerjys plans to deploy via its projects the very technologies in which its equity investment arm invests.

“I put a lot of my net worth into it,” Ouaknine said about Inerjys.

Art by Mike Lucas

Liquid Metal Battery received an additional $15 million investment to complete its Series B round, as investors continue to see promise in battery technology. Khosla Ventures led the round for the Cambridge, Mass.-based company, and the company’s Series A investors Bill Gates and
Total SA participated.

Recorded Future, a company that’s organizing the Web for analytics, has secured $12 million in Series C funding to expand further into the intelligence business. The company provides people with a way to interact with everything that gets written on the Web with visualization tools sitting on top of a database of facts or through an API.

Also in today’s VentureWire: Flowonix Medical, a company with an implantable drug-delivery pump that has been approved for sale by the FDA, has raised a $25 million funding round to put its technology on the market…Blueprint Medicines has brought Fidelity Biosciences into its $40 million Series A financing as it pushes ahead with plans to develop cancer drugs for small populations of genetically defined patients…and following the sale of a minority stake to TA Associates, optical component company CyOptics withdrew its IPO registration; the private equity investor put $100 million into the business in March to enable it to buy up the stakes of its long-time venture investors, according to a person familiar with the deal.

(VentureWire is a daily newsletter with comprehensive analysis of all the investments, deals and personnel moves involving start-ups and their venture backers. For a two-week trial, visit our homepage, scroll to the bottom and click “try for free.”)

Elsewhere around the Web:

With the BlackBerry’s grip on corporate America loosening, start-ups are moving into the business of helping big companies manage mobile devices, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Valuations of venture-backed companies in Silicon Valley are moderating a bit, especially in later-stage deals, says the latest survey from law firm Fenwick & West.

Benchmark Capital is opening an office in San Francisco, not far from portfolio company Twitter, the San Francisco Chronicle says. The firm is keeping its office in Menlo Park, but the move is another sign that for many tech investors, SF, not the Valley, is the place to be.

The Daily Start-Up won’t publish Monday. Enjoy Memorial Day.

Like many children in the 1980s, Yann Ngongang wanted a Nintendo. Instead of buying him one, his father, a computer scientist, handed him four programming books and an Alice 64K computer.

“If you want a game, build it yourself,” he told Ngongang, who was nine years old and living with his family in Cameroon. So that’s what the future entrepreneur did.

Ngongang’s father succumbed to liver cancer when Yann was just 14, leaving his son with a profound curiosity about technology, and the inspiration to create things and solve problems through programming.

His mother demonstrated entrepreneurial spirit too–she left steady work at a bank to start her own import-export business, while raising her three children as a young widow shuttling between Western Africa, Asia and Europe for her work.

Her example stoked Ngongang’s interest in business, and showed him what it takes to be your own boss–”hustle and courage,” he says.

Today, as the founder and chief executive of hotel-bookings site Guestmob, he has to be fearless. His company competes in a $120 billion market against a formidable group of online travel agencies and deal aggregators, including incumbents like Hotwire, Expedia, Priceline, Travelocity and newer players like Kayak, Hotels Tonight or Jetsetter.

Guestmob helps people get great deals on hotel rooms by aggregating demand, with Guestmob users becoming part of a virtual “shopping mob.”

Ngongang says the concept started buzzing around in his head around 2007, when he saw an anti-capitalist “flash mob” on a visit to Avignon, France.

At the time, he was working as a strategy consultant at Mercer Management in San Francisco, analyzing social networks and search for his client, Microsoft. He knew he wanted to do something leveraging the power of crowds online.

He had also been reading about the Chinese concept of Tuángòu, which translates into something like “team buying.” In China, “shopping mobs” had showed up everywhere from car dealerships to clothiers, to successfully attain better deals than advertised.

Ngongang decided to test that group-buying concept in travel. He called around to four-star hotels in San Francisco to see what kind of rates he could get if he was booking for a large party within one week.

Rooms were listed online at $225 for the next week. Ngongang says, “I called and asked, ‘If I bring you twenty rooms next week, what can you do for me?’ At one hotel, the group sales rep asked, ‘How much do you want to pay?’ and I started laughing. I said, ‘We’ll pay $100.’ She said, ‘We can do it for $125.’ At that point the bells went off.”

Ngongang realized that nobody was coordinating groups of people online who were traveling to the same places during the same weeks, but who were not part of the same wedding party, business, or alumni network. Guestmob was born.

The way it works is this: Travelers go to the Guestmob site, log in and select a destination, a date range and the number of hotel rooms they want to book. The site shows them “curated collections” of 3-, 4-, and 5-star hotel rooms in the neighborhood where they want to stay, along with available pricing for their dates of travel. Users know they’ll get one of the hotels in a “collection” once they book. They don’t know which one they’ll get until a few days before they travel.

What customers may not see in the Guestmob user experience, but what they benefit from, is that the company aggregates demand to negotiate last-minute bulk rates on hotel rooms for them.

When the hotels are in danger of having a lot of “spoiled inventory,” as Ngongang calls it, or unused rooms, they may be eager to lock in a great price. If no hotels give deals to Guestmob, the start-up will “pay at the delta” but still pass along the promised, discounted rate and rooms to their users.

Guestmob gets good prices by offering to bring hotel owners and reservation desks a big group at the near-last minute, in a way that does not force the hotels to violate the brand agreements they have with other sites like Travelocity and Expedia.

Because Guestmob addresses the wishes of consumers and needs of hotels at once, it could be a disruptive business model, says Mark Allen, a travel-industry expert and an adviser to Guestmob.

Some insiders have responded negatively to Guestmob’s launch. One blogger–former Hotwire and Starwood executive Tom Botts–wrote a scathing post that seems to call on hoteliers to resist the Guestmob model. He wrote “downward rate spiral, anyone? Haven’t we seen this movie?”

From Ngongang’s point of view, Guestmob actually helps hotels by filling vacancies, while ensuring hotel brands avoid contractual conflicts in doing so. Nobody knows which hotels are actually providing deals to Guestmob–even if their rooms are featured in a collection offered online.

“It’s not a permanent relationship or non-relationship with hotels. One may provide a deal this week, but not next week,” Ngongang points out.

The company hedges its losses by predicting where it will be possible to strike good deals on behalf of customers, using algorithms, historic and real-time data about cities, hotels, weather and other travel trends, and price-engine technology.

Since launching nationally in March, Ngongang says site traffic grew five times, without marketing and advertising. Guestmob has also experienced acceleration in bookings with New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Chicago as its top destinations outside of San Francisco.

“Not everybody is going to like us,” Ngongang said in an interview following the company’s national rollout. As bold as he is in some ways, the CEO reins in his optimism. Past failures in start-up land may have instilled this humility, or at least reinforced it.

From 2005 to 2007, the CEO ran another ambitious business, eSmogCheck, that wanted to be a sort of OpenTable for auto services by helping car owners book appointments easily with reliable auto mechanics. The service also helped auto mechanics manage reservations.

ESmogCheck shut down in 2007 while the company was generating revenue. It wasn’t growing fast enough to generate returns for investors, or to stay ahead of bills, Ngongang admits.

Though customers–drivers and mechanics alike–were enjoying the service, he says, its addressable market wasn’t big enough. His investors were not institutional angels or VCs, and Ngongang agonized over asking them for more money to get to scale, or quitting while he was facing reasonable, rather than insurmountable, debt.

He knew it was time to fold when it was hard to get up and go to work every morning.

“I had six-figure investors who were not super-diversified,” he said. “It made me feel a great burden. I did not want to double down. They lost money. You take on that battle. As an entrepreneur you go into a funk for a few months and you come out of it after you decide to fold. It was emotionally gut wrenching. Here was your first true start-up. People wrote you a check and trusted your plan. But it didn’t deliver.”

He let his team go and paid the expenses that he could. He went back, briefly, to consulting and writing code. But all the while, he was formulating the concept for Guestmob, thinking about a much bigger market.

Eric Chen, founder of UJVentures and TinyPrints, was familiar with Yann’s failed first start-up. But he also saw technical talent, persistence and vision. He ended up financing Guestmob and helping the start-up attain an $800,000 seed round in August 2011.

Chen helped bring in a network of other tech angels including Fabrice Grinda, the founder of huge success stories in tech like Xingy, a pioneering mobile media company, and Joe Lonsdale of Palantir, the intelligence and big data software business.

Why back a CEO with a failure on his record? Chen says, “I was intrigued because this is a tremendous market. But after spending a bunch of time with Yann and talking to people that knew him, I saw he’d will this thing to happen or die trying.”

Art by Mike Lucas

Comcast Ventures, which has been making investments for several years in providers of information technology for the health-care industry, has made its first-ever investment in a health-related gadget, leading a $12 million funding round for wearable sensor company BodyMedia. The company makes monitors that feature several sensors that monitor the body’s expenditure of energy.

Lightbank, the technology investment fund started by Groupon co-founders, has created its own founders’ laboratory–it’s hauling in promising experts from different disciplines and turning them into first-time entrepreneurs. While it’s not unusual for venture firms to nurture ideas with entrepreneurs they’ve handpicked, Lightbank picks people who haven’t founded and scaled companies before.

Also in today’s VentureWire: Being too early to a market is often the kiss of death for a start-up, but for Vitrue being early in the social-media market is about to pay off as the company has agreed to be acquired by Oracle…TrustedID, which makes technology to protect Web and mobile users’ identity, reputation and credit, acquired the non-profit Catalog Choice…and nine months after launching Erly, Eric Feng has sold it to the stealthy live video platform Airtime, led by Napster founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning.

(VentureWire is a daily newsletter with comprehensive analysis of all the investments, deals and personnel moves involving start-ups and their venture backers. For a two-week trial, visit our homepage, scroll to the bottom and click “try for free.”)

Elsewhere around the Web:

Start-up accelerators, or incubators, have multiplied but critics question their value, especially outside tech hubs in Silicon Valley, Boston and New York, where operations such as Y Combinator and TechStars have the kind of clout with VCs to give their offspring a fighting chance.

Questions linger about Facebook’s fumbled IPO as news surfaces about how underwriters advised big clients, but not average investors, that analysts had lowered expectations for Facebook’s revenue growth.

Venture firms have discovered Brazil, and now Sequoia Capital is sending Partner David Velez south to lead its regional office there, New York Times blog DealBook says. Velez joined Sequoia last year and before that helped private equity firm General Atlantic launch operations in Brazil.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm has more than 60 clean-technology companies, several of which are raising capital at a difficult time. They can’t access the IPO market, and private capital is growing thinner for this sector. That sets the stage for write-downs.

One of Kleiner Perkins’s best-known clean-tech portfolio companies, Fisker Automotive, maker of a luxury plug-in hybrid, retained bankers months ago to explore an IPO, but instead had to turn to private investors for more capital. Luca Technologies, which converts coal into natural gas, pulled its IPO recently. Silver Spring Networks has been in registration to go public for months.

A year ago, Ray Lane, partner at Kleiner Perkins, said that he expected that the firm would exit at least ten companies shortly in an IPO or merger, but the many IPOs he was hoping for didn’t materialize.

Lane is not going to be a general partner in  the new Kleiner Perkins fund, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Now that the IPO market is practically closed to new issues, Kleiner’s clean-tech companies will need to raise capital from private investors, but that source of capital is also in short supply, as venture firms pursue other sectors. As VentureWire reported, several funds have deemphasized clean-tech recently, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies and Polaris Venture Partners. Good Energies is a co-investor with Kleiner Perkins in Alta Devices, a solar manufacturer. DFJ has co-invested with Kleiner in lighting-controls company Enlighted and in GreatPoint Energy

 That puts Kleiner’s clean-tech portfolio in a difficult spot. Kleiner Perkins is known for setting high valuations when it brings in additional investors to its rounds. When times are tough, a high previous round can spell a big write-down, as seen in the plummeting values of solar manufacturing start-ups that raised capital around 2007 at the height of solar euphoria.

Kleiner Perkins has gotten its clean-tech portfolio through the recession, with a good chunk of help from the government’s stimulus program. But the market didn’t recover strongly enough to allow the firm to sell its holdings at a high valuation. And the companies may need hand-holding again. Kleiner Perkins does have a Green Growth Fund that could provide additional financing.

The later-stage financing shortage is a problem that the wider clean-tech sector has to cope with. Kleiner’s portfolio is a case in point.

-By Yuliya Chernova; yuliya.chernova@dowjones.com; Twitter: @ychernova

Art by Mike Lucas

General Catalyst Partners, a firm known for bankrolling technology concerns, is making a push into health care, launching and funding life sciences start-ups and backing some mature companies, VentureWire has learned. The firm, which closed its sixth fund at $500 million in December, is seeking to use its company-building techniques to profit from large markets.

Solar company Amonix, a recipient of significant venture and government funding, plans to lay off 76 people in a variety of manufacturing, planning, R&D and other positions, according to a filing it made with a state agency. The layoffs at two California facilities come on the heels of some success–the largest power plant using Amonix’s high-concentration photovoltaic solar panels just started producing power in Colorado.

Also in today’s VentureWire: Yottaa, a company that protects, monitors and optimizes the performance of websites and Web applications, especially for small and medium-size businesses, has raised $9 million in Series B funding… GroSocial, a creator of social-media marketing softwarefor small and mid-size businesses, said it closed a $1 million Series A financing round led by Kickstart Seed Fund…and SG Biofuels, an energy crop companydelivering bioenergy products for the renewable fuel, biomass and chemical markets, has appointed Jerry Caulder as chairman of the board.

(VentureWire is a daily newsletter with comprehensive analysis of all the investments, deals and personnel moves involving start-ups and their venture backers. For a two-week trial, visit our homepage, scroll to the bottom and click “try for free.”)

Elsewhere around the Web:

Fallout from the Facebook IPO continues as market watchers second guess CFO David Ebersman’s decision to boost the number of shares offered by 25%. Bill Hambrecht, who engineered Google’s Dutch auction IPO, tells peHUB that Facebook should have used the same method.

Activate Networks has employed its analytics software to map connections between and among venture capital firms, writes the Atlantic.

After a quiet seven years, the MySpace co-founder (who sold his company to News Corp. for $580 million) is now leaping to his next gig–serving as an adviser to tiny start-up RocketFrog Interactive.

The 16-person Los Angeles-based company makes a Facebook app that launched Tuesday, allowing people to play poker, blackjack, slot tournaments and other games against their friends and win real prizes.

Co-founded in 2010 by Brett Calapp (who sold his previous start-up Centaurus Games to Party Gaming in 2010 and then served as president of game network and television show Ultimate Blackjack Tour) the company does something a little different from many other online gambling sites: It awards prizes that also serve as stealthy ads for brands willing to give away movie tickets, music, food and other goodies.

“You’ve got brands on Facebook who have spent millions acquiring all these fans, but they’re still figuring out what to do with them when it’s time to launch a product,” said Calapp. “We allow them to get these products in front of people.”

And, if business goes as planned, RocketFrog will also earn revenue from advertisers via sponsorships that brand the cards, chips and felt during the game and virtual currency.

Calapp said he’s still experimenting with the exact fee model, but confirmed the company will be sharing roughly one-third of its revenue with Facebook–the going rate for Zynga and other companies running apps atop the social network.

Although RocketFrog has yet to hit the jackpot–it just launched, after all–Calapp said he’s not in any rush to raise outside venture funding.

Having raised roughly $2 million from a clutch of angel investors including reality TV star Brody Jenner (the son of Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner and step-brother to the Kardashian ladies), RocketFrog may decide to leap over VCs entirely.

Said Calapp: “We’re not thinking about that (fundraising). We’re focused on launching and building the beginning of something big.”

Pao, who joined Kleiner in 2005 and is currently a member of the firm’s Digital Team, claims in a lawsuit filed this month in San Francisco Superior Court that she suffered multiple instances of sexual harassment, retaliation and sexual discrimination over the last six years and that Kleiner failed to resolve them, despite her repeated complaints about the matter to partners including John Doerr, Ted Schlein and Ray Lane. Kleiner did engage an outside investigator, the suit says.

Pao also claims in the suit that discrimination is integral to the operation of the firm, and that Kleiner fails to promote women comparably to men; compensates them less than men through lower salaries, bonuses and carried interest; fails to act when complaints of sexual harassment or discrimination are made; excludes women from meetings and discussions; fails to provide equivalent sponsorship of junior women compared to junior men; and fails to provide “opportunities for visibility and success inside and outside the firm for women as compared to men.”

Here are some of the specific complaints:

–Pao claims that in 2006, another junior partner, Ajit Nazre, made inappropriate sexual advances toward her that made her feel her position at Kleiner could be threatened if she refused those advances. Pao says she then had sex with Nazre on two or three occasions, but he then retaliated against her after she broke off the relationship. She alleges that at one point, Ray Lane, who was Nazre’s mentor, pressured her to drop her complaints about Nazre and encouraged her to “engage in a personal relationship with Mr. Nazre and even to marry him,” although in that case one of them would have to leave Kleiner because spouses can’t work for the firm. Nazre left the firm after another junior partner complained in 2011 that Nazre had harassed her and Kleiner engaged an outside investigator, the complaint says. Nazre could not be reached for comment.

–Pao claims that for Valentine’s Day in 2007, Senior Partner Randy Komisar gave her a book, “The Book Of Longing” by Leonard Cohen, that contained strong sexual content, and asked Pao out to dinner, claiming his wife would be out of town. She said she turned down the dinner invitation. Pao claimed that in late 2010, she lost one of her board seats to Komisar after Doerr told her that Komisar “needed a win” and that she was told to terminate her relationship with the company so Komisar could build his own relationship. In December 2011, Komisar allegedly told Pao that the personalities of women “do not lead to success at KPCB, because women are quiet.”

–Pao claims that in May 2007, three administrative assistants complained of harassment and discrimination by Kleiner partners and that Kleiner engaged an outside investigator.

–Pao claims that in 2011, she was excluded from two all-male dinners organized by then-Partner Chi-Hua Chien, who allegedly said when she complained that women would “kill the buzz.”

A Kleiner spokeswoman says the firm “regrets that the situation is being litigated publicly and had hoped the two parties could have reached resolution, particularly given Pao’s 7-year history with the firm. Following a thorough independent investigation of the facts, the firm believes the lawsuit is without merit and intends to vigorously defend the matter. The Firm has been a diversity pioneer in its industry and was one of the first venture capital firms to hire women as partners. The number of women partners at the firm is one of the highest within the venture capital arena and the firm has actively supported women in all respects.”

Doerr, Lane, Chien, Komisar and Schlein all declined through a spokeswoman to comment. Nazre so far has not returned a message seeking comment.

Pao’s attorney, Alan Exelrod of Rudy Exelrod Zieff & Lowe, did not return a call seeking comment.

Out of 50 people on its investment and operations teams, Kleiner employs a dozen women, including Pao, according to the firm’s website.

Those numbers show Kleiner is generally more gender-diverse than the venture capital industry as a whole, which is dominated by men, especially white men. A survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones VentureSource in November revealed that of more than 460 respondents identifying themselves as investors, 89% were men and 11% women. A 2008 survey by the same groups consisted of 86% men and 14% women. When looking at race, 86% of investors in the 2011 survey identified themselves as white, about the same as the 2008 number.

Last week the firm announced it had closed a $525 million fund, its fifteenth main fund, to invest in early-stage consumer technology, enterprise technology, clean technology and life sciences companies. Pao claims that she was excluded from the investment committee.

News of the lawsuit was reported earlier by Fortune.

UPDATE: This story was updated to add more specific allegations from the lawsuit.

-By Deborah Gage, 415-439-6653, deborah.gage@dowjones.com, 415-439-6653

Art by Mike Lucas

After winding its way through a couple business models, AnchorFree has found early traction by providing private networks for anonymous, secure Web browsing. Now it’s raised $52 million in Series C funding with plans to dramatically increase the amount of people who use the service. New investor Goldman Sachs Group led the round for the company, which provides virtual private networks that enable people to have a secure Internet connection over public Wi-Fi networks.

Aiming to make the buying and selling of real estate entirely electronic, the DotLoop Company raised $7 million in Series A funding from Trinity Ventures. The company was co-founded by Austin Allison, its chief executive, who bought a house at age 17 and became a real estate agent at age 18 and decided the process of conducting real estate transactions was “antiquated.”

Also in today’s VentureWire: The co-founder of Japanese mobile social gaming titan DeNA, Masa Watanabe, founded Quipper last year and has now closed a $3.6 million Series A round led by Japanese venture capital firm Globis, with participation from Atomico…advertising-tracking company EyeTrackShop said it closed its first institutional round of funding at $3 million to speed international expansion…and Facebook shares fell 11% Monday, dropping well below its IPO price of $38 on just their second day of trading, a black eye for all those involved with the social networking company going public.

(VentureWire is a daily newsletter with comprehensive analysis of all the investments, deals and personnel moves involving start-ups and their venture backers. For a two-week trial, visit our homepage, scroll to the bottom and click “try for free.”)