Iovation, a Portland, Oregon company that aims to track and prevent online fraudsters, has closed off its first round of funding at $15 million.

The basic idea behind Iovation’s product is keeping track of millions of computers to pinpoint the few that are used for fraudulent activities, a scheme the company calls “device reputation fraud management.” Iovation sells its software to online retailers, banks, social networking sites and others.

Of the funding, $10 million was closed last November, provided by Intel Capital. The additional $5 million came from SAP Ventures and European Founders Fund.

Started in 2004 as a collaborative project between agricultural giant Cargill and Materia, a catalyst maker based on IP from the California Institute of Technology, Elevance Renewable Sciences has spun off to commercialize a promising technology that can transmute natural oils into other chemicals.

Elevance is capable of using a variety of feedstocks like soy and corn oil to form a variety of other chemicals, much as crude oil has been used for decades. The company says its products, which will include waxes, antimicrobials, derivative oils and lubricants, among others, are safer than crude oil-based alternatives.

The $40 million funding was led by TPG Growth and TPG Biotechnology Partners. Elevance is based in Lisle, Illinois.

Citing the need for consumer market investments in China, Granite Global Ventures has raised another $200 million for its third fund, which was originally closed off at $400 million in 2006.

Granite has traditionally invested in technology and emerging sectors, but plans on expanding to some sectors in China that are already well established in the United States. They won’t be alone; as we reported late last year, Kleiner Perkins has invested in a Chinese shirt factory and Sequoia Capital backed a farm in the country.

The firm also added brought on four partners from SIG Capital, which in turn is the managing firm behind Venture Star Shanghai, an affiliate of Granite Global. The four are Zhuo Fumin and Jessie Jin, who are will be managing partners at Granite, and Michael Kuan and Steve Chu, who will be venture partners.

Granite Global has about $1 billion under management, including investments from its first two funds.

The US has already seen its explosion of mom-related sites: Mommy bloggers, social networks, shopping sites and more have proved to be one of the most successful Web 2.0 niches. Now a hefty funding for the Chinese site Yaolan.com from Foundation Capital and NSA Investments, reported by peHUB, makes it look as if China is the next frontier.

Yaolan is a community site, where moms can post pictures of themselves and their babies, take part in polls, read articles and blog posts and find products for their children. The site appears to already have a fairly significant amount of traffic.

Also joining the $17.1 million funding were previous backers Sutter Hill Ventures and Chengwei Ventures. The company has raised a total of $26.1 million to date.

Water cleaning, purification and desalination is becoming ever more important in the cleantech world. AqWise, like others, is touting a cheaper solution for treating water.

The Israel-based company has a biological film that it uses to filter waste water. Its Attached Growth Airlift Reactor systems can be deployed in existing treatment plants, which should help the company grow more rapidly.

The $3.6 million funding was provided by AHMSA Steel Israel Ltd, Elron Electronic Industries and Israel Cleantech Ventures.

Tapioca Mobile is a San Diego, Calif. startup that offers to monetize multi-media messages consisting of video and images, or just plain old text SMS.

The company works with both publishers and advertisers to deliver content seeded with ads. Its executives come from Qualcomm, Nokia and OpenWave.

The $5 million funding was provided by Venrock, according to Mashable. Venrock also gave Tapioca its seed round in September of last year.

Demand Media, one of the most heavily funded companies on the internet, has boosted its lifetime total to $355 million with a new $35 million investment reported by peHUB.

While the amount would be shockingly large for almost any other company, it’s a relatively small funding for Demand; for perspective, the new investment is about half what the company payed for the social media tool provider Pluck in a deal reported earlier this month.

Demand is better known for buying large numbers of generic web sites based on the value of their names, then plastering them with advertisements. The acquisition of Pluck makes Demand look as if it might finally be moving to build out its portfolio of domains with content, perhaps partially user-generated.

The source of the newest funding was not disclosed. Demand is based in Los Angeles, Calif.

4DK Technologies, a Herndon, VA company with a “SuperConnectivity platform” that it claims can make applications on mobile phones work with each other, has raised part of a first round of funding according to TechJournal South.

The company has two different applications, called respectively SCamp and SCout. Together they draw on information provided both through applications and by the wireless provider, like GPS data, user preferences and calendars, to provide more working information to apps for decision-making.

The company’s own explanation is pretty vague, but according to one example on their website, SCamp could determine from the user’s location that he was driving and help make the decision to automatically read a received text message out loud.

The $1 million funding was provided by undisclosed investors, and is part of a total of $3 million the company is seeking, according to TechJournal.

There’s not much public on Israeli startup Cotendo, a content delivery network that Sequoia Capital recently invested in, according to Tech Confidential. The Sequoia page on the company simply states that the company offers “better performance and low operational costs.”

Despite the mystery, it seems a pretty sure bet that Cotendo is, like most newer CDN startups, aiming for better video delivery. The company’s founding team, most of whom came from an anti-virus firm called Commtouch, are also members of a Meetup group “dedicated to exploring the IP Video revolution.”

No amount was disclosed for the funding in Cotendo, although it was almost certainly the company’s first, as it appears to have been founded just a few months ago.

Here’s the latest action:

Google’s search-within-search bugs some publishers — Apparently some folks such as the Washington Post aren’t looking too kindly on latest feature provided Google which lets people search within publications like the Post directly from Google. The feature, started earlier this month, lets you search for a publication on Google, for instance the Post or other sites like Wikipedia, The New York Times, and Wal-Mart, and then gives you a secondary search bar to search within those sites. Here’s the rub: If you search the Washington Post from that bar for say, “jobs,” you’ll see results for the Post’s employment pages, but also ads nearby for competing job sites like CareerBuilder and Monster.com. The NYT has the story.

Modu, a secretive company with a module that can be inserted into various wireless devices, raises $100 million — The Israeli company is expected to close the round within the “next few weeks,” according to the Globes, which also says the company is valued at a significant $150 million before the investment. The company has raised $20 million to date from Genesis Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, SanDisk and founder Dov Moran. The company hasn’t released many detail, but there’s a video here (or just see below).

Sun gets $44M contract from Pentagon’s DARPA to replace chip wires with laser beams –The wiring between processors on a chip is one of the biggest bottlenecks to increased efficiency in semiconductors. Sun has beat out Intel, IBM, MIT and HP on a government contract to figure out how to use silicon photonics, or light beams, to make chips faster and more efficient.

Will Fed make taxpayers pay more for Bear Stearns? — Shareholders of Bear Stearns, a third of which comprise Bear Stearns’ own employees, were so upset by the deal to bailout Bear Stearns at the low price of $2 per share that they’ve revolted and are pushing for a higher price of $10 per share. This is the bank that got caught up in the worst excesses of the subprime bubble, was apparently literally gambling while the ship sank and refused to participate in bailing out other companies (Long-Term Capital Management) in the past. So why would the Fed would and JPMorgan want to make taxpayers pay the higher price to bail these guys out?

Search arbitrage company Geosign disintegrates after receiving record $160M investment last year – The Canadian company’s saga shows the danger of trying to use an arbitrage strategy with Google’s ads. It was buying Google keywords and sending people to landing pages with Yahoo ads on them. When Google found out about the trick, it changed its terms and shut off Geosign’s ability to conduct its arbitrage. The company’s business model disintegrated. American Capital, the lead investor in the company last year, is looking pretty foolish. Why make an investment in a company that isn’t producing anything of sustainable value? We reported on the company here last year when it raised the money.

The X Prize Foundation offers $10 million to team that produces vehicles that can get 100 miles per gallon or more — Details here. The winning cars must carry four or more passengers and have climate control, an audio system and 10 cubic feet of cargo space. Qualifiers also must have four or more wheels, reach 100 mph, and reach 60 mph in 12 seconds, and have a range of 200 miles.

Battery companies LionCells and Seeo raise cash — Seeo, of Berkeley, Calif., has raised nearly $1 million in capital from Khosla Ventures, to make safe, high-density batteries. This comes after the company (which doesn’t have a web site) took in $1 million last year, according to a California regulatory document cited by VentureWire. Last month, another company, Menlo Park’s Lion Cells, whih makes high-power lithium ion batteries, raised approximately $12 million, according to the SEC. Battery Ventures and Nth Power participated in the second round, according to the filing.

GotVoice, the speech-to-text company, now wants to raise money too — Perhaps jolted by the announcement last week that competitor SpinVox raised $100 million in a carrier land-grab for its own speech-to-text technology, GotVoice is now saying it too wants to raise financing. To give it more time, the Kirkland, Wash. company has raised a $1.78 million a “bridge round” of funding to supplement the $3 million in raised in 2006 from Ignition and other individual investors, according to VentureWire.

Silicon Valley venture firm Morgenthaler Ventures raising funds — The venture capital firm is trying to raise another fund, totaling about $400 million, but VentureWire reports that its firm’s 2001 fund is below median in its performance and suggests investors are on the fence on the firm, founded in the 1960s.