Bleacher Report who raised $1.5 million back in Febuary has now raised another $3.5 million according to TechCrunch.  The round of funding included Hillsven Capital, Gordon Crawford, SoftTech VC, and Jacob Lodwick, founder of College Humor and Vimeo.

This is great news for Bleacher Report’s 13 employees as they now have job security.  We hope they didn’t burn through their original $1.5 million in 8 months already.  Hopefully they raised this money knowing that they are going to need it for a while due to no end in site of deteroriating ad sales.

If you would like more information on Bleacher Report, we interviewed Dave Nemetz of Bleacher Report a while back.

Tyler Bleszinski has come a long way since starting Athletics Nation.  He is president of SB Nation which just received 7 figures in funding which Jim Bankoff, former AOL programming chief, was able to pull off.  For those of you who are not familiar with SB Nation, you can read about it here in our SB Nation interview with Tyler Bleszinski.  Not bad for a guy who started with an A’s Blog.

The Round of financing was led by Accel Partners.  Additional funding came from Allen & Co., Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitols, Brent Jones, former San Francisco 49ers player and now managing director of private equity firm Northgate Capital, Dan Rosensweig and Jeff Weiner.

According to TechCrunch, Sports Genic has added $10 Million in Funding.  Formely Active Athlete Media, Sports Genic is an ad network that focuses on selling ads for medium size sports websites that can not sell ads on their own or are very limited.  When SportsGenic was Active Athlete they focused on selling ads for websites that were for the active athlete like running, biking, and swimming.  They re-launched as SportsGenic because they also wanted to get into the teams sports area as well.  The new $10 million in funding should help them be on their way.

The funding came from Adams Street Partners, Louie Partners, KPG Ventures, and Greycroft Partners.

Open Sports, started by the former founder of Sportsline.com Mike Levy, has launched into Public Beta.  We previously covered Open Sports when they first announced their funding.

At first look it looks to be a standard sports fan site and it looks like they got Sean Salisbury involved.  If we are choosing someone notable to partner with when launching our site we would probably would put Salisbury last on our list. 

This is what there About page says they are going to do:

• Read national and local stories from around the web
• Read and write insightful and entertaining blogs
• Stay up-to-date on teams and players
• Keep your friends and other sports fans informed by uploading videos, photos and stories
• Become friends with other registered members
• Participate in passionate discussions through commenting and forums
• Be entertained through engaging community programming experiences

It will be interesting to see if they can garner the amount of unique visitors a venture backed site needs to be successful.

According to Paid Content, Wazoo Sports has raised $2 million dollars to fund their expansion in high school sports broadcasting.  They broadcasted 88 games last year.

WazooSports.com delivers video content to the user over the Internet using the latest in streaming technology, combined with professional broadcasting technology, to ensure a quality Internet broadcast like traditional television broadcasts. Unlike traditional television  and radio, WazooSports.com is expanding the reach of athletics far beyond geographic boundaries, while contributing significantly to local schools and communities.

Sportme, which was previously featured on Sports Tech Now is starting 2008 with an investment out of the VC-fund “Kreativwirtschaft“.  At the end of 2007, business angels, Peter Kabel and Maximilian Thyssen joined the investing team of – Oliver Jung, Mountain Super Angel AG, ECONA and Alexander Artopé as sportme’s newest investors. The above group increased their investment amounts and took IBB in to their investor team to financially hedge sportme in the long term.

IBB provides risk capital to selected young technology companies in Berlin. The risk capital of the sportme investment is obtained by IBB and the VC-fund “Kreativwirtschaft”, which is particularly available for companies located in Berlin.

Sportme is the first company to be supported by the IBB risk capital funds. sportme appears as a young and creative company with the high potential for growth and is therefore a suitable partner for IBB. In order to work closer with its new investor’s sportme has relocated its office from Frankfurt to Berlin.

“We are very pleased to be working with IBB and are energized by their confidence in sportme and its founding team. In addition to expanding the platform and our marketing efforts, sportme will invest the new risk capital in to monetary assessments and commercialization of the platform,“ said Dani Warshager, International Director of sportme.

Thanks to Pat Coyle over at Sports Marketing 2.0 we have learned that Accrue Sports and Entertainment Ventures has opened up. Their catch phrase is “We identify next-generation sports-related companies involved in the media, entertainment and technology sectors.” The firm is led by:

Bryant Mcbride: He advised Sports Technologies, Inc. (STI) from its initial capital raise to the sale of its flagship property, FanNation, to Sports Illustrated/Time Warner. In addition to purchasing 100% of FanNation, Time Warner purchased a minority stake in STI. In 2005, he sponsored an investment in Football Scouts, Inc. and spearheaded the sale of that company to ESPN 14 months later, which generated a significant return to investors.

Steve Solomon: Since 2001, Steve has developed a leading advisory and consulting business, SJS Sports. Steve is recognized as a leader in the sports and broadcast industries with a deep understanding of the convergence of the digital/broadcast worlds and its effect on sports content and sports properties. Clients of SJS have included Major League Soccer, National Hockey League, Sports Illustrated, Octagon Worldwide, Tickets.com, Stats, Inc., Buffalo Sabres, NY Road Runners, Southeastern Conference, New York Red Bulls and Little League International, among others.

Paul Levy: Prior to Accrue, Paul was a Vice President with Main Street Resources, a private equity firm with $100 million under management focusing on both growth capital investments and buyouts in the lower middle market. Prior to Main Street, Paul was co-founder and CEO of Live Audience Business Solutions (LABS), a ticketing technology company focused on the Live Entertainment and Sports vertical that he sold to SmartDM, a Nashville-based CRM company in 2004.

Its great to see a venture firm started just to focus on the sports industry. We are sure any of our readers would love to work with an organization like this to develop a great sports company. If you have a good business plan, they are accepting them here: http://www.accruesev.com/contact.html