Today, TechStars announced that they’ve raised $24 million from a broad syndicate of investors to fund an additional $100,000 for every TechStars company going forward. The investors include Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventures, DFJ Mercury, SoftBank Capital, SVB Financial Group, RRE Ventures, Right Side Capital Management and TechStars alumni.

There are lots of good articles on the news – two of them are at TechCrunch (Startup Incubator TechStars Raises $24M, Increases Funding For Each Company By $100K) and Launch (TechStars Offering Extra $100K to All Companies with New $24M Fund.)

One of the principles of TechStars has been to be as inclusive as possible for the VC and angel investors in the communities in which we run programs. To date, there are over 75 VCs and angels that are funding TechStars programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York. There are many more who have invested in individual TechStars companies.

With the launch of the new TechStars Cloud program, there are now over 60 new companies a year going through TechStars and getting launched. At $100k / company, TechStars has raised enough to fund each company with the incremental $100k for the next three to four years (that’s a hint that there will be more programs coming.)

When I think about all the amazing investors – and the hundreds of mentors - involved in TechStars, I’m deeply humbled to be a part of it.

I find it endlessly entertaining that people say things like “I don’t need to back up my data anymore because it’s in the cloud.” These people have never experienced a cloud failure, accidentally deleted a specific contact record, or authenticated an app that messed up their account. They will. And it will be painful.

I became a believer in backing up my data when I was 17 years old and had my first data calamity. I wrote about the story on my post What Should You Do When Your Web Service Blows Up. I’ve been involved in a few other data tragedies over the past 28 years which always reinforce (sometimes dramatically) the importance of backups.

We recently invested in a company called Spanning Cloud Apps. If you are a Google Apps user, this is a must use application. Go take a look at Spanning Backup for Google Apps – your first three seats are free. It currently does automatic backup of your Google contacts, calendars, and docs at an item level allowing you to selectively restore any data that accidentally gets deleted or lost. I’ve been using it for a while (well before we invested) and it works great.

I’ve known the founder and CEO, Charlie Wood, for six years or so. Charlie was an early exec at NewsGator but left to pursue his own startup. I came close to funding another company of his in the 2005 time frame but that never came together. I’m delighted to be in business with him again.

Don’t be a knucklehead. Back up your data.

Today we announced that Foundry Group took a bite out of Cheezburger as we led a $30m financing of the company that started out by bringing you cute cate pictures.

Ever since I met Ben Huh 18 months ago via an introduction from Micah Baldwin (see Micah – I do take you seriously – some of the time) I’ve had a major entrepreneur-crush (sort of like a man-crush, but, well, you get the idea) on Ben. C’mon – the guy wears a cheeseburger on his head – how can you not love him.

After meeting Ben, I decided to try out the site. My first LOL was my wife Amy’s car on fire – feel free to click on it and go vote it up.

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We’ve made this investment as part of our “Distribution Theme” which includes Zynga, Topspin, and StockTwits. I realize that I haven’t written about Distribution on the Foundry Group blog – guess I’ll go do it after I finish this post. Or maybe I’ll just surf around on some of the 50 Cheezburger Network sites.

I’m back – that was a not so short sojourn to My Food Looks Funny, I Has A Hotdog, FAIL Blog, and Very Demotivational.

Our co-investors are Madrona, Avalon Ventures, and SoftBank Capital. Ben and his team have built an awesome company. I’m really psyched to be a part of it to help it grow to the next level.

Standing Cloud, which makes it easy to deploy and run apps in the cloud, recently closed a $3m financing led by Rich Levandov at Avalon Ventures. Rich and I have known each other and worked together since the mid-1990′s and more recently have invested together in NewsGator and Zynga.

Rich has spend a lot of time in the clouds lately, including his investment in Cloudkick which was acquired yesterday by Rackspace.  He got excited about Standing Cloud and their mission to “reimagine hosting” in the context of cloud computing.   Shared hosting was a great idea back in 1999 but most users of Web apps today require more control over upgrades, better access to backups, ability to move applications across cloud providers, and extremely high reliability.  In addition, deploying apps on most cloud providers continues to be unnecessarily complicated.

There are a huge number of solution providers out in the world who are specialists in any of the more than 70 open-source apps that Standing Cloud supports. For them, Standing Cloud is a simple way to deploy multiple instances of a single app across all of their clients, retain a high degree of flexibility and control over the apps, and not ever have to worry about hosting. These are folks who are helping businesses launch and maintain not only websites but the software they use to run and manage their business.

This week, Standing Cloud launched the Standing Cloud Partner Program for these customers.  Becoming a partner includes free hosting for one instance of a single application for one year, volume pricing, and a listing of their services in the Standing Cloud Application Network, launched last week, which is gearing up to be the go-to place for end users and solution providers around Web apps. The program is designed to help grow the business of service providers who customize, support, and deploy online applications, ranging from CMS systems like Drupal, WordPress and Plone, CRM systems like vTiger and SugarCRM, and other business tools like Status.Net, and OpenVBX.

If you’re a solution provider looking for a better way to manage apps for your clients, you can sign up at Standing Cloud.  And if you want to see how easy it is to set up any of over 70 open source apps in under five minutes, just select an app and click on “Use It Now.”

This summer I made two new friends who completely blew my mind – Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson. I met them through TechStars – they were founders of Orbotix, one of the 11 teams to go through this TechStars Boulder this summer. Today, Foundry Group announced that it has led an investment in Orbotix.

I’m always on the lookout for what I consider to be genius level software engineering talent. As an MIT graduate, I’ve been around plenty of it, but I also know that it shows up in unexpected places. A few weeks into TechStars, I realized that not only was I hanging out with genius level software talent but that Ian and Adam thought about hardware and the combination of hardware and software in unique ways. For example, take a look at a robotic ball controlled by a smart phone.

As part of my involvement in TechStars, I choose one or two companies from each program to mentor. We believe the magic of TechStars is the mentorship and while I tried to work with all the companies in the first two Boulder programs, given that there are now over 40 companies a year going through TechStars (10 each in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York), I realized I needed to act like every other mentor and focus at most on two companies per program.

While Foundry Group has investment in two other TechStars companies (both from the TechStars Boulder 2009 program - Next Big Sound and SendGrid) this is the first company that I’ve mentored that we’ve invested in. One of my goals with my mentorship is to work with companies that are both within our themes and outside of our themes – this keeps my thinking fresh in other areas. So, I set the expectation early with the companies that I mentor that it’s unlikely we will invest. For example, the company in the TechStars Seattle program that I’m currently mentoring is absolutely killing it, but it’s far outside any of our themes. But, I’m learning a lot and they are also.

In the case of Orbotix, I knew they’d be within our human computer interaction theme, but when I started working with Adam and Ian, I didn’t realize how profound what they were doing was. Fortunately, by mid-summer I did, and began encouraging one of their other mentors, Paul Berberian, to engage more deeply with them. Paul, Adam, and Ian quickly started talking about teaming up and used the last four weeks of the program to “pretend” they were partners. By the end of the program they decided to join forces with Paul becoming CEO of Orbotix.

While this investment has resulted in endless teenage humor for my inner 14 year old, it is also another step in my personal strategy of making sure that if the robots actually do take over some time in the future, I’ve helped create some of their software.