There must be some pins in the water over at Bessemer Venture Partners. Back in May, Sarah Tavel, the former Bessemer VP who led the firm's prescient early investment in Pinterest, left to head up "business" at the social network for "regular people" connoisseurs of pretty, special things.

Now, founder and CEO Michael Segal, a former Bessemer analyst, also finds himself going after the exact same target market that Pinterest helped define. Yesterday, he launched Curio Road, a New York-based "curated discovery site" (i.e. online shop of rotating collections of jewelry, accesories, home decor, and gifts) heavily influenced by his ecommerce training at Bessemer, he told Betabeat.

"We are saying to the Pinterest user--hey, here is an end-to-end shopping experience where you can channel your love for unique, creative stuff," Mr. Segal explained.

Despite the fact that any juxtaposition of "ecommerce" and "Pinterest" is likely to pique investor interest these days, Mr. Segal has stayed noticeably quiet about a seed round he raised in June from local investors, including SeamlessWeb founder Jason Finger, Gary Vanerchuk, Josh Abramowitz of Deep Creek Capital, Fabrice Grinda, Josh Reznick, and more.

Over gChat, Mr. Segal explained that Curio Road skips the "regular old 'browse our whole inventory' experience" for a weekly "showroom of finds from artists in a range of categories." In that way, it's similar to Of a Kind, a New York based newsletter and website, except with a different (less urban) customer in mind and a focus on existing lines over of Of a Kind's limited-edition, exclusive pieces.

For the startup's initial offering, users can shop a cutesy collection of affordable necklaces and a sweet set of brightly-patterned scarves, in addition to a series of twee prints tailor made for a starter apartment, featuring every hipster's favorite animal, and more.

Much like your standard retail store, Curio Road employs a merchandising team, but in the startup's case, the team members are all "mavens of Etsy, Pinterest, and the lifestyle blogosphere. So they spend their days scouring the world for the most inspiring, unique and beautiful products," said Mr. Segal. Most of the artists Curio Road features are full-time designers who sell to offline boutiques and lack visibility. "We help them get discovered, so it's not tiny Etsy sellers or anything," he said.

Mr. Segal said his cofounder Sonali Bloom, the startup's chief merchandising officer, is "pretty much the most gifted Pinterester ever. She is in many ways our target customer. Obsessed with the unique find. And what we realized is, wait a minute, there are MILLIONS of women who are obsessed with the unique find. Not just big brands like you'll find on Gilt etc. But finding unique stuff is a pain--even on Pinterest."

Bessemer is a large firm and Mr. Segal emphasized that he was not on the Pinterest investment team. Any overlap with Ben Silberman's team, we asked? "Only in that we're going after the exact same target market. And at Bessemer we thought a LOT about that target market," he said, dismissing the notion that Curio Road could be viewed as unfriendly competition. "Pinterest is like the giant social network sending clicks to retailers that have great, beautiful stuff. So they WANT retailers to cater to their customers. Our customers are going to pin up a storm with our stuff."

Knowing your audience was a key principle at Bessemer, Mr. Segal noted. "Most online retailers are kind of soulless--they try to get out of the way. We are the opposite--we are a sensual, highly visual shopping experience." Visuals are key, he added, because ecommerce players don't understand that how their industry is converging with media. In this new model, an e-tailer's "content" is the products it sells.

"On tablets, people browse shopping sites that are 'lean back' and highly entertaining. So we've essentially built that lean-back, effortless shopping experience for the lover of unique finds," he explained.

Curio Road takes a varying share of revenue from each of its sellers. Although Mr. Segal wouldn't disclose the range, he did note that it was "substantial," since, unlike Etsy, his site takes a more direct role in bringing buyers to the designer.

Although there are deals, Mr. Segal is keeping his difference from the Gilt Groupe approach. "We want our customer to look at all of our stuff and with Gilt, you get on this crazy treadmill. Fifty new things each day, and so the customer just tunes them out and try not to miss a brand you know you want," he reasoned. "That's not real discovery shopping!"

(Jamie Grill via Getty Images)

Online learning platform 2tor today announced the close of a $26 million Series D funding round led by an affiliate of the Hillman Company. This brings the Chelsea Piers-based company's total venture funding to $96 million. All previous investors—Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Novak Biddle Venture Partners and City Light Capital—who helped 2tor raise $32.5 million just over a year ago decided to come back. Joining them were new investors SVB Capital and WestRiver Capital.

"The next steps—plural—are really to continue building out our existing programs and to launch new programs that are of the exact same caliber and quality of our existing ones,” Jeremy Johnson, cofounder and CMO of 2tor said. “We believe the world is moving more and more online and we believe that these programs are head and shoulders above anything else out there."

Roughly 1,000 students have already graduated, and masters candidates are perusing degrees on 2tor through big-deal schools like USC's Rossier School of Education and School of Social Work, Georgetown's School of Nursing and Health Studies and UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School and School of Government. Mr. Johnson said 2tor is largely responsible for the Rossier School's ability to expand its student base from 75 to 1,500 online students in just two years. The program also jumped from 38th to 15th in education school rankings, he said.

What separates 2tor from its competitors is its social component. "We focused on building a robust social network so it feels much more like Facebook than BlackBoard and we focused on live streaming video so most of the classes on the platform are done in a live environment where you see the professor," Mr. Johnson said. "You can raise your hand. You interact with them in the way that you would interact in a small group session in a class so it feels very different than all those other platforms because you're really replicating the campus experience. You actually are showing up at a certain time and engaging with other students in the way that you would in a classroom—you just don't have to be in South Central Los Angeles or Georgetown.”

2tor plans to announce a sixth university partnership this spring. The company is hiring for more than a dozen positions and an army of interns.

Mr. Stein.

Betterment, the online investment manager for individuals that TechCrunch named "New York's Best Startup" in 2010, just announced it'll be delivering more for less. The startup introduced individual retirement accounts, or IRAs, in addition to its investing accounts, and changed to a lower fee structure at the same time. Betterment—a portmanteau of "better" and "investment"—charges users a percentage of assets under management; it has 10,000 paying users and 20,000 subscribers, founder and CEO Jon Stein told Betabeat.

With 13 employees in its Soho office, that's a pretty efficient company. Mr. Stein, a Certified Financial Analyst whose background is in investing and retail banking, wants Betterment's customers to manage their money efficiently as well. "Think of it as Apple meets Vanguard," he told Betabeat by phone last week. "A slick, intuitive interface on a smart investing backend."

Lower fees seems to be somewhat of a February tradition at Betterment. "Starting today, Betterment’s straightforward fee is now even lower, ranging from 0.3% to 0.9% annually, depending on your balance," the company announced on February 11, 2011.

Betterment's fees are now in three tiers instead of four: .15 percent, .25 percent and .35 percent, depending on the minimum balance and desired features.

"This is huge," Mr. Stein said of the announcement. Betterment customers will pay an average of .25 percent on their IRAs, Mr. Stein said, much less than the average .78 percent, according to Deloitte. "We're launching IRAs, which has been most requested feature so we're super excited to get that out there."

Customers can open a new IRA, or roll over an existing IRA or 401(k) into a Betterment account, the company said. Betterment designed the rollover to be simple and economical, the company said, because 30 percent of Americans don't rollover their retirement accounts because it's too expensive and complicated.

Betterment figures three million 401(k) accounts are left un-rolled over every year, using numbers from a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by ING Direct. The math on the back of Betterment's envelope says if all those account holders switched to Betterment, they'd collectively save almost a billion dollars.

It's easy for Betterment, investment adviser, money manager and broker, to undercut its competitors, he said, "and still provide great value to our customers and save them a boatload of money."

Betterment has been listening to its users, thousands of doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, engineers and other professionals who use it to streamline their investments. "We're also launching next day deposit," Mr. Stein said. "You invest and next day funds are invested super fast as well—that's a feature that was requested left and right."

Going forward, Betterment's new features are likely to be "behaviorally-based," he said, meaning recommendations and user experience changes.

The company, which raised $3 million in 2010 from Bessemer Venture Partners, Anthemis Group, and Thomas D. Lehrmanreinmkr Inc., is of course hiring. "We're looking for developers and operations and marketing folks," he said. "All."

A screenshot of the Betterment retirement account.