Jordan Cooper, left, and Ben Lerer (Photo: via The Pitch)

Roughly a year-and-a-half after closing its second $25 million seed stage fund, Lerer Ventures is in the processing of raising money for a third. An SEC filing, first noted by TechCrunch, says the size of the round is $30 million.

Although the Form D indicates that the early-stage venture capital firm has yet to sell, expect the round to close quickly.

Last May, it only took Lerer Ventures "a matter of weeks" to raise that $25 million from individuals and family offices. And that was before the highly-regarded New York City firm--launched by Huffington Post cofounder (and Betaworks and Buzzfeed chairman) Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, cofounder of Thrillist--boasted a handful of exits. 

Indeed, Lerer Ventures, whose team also includes partners Jordan Cooper and Eric Hippeau as well as advisors Jonah Peretti and  Christopher Poole, aka Moot, has been humming along since last August when portfolio company GroupMe*, a group messaging service, was acquired by Skype for $41 million.

In February, Groupon purchased Mr. Cooper's startup Hyperpublic-- an open database of location-based info on people, places, and things--which was funded by Lerer Ventures. This March, AOL purchased the photo sharing app Hipster. In July, Airbnb acqui-hired DailyBooth, the startup that lets you share webcam photos. And last month, Venmo, the mobile payments startup, was acquired by Braintree for $26.2 million.

Thrive Capital*, helmed by Josh Kushner, also recently a new $150 million fund after a number of exits, including GroupMe.

SEC regulations prohibit discussing private placements while fundraising is still in progress, but we will update you when we know more. In the meantime, please enjoy the odd couple stylings of Mr. Lerer and Mr. Cooper, courtesy of Betabeat's 2011 web series, The Pitch.

The Pitch, Episode 1 from Spinks on Vimeo.

*Disclosure

Hook 'em! | U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Wikipedia)

HILL COUNTRY. Made in NY: Austin will celebrate New York based tech startups at South by Southwest on March 11 from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. at the Fast Company Grill at Cedar Door in the Texas Capital. The event will be hosted by Gust, and the New York Tech Meetup and will be attended by over 250 NYC based startups. RSVP here. You might even be able to get there in a real NYC yellow taxi.

GroupMe is also heading to Austin for SXSW to keep you connected to your fellow conference-goers. Start a group on the GroupMe SXSW landing page and get exclusive updates, news and a chance to win prizes.

Be sure to RSVP for the GroupMe Major Rager end-of-the-weekend celebration at Cedar Street Courtyard featuring DJ sets from the likes of COMA and Nancy Whang of LCD Soundsystem.

Pixable is going to SXSW with a special section dedicated to the interactive conference based on what's happening, where you should be and what's most popular "#SXSW Live Feed" is a real time stream of all #SXSW tagged photos on Instagram and Twitter and "#SXSW Popular" is a showcase of the most shared and liked pics.

PIIIIIING. Sonar, the mobile app that shows hidden connections to the people around you based on the information you publicly post online, is going to SXSW with an Android App in beta. And that's not all—new features are also live including a people tab, to show users whose around no matter what the venue may be, Facebook and Twitter location data integration to show more people with more context and the entire app has been reengineered under the hood for improved speed and power.

GIRLS. GirlDevelopIt now has over 2,300 members and will be on hand at SXSW celebrating women in tech with a totally unofficial All Girl* Dev Brunch. The nerdettes also announced that classes in San Francisco are open for enrollment.

*Boys allowed.

ISPs 4 U AND ME. KeyWifi, the disruptive little startup spearheading the effort to bring Internet access to all by sharing hotspots, came out on top at the Silicon Alley Battlefield event at the New York Entrepreneurs Business Network. Betabeat believes uninhibited access to information is a good thing, so it's nice to see KeyWifi win with a refined pitch after struggling to connect with judges at last month's Common Pitch.

TESTING 1-2-3. After over a year of beta testing, Broadcastr 2.0 is available in the iOS app store and in the Android Market. Broadcastr allows users to " find memories, insights, and enriching information about eclectic and everyday places on every continent on Earth." New features include imprived filtering options, a gallery view, curated story collections and more intuitive map browsing.

ADITUDE. Solve Media heard our prayers and has come up with a way around 30 second ads for online videos that are sometimes only half that length. With Solve Media's solution, viewers will be able to type a sponsor's message in a text box to bypass the commercial. Users will be less frustrated and sponsors will know that their message was heard instead of playing to nobody while the intended target is making a sandwich.

CHA-CHING. Covestor, an investment management company that basically lets users see the transactions of pro traders and copy their moves, is joining forces with SlashDeclare, a cooperative movement of financial services companies calling for fairness and transparency in financial markets.

Covestor’s Next Invest, a virtual conference, is set for March 20 and 21 where Charles Lewis Sizemore, of the Sizemore Investment Letter, will talk about "using content to build a money management practice."

LIFE COACH. "It is time for you to stop stalking your exes and start living your life!" proclaims LifeGunk, a startup that touts itself as "the world's first life-management network." LifeGunk allows you to maintain schedules, take notes, log goals on your calendar, and send yourself reminders. When you accomplish one of your goals you can even give yourself a checkmark. Sort of like Google Calendar—but more patronizing. LifeGunk is currently self funded. Investors—get in while you can.

45 RPM. Turntable.fm is rolling out new features including a private chat function, improved search and a guest list so you can see how else is is jimmying to your jams. Best of all, there's a new free iPhone app—gratuitous guitar solo goes here.

MAXIMIZE. Clickable just made some big expansions to their senior leadership team as they plan to continue their rapid growth as a platform that combines search and social across Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare, Bing and LinkedIn. Dave Fall joins Clickable as COO, David O. Smith as CRO, Sanjay Gupta as senior director of engineering and Brian Tucker as the VP of agency sales.

WORK FOR CHANGE. Gawker is looking for a new creative director with coding proficiency. Apply Here. Hyperpublic needs a web developer who's comfy with MongoDB, Javascript and JQuery. Throw your hat into the ring. Betaworks wants a senior backend engineer and architect for contract or full-time. Expertise in Python, Mongo and AWS is preferred. Tell 'em why it should be you. GetGlue, the social network for entertainment, has an opening for a senior product manager with 3-5 years experience and a social media presence. Apply here. Signpost, the "Google AdSense of local commerce," is on the prowl for a new publisher development manager. Strong business acumen and three years of marketing/sales experience gives you a good shot. Shoot. Work Market, a labor and HR management platform, backed by Union Square Ventures, is looking for a back-end Java developer, operations engineer, community manager and many other positions. Check 'em out here. Foursquare has internships for young, budding techies on the software engineering and community fronts. They've also got more than a few job openings. Check it all out here. And last but not least, Boxee wants to pay an intern on their product team. If you're based in NYC apply here.

Mr. Cooper. (jordancooper.wordpress.com)

Hyperpublic, the two-year-old startup helmed by Lerer Ventures partner Jordan Cooper, has been acquired by Groupon for an undisclosed price.

On Friday, Mr. Cooper teased the news with a few ellipses on Twitter before linking to the announcement. "Today is an INSANE day! We are so proud to announce that Hyperpublic has been acquired by the rocket ship that is Groupon," Hyperpublic wrote. "This is a huge win for our team, our investors, and everyone who contributed to our company over the past two years." Then there was a party at The Standard, natch.

Hyperpublic collects data about locations in an open database. Its primary products are APIs. "Anyone can add objects to the database and developers will be able to build applications on top of the data," the company says.

Some of the 10 members of the Hyperpublic team will ship out to work at Groupon, while others will pursue their own projects. Mr. Cooper will have an official title at Groupon, although specifics have not been disclosed (or maybe, have not been decided).

Mr. Cooper declined to talk about the negotiations. "Groupon of course has an interest in better understanding the places that their users interact with everyday," he wrote in an email over the weekend. "We've been focused on that problem for a long time."

However, Mr. Cooper has emphasized to press that Groupon bought Hyperpublic for its technology and database, and although some employees would be going to Groupon, this was not a talent acquisition.

Groupon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why it wanted to buy Hyperpublic.

Hyperpublic raised just $1.5 $1.15 million in seed funding mostly locally from Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, RRE Ventures, NextView Ventures, Thrive Capital, SoftBank Capital and Hudson River Angels.

Disclosure.

Never met a data set he didn't like

Hyperpublic is a relatively new startup with a very ambitious agenda, to organize the world's geodata and in effect index online what exists where in the physical world. To get there, the company will have to pair a huge machine learning and big data effort with a killer consumer product that layers on great metadata.

In many ways this project resembles the work being done by Joe Einhorn at thingd. Mr. Einhorn is trying to be the "thing" layer on the web, tagging every object in every image, whether it's part of a Conde Nast photo spread or a personal blog about toy cars. Except Hyperpublic is going after the people, places and things in the real world.

To make this all happen, Hyperpublic has hired Jeff Weinstein as their President. Mr Weinstein was head of R&D at Comscore and was reportedly being recruited by Google before Hyperpublic snapped him up.

"At Comscore we were pulling usage data on 2 million machines and combining that with feedback from the web's biggest publishers, folks like Gawker, AOL and Yahoo," said Mr. Weinstein, who stopped by Betabeat's offices for a chat after his first day. "So I am used to dealing with big data problems and figuring out ways to surface what interests people across different industries."

Mr. Weinstein says his role is to build out the data team and devise ways to make their content compelling to businesses who might pay for API access at scale. "The other half will be coming up with something that people want to use on a daily basis, so we can begin to generate a robust set of user data as well."

The choice to work at a startup over a major corporation was one Mr. Weinstein had been longing to make for a while. "I just want to get my hands dirty. I want to write code, tweak marketing copy and get to know the New York developer community."

It seems Hyperpublic founder Jordan Cooper is making good on his promise to import the top tech talent from around the country to Silicon Alley. Next up, building, "the first multi-billion dollar public true technology company to be built in New York City."

"We just felt like there is so much noise out there," founder Jordan Cooper told The Observer. "Tons of companies with no real engineering culture begging for engineers to come work with them."

The challenge consists of two questions: one easy, one hard, and can be completed using any language.

The first problem is to create a way to rank user influence. Despite entering several random numbers,The Observer couldn't nail that.

"We wanted to give the hacker community something fun to work on for a day, and also to communicate our own technical DNA," said Cooper.

The second problem reveals a few interesting details about Hyperpublic's strategy.

The company has an internal karma system to determine which users are the most involved in the ecosystem. Users earn points for tasks like adding places, things or tagging photos. The second challenge asks programmers to determine the minimum number of tasks the Hyperpublic team has completed to hit their current scores.

Prizes include a one year subscription to Dropbox or Github and a free desk for one month at Hyperpublic HQ, located a floor above betaworks and Cooper's office at Lerer Ventures. Sounds cozy.

At this moment there are more than 400 folks hacking on the problems at the same time, and 28 have gotten the right answers. That makes The Observer feel a little better about our lack of coding skills.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

But Hyperpublic, a startup that launched this morning, thinks users might be interested to learn about the people, places and things they pass by everyday. It gives users a way to tag and search what's interesting by location, even setting the radius for the area you want to explore.

The startup is founded by Jordan Cooper, a venture partner at Lerer Ventures, and Doug Petkanics, a developer and entrepreneur. It raised $1.2 million from Lerer Ventures, Ron Conway, Nextview Ventures, Hudson River Angels, RRE, Softbank and Thrive Capital.

"We believe that you are only aware of 10 percent of what's inside the locales and neighborhoods where you spend time, and we're shooting to show consumers that collectively we can expose, discover, and search through the unknown elements that we pass by every day," Cooper told The Observer.

Right now goal is to grow the site, not monetize the process. "We're squarely focused on surfacing the unknown within your local experience," says Cooper. "If we can do that, we win."

But it's clear the site has a path to commerce. When I search for things in my zip code, I can see a price tag next to many of the items and a link to contact the seller.

"People like to eat, shop, socialize within a few blocks radius," wrote Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti. "This is the secret sauce of Hyperpublic."

That's true, but well established services like Yelp and Foursquare are already great at helping users find places to eat and shop locally. The success of the Hyperpublic will depend on the emergence of engaged communities, in this case built around specific neighborhoods, that create a rich enough database to make the service worthwhile.

The site is off to a good start, with support from lots of local techsters. "I love the message — what's the local spot that brings you joy'?" Betaworks Andy Weissman told The Observer by email. "It's very affirmational and we need more of those types of services about our local surroundings."

Like many New York startups, it's an online product with an offline message. "The idea is to allow our users to see and navigate their neighborhoods with a new level of clarity and engagement," says Cooper.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

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Disclosure.