Too cute. (Via: Littlebits.com)

Local maker-minded startup LittleBits just announced a $3.65 million Series A, led by True Ventures. Also participating were Khosla Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

Founder (and MIT Media Lab alum, and TED speaker) Ayah Bdeir told Betabeat that the round will help the company to--pardon the expression--kick it up a notch. "The first phase was really sort of a proof of concept," she said. The response did not disappoint: LittleBits sold better than expected, "so that we actually now know it's time to press the peddle."

The company describes itself as "an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnants for prototyping and play." And what does that mean, precisely? Think wired Erector Sets.

The namesake "little bits" are small modules that snap together to create larger projects, like this car that goes when hit with a light or this "fire-breathing" Komodo dragon. The projects do not require a PhD in electrical engineering and are simple enough that a kid can assemble one without driving herself (or her parents) to distraction.

And those kids are exactly where LittleBits sees its biggest opportunity. While "open source" and "electronic modules" might trigger visions of enthusiastic geeks, Ms. Bdeir said that 60 to 70 percent of their sales are individuals who are "outside the circle."  "They're not hobbyists. They're not geeks. They're not engineers," she told us. Hence she's looking to education and educational toys as their largest potential market, and she's already pushing hard on why LittleBits is better than whatever throwaway tchotchke becomes this year's must-have:

"The toy market is a very large market, but the toy market unfortunately has been really sort of dominated by companies that are more interested in selling plastic toys that break than things that are of value."

That's where the open-source aspect comes in. Ms. Bdeir explained the approach is rooted in a desire to "make the very individual bricks of electronics available, accessible and allow them to be creative tools," with the aim of creating a relationship to technology that's "very symbiotic and very creative."Considering it's practically impossible to so much as change a carburetor any more, that goal seems both noble and much easier said than done.

And then there's the matter of scaling. Asked about how the company's growth changes the open source element, Ms. Bdeir told us, "It changes in a good way." Without elaborating, however, she shifted gears into the challenges such an approach presents.

"When you say you're open source, the number of investors that are interested starts to shrink." But the VCs that ultimately signed on "got involved because they believe in the mission. It wasn't an afterthought," she added.

It sounds like the number of orders really did catch the team by surprise. Ms. Bdeir also emphasized that LittleBits is "ramping up our production to really meet demand, demand which we really didn't expect so fast." To that end, company is handing over production to supply chain management company PCH International, while the LittleBits team will be focus on product design, marketing, and so forth.

With a Series A in the bank, Ms. Bdeir told us, the company can begin building out its product line, with new modules and kits already in the works. LittleBits will also be expanding its "really small" team of eight people with hires in education, sales and distribution, engineering--"really every facet," Ms. Bdeir said.

Mr. Stern (Photo: LinkedIn)

Bitly CEO Peter Stern, who once told Betabeat he's been in the process of raising funds ever since he joined the company, finally has a milestone to announce. The company has raised a $15 million Series C led by Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures.

"[Mr. Kholsa] has been fascinated with the growth of Bitly all along," Mr. Stern said by phone this afternoon. "Fascinated with this kind of invisible glue that enables people to share in social media and the insight that you can extract from doing that at scale and thinking about what kind of services and products you can offer consumers to grow that set even more."

Mr. Stern said he has been in contact with Mr. Kholsa for a while. A Series C has been expected since Bitly raised a $1.4 million convertible note in March. Previous investors RRE and OATV also participated in this round.

The round is focused exclusively on Bitly's consumer offerings, Mr. Stern said. "On the business-side we continue to have record month over record month, but this raise is not about the B2B side. This raise is about giving us the runway to grow Bitly as a consumer service much faster than cash flow would allow."

In May, Bitly released a major redesign--transforming its utilitarian link-sharing and tracking service into more of a consumer-focused curation and discovery platform. (Some kind of expansion was expected after Twitter announced automatic link shortening with t.co last year.) The Internet lashed back--as it is wont to do--with a hair-trigger criticism; Bitly swiftly responded, reinstating its one-click link shortening.

It seems the redesign gamble has paid off. Since the end of May, daily consumer registrations have increased by 300 percent. "I think we made Bitly more relevant for a wider set of people," Mr. Stern said.

But don't expect him to gloat with vindication, at least not to a reporter. "The backlash was very regrettable because we love our customers and we changed a lot on them on a Tuesday morning after Memorial Day," he said. "But if you look at the tweets you’ll see a lot of the people who originally tweeted [their disapproval] a few seconds later tweeted that they actually liked what Bitly was doing." Hmm, we must've missed those ones!

Bitly monetizes exclusively with a paid option for business customers, not advertising. The long-term plan, said Mr. Stern, has stayed the same: "Grow Bitly as a consumer service where people use it to collect and share and organize content--and from that massive set of interactions, find actual insights that we can package and sell to business who understand what audiences are interacting with."

Even with just two product people and a few sales people dedicated to the enterprise side, the B2B front has still managed record record sales for the past three or four months, "with its very exciting and interesting, but not rapidly growing product," he said.

The Series C will be spent on hiring to help Bitly build more consumer products. "And we’re gonna buy a giant statute of me!" said Mr. Stern. "No, just kidding. Total joke."

Done.

Done., which raised almost a million in an oversubscribed round last year from investors including Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital and angels including Harvard Business School professors Bill Sahlman and Joseph Bower, launched with a team of 12 and 100 "doers," including Apple consultant Brendan Perreault, who in addition to making slow MacBook Pros fast again has the added bonus of being kind of a stud.

With "do it for me" startups all the rage—see Zaarly, TaskRabbit, and the just-announced mobile startup from Justin Kan—Done. differentiates itself in a few ways. It's very pretty, its doers are organized into handy categories, and it's launched with a highly-curated set of specialists.

The big difference for Done., though, is its do-gooder bent. Donations are made to Unicef for every task completed.

The company also tries to appeal to neighborly sentimentality. "In earlier times people relied on the members of their community," the website says. "You knew who your neighbors were and what they were good at. You knew they wouldn’t mind if you looked them up and called on them to help out." For money. Mr. Perrault, the Apple consultant, starts at $75 an hour. Done. also takes 10 percent of every transaction. New doers must sign up with Facebook and be verified by two friends before they can start doing.

The startup comes from CEO Kevin Nazemi, CTO Paul Covell (first engineer at Zipcar) and COO Ken Nesmith, former MIT roommates. The founders were then joined by other lifelong friends, some of whom have known each other since 7th grade, to form a team of 10 based in Soho, according to a press release.

With Zaarly's TaskRabbit's acquisition of SkillSlate, Done. appears to be the New York contender in the convenience economy craze as underemployed Brooklynites shlep laundry and piece together IKEA futons. We were skeptical when we first heard of Zaarly last year at SXSW—Demi Moore actually explained it to Betabeat, no big deal, after the Diplo show in Austin. But it seems DIFM may be  the new DIY.

Disclosure.