Online marketing platform Trada, established in 2008, recently sealed a funding deal with top-level advertising distributing companies that sets it on course for another successful year of crowdsourcing marketing projects. Its lead investors, Foundry Group and Google Venture, seem keen to support the service as their combined investment this time exceeds their previous input by over $1million.

At a time when the economic crisis makes it increasingly difficult for businesses to grow or even survive, a UK crowdfunding platform has defied the odds. Crowdcube, which allows people to invest in new and expanding business in return for an equity stake, has successfully used its own platform in securing investment of £300,000 from 162 investors for the next phase of its development growth.

Today uTest closed a $17 million Series D financing round bringing their total funding to more than $37 million. The additional capital will be used to launch developer tools, open regional offices, and scale faster through M&A opportunities and expert recruiting. The $17 million D round marks one of the largest investments made in a crowdsourcing company. It follows a successful C round that raised $13 million which closed in September 2010. Previous investors participating in this round include Scale Ventures, Longworth Partners, Egan-Managed Capital, and Mesco Ltd.

DesignCrowd, an Australian crowdsourcing website, recently received $3M in venture capital from Starfish Ventures. The purpose of the investment is to bring a new, fairer, and higher-quality form of crowdsourcing to the US market.

MicroVentures has just announced that it has raised $300,000 for a fund to buy Facebook private shares on a secondary market. According to the company, ten minutes after becoming available, the investment already had raised $40,000. After two weeks the fund reached $300,000 with 30 investors in five states.

Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, Groupon investors, led a $3 million Series A vote in Udemy, an online platform that allows anyone to teach or learn from online classes. Located in SOMA San Francisco with a satellite office in Ankara, Turkey, they currently offer over 6000 free and paid courses.

It’s no secret that crowdsourcing has enjoyed explosive growth over the past several years. Businesses, mainstream media, and consumers alike have all followed developments in the crowdsourcing world with keen interest. It should come as no surprise, then, that investors have pumped a great deal of money into the crowdsourcing economy. In an effort to gain a better understanding of the layout of the crowdsourcing field, Daily Crowdsource has spent some time tracking down the movement of funding dollars – who is getting it, who is giving it, how much, and so on.

Smartling, a company that uses its community to crowdsource translations for apps and websites, has recently raised $10 million to expand its operations. The series B funding round relied on the already existing investors Venrock, US Venture Partners, and First Round capital, which were joined by their new investor, IDG Ventures.

The Swiss financing platform investiere.ch has rounded up US$600,000 to improve its operations. The capital was gathered over the course of two weeks from several business angels and investors using investiere.ch’s platform. The funding will be used to improve the company’s platform usability and investment process management capabilities as well as to implement post-deal services.

CrowdEngineering,  a provider of crowdsourcing solutions announced that it has closed a $4 million Series A round. The funding round was secured with the help of Quantica SGR and Digital Investments SCA SICAR, which will allow CrowdEngineering to continue providing easy access to crowdsourcing services (especially to business whose main activity is gaining loyal customers), whilst increasing their business presence throughout the rest of Europe and other regions beyond their current US/Italian market.