Motley Fool Holdings Inc. this week announced it raised $25 million in venture financing. Good for The Fool.

But pulling back the curtain, there’s more than just a simple round of financing here. The deal points to creative ways in which venture firms are finding liquidity other than the standard acquisitions, IPOs and secondary sales.

The funding comes from mezzanine investor BIA Digital Partners and growth investor Patriot Capital, new shareholders in the online investing site. Motley Fool’s early investors–venture firms Maveron and Mayfield Fund, which invested during the dot-com bubble–and secondary firm Saints Capital, which bought shares in 2005, did not reinvest. Instead, they will eventually be bought out.

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The tech services business has been hot for the last year or so, since H-P (HPQ) bought IT outsourcing giant EDS in May for more than $13 billion. H-P and IBM (IBM), the market leader in services, are now going head to head for big outsourcing deals. PC giant Dell (DELL) is also trying to expand its own services offerings, and smaller players are trying to grow their market share and profits as they look to capitalize on what’s expected to be a wave of new acquisitions in the area.

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Tech companies buy their neighbors much more often than they acquire companies elsewhere, according to a study of tech acquisitions since 2002.

The conclusion isn’t shocking. There are a number of reasons why a buyer would be more familiar with companies based nearby. They’re more likely to share investors, have employees who worked for both companies, or maybe the CEOs belong to the same golf club. But given the ongoing battle between East-Coast giant EMC (EMC) and Silicon Valley’s NetApp (NTAP) to take over another Valley company, Data Domain (DDUP), it’s instructive to see just how prevalent the preference is.

Since the beginning of 2002, publicly-traded tech companies based in California have bought 1,994 private companies, 36 percent of which have been based in the state, according to 451 Group, an analyst firm that tracks M&A activity. That’s about three times the rate that publicly-traded companies based on the East Coast bought California companies.

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Cisco (CSCO) CEO John Chambers just might be one the most careful executives in the Valley about talking to the press; in a brief chat with Tech Trader Daily at a media reception last night, he didn’t give away much about his views on the state of the economy or the current quarter. But he did have a few things to say. Here’s a summary.

• On the state of the economy: “I’m going to pass on the economy question,” he said. But he did say that in the current environment, “companies with cash are king, queen and the royal family.” Cisco has close to $27 billion in cash and short-term investments, and the total continues to climb.
• On acquisitions: Chambers says Cisco is always aggressive in making acquisitions during downturns. He says the best time to make acquisitions is during downturns.

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If you think Oracle’s acquisition spree is nearly completed, you ought to guess again.

In a research report, Bernstein Research analyst Charles DiBona today asserts that Oracle is almost certainly going to continue spending billions on additional acquisitions. He notes that CEO Larry Ellison last summer projected that the company would hit $50 billion in annual revenue by FY 2012. But he contends that current businesses, growing at an estimated 11.4% compounded, would only bring the total to $34.4 billion by 2012.

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Oracle has enjoyed considerable success by rolling up the software side of the the now-mature client-server model of corporate computing. With its $13.9 billion acquisition of sluggish outsourcing giant EDS, Hewlett-Packard is playing the same game on the services side. It’s buying vast tracts of data-center space in which run the computers and other IT machinery that power the operations of lots of large companies and government agencies. The addition of EDS more than doubles the size of HP’s services business, giving it a scale closer to that of the leading IT outsourcing company, IBM.

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