LinkedIn raises another $22.7 million

LinkedIn has raised an additional $22.7 million in funding, giving the business-networking site a little cushion in difficult economic times.

The strategic investment, announced Wednesday, comes from Goldman Sachs, SAP, McGraw-Hill, and longtime investor Bessemer Venture Partners. The money arrives on the heels of a $53 million Series D funding round in June that gave LinkedIn a valuation of $1 billion. The latest funding round brings the total funds raised to just more than $100 million.

LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye announced the funding in a blog posting on his company's site:

I'd like to reiterate our commitment to creating the right partnerships to help us build a great service for over 30 million professionals on LinkedIn today--a number that's growing by leaps and bounds each month. This funding strengthens LinkedIn further, and will help us to continue creating additional services for professionals to connect and collaborate more effectively, around the world.

So how can LinkedIn raise fresh cash as many tech companies are scrambling to horde it? While the site is small in comparison with social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace, the average LinkedIn member is 41 years old and earns about $110,000 a year.

Its white-collar focus--billionaire Bill Gates is proud of his profile--means that LinkedIn can attract premium advertisers and charge quite a bit for ads--reportedly $75 per thousand impressions.

However, the economic state is certainly on Nye's mind. The networking site has reportedly slowed its hiring rate after growing from 60 employees to 370 employees in the past 18 months.

[Understarsidream]

Too bad, I was hoping they'd go bankrupt. It'd be one less moronic specialized "networking" site sending me spam.

[internetbiz]

actually, there's lots of settings on Linkedin to prevent other people from sending you invitations. (it's all driven by people.) and i use linkedin for finding clients for my consulting biz plus staying in touch. so, you may find it moronic; i find it really useful.