Madrona Venture Group usually likes to stay close to home when it makes an investment. But the Seattle venture capital firm made an exception with its latest bet.

Madrona is leading a $4.4 million venture round in Animoto, the fast-growing New York startup that has developed an easy way for people to create interactive slide shows from personal photos. Amazon.com, iStockphoto founder Bruce Livingstone and angel investor Jeff Clavier also participated in the deal, which brings total funding to about $5 million.

Madrona's Matt McIlwain admits that Animoto is "a little outside of our geographic focus." But strangely, Animoto is about as deeply connected to the Pacific Northwest as a tech startup can get without actually being headquartered here.

The company's four founders -- Brad Jefferson, Jason Hsiao, Stevie Clifton and Tom Clifton -- all graduated from Bellevue High School in the 1990s.

It also has built the entire platform on the back of Amazon Web Services, with executives of the giant Seattle online retailer often pointing to Animoto as an example of how companies can quickly scale their services through its cloud computing offerings.

And even though Animoto's 18-person staff is split between New York, San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio, the company regularly holds its shareholder meetings in Seattle due to the fact that most of its investors (including many friends and family members) are located here.

"It feels like -- even though we are geographically all over the place -- that there is sort of a heart and soul in Seattle of Animoto," said Jefferson, who previously spent eight years at Bellevue-based Onyx Software.

In fact, it was former Onyx Chief Executive Brent Frei -- who now leads Madrona-backed Smartsheet.com -- who introduced McIlwain to the Animoto team. They hit it off in part because McIlwain and three of the four Animoto co-founders attended Dartmouth College.

But what really got McIlwain excited was the Animoto business, which has been firing on all cylinders since its debut in August 2007. The company, which turned cash flow positive last December, now boasts more than 750,000 registered users on the site. Its Facebook application -- which also allows users to set lively video-style slide shows to music of one's choosing -- has  two million users.

Even more impressive to McIlwain, the company has multiple lines of revenue coming in the door. The basic service is free to use, allowing consumers to create slide shows for 30 seconds or less. If someone wants to create a longer presentation with more photos, Animoto charges $3 per video. Unlimited video creating capabilities are available for $30 per year. 

Animoto also charges $5 to create a video in a high resolution format and $20 to have it converted to a DVD.

The company also is pushing deeper into commercial offerings. It already has a service for professional photographers, which allows them to create personalized slideshows of weddings, senior portraits or other special moments. 

That costs $99 for three months or $249 for the year.

Next up is a push into residential real estate and the hospitality industries, allowing real estate brokers or hotel operators to create Animotos to market properties.

Animoto does face some well-funded competitors, namely Slide, RockYou, Apple's Final Cut Pro and Redmond-based Smilebox. In fact, McIlwain said the competitive landscape was one of the reasons why Madrona didn't invest earlier.

"We wanted to see the adoption traction and revenue traction and what impressed us is they did both of those and they did it on very little capital," he said. "We believe they have jumped out as a leader in multimedia storytelling."

In fact, the company bootstrapped itself for the first year, helped in part with cash from Jefferson's severance package from Onyx.

Jefferson, 33, recalled some nervous wives and girlfriends during the first months, especially when the four founders tried to get a holiday greeting completed by Christmas.

Everything worked perfectly, except the video appeared upside down. "We were just ecstatic that it actually worked ... and the wives and girlfriends were sort of rolling their eyes," Jefferson recalled.

Those minor technical hiccups are gone. And today, tens of million of people have viewed an Animoto of some kind.

In preparation for this story, I created one from my wedding and for first TechFlash Live event. It took a few minutes to upload the photos from my hard drive and add some jazz and electronica music, but within 10 minutes I had created the shows and emailed them to friends and family.

"The idea is that with a click of a button, you can turn your pictures and music into a video -- like something you'd expect to see in film or television," said Jefferson. "To set it against a body of music and actually have the photos move to the cue of the music and the beat and the tempo and the energy, that just brings out so much more emotion from the photographs."

The company will use the $4.4 million to add new features, including the incorporation of video and new ways to match images with music.

Jefferson met with a investors in New York and San Francisco, but he said Madrona was the best fit as it looks to "put the pedal to the metal."

This marks the second time this year that Madrona has co-invested alongside Amazon in a New York-based startup. In February, Madrona led an $8.5 million round in online advertising startup Yieldex.

McIlwain -- who is joining the Animoto board -- said a trend is not brewing in those two deals as Madrona is still very much committed to the Northwest.

Here's the Animoto I created from the TechFlash event.