Braintree said Wednesday that it raised a $35 million Series B round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates . Existing investors, including Accel Partners, RRE Ventures and Greycroft, also participated. Chicago-based Braintree, a payments platform for online and mobile commerce, has raised a total of $70 million in funding.

United Sample, an Encino, Calif.-based provider of online sample solutions for the market research industry, has raised $3 million in Series B funding. Greycroft Partners led the round, and was joined by return backer DFJ Frontier.

Alan Patricof has been hearing the VC industry’s doom and gloom — including Sequoia Capital’s graveyard deck — and thinks that a lot of it is overstated. In comments to PaidContent, he says:

The comments made by the partners of Sequoia Capital at their recently held ‘CEO Summit’ have been widely covered by leaks to numerous bloggers. These bloggers have disseminated the details and spread the contagion of the sentiments to the public at large, unfortunately running the risk that the words become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Without challenging the comments, which expressed a heightened degree of doom and gloom for the economic prospects of young start-up companies particularly, I do think it calls for a somewhat more restrained response on the outlook and required action before throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Kind of reads a bit like shooting the messenger, so now is probably a good time to tell you that I’ll be interviewing Patricof as part of the North American VC Summit on Oct. 28 in Quebec City. He’ll give a 20 minutes speech, and then I’ll do a 20 minutes Q&A with him. Later that same afternoon, I’ll do the same thing with David Rimer of Index Ventures. In between will be a luncheon keynote from Steven Schwarzman. Get more info here.