ShotSpotter Inc., a maker of gunshot location and detection technology, has closed a $7 million equity financing round, and added $3.5 million in debt financing, the firm said Thursday. The funding will help ShotSpotter develop its technology into a domestic public safety platform-as-a-service delivery model. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., is backed by City Light Capital, Claremont Creek Ventures, Labrador Ventures, Lauder Partners, Levensohn Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and The Westly Group.

Pascal Levensohn always has been a particularly thoughtful VC, so it’s no surprise that he’s approaching the wind-down of his 15-year-old firm with a reasoned explanation. After the jump you can read a note authored by Levensohn this morning, and sent to peHUB.

Not cited is whether or not the decision had to do with LP reaction to a possible fourth fund, which was rumored to have been in the works.

San Francisco-based Levensohn Venture Partners is a San Francisco-based firm that has made early-stage investments in the digital media, security and demand-side cleantech space.

Activity on the auction site has spiked in the last 18 months because so many people — venture capitalists, limited partners, employees of startups and others — have their money tied up in illiquid assets and want out, said founder Barry Silbert, who spoke yesterday on Grant Thornton’s conference call introducing their latest report on the long-term decline of U.S. IPOs.

Second Market now has $25 billion worth of assets for sale and 5,000 participants, and Silbert expects the site to complete 2 billion transactions by the end of the year. Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley — private companies that are unwilling or unable to go public — are selling assets, including Facebook, eHarmony, Second Life, LinkedIn and Tesla Motors.

There’s more interest in Second Market from investors too, Silbert said, partly because secondary sales are the only way some of them can get in on these deals. So Benchmark, Accel, NEA, IVP and several other VCs and investment banks are shopping at Second Market.

Grant Thornton confirmed that the study will be rolled out at a press conference on November 9th. It’s been in the works for two years.

One VC who’s aware of it, Pascal Levensohn, said he was “shocked” when he learned what’s in it. “It has really scary statistics about the secular decline in marketshare, globally, that all listed markets in the U.S. have been experiencing since 1997,” he said. “This proves that (the IPO drought) has nothing to do with Sarbanes Oxley and the tech bubble. The reality is that America peaked in 1997 as a capital markets force in equities, and since then it’s gone straight down and every other market has gone up.”

NASDAQ OMX’s Bruce Aust told peHUB on Tuesday that NASDAQ has a new “lower-tier listing market” in the works that will be aimed at emerging companies and at financially solid companies that can’t meet the NASDAQ’s listing requirements.

The idea is to make it easier for companies to go public, which has been tough for over a year. Aust said NASDAQ has been working closely on this project — which would operate in Boston — with the National Venture Capital Association.

Not so, says the NVCA.

IPO filings and pricings are on the rise, but not everyone believes that the window is opening more than just a crack.

One naysayer is Pascal Levensohn of Levensohn Venture Partners, who plans to deliver a speech tomorrow at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum in San Francisco on how decades of corporate and government neglect of research and development — combined with the global financial crisis — will continue to drain capital and create liquidity problems for all but a few viable U.S. companies seeking to go public.

He says the entire clean tech industry is at risk. Also, relaxing Sarbanes Oxley to make it easier for companies to go public is out. An abstract of his speech comes after the jump:

Nokia today acquired “certain assets” of Plum, a tiny (10-person) software company that lets people create private social networks on iPhones and other devices. Various Web sites also use the software under their own brands.

You’d think VCs would be shouting from the rooftops about any exit these days given the rough economy, but no. The investors — Levensohn Venture and Vulcan — aren’t saying how much they invested or how much they got out of the deal, although they are of course “pleased.” Nokia and Plum CEO Hans Peter Brondmo aren’t talking much either.

We at peHUB central have noticed lately that some VCs have allowed cyber dust to collect on their blogs, as some have not posted their thoughts online in months.

Has the bloom fell off the blogging rose? Has Twitter, and its 140 characters of brevity, replaced blogging?

Definitely, the “aura is off the medium,” says Gerry Langeler, managing director of OVP Venture Partners. But blogging hasn’t gone the way of the rotary dial telephone just yet.

Langeler and OVP began its blog in late June, featuring posts by Langeler and his fellow team members, as well as guest

Venture capitalist Pascal Levensohn this morning gave a keynote speech at the Cybersecurity Applications and Technologies Conference for Homeland Security (CATCH), delivering the message that U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship, the crucial growth engines of the U.S. economy, are at risk of stalling out. What follows is the text of his prepared remarks:

I’d like to thank Doug Maughan and DHS for their gracious invitation to address this gathering of distinguished technology entrepreneurs who are focusing their talents on protecting the security of our nation’s critical infrastructure.

“Crisis” seems to be the common thread in everything we see on television or read in the popular media. I do not use the words “American Innovation in Crisis” lightly. As a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, and an American, I am very concerned about the state of innovation in our country today. I believe that we need to be proactive in addressing the innovation crisis because the consequences for the future of our country are simply unacceptable if we don’t.