Video-sharing site Metacafe has received $15 million in a second round of funding, from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners, writes TechCrunch (via paidContent). Metacafe uses a filtering algorithm to prescreen videos, only about two dozen of which are approved each day - but those few videos are viewed by 20 million unique visitors each week.

With the investment, Accel's Kevin Efrusy, an investor in Facebook, will join Metacafe's board of directors. Metacafe said it has grown its revenues more than tenfold since the beginning of 2006. It said it will use the new funds to open its U.S. headquarters (San Francisco) and invest in marketing, contributor remuneration and new distribution technologies. The company is based in Israel.

"Metacafe's one of those great hidden gems on the web," Efrusy said in a statement. "Its usage statistics are dramatic, but when you dig deeper you realize the statistics are driven by the cleaner experience - the filtering technology is quite unique. Metacafe is the next generation model for user-generated video."