The born-again version of once great social sharing site Digg, Inc. has taken the venture capital path with the company taking $4 million Series A (apparently you start again when you’re reborn) in a round from DG Incubation, the Tokyo-based investment subsidiary of Digital Garage.

As part of the deal, Digg itself is spinning off from owner Betaworks into a separate company (hence the round for Digg specifically), with current Betworks Partner and current Chief Executive Officer Andrew McLaughlin moving to the position of Executive Chairman and Digg Chief Operating Officer Gary Liu taking the lead role.

The current version of Digg, sort of a curated news service come original content provider (they link out to content on other sites while writing their own stuff as well) came about following Betaworks’ acquisition of Digg for a measly $500,000 in 2012 in what SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier at the time described as Grand Theft Startup.

That deal saw Betaworks taking the brand, domain, code and traffic from the original social sharing site, with the patents for the site being sold separately to LinkedIn, Inc.

“Digital Garage is excited to be investing in Digg,” Digital Garage Group Chief Executive Officer Kaoru Hayashi said in a statement. “We believe that the market for effective curation, especially on mobile, is vast and growing.”

“The Digg team has proven its ability to execute on that vision, and we look forward to helping them advance it even further,” Hayashi furthered.

“The Digg team has done what many thought to be impossible; they have restored an iconic Internet brand with a strong voice, high-quality products on web and mobile, and a loyal and growing user base,” Betaworks Chief Executive Officer and Founder John Borthwick added. “We are serious about Digg’s full global potential, and because of Digital Garage’s formidable expertise, there was no better investment partner for the next stage of growth.”

Digg 2.0

It’s strange to be writing about a Series A round for a company who shares the name of one that lives on in infamy in the venture capital funded startup space for rising so high then crashing so unbelievably hard through arguably unprecedented gross mismanagement.

That all said, Digg 2.0 has seen steady growth and has become an interesting read for its growing number of fans and credit where due to Betaworks for taking a dead horse and resurrecting it from the dead, even if the horse now appears to be a cat with the same name.

This is Digg 2.0’s first round, but the old Digg had raised $45 million prior to its implosion and was once valued in the mid hundred millions.

The company said it would use the funding to accelerate growth in users and revenue, the expansion of community and network features, and new products for international markets.

Image credit: Digg/ Betaworks