The Canadian “e-tailer” Beyond the Rack scores $36.6 million in new funding and Euro-American Index Ventures disregards the VC blues to raise $692 million in the top five venture plays of the week. Here’s the rundown:

The Gobbler: Rather than start its own coupon site—that’s so last year!—the Austin, Texas-based startup WhaleShark Media is snatching up others around the around the world. And it scored $150 million in new venture capital on Wednesday from the likes of JP Morgan Asset Management and Institutional Venture Partners, Portfolio.com reported. So far, it’s raised $300 million.

Merck=VC: We don’t want to say we told you so, but there sure are a lot of big companies acting like venture capitalists. One of them is Merck & Co., the New Jersey-based drug giant which said two months ago that it was starting a $250 million venture arm—Merck Research Venture Fund, aptly named. On Thursday, the company announced it had promoted one of its own executives, Reid Leonard, to be the fund’s first managing director, according to the Boston Business Journal. The fund plans to back venture funds investing in biotechs. Who said life sciences was dead?

Break Out Those Credit Cards: Ranked by Internet Retailer as the fastest-growing e-tailer in 2011, it’s probably no surprise that Beyond the Rack, a Montreal, Canada-based startup founded in 2009, raised $36.6 million in new funding on Wednesday. The round was led by Panorama Capital in the Silicon Valley, and other Canadians. So far, Beyond the Rack has raised about $53 million, but, as the website VatorNews pointed out, it’s unclear whether it’s actually making money.

Index This: What was that about venture capital firms having trouble fundraising? Index Ventures, one of Skype’s investors, has raised another $692 million (or 500 million euros, since the company has offices in London and Geneva, as well as San Francisco), according to the New York Times, which reported the news on Tuesday. The money will be used to fund American and European startups and, specifically, “fast-growing companies.” Isn’t that what everyone wants?

Facebook Rewards: This San Francisco-based startup has a tongue-twister of a name—Kontagent—but it’s managed to find a Facebook niche by building a platform that tracks demographics for Facebook developers (it also won a $225,000 grant from Facebook for its work.) Now that we’ve just used the word “Facebook” three times in one sentence, let’s get back to Kontagent, which scored $12 million in a second round of funding on Thursday, according to TechCrunch. The round was led by Battery Ventures. And don’t fret—in case you’re still not sure how to pronounce its name, Kontagent has written out the phonetic spelling for you on its website.

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