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Tomio Geron writes this dispatch about the venture capitalists behind Bill Me Later. Geron is a reporter for VentureWire, a Dow Jones publication and contributor to Deal Journal.

Bill Me Later’s agreement to be acquired by eBay for $945 million in cash and options is the third-largest acquisition of a venture-backed company this year and looks to have earned its venture investors some sizable returns.

Bill Me Later’s first venture investor was Crosspoint Venture Partners, which in 2000 put $17 million into the company, a service that enables Web shoppers to extend payment for products for a fee. James Dorrian, a general partner at the firm, said the investment was “very successful,” especially given the tough environment at that time. “For anybody making any investment in early 2000, there was no exit strategy really,” Dorrian said. “You had to say, ‘Can this be a good company?’ And let the market take care of itself.”

Azure Capital Partners was Bill Me Later’s largest venture investor, first investing in the Timonium, Md., company at a valuation below $100 million, according to Mike Kwatinetz, general partner at Azure. Kwatinetz declined to specify his firm’s overall return, though the return from the initial investment would be at a multiple of about eight. Azure returned to invest in later rounds.

Later institutional investors included T. Rowe Price and Legg Mason, while strategic investors included Amazon.com, First Data and Chase Paymentech Solutions.

The third venture-capital firm to invest in Bill Me Later, GRP Partners, expects a return of five to six times its investment, according to Steve Lebow, managing partner and co-founder of GRP. “I loved the deal,” Lebow said. “(CEO) Gary Marino and his team are brilliant.” Bill Me Later was ahead of its time in figuring out how to quickly provide credit to consumers, he said. It just took time to build the company to where it is today, Lebow said.

Venture capitalists have endured a tough environment for exiting investments, with the industry on track for the lowest number of M&A deals involving venture-backed companies this decade. The only bigger venture-backed M&A deals this year were Dell’s purchase of EqualLogic in January for $1.4 billion and Sun Microsystems’ purchase of MySQL for $1 billion in February.