Twice a year the Northwest Energy Angels put on a showcase where the organization’s investors can talk shop, and local cleantech companies have the opportunity to update the group of angels—many of whom have backed them in the past—on their recent accomplishments. It’s a chance for the growing organization to benchmark its success in facilitating relations between cleantech entrepreneurs and potential investors looking to provide early-stage capital to up-and-coming cleantech companies here in the Northwest.

“It’s been a year already— an excellent time to bore you with lots and lots of statistics about what’s happened over this last year,” angel Lars Johansson joked in his address at the group’s holiday party/winter showcase on Friday at the Talaris Conference Center.

Over the last year the NW Energy Angels, founded in 2006 by local entrepreneur Martin Tobias and state lawmaker Jeff Morris, have made some substantial strides. In March the group hired on new executive director Margo Shiroyama, who has spent her first nine months on the job growing the group’s scope—growing the organization’s resources and events for cleantech companies and investors, including research field trips, new member programs, and investor discussion groups, a project spearheaded by one of the group’s members, Kiki Tidwell.

The group itself has grown from 45 active members at the time of its summer showcase in July, to more than 53, and has invested more than $3 million in 20 cleantech companies in the region to date.

The rest of the night was turned over to company presentations and mingling. Though all of these companies had presented at previous NW Energy Angels events, they were all in varying stages of development—some approaching third and fourth investment rounds, while others were just completing due diligence. Some we’ve reported on before, others are brand new. Take a look at these highlights from the presenting cleantech companies:

—MicroGREEN Polymers (Arlington, WA)

This company, which develops technology to recycle plastics into cheaper, environmentally friendly items, such as coffee cups, has been on our radar for some time. MicroGREEN Polymers raised $6.9 million in a Series B round back in May, funding that allowed it to build a new facility in Arlington, which is “now filled with $6 million worth of equipment” leading to toward commercialization, according to CEO Tom Malone. “We’re cranking out products,” he says. That financing was followed up by an additional $2.7 million last month, in a round that is still open and could be worth as much as $3.75 million. While Malone says the company is six months behind schedule, he’s excited to announce that MicroGREEN currently has samples in the hands of 2,000 customers. “I’ve never been higher about the company,” he says. “No doubt you’re going to see us announcing great things in the next quarter.”

—G2B Ventures (Seattle, WA)

G2B Ventures, also known as G2B Holdings, is a Seattle-based real estate consulting and redevelopment company that buys homes, retrofits them for green, energy efficient technologies, and resells them for a profit. Chairman and CEO Aaron Fairchild says G2B is “racing to revenues,” having just closed a round on Friday. “The money just came into our account today, so we’re really fired up about that,” he says, adding that NW Energy Angels investments accounted for one third of the round. The new funding, according to Fairchild, will back the company’s new home renovation venture, getting started under the name “Green Canopy Homes.”

—Farm Power Northwest (Skagit County, WA)

This company, which also presented at the summer showcase, is in a different kind of clean tech business—manure. The company, which develops, owns and operates energy harnessing manure digester facilities out of backcountry dairy farms in Washington and Canada, just closed its third round … Next Page »

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Bellevue, WA-based mobile Internet service provider Motricity (Nasdaq: MOTR), passed the profitability mark yesterday, when it posted its 2010 third quarter financial results. The company, which struggled through a disappointingly low $50 million IPO in June, is reporting its first ever positive net income, in the amount of $3.3 million for the three-month period that ended September 30.

“Motricity accelerated its financial performance and leadership in the mobile data services market during the third quarter,” chief executive Ryan Wuerch said on the company’s quarterly investor call.

Motricity’s revenue from the third quarter climbed nearly $10 million over the same time last year, from $28.1 million to $37.9 million, a 35 percent increase. The company reported a net loss of $1.8 million in the same period a year ago.

The company also rolled out details yesterday on its latest partnership in its aggressive international expansion plans, with Indonesia’s fastest growing mobile operator XL Axiata. The two companies have teamed up to extend mobile Internet, mobile social networking, e-mail, carrier information, and personalized mobile content to XL Axiata’s 38.5 million subscribers.

This is the second international partnership Motricity has inked recently. Last month, the company partnered up with Reliance Communications, one of India’s largest mobile operators. The deal caused the company’s stock to soar 34 percent in one day, closing at $17.42.

“Motricity is a mobile Internet pure play, and we sit at the center of the mobile data services ecosystem, where we provide the technology and the services that enable some of the largest mobile operators and enterprises globally the ability to offer these services to their subscribers,” Wuerch said. “Our global opportunity is exceptional.”

Motricity shares closed at $21 yesterday, with a market value of $840 million. The shares have kept climbing, up to $23.785 at 2:40 pm Eastern time, establishing a market capitalization of more than $955 million.

Read more about the company’s international expansion plans in an in-depth interview I did with Wuerch last month.

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Anyone who says software startups don’t bring in big investment dollars anymore, clearly hasn’t been paying attention to Urban Airship.

Beyond being one of a new and interesting class of startups that are part software, part mobile, the Portland, OR-based company is bringing in some major financing, including its $5.4 million Series B round led by Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group.

The investment, being announced today, comes only six months after Urban Airship inked its initial $1.1 million investment from True Ventures, and Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op. Both initial investors also participated in the Series B. As part of the deal, Foundry Group managing director Jason Mendelson has joined Urban Airship’s board of directors.

So what kind of powerhouse business does a new software company have to be involved in to get such uncharacteristically large sums of funding in this age of bootstrapping, and cheap pay-as-you-go cloud-computing infrastructure for startups? Two words: mobile messaging. Essentially Urban Airship builds software that gives mobile providers and app developers the ability to power “push notifications.”

If you’re a smartphone user, you’ve more than likely received a push notification or two, and you might be wondering what’s so special about something that is, essentially, a text message? The answer is that push notifications are not really like text messages at all. While they may look like SMS messages, they are actually sent over the data network, not the voice network. This makes them cheaper to send, and means they can be received by customers even if the particular app on the mobile device it correlates to isn’t open—hence the term “push.”

Since the company was founded in June 2009, it has attracted some big-name clients, including Universal Music Group, Dictionary.com, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Mashable, LivingSocial Deals, Newsweek, the Democratic Party, and fellow tech startups Tapulous, Gowalla, and Z2Live. In September, the company teamed up with another Seattle-based company, Ground Truth, to offer its services to the Verizon Developer Community, a partnership with chief executive Scott Kveton says has made Urban Airship the “preferred provider for network notifications across their network of over 100 million subscribers.” Saying the company has grown fast would be an understatement.

Greg spoke with chief executive Scott Kveton back in March, and got the skinny on how the startup erupted into the mobile world and inked some of its big initial clients (here’s a clue: their strategy heavily involved donuts).

At the time, the company had just hired on two new employees, for a grand total of eight. Kveton says Urban Airship has hired another six in the past six months, and plans to use its most recent funding round to double that number in the next year, “to hire folks to meet the demand of the products.” And Kveton fully expects the growth spurt to continue. “We’ll have plenty of room to house our continued growth,” he says. The company has just signed a shiny new lease for a 2,500 square foot building in downtown Portland.

The company has performed well enough to justify the new digs. Last March, Urban Airship had 1,600 customers. Today they have more than 4,000.

“Since we did our Series A back in February, things have really continued to take off for us,” he says. “What we have built is a mobile services platform that app developers and publishers can build into their apps, giving them the ability to more easily engage, and monetize on their platform. And what we’re finding is that our customers really like the ability to directly engage with push notifications, and monetize on a regular basis.”

To date, Urban Airship has facilitated the sending of more than 1.2 billion notifications. The company is clearly riding the wave of growth in the broader smartphone market. An estimated 77 million smartphones were sold in the third quarter, a 78 percent increase over the same period a year earlier, Kveton says.

“We’re sending around five to ten million notifications a day, and we’ve seen that growth really take off,” Kveton says.

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[Correction: 7:40 am 11/1/10] Last night was the big night—we gathered some of the biggest names in Northwest financing for Xconomy’s “VC Crossfire” event, at Amazon’s new headquarters in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.

The panelists consisted of some of the region’s top financiers and technology entrepreneurs—including Bob Nelsen of Arch Venture Partners; Tom Alberg of Madrona Venture Group; Andy Sack of TechStars Seattle, Founder’s Co-op, and RevenueLoan; and Christopher Henney, the co-founder of Immunex, Icos, and Dendreon. And the “fearsome foursome” were certainly not shy when it came to the more grilling questions from our Xconomy Seattle editor Luke Timmerman, and national IT editor Greg Huang, who flew in from his new digs in Boston especially for this event.

The talk of the evening centered around the changing venture capital modelas a new wave of technology startups seek financing. How will innovative startups get funded in the future now that venture capital is declining as a financial asset class? Is the venture capital model as we know it reaching the end of its existence? Will traditional VC funding be replaced by angels, super angels, or micro-VCs? What can we do in the Pacific Northwest to finance—and foster—innovation?

No silver bullet for financing of innovation emerged, but there were a number of constructive ideas floated. Here are some highlights from the discussion, edited for length and clarity.

Xconomy: Is the venture capital model still relevant today, or even necessary?

Bob Nelsen: If you look at the data, 20 percent of GDP is comprised of venture capital [Correction: 7:40 am, 11/1/10. An earlier version said it was 40 percent]. Everywhere in the world we are admired—even worshiped—from the other countries that want to get our innovative infrastructure, and want to figure out how to fund companies the way we do them here. It’s the future of our country, it’s what creates our productivity gains, and we are in somewhat danger of losing our edge there as we tax it more—if we don’t somewhat fertilize the ground that we’re basing it on. There’s no other finance structure that I’m aware of that can put the startup capital in that venture does.

Xconomy's VC Crossfire event at Amazon's new South Lake Union headquarters.

X: We’ve seen the costs of getting tech startups going come down significantly in the past few years, but is there really a different story here in biotech?

Christopher Henney: As a pharmaceutical company, we live in an entirely different world—these numbers, $200,000 doesn’t mean anything for us. Venture capital as it existed 40 years ago, essentially doesn’t exist anymore. In the early days in the ’80s, most funds that invested in the biotech space were composed of wealthy individuals or wealthy families who were diversifying looking for winners—there was not real time construction on the amount of time the money was there. So we were able to start research companies. Nobody wants to pay for research anymore—that’s one of the problems in the biotech space. I think many people think that research is for the federal government.

Angels, really for me, have no place in the biotech space because they’re just going to lose their shirts, because when the professional money goes in—as it’s going to—they’re going to get wiped out, so they should just stay away.

X: Is the phenomenon of the “super angel” overrated? Are these the new players on the block, or are VCs still the people who can build big companies?

Andy Sack: There is a phenomenon of super angels—in pretty much every major tech market there appears to be a super angel fund of some type. In venture, the funds are larger, and in those venture funds, there are some people who lack specific entrepreneurial experience. In the class of super angels, the trend that you’re seeing is entrepreneurs who have had some degree of success and want to be helpful to the next generation and, almost by default, you end up in a situation where it’s almost more performance-oriented.

There are some real differences between super angels and venture capital, and there’s definitely a phenomenon with super angels, and I think it’s a good thing—more players, seed stage. Companies need stage-specific funding, so it makes most sense if you’re raising between $500,000 and a million bucks, it makes the most sense to get angels or super angels.

X: If you look at the VC returns from the past decade, they are really lousy. What are you guys doing now to get your house in order, and how many firms will be going away?

BN: You’re not going to see so many firms go out of business. You are seeing some partners are going away. It’s hard to kill a venture fund, but it’s easy to kill a venture partner.

X: How might bootstrapping, super angels, and micro-VC be disruptive to traditional VC?

BN: I think it’s rebranding. Super angels have always been around—it happened in the ’70s, it happened in the ’80s, it happened in the ’90s, and now it’s being rebranded as super angels. It’s not clear to people who are outside of the industry how fast it’s contracting.

Firms are getting smaller. Even the big firms are going from a billion to $300 million. Basically early stage is becoming much more popular now, amongst limited partners, so now the next stage … Next Page »

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Seattle-based social wedding software company Nearlyweds said today it has closed a $500,000 equity financing round from Founder’s Co-op, Jon Kelly, Andy Liu, David Niu, and other investors. The startup also announced it has acquired Chicago-based OneWed for an undisclosed amount.

Nearlyweds, founded in 2007, designs personalized wedding websites for couples for a flat rate. The company first popped up on our radar last year when it earned an investment from Founder’s Co-op. According to chief executive John Scrofano, the growing company is diving into the online wedding services market at an interesting point of change in the industry—a turning away from the “traditional American” wedding, and an embracing of the more unique and personalized.

“Couples are asking ‘why’ to many things, including themes, bridal parties, venues, etc. And we are seeing both an inclusion of more ethnic heritage traditions at the same time as things that are not traditional at all, but totally unique to the couple,” Scrofano said via e-mail. “This is bad news for mega-generic wedding industrial complex media outlets who write content aimed at ‘traditional American.’” It’s good news, however, for Nearlyweds, he adds.

Nearlyweds’ small team is competing against the ranks of bigger players like TheKnot. But smaller upstarts like Nearlyweds have an advantage over larger companies, which tend to have more generic offerings, he says. Indeed, Nearlyweds prides itself on its customizable, personalized options for couples planning their big day.

Although the company did not disclose how much revenue it brought in last year, Scrofano did say it doubled from 2008 to 2009, and that Nearlyweds is on pace to do between four and five times that amount in 2010, including the acquisition. With the new financing and acquisition of OneWed, Scrofano says Nearlyweds will be well-placed to blossom in the growing online wedding-planning market. OneWed, which currently gets between 250,000 and 500,000 unique visitors to its website a month, and has a database of 25,000 bridal vendors, will substantially add to the company’s traffic base, he says. “OneWed accelerates our vision dramatically,” he says. “We were not awesome at building a large audience. OneWed is great at building a large audience.”

OneWed’s 10-person staff will stay in their current office in Chicago under the Nearlyweds umbrella. The new deal, according to Scrafano, will allow his company to expand on its current revenue model. Wedding planning companies, he says, generally make money in three ways—advertising with local vendors, advertising with national vendors (such as David’s Bridal, and Crate and Barrel), and selling products and services marketed direct to customers.

“We see lots of opportunity for innovation online in categories one and three. Nearlyweds’ was good at one and three, and getting better,” he says. “OneWed creates a huge opportunity for us in category one (vendors) and a base on which to make some moves quickly.”

Scrofano also plans to capitalize on the cultural shifts he’s noticed in the wedding sector, incorporating even more personalization and social elements to help make wedding planning as easy as possible for couples getting ready to walk the aisle (figuratively, for the less traditional).

“Wedding planning is already inherently social, but there are only anemic online offerings that play to that fundamental core part of the process,” he says, adding that Nearlyweds’ goal is to make that process “simpler, more social, and more fun.”

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Every month we take some time to look at the deals Washington tech and biotech companies inked in the month prior, and compare them to recent trends. Unlike our weekly investment deals roundups, these monthly features give us the opportunity to look back through both the large investment that made big headlines when they broke, as well as the smaller “under the radar” deals that may have gone unnoticed. As October comes to a close (can you believe it’s gone by this fast?), it’s time to take a look at the tech and biotech deals Washington companies closed in September. As always, the information is based on data provided by our partner, New York-based private company intelligence firm CB Insights, and our own past coverage.

Since we first started these monthly deals roundups back in June, the healthcare sector has been the dominant deal-maker, hands down, bringing in $41.1 million in June, $62.5 million in July, $21.8 million in August, and serving as the bulk of Washington’s startup financing over any other sector each month.

In September, the healthcare sector was still the top contender for financing, bringing in $17 million. But much like in August, the Internet and software sectors came in second and third in September, bringing in $13.6 million, and $12 million respectively.

Computer hardware and services startups came in fourth, with $8 million in financing, and the mobile and telecommunications sector trailed behind for the bottom rank, with just $1.1 million in deals.

Some of the more notable deals from September include Bothell, WA-based business software company Winshuttle’s $12 million financing from Summit Partners, which singlehandedly carried the software sector to the top of the financing list in September. Others include DataSphere Technologies’ $10 million Series C, led by Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, MOD Systems $6 million Series B (which the company inked despite a rather public indictment of its co-founder Mark Phillips), and Stratos Genomics’ $4 million Series A for low-cost DNA sequencing.

One big deal somewhat surprisingly squeaked by our coverage: Pathway Medical Technologies raised $10 million in equity, according to a regulatory filing, and somehow we missed it. Seattle-based video optimization company Opanga Networks raised $600,000, as did Bellevue, WA-based cloud-based IT services startup, Doyenz, both of which flew under our radar.

Here’s the full list of September’s equity-based deals, both under the radar and on it:

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It’s not often that you meet a CEO who works a maximum of 55 hours a week, participates in push up challenges with coworkers in the office, and wears the company values—which read “anything is possible,” “speak plainly,” “we make things for customers,” and “be it”— on a dog tag around his neck. But for Henry Albrecht, it’s all part of his corporate and personal mission to create a better kind of company culture through happier, healthier, and well-balanced employees.

“Life is too short,” Albrecht says. “We really want to create a better kind of company. We want it to be OK to be yourself.”

The 41-year-old entrepreneur founded the software startup Limeade in early February 2006, with the aim of doing just that—helping companies succeed by improving the wellbeing and productivity of their employees.

Albrecht himself came from an economic strategy, and business, brand, and marketing background. After getting his bachelor’s in economics and literature from Claremont McKenna College, he spent a year playing basketball in Portugal. Then he found work as an economic consultant, went through business school, and worked his way into a tech career at Intuit, the Mountain View, CA-based software company.

Today Albrecht lives back in his native Northwest, is happily married, has three young kids (ages three, six, and 10), and a young a thriving startup with 25 employees that follow the same creed as he does. Juggling all that, he still manages to get out of the office long before most startup employees do, and more importantly, he is more productive than he’s ever been and enjoys the time he’s at work—a lot. In fact, Albrecht wakes up every day excited to go to the office. The phrase ‘case of the Mondays’ is not in his vocabulary.

“Like many people, I go through life trying to figure out what really makes me tick, makes me passionate, and gets me psyched in the morning, and I’m super fortunate to have found something that I feel that way about,” he says.

The company values he and his employees all wear as emblems (though Albrecht admits he’s a little behind in ordering the tags for the whole staff) may be simple, but they represent the idea behind the company: that personal wellbeing is the key ingredient to success—in life, and in business.

Using Limeade’s Web-based system, employers can actively focus on improving corporate health and productivity, working from the specific needs of each individual employee up. After completing an initial—and private—health assessment through the system, employees can log their daily status against personal health and wellness goals they set themselves, or those set by the company, journal about their progress, engage with fellow coworkers for challenges that capitalize on social gaming strategies that make self-reporting wellness more fun, and track their stats over time. Employers get valuable insights into the wellness of their employee population, and are able to initiate incentive programs or challenges to help their employees meet their personal goals, which in turn help the company have a richer, stronger, happier, and more productive culture.

And so far the mission is paying off. In four short years, Limeade has raised two successful financing rounds from friends and family, and angel investors—one for $2.4 million in July 2009, followed by another for $3 million in January—and boasts some big-name customers, including the State of Washington, Jamba Juice, Group Health, and REI.

Last week, the company signed on two new clients, the Texas-based Scott & White Healthcare (very similar in size to Group Health), and a popular national restaurant chain. At this rate Albrecht estimates that the company will break the profitability barrier this year, and plans to double its staff in 2011 as it expands.

I sat down with Albrecht a couple of weeks ago and spoke with him about Limeade, the burgeoning health IT/wellness space, and what makes his company different, especially compared to other startups in the space that have been on our radar, such as Mindbloom. Here are the highlights from our conversation, edited, as always, for length and clarity.

Xconomy: Where did you get the idea for Limeade?

Henry Albrecht: Having studied marketing in business school, I consider myself a little bit of an amateur psychologist, and I like to study what makes people tick and what makes people move. A lot of my interests revolve around that? What motivates people?

Intuit was doing some neat things with consumer directive and small business software, and taking all these complex factors that, let’s say, predict a healthy financial life, or predict a healthy business, and reporting them back in crisp, easy to understand ways. Here’s your whole personal portfolio, here’s your payroll, here’s your checking balance and your savings, and here’s what you need to do about it.

Having spent a lot of time in that environment, that helped brew a passion in me. It helped frame a question. If you could do this type of thing for your financial well being, what if you could do something like that for your overall wellbeing? Something that helped you measure and get all the … Next Page »

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Denver, CO-based Photobucket, which merged with Seattle-based mobile imaging startup Ontela in December 2009, has promoted Tom Munro to the position of chief executive, the company said today. Munro previously served as Ontela’s chief financial officer, and has been acting as Photobucket’s president and CFO since the merger last year. MocoNews.net is reporting that along with the promotion, Photobucket also moved its mobile development office from Seattle to its San Francisco and Denver offices, a consolidation that resulted in 11 layoffs. The Seattle office remains open, according to the report.

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Seattle-based supercomputing company Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) has inked a contract deal with the University of Stuttgart, to deliver two supercomputers to the University’s High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). The multi-year, multi-phase contract is worth an estimated $60 million. The first phase of the contract will take place in 2011, during which the Cray XE6 supercomputer will go into production at the university. The second supercomputer, the next-generation Cascade, will be delivered to the university in 2013. Cray says the Cascade is made possible, in part, by the company’s participation in the Defense Advance Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) High Productivity Computer Systems program earlier this year.

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[UpdatedI 12:15 pm Pacific] We’ve been covering the cleantech space here at Xconomy for some time, and the whispers we keep hearing from the folks at the Northwest Energy Angels, cleantech incubators like the McKinstry Innovation Center, or the Puget Sound Regional Council, is that although the Northwest is an obvious contender to lead in green innovation, we haven’t won the title of cleantech hub just yet.

In an attempt to survey what’s going on in the clean innovation scene in the Pacific Northwest, two years ago we compiled an all-encompassing guide to the cleantech clusters not only in Washington state, but in Oregon and British Columbia as well. But in just two short years the list has quickly grown longer—and outdated.

As the industry has grown, it’s now apparent that the term cleantech is a broad and reaching one that breaks down into subcategory upon subcategory—such as renewable energy, green buildings, energy efficiency, alternative fuels, power systems. The list goes on and on. So to make this canvassing more manageable, we’re breaking it down by individual sectors.

We’re starting with one of the more obvious ones—energy efficiency—due to the strong IT presence we have here in Washington, as well as in Oregon and British Columbia.

We defined energy efficiency to include energy management hardware and software companies, as well as IT-based efficiency service companies (some of these companies may overlap with other sectors). We did not include energy consultants or efficiency construction or retrofitters—though these too play a vital role in the cleantech climate. To read up on some of these companies, see the Washington State Energy Marketplace Directory (.pdf), which was compiled and updated as of October 2010.

We compiled this list, which is by no means comprehensive, from our past coverage, along with resources from the Washington state Department of Commerce energy division, the Washington state Department of Ecology, the Washington Clean Technology Alliance, the Northwest Energy Efficiency Council, the British Columbia Environmental Industry Association, the Oregon Department of Energy, and the Bonneville Power Administration’s Energy Efficiency database. If you know of any companies we missed, or others that are just getting started, please shoot us a note at editors@xconomy.com, and we’ll add them to the list.

—3 Phase Energy Systems (Auburn, WA)

This company spun out of the University of Washington, and develops technology to harness wasted exhaust energy and feed it back into the power grid.

—Advantage IQ (Spokane, WA)

The company monitors corporate energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions through Web-based data management services, helping companies to better conserve.

-Alerton (Redmond, WA)

This company, part of Honeywell International’s Automation and Controls Group, provides building heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning management services. In fact, the company says it was the first to pioneer ways to help building owners automatically control HVAC systems.

—Calico Energy Services (Woodinville, WA)

This smart grid data management company plugs into energy management systems and monitors output from the source—major utilities companies and energy service providers—allowing these companies to instigate energy management campaigns with customers.

—Clean Power Research (Kirkland, WA and Napa, CA)

This company develops Web-based software for solar power and other clean energy industries, calculating everyday things like energy output, utility bills, and renewable energy system incentive programs.

—ClearEdge Power (Hillsboro, OR)

This company makes a product called ClearEdge5, which is a fuel cell system that converts natural gas into electricity and heat, increasing efficiency, decreasing carbon dioxide emissions, and cutting utility bills for homes and small businesses. The company raised $15 million in financing in August 2009.

—EnerG2 (Seattle, WA)

This advanced materials and energy storage company is a UW spinout that develops materials to help make it more efficient to store energy from hydrogen, solar cells, and natural gas. The company received an $8.5 million Series A investment from OVP Venture Partners two years ago, followed up by another $2.5 million in June 2009, a $21.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in August 2009, and another $3.5 million round in April.

—Energy Aware (Vancouver, BC)

This company manufactures in-home energy energy monitoring hardware and smart meters that provide homeowners and utilities companies with wireless real-time information on power consumption, electricity rates, and energy management. [Updated: This company was added on 10/27/10].

—Energy Trust of Oregon (Portland, OR)

The Energy Trust of Oregon is an independent nonprofit organization that helps residents and businesses save energy and tap into renewable resources through an online database of information on … Next Page »

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For months the flow of news about Seattle-area technology company deals has felt like a trickle, and then all of the sudden this week we have deals coming out of our ears. It must be the fall weather, which has finally set in, quite a bit later than usual. Take a look at the highlights:

—One of the early executives at San Francisco-based social gaming company Zynga (the group behind Farmville), Andrew Trader, joined Seattle- and San Francisco-based venture capital firm Maveron. According to an announcement, Trader will be based out of the firm’s Bay Area office, and “will explore new web-enabled consumer service opportunities.”

—Seattle-based travel startup Off & Away raised $2 million in a financing round led by local Madrona Venture Group. The company, headed by former Madrona entrepreneur in residence Doug Aley, launched in May and offers high-end hotel rooms at cheaper prices through online auctions.

—This isn’t exactly a deal, but it certainly is interesting. Last week Irish mobile company NewBay, which has had a presence in Bellevue, WA since 2005, opened a new Seattle office that will also function as the company’s U.S. headquarters. Read our interview with senior vice president and general manager of the Americas, Timo Bauer, about what this means for the company and the Seattle-area mobile sector.

—Tukwila, WA-based digital-to-physical media company RPI raised $5 million more in a financing round led by Portland, OR-based Riverlake Partners. One of the few older mid-sized tech companies in the Seattle area still around, RPI, which was founded in 1979, says it will use the funding to “accelerate its strategic growth plan.” The company raised $5 million back in July from San Diego-based Huntington Capital, which also participated in this round.

—A number of smaller local and countrywide deals also popped up on our radar last week due their rather interesting ties to Seattle. We did a midweek roundup of these deals, which include news from Porland, OR-based social e-commerce company ShopIgniter, San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, local WhitePages, Troy, MI-based disaster restoration and reconstruction firm InStar, and Seattle-based Shiftboard.

—Seattle-based search engine optimization (SEO) and social media software company Optify raised $6.1 million in a round led by Triangle Peak Partners, with participation from Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group and a number of prominent angel investors. The two-year-old company rolled out of stealth in March on the heels of a $2.75 million investment from Madrona in July 2009. As part of the deal, Triangle Peak co-founder David Pesikoff is joining Optify’s board of directors.

—This isn’t a deal either, but it speaks to one. After months of stealth, and $5.25 million in financing, Seattle-based, Jeff Bezos-backed, startup Doxo has finally rolled out its actual service—a free online paperless bill management tool. Read our story on the company’s plan, the future of the paperless movement, and why Doxo’s business model allows it to offer its Web-based tool to consumers for free.

—Seattle-based TalentSpring was acquired by Richmond, B.C.-based recruitment and hiring software company Talent Technology for an undisclosed amount. TalentSpring is a semantic-search software developer that assists employment recruiters in finding candidates that better match open positions. The company, to date, has raised $2.7 million in financing from Second Avenue Partners and private investors.

—Seattle-based Recruiting.com (formerly known as Jobster) was acquired by Phoenix, AZ-based employment website Jobing for an undisclosed amount. To date the six-year-old company has raised more than $50 million in venture financing from Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners, alongside Trinity Ventures, Reed Elsevier Venture, and Mayfield Fund. Recruiting.com sold its Jobster business to Boston-based talent management company Zapoint in April.

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Seattle-based Recruiting.com (formerly called Jobster) has been acquired by Phoenix, AZ-based employment website Jobing, according to a report by TechFlash. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Recruiting.com was founded in 2004 and has raised more than $50 million in venture capital from Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners, Trinity Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures, and Mayfield Fund. The company sold its Jobster business, brand name, and URL to Boston-based talent management company Zapoint in April. To read more on the recent acquisition, see TechFlash’s story.

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There’s a new mobile company in town—Dublin, Ireland-based NewBay Software, which is celebrating the opening of its new U.S. headquarters in Seattle today. The firm says it chose Seattle for its Americas headquarters because of the unique mobile and technological ecosystem here in the Pacific Northwest.

NewBay, founded in 2002, sits in a tech sector reminiscent of ventures like Mozy and Ontela (now Photobucket)—except the technology is geared more toward the service provider than the consumer. The company provides social networking, digital media, and cloud-based services to wireless service providers around the world. Some of its biggest clients include Alltel, Telstra, Orange, LG, and, in the U.S., AT&T, and T-Mobile. Its primary service—called LifeCache—gives mobile operators a way to offer consumers the ability to create, view, store, and share rich media across a number of digital devices.

Newbay, which currently has 250 employees spread across the U.S., Ireland, England, Germany, and Korea, says the Seattle office is part of the company’s international expansion plans. According to senior vice president and general manager of the Americas, Timo Bauer, the company has more than doubled its U.S. staff over the last year—to 48—and plans to aggressively hire an additional 100 employees over the next 12 months in Seattle.

Yesterday I caught up with Bauer, who talked about the company’s plans, and its decision to expand and bring 100 new mobile jobs to Seattle. Bauer is excited to be in Seattle for both business and personal reasons. “Given the depth of tech talent and innovation here, it will also be a great place to spearhead NewBay’s continued growth and success,” he said, adding, “I am from Northern Germany, and the weather is much worse over there, so I am quite happy with Seattle.”

Here are the highlights of our e-mail interview, edited for length and clarity:

Xconomy: What is the idea behind NewBay’s technology?

Timo Bauer

Timo Bauer: NewBay provides a cloud-based user content ecosystem to service providers and OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. Our white-label platform is called LifeCache, and it enables our customers to offer user content solutions including social networking, digital vaults, network address books, notifications and messaging services. [Editor's Note: Basically NewBay sells technology to wireless carriers that allow their customers to interact with digital media across devices, such as from mobile phone to desktop computer.]

We are enabling our customers to properly compete and partner with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple.

We have achieved great traction to date with our LifeCache platform and have four of the five top operators in the U.S. and Europe—as well as four of the top five global OEMs—using the technology today.

We believe that service providers—specifically the operators—play a crucial role in powering their subscribers’ digital lifestyle. Our mission is to help our customers to enable their subscribers with a rich digital lifestyle experience based on our LifeCache platform.

X: How does NewBay’s technology compare to that of related companies like Mozy and Ontela/Photobucket?

TB: EMC/Mozy and now Ontela/Photobucket are services that provide only very specific use … Next Page »

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Tukwila, WA-based digital-to-physical media company RPI has raised an additional $5 million financing round led by Portland, OR-based Riverlake Partners, with participation from its previous investor, San Diego-based Huntington Capital, the company said today.

RPI has quite an interesting story. One of the few veteran mid-sized companies left in the Seattle area, RPI has been profitable since 1979. How’d they do it? By making actual physical stuff for their customers. In an age when digital media is reigning supreme, RPI has found a niche printing things—like photo books, greeting cards, invitations, calendars, notebooks, posters, and other custom-designed products—for people who want to preserve their digitally-captured memories in a tangible, tactile way.

This second round of financing comes just four months after RPI raised its first major funding round—a $5 million financing led by Huntington. The company says it will use the additional funds to “accelerate its strategic growth plan,” enabling the company to solidify its position in the growing consumer personalized product space. As part of the deal, Riverlake  representative Victor Petroff has been appointed RPI’s chairman of the board.

“RPI has successfully reinvented itself by focusing exclusively on the personalized make-on-demand printed products market, and we believe this important differentiator sets it apart from other manufacturing and fulfillment companies,” Petroff said in a statement. “RPI already partners with top-tier retailers representing more than 40 percent of the total U.S. market for photo products.”

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It’s been quite a busy week here for Northwest-area technology companies and entrepreneurs. There haven’t been a particularly high number of straight deals, but while flipping through my notebook this week, I realized that there’s been a lot of smaller news that speaks to some interesting trends and happenings.

—Portland, OR-based social e-commerce company ShopIgniter appointed Dave Hersh, the chairman of the board and former chief executive of Jive Software, to its board of directors. The company says Hersh’s social business software background will help it prepare for “explosive growth” in the fast-growing retail and e-commerce space. ShopIgniter, founded in 2009, raised $3 million in Series A financing from Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group in March. As part of the deal, Madrona partner Matt Compton joined the company as chief executive.

—Salesforce.com, the San Francisco-based enterprise and cloud-computing company, has secured space in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood for a new development office, according to a report by TechFlash. The 12,000-square-foot space is located in the West 8th building at the intersection of Westlake Avenue, 8th Street, and Virginia Street. Woodson Martin, the senior vice president in the office of the CEO, told TechFlash that the “sky is the limit” in terms of hiring in Seattle. See the full story here.

—Seattle-based WhitePages expanded its Seattle-, Los Angeles-, and San Francisco-based social buying site, DealPop, nationally with DealPopUSA. Unlike other deal-a-day sites that promote discounted deal items specific to a particular location—by city, region, or neighborhood—DealPop is offering a new campaign of deals available nationwide. DealPop launched in July, joining the ranks of other deal-a-day sites like Groupon and the locally owned Tippr.

—Troy, MI-based national disaster restoration and reconstruction firm InStar has set up two new offices in the Seattle area and Southern California. The local office, located at 605 W. Main Street in Centralia, opened at the end of August. The space houses water extraction and drying equipment for commercial construction.

—Seattle-based online and mobile scheduling software company Shiftboard rolled out a new partnership program designed to offer cloud-based scheduling services to small businesses and independent vendors. The program is meant to help facilitate a relationship between software developers, technology service providers, and the Shiftboard platform. Partners can choose to between using Shiftboard’s system, and offering a custom-branded white-label version. Read more about Shiftboard in our exclusive interview with CEO Rob Eleveld.

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Seattle-based search engine optimization (SEO) and social media software startup Optify has raised $6.1 million in a Series B round led by Triangle Peak Partners, the company said today. Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group, and a number of prominent angel investors, including Upstage Ventures founder Mark Wachen, former Microsoftie Bill Baker, Alexrod Capital Management founder Alan Axelrod, and Clear Fir Partners partner John Cunningham, also participated in the round.

Optify was founded in 2008 by Brian Goffman, a former venture partner at Madrona, and Erez Barak, a veteran of Hewlett-Packard and Mercury Interactive. The company, which received $2.75 million from Madrona in July 2009, develops a software system for marketers who want to launch SEO campaigns, use social media for business, track and organize visitors, and analyze results.

Optify rolled out of stealth in March, with a slew of big-name customers, including the Wall Street Journal, LexisNexis, Microsoft, and a number of Seattle-area startups, such as Bocada, Concur, Marchex, and SonoSite, and up-and-comers like AdReady, Smartsheet, and Skytap. The company says it tracks over 100 million pages per month. Optify’s customers, on average, see more than a 300 percent increase in leads and conversion rates, and more than a 100 percent increase in website visits over a four-month period, the company said.

As part of the deal, Triangle Peak Partners co-founder David Pesikoff will join Optify’s board of directors.

“This round of funding validates Optify’s opportunity and will fuel our continued growth,” said Goffman, Optify’s CEO, in a statement.

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There’s been a lot of buzz around Seattle about Doxo lately. And yet, the startup has managed to maintain some stealthiness around what it actually does—despite the fact that it has some big names involved. The company has ex-Qpass dream-team Steve Shivers, Roger Parks, and Mark Goris (also known as the “Qpass mafia“) for founders. And in November 2009 it garnered $5.25 million in support from Bezos Expeditions (the venture organization of Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos) and Silicon Valley-based Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Up until this point, all we’ve known about Doxo, is that the Seattle-based startup has some big plans for “going paperless”—making items like insurance policies and credit card bills manageable online.

How the two-year-old startup planned to do this was anyone’s guess. But wonder no more. Today it is lifting the screen, rolling out its services publicly, and shedding some light on its sizable mission.

So what is Doxo all about? Drum roll please… The company has developed a cloud-based service where consumers can manage bills and other correspondence that’s usually snail-mailed.

Through Doxo, a person can view and organize their personal and financial accounts, bills, privacy policies, and other important documents—everything from bank and credit card statements to utility, mobile, and cable bills, insurance information, investment portfolios, and frequent flyer programs—in one place, with one password.

For many, Doxo’s product may not sound revolutionary. In fact, vice president Kevin Frisch says the idea is so simple, he’s surprised someone else didn’t think it up first.

“It makes so much sense, I almost wonder why it hasn’t been around before,” he says.

Contrary to what we at Xconomy originally anticipated—and unlike similar companies in the paperless space, like Earth Class Mail—this product is being marketed toward consumers, not companies. And it’s free, for consumers that is.

Here’s how it works: through Doxo, consumers can connect and go “paper free” with providers who have already joined in, after which all bills and correspondence will be delivered electronically to their secure account. Users can also upload their own documents, and request that service providers that aren’t already on Doxo join, so that everything will be in one management hub. From there consumers can pay bills, schedule automatic transactions, and communicate with each account. Doxo then takes a small per-transaction fee from the companies and service. But even this, according to Frisch, pales in comparison to the money they’ll save in printing and mailing costs to their customers.

“Businesses spend a tremendous amount of money printing paper and sending out those bills,” Frisch says. “Using Doxo, they’re saving a tremendous amount.” According to Doxo, 55 billion … Next Page »

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Seattle-based travel startup Off & Away has raised a $2 million financing round, led by Madrona Venture Group, according to a report by TechCrunch. The company, which rolled out in May, offers high-end hotel rooms at cheap prices via an online auction bid-based service. Off & Away is headed up by chief executive Doug Aley, a former entrepreneur in resident at Madrona. The firm also led the company’s initital $1.35 million funding round earlier this year. According to the report, Off & Away will use the new financing to expand its team, ink new hotel partnerships, and further develop its products and marketing initiatives.

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Seattle-based TalentSpring has been acquired by Richmond, B.C.-based recruitment and hiring software company Talent Technology, according to a statement released today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TalentSpring is a semantic-search software developer that helps job recruiters better match candidates to open positions. To date, the company has raised $2.7 million in financing from Second Avenue Partners and private investors. TalentSpring’s system gives employers access to over 120 million resumes, aggregating information from Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, and Dice, alongside niche job boards, social networks, the Web, and the company’s internal resume database.

Bryan Starbuck

The acquisition was a strategic move for the company, founded in 2007, according to ex-Microsoftie, and TalentSpring founder and chief executive Bryan Starbuck. TalentSpring’s 10 full-time employees will be staying on with Talent Technology, including Starbuck, who will become the vice president of product management under the new company.

Talent Technology currently has about 95 employees, and was recently ranked by Software Magazine as the 352nd largest software company worldwide. With the acquisition, TalentSpring’s Seattle offices will become the new regional offices for Talent Technology.

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The last few weeks have been slow on deals for Seattle-area technology companies, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some interesting ones to watch. Take a look at the highlights:

—Just a few days after we ran a story about the business’s strategy moving forward, Bellevue, WA-based mobile software company Motricity (NASDAQ: [[ticker: MOTR]]) inked a new deal with one of India’s largest mobile operators, Reliance Communications. The news caused Motricity’s stock to rise by 34 percent in a single day.

—Bothell, WA-based water purification company Halosource raised $80 million through a public offering on the London Stock Exchange. The company started trading today. Halosource is taking about $50 million in net proceeds from the deal, which gives the company a market valuation of about $158 million, according to Reuters.

—Seattle-based e-commerce company Avelle (formerly known as Bag Borrow or Steal), raised $1 million in debt financing. The company, founded in 2004 and humorously dubbed the “Netflix for handbags,” offers a rent service for high-end bags and jewelry from over 3,000 designer labels for a small monthly fee. The company is now competing with another online marketplace, Bonanza (formerly known as Bonanzle), which launched its new BagsBonanza site on the same day.

—This isn’t so much a deal as a lack of one—Bellevue, WA-based online background check and information commerce company Intelius withdrew its IPO last week. The company filed for a $143 million initial public offering in January 2008. In the withdrawl statement, the company said it did not appear that the public offering would be made in the foreseeable future.

—Although this isn’t a deal yet, this could amount to a few. Last week, we did a roundup of the 31 Northwest ideas participating in General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) $200 million open innovation competition, the GE Ecomagination Challenge. Competing against 3,809 ideas from around the world to help create a smarter, cleaner, more efficient, and more economically viable grid, these cleantech concepts are up for up to five $100,000 awards, and the opportunity to work with GE’s Global Research Center.

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