Seattle-Area Business, Life Sciences, and Technology News Briefs
05/25/11
Votes are in for the second class of Pivotal Leaders—the peer-selected group of cleantech business leaders in the Pacific Northwest, created by Portland, OR-based venture firm Pivotal Investments. This year’s honors were whittled from a field of more than 700 nominations for leaders from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia.
One interesting thing about the criteria for the Pivotal Leaders is that they reach beyond just the world of business to include notable people from higher education, government, and the nonprofit sector. As we discussed when the program was launched, the founding idea is to formalize a network of top people who can build connections and grow the regional cleantech industry.
This year’s honorees include folks from outfits like Microsoft, McKinstry, Nike, Climate Solutions, SeQuential Biofuels, and much more. Go check out the list of nearly 50 people identified by the regional the cleantech community as poised to make a big impact in the next few years.
05/24/11
Waltham, MA-based Harvest Power, a cleantech and waste management startup with operations in Seattle and Vancouver, BC, said today it has raised $6 million from new investor SAM Private Equity, based in Zurich. The deal is an extension of Harvest’s Series B round, first announced in March, which now totals $57.7 million. The company was founded in 2008 and focuses on converting organic waste into soil products and electricity. Its previous investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Waste Management, Munich Venture Partners, TriplePoint Capital, DAG Ventures, Keating Capital, and Generation Investment Management. Earlier this month, Xconomy’s Luke Timmerman profiled Harvest Power and its West Coast genesis and operations, sitting down with co-founder Jan Allen in Seattle.
05/23/11
iTegris, a stealth-mode Bellevue, WA-area startup headed by former Ignition Partners entrepreneur-in-residence Kurt Kolb, has raised about $4.6 million in equity financing according to a new SEC filing. iTegris’ web page is the standard placeholder, but the metadata search description says the company’s “focus in on helping companies to effectively manage their software and IP assets.” Along with CEO Kolb, iTegris’ co-founder and CTO is former Microsoft general manager Tom Phillips. Other iTegris board members, according to the SEC filing, are VCs Cameron Myhrvold of Ignition and Nick Sturiale of Jafco Ventures.
Kobo, the Canadian company that makes an e-reader for Borders, plans to expand its presence in Seattle, according to this interview with The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley. Kobo, which is out with a new touchscreen version of its e-reader today, previously hired Amazon.com alum Todd Humphrey as its business development director. Now, Dudley reports that Kobo plans to open a full office in Seattle by year’s end. ”Whether it’s five or 15 or 20 people, we’ll see,” Humphrey told the Times. That would put a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle right in the company’s face, potentially competing for talent. Amazon, of course, also seems to be moving beyond the Kindle, with recent indications from CEO Jeff Bezos that an Android tablet is in the works.
Dan Rossi is the new executive director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, replacing Rebecca Lovell, who took on a business-development job at tech news startup GeekWire earlier this month. Rossi was co-founder of Nanocel, a startup focused on an advanced liquid-cooling system for computer chips. He earned an MBA from the University of Washington last year. Lovell was executive director of NWEN for just over two years, and worked as program director for the Alliance of Angels for nearly three years before that. In announcing Rossi’s hiring, NWEN said Lovell will become a board member at the organization in addition to her chief business officer job at GeekWire.
Jive Software, the San Francisco-based provider of social business software, said today that it has acquired Seattle-based OffiSync, whose software lets businesses integrate Microsoft Office documents with Google Docs and Google Apps. OffiSync’s largest development team is in Tel Aviv, Israel, where Jive said it will set up a new R&D center led by OffiSync co-founder and CTO Roy Antebi. The financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. OffiSync is Jive’s third acquisition in the last 18 months; the company bought social media monitoring startup FiltrBox last year and big data startup Proximal Labs in April.
Liquid Metal Battery, an MIT spinout that is building a battery made of liquid-state cathode, anode, and electrolyte components, has nabbed a seed investment from Bill Gates and an undisclosed oil driller, CNET reports. The aim is to cut the cost of energy storage and enable batteries to store hours of wind and solar power, according to the report. The company is expected to announce its full Series A funding next month.
05/18/11
After several weeks of hype-building, name-your-price crowd-commerce startup Zaarly began publicly operating today. The company came together when co-founders Bo Fishback, Eric Koester and Ian Hunter won a Startup Weekend competition in Los Angeles. Here’s how it works: A consumer posts an offer to Zaarly, either through its website or a mobile app, naming a price for something they want. So, for instance, you could say you’d pay $5 for a Top Pot doughnut—and see if someone else monitoring the site will fulfill the request. According to this YouTube video, that deal apparently actually went down today in Seattle. Zaarly has financing from investors including actor Ashton Kutcher, Felicis Ventures, and Lightbank.
05/17/11
WPP Digital, the Dublin, Ireland-based communication services company, said today it has has purchased a minority stake in Redmond, WA- and Palo Alto, CA-based nPario for $5 million. As we explained in a September 2010 profile, nPario has developed cross-platform tracking software that can identify unique individuals as they move from PCs to tablet devices, smartphones, game consoles, and Internet-connected TVs and target them with customized advertisements. WPP said the investment will lead to a strategic partnership in which several of its business units will use the nPario platform to help marketers and publishers “gain faster access to audience insights.”
Scott Jackson, the vice president of external relations at Seattle-based PATH, is leaving to become the CEO of Global Impact, an Alexandria, VA-based humanitarian organization. Jackson, who oversaw PATH’s advocacy, visibility and fundraising efforts the past five years, will now oversee an organization that has raised more than $1.3 billion for 58 U.S.-based charities, according to a PATH statement. Jackson will stay at PATH until September.
Bothell, WA-based Marina Biotech (NASDAQ: MRNA), the developer of RNA interference treatments, said today it has raised gross proceeds of $6.9 million through a stock offering. The company sold 22.3 million securities units, made up of one share of common stock and one warrant to buy a share of common stock. Marina has said it plans to use the money to support clinical development of its drug for familial adenomatous polyposis. Roth Capital Partners managed the offering. Marina has said it had about $2.3 million in cash on hand at the end of March.
05/16/11
Marketfish, a Seattle startup that provides email marketing services for businesses, has raised another $4.5 million in venture capital from Javelin Ventures and Rustic Canyon, according to GeekWire. Marketfish’s product gives marketing clients the ability to dial up specific criteria for the people on its email blasts—targeting by profession, size of family, income, and location, for example. The company says there are “200 million records in the Marketfish platform database, and 250 different ways to filter them.” Marketfish is led by founder and CEO Dave Scott, who has worked in marketing for Intermec, PeopleSoft, and others.
Seattle-based e-commerce startup Billing Revolution has raised $6.6 million in a Series B financing round led by DCM and SK Telecom Ventures, according to multiple reports (TechCrunch appears to have published it first). The company makes software that allows mobile application developers to incorporate credit-card sales. Unlike other mobile-payment startups, such as Square, Billing Revolution’s system is entirely software-based and doesn’t require a second device for swiping a card. The company was founded by CEO Andy Kleitsch, an AT&T Wireless alum who founded WeddingChannel.com and sold it to The Knot for about $80 million.
Up-and-coming Seattle casual game company PopCap Games is partnering with one of the city’s tech titans, Amazon.com, to sell its first games for Google’s Android smartphone platform. The deal, announced today, gives Amazon’s Appstore for Android first crack at selling the games Chuzzle and Plants vs. Zombies, for two weeks each.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been making news around the Android platform for weeks, including the unveiling of its Appstore (and a lawsuit with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) over the name), and a cloud-based music service that looks like an Android answer to Apple’s iTunes.
Add to that the growing reports that Amazon may be moving toward making an Android-based tablet computer, stoked recently by CEO Jeff Bezos’ advice to “stay tuned” when Consumer Reports asked him about the possibility of an Amazon tablet. PopCap is making some moves of its own: It recently purchased San Francisco-based social gaming company ZipZapPlay, and is strongly considering an IPO this fall.
05/13/11
Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), the developer of targeted cancer drugs, said it has leased 81,000 square feet of office space in a building in Bothell, WA to accommodate its growth. The company agreed to pay $7.7 million for a 7-year lease at the new building, and has a couple of five-year options to extend the lease, according to a regulatory filing. The company is seeking FDA approval of its first product, brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris), and the agency has an Aug. 30 deadline to complete its review. The company had 348 employees as of December 31, according to a prior regulatory filing, and CEO Clay Siegall has said before that the company could get to as many as 400 employees as it seeks to commercialize the new product.
05/11/11
The GAVI Alliance, the Geneva, Switzerland-based global health organization, said today it has committed $100 million to support the use of a meningitis vaccine developed by Seattle-based PATH. The vaccine, MenAfriVac, was developed through a $70 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a 10-year development effort. It has been widely used in recent months in Burkina Faso, and now GAVI said it wants to further disseminate it in Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria. For more of the background on the meningitis vaccine effort, check this feature I wrote back in December.
05/10/11
Bothell, WA-based Halosource, the developer of technology to purify drinking water, said today it has secured formal approval from the Chinese Ministry of Health. Halosource said it is the first developer of clean drinking water technology to get approval from Chinese authorities under a new set of regulatory standards. The company said its China subsidiary now plans to start selling replaceable cartridges, components, and other devices in China. Halosource has long had its eye on China, after its technology gained in popularity in India the past several years.
05/05/11
Seattle-based digital media and marketing company Smashing Ideas has been acquired by Bertlesmann AG, which is pairing the 15-year-old company with its Random House book publishing unit. Terms were not disclosed. The companies said in a release that Smashing Ideas would keep its Seattle headquarters, along with a branch in the United Kingdom, working with current clients and continuing to recruit new ones. The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley says that means Smashing Ideas’ 70 Seattle-area employees will stay on board. Smashing Ideas has been working with Random House since last fall to develop mobile apps for books, starting with two children’s titles. Paid Content’s David Kaplan notes that Smashing Ideas’ e-publishing unit “is headed by the co-creator and developer of the Alice for the iPad,” an interactive retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Xconomy’s Wade Roush reviewed that title and some other attempts at “superbooks” earlier this year.
Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), the developer of targeted cancer drugs, said today in its quarterly financial report that it ended March with $455.9 million of cash and investments in the bank. That’s up from $295 million in cash that it reported heading into this year. The increased cash reserves reflect the addition of $168 million from a stock financing in February, plus revenue from collaborators who are using SeaGen’s technology that links antibodies to toxins that make them more potent against tumors. The company also said the FDA has conditionally accepted its proposal to use Adcetris as the brand name for brentuximab vedotin, its lead drug candidate for Hodgkin’s disease and anaplastic large cell lymphoma.
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is among the investors in a new financing round for General Fusion, a British Columbia-based company working on “utility-scale fusion power.” The investment, part of General Fusion’s $19.5 million Series B round, was through Bezos Expeditions. Other investors named by General Fusion include Cenovus Energy, Chrisalix Energy Venture Capital, GrowthWorks, along with others. General Fusion said the money will help it finish the initial phase of its development and demonstration. The company is working on an approach called Magnetized Target Fusion, aiming to fuse hydrogen isotopes into helium, with seawater as the fuel. Bezos’ fellow Seattle-area tech founder, Bill Gates, also is investing in next-generation nuclear through Intellectual Ventures spinoff TerraPower.
