It’s time for our irregular, data-driven roundup of high-tech fundraising, M&A, and IPO news from around the San Francisco Bay Area.

$100 billion—The potential valuation of Facebook in an IPO tentatively planned for late May, according to a story yesterday from Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. Facebook hopes to raise $10 billion in the offering, according to Swisher’s sources.

$125 million—The amount San Francisco-based Splunk hopes to raise in an upcoming initial public offering, according to the startup’s S-1 filing last week. The main venture backers of the big-data analytics startup include August Capital, Sevin Rosen, JK&B Capital, and Ignition Partners.

$115 million—The amount Symantec is paying for LiveOffice, the Torrance, CA-based maker of cloud-based e-mail archiving systems. Mountain View, CA-based Symantec said yesterday that the acquisition “will extend Symantec’s intelligent information governance offering to the cloud, providing customers choice between on-premise, cloud or hybrid delivery of Symantec solutions.”

$75 million—The amount Mountain View, CA-based Audience hopes to reap in an upcoming initial public offering, according to S-1 papers filed last week. Audience makes noise-suppression chips for mobile phones that improve the quality of voice calls. Its biggest venture backers include Tallwood Venture Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Vulcan Venture Capital.

$20 million—A Series C funding round for AppDynamics, the San Francisco-based maker of software that monitors the performance of enterprise applications. New investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) led the round, with existing backers Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating.

$13 million—New funding for PivotLink, the San Francisco-based maker of retail analytics software. Trident Capital, Emergence Capital, and Starvest Partners led the round. PivotLink also announced the acquisition of Salt Lake City, UT-based Acteea, a maker of e-commerce analytics software.

$11 million—New funding for Fremont, CA-based disaster recovery startup QuorumLabs. Airtek Capital Group led the round, which also included QuorumLabs’ existing investors.

$6.7 million—A Series B financing round announced last week for Senova Systems, a Sunnyvale, CA-based maker of solid-state pH sensors for the food, water, medical, and agricultural industries. Phoenix Venture Partners and Harris & Harris Group led the round.

$5 million—New funding for Affine, the San Francisco-based startup offering targeting software for online video ads. Crosslink Capital and Highland Capital Partners led the round. Former Quattro Wireless CEO Andy Miller, the chief of Apple’s iAds program, has joined Affine’s board.

$2.5 million—Seed funding for PandoDaily, a new San Francisco-based technology blog founded by ex-TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy. Institutional backers, according to Lacy’s introductory blog post, include Accel Partners, CrunchFund (founded by ex-TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington), Greylock Discovery Fund, Menlo Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Ooga Labs, and SV Angels. Individual investors include Marc Andreessen, Andrew Anker, Matt Cohler, Chris Dixon, Tony Hsieh, Jeff Jordan, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, and Zach Nelson.

$990,000—New equity-based financing for San Francisco-based AllTrails, according to a regulatory filing. An alumnus of the AngelPad startup accelerator in San Francisco, AllTrails offers maps and reviews of hiking, biking, and camping trails.

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It’s not just the Silicon Valley giants of technology who are moving into the Seattle area to raid technical talent from Microsoft, Amazon, and others. These days, you’re just as likely to see some well-financed startups wooing the big-company guys with promises of changing the world.

A prime example is Nebula, a cloud computing startup that has about half of its roughly 30-person staff in Seattle. As Xconomy’s Wade Roush wrote in this detailed profile of the company, Nebula is selling a smarter version of a networking switch, one that is integrated with the open-source cloud computing platform OpenStack. Specifically, the Nebula device contains a 10 gigabit Ethernet switch along with access to the OpenStack software platform—a combination the company is calling a “cloud controller.”

Nebula’s device, which is just now being tested by potential customers, will allow companies to cheaply build private cloud computing systems. Nebula’s device uses customized OpenStack software and works with inexpensive, commodity servers, including hardware from the Facebook-sponsored Open Compute Project.

Chris Kemp, Nebula CEO

It’s worth mentioning that Nebula’s CEO, Chris Kemp, is one of the co-founders of OpenStack. He helped get the project off the ground when he was the chief technology officer for IT at NASA, working out of its Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

Kemp’s also no stranger to Seattle. He was a key employee at Classmates.com, and co-founded the vacation rental management startup Escapia before heading to NASA. Another veteran of Escapia and NASA, Devin Carlen, is a Nebula co-founder and its engineering vice president, based in the Seattle area.

When I visited Nebula’s temporary digs recently, Carlen and Kemp were in that tired-but-excited phase of developing a new company and getting the first versions of their product out to testing. Their conference room was peppered with notes and diagrams, piles of hardware, and the occasional wine bottle, as engineers worked intently in an office down the hall. The company’s current hiring plans will put it at about 50 people in the next six months or so, and a bit more than half of the team will probably be based in Palo Alto, CA. But “all the cool kids are in Seattle, of course,” Carlen says with a smile.

“Seattle’s actually been our secret weapon,” Kemp says. “We found it very difficult to bring folks on in the Bay Area. And, as it turns out, Amazon’s a great place to recruit from. Microsoft’s a great place to recruit from.”

Those hires include a pair that Nebula boasted about in a recent press release: principal engineer Tres Henry, a former lead in developing the Amazon Web Services Management Console; and Matt Gambardella, who … Next Page »

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The holiday weekend didn’t seem to slow New England deals making down.

—MedicalRecords, a Cambridge, MA-based startup connecting doctors with sellers of health record software, is working on raising its first outside funding round. It’s got about 60 percent of a targeted $500,000 round committed, from investors like Ty Danco and Peter Bordes.

—New Haven, CT-based antibiotics developer Rib-X Pharmaceuticals filed federal documents that reveal its plans to go public. The company has raised $208.4 million in venture funding and recently inked a partnership with Sanofi that could be worth as much as $772 million.

—Mundipharma will provide more than $50 million in funding in 2013 to Cambridge-based Infinity Pharmaceuticals as an expansion of a drug development partnership first inked in 2008. The money will go to developing drug candidates from Infinity (NASDAQ: INFI) such as IPI-145, which is being designed to target blood cancers and inflammatory conditions.

—VMTurbo, a Waltham, MA-based virtualization management software developer, announced that it had wrapped up a $10 million Series B investment led by its return backers Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. The new funding will go to product development, customer support, sales, and marketing.

—Skyhook Wireless has inked a deal to get its location-finding technology into the new Norton Anti-Theft Web service, from Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC). The Norton service enables people to lock, locate, and, ideally, recover a lost or stolen Windows-based laptop, and Android smartphone or tablet, with Skyhook’s technology that use GPS, WiFi and cellular signals to track a device.

—ChoiceStream, a Cambridge-based developer of software for personalizing e-commerce shopping experiences for consumers, raised $8.7 million of a targeted $12.3 million equity and options offering, an SEC filing showed.

—Boston-based Summit Partners led a $10 million investment LogiXML, a maker of Web-based business intelligence software. Other LogiXML investors include Grotech Ventures and Updata Partners.

—Civitas, a Chelsea, MA-based spinout of the biotech Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS), will get an undisclosed grant award from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Reseach to put towards development of an inhaled form of the Parkinson’s treatment levodopa (L-dopa).

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Waltham, MA-based VMTurbo, a maker of virtualization management software, said today it has closed $10 million in Series B financing led by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. The company says it will use the new money to expand its product development, customer support, sales, and marketing. It has raised $17.5 million to date.

VMTurbo gives businesses and IT departments real-time performance metrics and analytics tools to help them run their applications and virtualized/cloud environments efficiently.

The company, which also has an office in Valhalla, NY, was founded there in 2008 by EMC and IBM veteran Shmuel Kliger. It is now led by CEO Lou Shipley, formerly of Citrix and Avid.

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New York’s OpenSky said in a press release today it raised $30 million in a Series C financing round led by Providence Equity Partners. Existing investors Canaan Partners, Highland Capital Partners, and The Raine Group participated in the round. In two prior funding rounds, OpenSky raised a total of $19 million.

OpenSky, which launched its website in April, is an e-tailer that curates daily shopping recommendations from some 75 food and style experts such as celebrity chefs Bobby Flay, Padma Lakshmi, and Tom Colicchio, as well as actresses Molly Sims and Holly Robinson Peete. Users of OpenSky choose which curators they want to receive recommendations from. The company said in the press release it plans to expand its roster of curators.

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New England area security, consumer Web, database, and medical device tech startups have been acquired by firms near and far at a feverish pace in the last week.

—CustomMade, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of an online marketplace for connecting consumers with artisans, raised $2 million in funding from an unnamed group of investors.

—A trio of area Web startups inked financing deals late last week. Cambridge-based education-focused startup BetterLesson nabbed a $1.6 million investment from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, New Markets Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel investors. Wikets, a recommendation technology startup, took in $1.5 million in seed funding from from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and angel investors. And Newton, MA-based online video delivery startup PeerApp added $8 million in financing from a group of investors that included Summit Partners. Cedar Fund, Evergreen Partners, and Pilot House Ventures Group.

—This week we’ve seen a slew of acquisitions. Boston-based Localocracy (developer of community platforms) was picked up by AOL’s (NYSE: AOL) Huffington Post Media Group, for a price tag of less than $1 million, according to tech media reports. Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NASDAQ: EMC) bought Concord, MA-based Zettapoint, a database management technology developer, for an undisclosed sum. In the medical devices space, Hudson, NH-based Atrium Medical will be acquired by Sweden-based Getinge Group.

—More on that: (NYSE: IBM) announced its acquisition of Waltham, MA-based security software developer Q1 Labs, marking Big Blue’s 19th acquisition of a Bay State company since 2003. Financial terms weren’t disclosed for the deal, which is expected to close this quarter. Q1 CEO Brendan Hannigan will lead IBM’s newly formed Security Systems Division, which includes Q1 and other security technology IBM has acquired in the last decade.

—And still more: Portsmouth, NH-based NitroSecurity will be acquired by Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) subsidiary McAfee for an undisclosed sum. Nitro makes technology enabling organizations to much more quickly protect their IT infrastructure from cyber threats and other intrusions.

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When Brad Weinberg started up his first company, ShapeUp, in 2006, incubator programs like TechStars and Y Combinator were barely off the ground. So Weinberg and his colleagues were left pretty much on their own to develop their software platform, which combines social networking, gaming, and financial incentives to promote wellness. The company has done well, Weinberg says, but the more he observed what was happening at TechStars, the more he wanted to start up a similar incubator—but one that would only cater to entrepreneurs working on health-related technology.

Now Weinberg’s wish has come to life, in the form of Blueprint Health, a new startup accelerator based in New York City. Blueprint’s three-month program, which will start in January, is taking applications from companies developing technology products for patients, doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, health plans, or employers. “We’re very interested in hearing from people that are trying to solve clinical issues, workflow issues with nurses and residents, and other problems that come up in healthcare settings,” says Weinberg, one of Blueprint’s partners.

Blueprint, which has raised $400,000 for its program, expects to receive 300 applications for 10 spots in the first class of startups, Weinberg says. They will set up shop at an office in Union Square that Weinberg can’t talk about yet, except to say, “It’s a really cool space.” Blueprint is a member of the TechStars Network—a group of incubators around the country that share best practices from that program and other business accelerators, Weinberg says.

For example, a hallmark of the TechStars program is mentoring from entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other business leaders. Blueprint will adopt that model, too. Weinberg says each Blueprint startup will be assigned at least … Next Page »

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On a dismal day in Boston, here are a few tech-related company financings worth mentioning (one in mobile/social, one in video, and one in education):

—BetterLesson, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that helps teachers organize and share lesson plans and curricula online, has closed a new $1.6 million financing round from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, New Markets Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel investors. BetterLesson says it has built up a Web community of tens of thousands of K-12 educators. Any education company led by a Teach For America alum (founder and CEO Alex Grodd) is worth paying attention to, I say.

—Earlier this week, Wikets, a social commerce and recommendations startup, said it raised a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and angel investors, according to TechCrunch. (Xconomy reported on the round back in June, but without information about the investors.) The Boston-area startup, which is working on its mobile app, is led by founders Andy Park, Vijay Manwani, and Ravi Reddy.

—PeerApp, a Newton, MA-based online video delivery firm, raised $8 million in growth financing led by Summit Partners. Cedar Fund, Evergreen Partners, Pilot House Ventures Group, and other investors also participated in the round. PeerApp started in 2004 and is led by CEO Robert Mayer, a former EMC exec.

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Highland Capital Partners has announced the 10 college startup teams participating in its 10-week Summer@Highland mentorship program in Cambridge, MA, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The venture firm provides coaching, networking, office space, and a $15,000 stipend; the teams don’t give up any equity stake and are under no obligation to Highland afterwards, the firm says. The teams based in Cambridge are: additup (Boston College), ByteLight (Boston University), Tivli (Harvard University and University of Michigan), and Type-U (Babson College). The Bay Area teams are: 27Bards (Stanford University), Adpop (Stanford), Clinkle (Stanford), Imprint Energy (UC Berkeley), Lemonwi.se (University of Pennsylvania), and Waddle (Northwestern University).

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New York’s Yipit, an aggregator of daily deals, said it raised $6 million in a Series B funding round led by Highland Capital Partners, based in the Boston area. The news was first reported by TechCrunch.

Vinicius Vacanti, co-founder of Yipit, said existing investors RRE Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, and IA Ventures also participated in the round. He said his company will use some of the funding for new hires in technology, expanding the staff from seven to 30 over the next year. Vacanti also said Yipit plans to move out of the General Assembly incubator and is looking for office space to accommodate 30 to 50 people in Manhattan.

Yipit tracks daily deal services, such as LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, Groupon, and Yelp, in 32 cities across North America. The company aggregates the deals in one location, and users can filter them based on their interests. Xconomy’s Erin Kutz profiled Yipit back in April. The startup previously raised $1.3 million last year.

Yipit has 250,000 users, up from 25,000 one year ago, Vacanti said.

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New England biotechs and IT startups don’t seem to indicate a summer slowdown. They’ve been inking some pretty massive financing deals this week, as well as an acquisition or two.

—Cambridge, MA-based drug developer Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO) raised $100 million, selling 5.75 million shares of stock at $17.50 apiece in an underwritten public offering. Aveo had $233 million in cash and investments as of March 31 and enough cash to operate through 2012, according to federal documents.

—Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) acquired Zurich-based embedded speech software firm SVOX, for 87 million Euros (about U.S. $125 million), in a mix of upfront cash and cash and stock over the next two years.

—Westford, MA-based Aylus Networks raised $16 million to put toward its software for improving video communications on mobile phones. The deal was led by London-based m8 Capital, with participation from previous Aylus investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

—Performable, a Cambridge-based marketing automation startup, was acquired by Cambridge-based HubSpot for an undisclosed sum. Performable’s 18 staffers will join HubSpot, a marketing tech company with more than 260 employees now, at its Kendall Square digs, with Performable founder David Cancel becoming HubSpot’s chief product officer.

–1366 Technologies, a Lexington, MA-based developer of silicon wafer technology for solar cells, said that it received a conditional commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy for a $150 million loan guarantee.

—Boston-based ad tech startup OwnerIQ nabbed a $7 million investment from its existing backers, Atlas Venture, CommonAngels, Kepha Partners, and … Next Page »

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