We hope to make this a regular feature in our Xconomy cities. It’s a look at small financings of private companies in tech, life sciences, and cleantech. These are deals in the roughly $100,000 to $1 million range, and they’re increasingly where the action is for local entrepreneurs, yet they’re often harder to track than the bigger deals we tend to report on.

And there were at least 12 of these smaller financings in the Northwest in October (see table below), according to ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company tracking VC, angel, and other investments in private companies. ChubbyBrain gets its data from regulatory filings, user submissions, and other sources, and this is the second monthly installment of “under the radar” deals in the Seattle area (you can see the previous deals for September here). The data didn’t include the investors or the stage of financing.

A few quick observations: Like the previous month, most of the financings were in Washington (7 out of 12), but a significant number (5) were in Oregon. Most were equity deals (7), with the rest (5) being debt financings. The majority of financings (9) were in software, Internet, or tech, while a much smaller number (3) were in life sciences and healthcare, and no cleantech or energy deals made the list.

If nothing else, these lists are a cool way to hear about emerging startups we otherwise wouldn’t know about. For example, I’ve heard of Teranode, Nearlyweds, and 1000Museums before, but Zapproved and Intellisist are completely new to me.

Here are the 12 “under the radar” deals from last month:

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In the past week, the Northwest has seen its share of debt financings in medical devices and bio-IT, small funding deals and partnerships in Internet software, and mounting interest in an impending IPO.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) rolled out a new mobile payments service that lets applications developers and distributors tap into the e-commerce giant’s one-click checkout system on mobile devices. As part of the rollout, Amazon has formed partnerships with mobile content distributors like Kansas City, MO-based Handmark, which sells games, apps, ringtones, and the like. Financial terms were not given.

—Seattle’s Theraclone Sciences formed a partnership with Tokyo-based Zenyaku Kogyo, worth up to $18 million over time, to discover antibodies that could protect millions of people in a flu pandemic, as Luke reported. Under the deal’s terms, Theraclone has given Zenyaku an option for exclusive rights to new flu antibodies in certain Asia-Pacific countries, while Theraclone gets an undisclosed amount of upfront cash and royalties on future product sales in Zenyaku’s territories.

—Seattle-based Omeros, the developer of anti-inflammatory treatments and other biotech therapies, is on the docket to go public this week and raise more than $80 million, as Luke reported. The company is also defending itself against accusations from its former chief financial officer that it filed false records with the National Institutes of Health and then wrongfully terminated him after he reported it to the board’s audit committee under the company’s whistleblower policy.

—Seattle-based Teranode raised $900,000 in debt financing, as Luke reported. The investors weren’t disclosed, although Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners has invested in the past. Teranode, a maker of software to organize life sciences labs, was founded in 2002 out of the University of Washington.

—Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op, a seed-stage investment organization, has backed two local Internet startups, Nearlyweds and BigDoor Media. Financial details of the deals were not announced, but Founder’s Co-op says it typically invests $250,000 or less in its portfolio companies.

—Redmond, WA-based Spiration raised $7 million in debt financing out of a $10 million offering, as Luke reported. The financing came from the company’s partner in Europe and Japan, Olympus Medical Systems. Spiration, which makes an implantable device to treat deadly lung diseases like emphysema and chronic bronchitis, has raised about $97 million since its founding in 1999.

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Plans by former Qualcomm spinout Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: LEAP) to raise more than $1.3 billion in debt and loans set off market speculation about potential mergers, although the company says it just plans to retire a credit line and maybe expand its wireless network.

Leap disclosed its capital-raising plans late yesterday in a pair of announcements, triggering an after-hours decline in the price of its shares. In its first statement, the pay-as-you-go mobile phone company said it intends to sell 6.1 million shares of its common stock, which would raise almost $240 million at Leap’s current share price. Leap, which has just over 70 million shares outstanding, says it plans to use the capital for general corporate purposes, including network expansion and acquisitions.

In a subsequent release, Leap says its Cricket Communications subsidiary plans to arrange $1.1 billion in loans. Leap says the net proceeds from its debt offering will be used to retire existing debt, and any remaining proceeds will be used to expand and improve Cricket’s wireless network, acquire additional wireless spectrum, purchase other companies, and for the long-term deployment of next-generation technology.

Cricket offers flat-rate, prepaid phone service in 35 of the top 50 markets, including Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Washington D.C, and Seattle. The announcement renewed market speculation of a possible combination of Leap, which has about 4.3 million customers, with Dallas, TX-based Metro PCS, which has about 6 million subscribers in complementary markets.

But the reaction was not altogether positive on Wall Street, perhaps because Leap has more than $2.5 billion in existing long-term debt on its balance sheet, according to the company’s financial results for the first quarter that ended March 31st.

In after-hours trading, the price of Leap shares declined by $2.31 a share, or almost 6 percent, to $38.74 a share.

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