Ironwood Pharmaceuticals is gearing up for the possibility of an IPO. The Cambridge, MA-based developer of a new treatment for bowel disorders like for irritable bowel syndrome and chronic constipation said it may raise as much as $172.5 million from investors through the deal, according to a prospectus filed late today.

The proposed offering would be underwritten by JP Morgan Securities, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, and Wedbush PacGrow Life Sciences. The prospectus doesn’t list how many shares it hopes to sell, or what the price range will be. Its proposed ticker is (NASDAQ: IRWD).

The proposed IPO filing doesn’t come as a surprise—we raised this question to the company last month when it added Genentech’s former chief financial officer, David Ebersman, to its board of directors. Ironwood has certainly put itself in a position to go public. Earlier this month, it passed the first two of four pivotal clinical trials, demonstrating that its drug is an effective new treatment for chronic constipation. The company has racked up a deficit of $290 million since its founding in 1998, yet it had $98.9 million left in the bank at the end of September according to today’s filing, so it’s not in urgent need of cash. Its lead drug candidate, linaclotide, treats chronic constipation that affects an estimated 26 million Americans, there are few available therapies for it, and the Ironwood drug has a way of working that’s unlike anything on the market. The U.S. healthcare system spends an estimated $25 billion on treating irritable bowel syndrome.

“We believe that linaclotide could present patients and healthcare practitioners with a unique therapy for a major medical need not yet met by existing therapies,” the company wrote in its prospectus.

Ironwood has no products currently on the market, but it has secured partnerships with three organizations to help commercialize linaclotide around the world. They are Forest Laboratories in the U.S., Laboratorios Almirall in Europe, and Astellas Pharma in certain Asian countries. The company has 167 employees.

Who stands to make the most money if Ironwood can complete an IPO? Ridgeback Capital Investments has the biggest stake in the company at 13.4 percent prior to the offering, followed by Venrock Associates with 11.3 percent, Polaris Venture Partners at 8.1 percent, and Morgan Stanley with 6.9 percent. Ironwood’s founding CEO, 46-year-old Peter Hecht, has a 5.5 percent stake, while Fidelity Biosciences has a 4.8 percent holding.

Ironwood still has a way to go before it can start generating cash flow from its first product. Results are expected from the additional two clinical trials of linaclotide in the second half of 2010, and the company will need time after that to submit its application to U.S. and European regulators and wait for them to complete their reviews.

If Ironwood can pull off this IPO, plenty of other biotech companies will to it as a bellwether to rekindle investors’ appetites for speculative biotech companies developing new products. Last month, Seattle-based Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER) completed the first IPO of a traditional U.S. biotech in the development stage since February 2008. While the company raised $62 million, it was a flop for investors. Omeros stock is down 25 percent from its IPO price of $10.

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Seattle-based Blue Marble Energy, the developer of renewable energy and specialty chemicals from biomass, said it has received a $2 million state grant through a partnership with the Odessa Public Development Authority. The company plans to use the grant, from the Washington Community Economic Revitalization Board, to build a refinery in Lincoln County that will turn organic biomass from around Eastern Washington into as much as 858 metric tons of biochemicals and 700 metric tons of green ammonia per year, says CEO Kelly Ogilvie, in an e-mail. The facility is expected to create 30 to 50 full-time jobs in its first year, he says.

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It’s been a busy week around here for the big tech companies. At Xconomy, we don’t usually report on things like product releases from Microsoft or sales figures from Amazon—our main focus is on new ideas, models, and companies—but readers need to understand where the big players are heading so they can see the gaps and opportunities for new businesses. So, for each of these pieces of mainstream tech news, I’ll tell you why savvy innovators and business leaders should care.

—Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) demonstrated its Web-based Chrome operating system for the first time in public yesterday. It won’t be available for another year, but the tech community is scrambling to understand all the implications. (Google’s Seattle engineers have contributed technology to the Chrome Web browser, helping to boost security—one potential advantage of a cloud-based operating system).

Sure, a fully cloud-based OS is a direct threat to Microsoft’s business model and the ecosystem of companies that support Windows. But more than that, it could reshape the landscape of online advertising by providing a new platform for launching ads on mobile devices, video channels (YouTube), and Internet TV. Perhaps the only thing that can slow down Google’s dominance on the Web is the federal government. In other words, this could get ugly.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide info about your business contacts within Outlook e-mail. It’s all part of Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector, an add-in that feeds you data from your social networks. Integrating e-mail with social networks and search is a fast-growing area, with startups like Gist in Seattle (backed by Paul Allen and Foundry Group) helping lead the way. Gist’s CEO T.A. McCann told TechFlash that he’s known about Microsoft’s effort for a while and doesn’t see it as a direct challenge. Gist’s offering is more advanced, he said, and it includes features like integrating with Salesforce.com and the iPhone. But startups and investors beware: if you’re in this crowded space, you better have a product that cuts through the noise and has a way to attract customers fast.

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) is in discussions with Viacom’s MTV Networks to sell off at least some of its stake in the Rhapsody music service, as first reported by PaidContent. In a regulatory filing, prompted by a tender offer to issue new stock, Real said it is in talks to reorganize the management structure and/or corporate governance of the division, which might mean giving up its majority ownership stake (51 percent) in Rhapsody. Back in September, digital-media guru Bill Baxter (now at Seattle-based Cozi) wrote in Xconomy about Rhapsody’s fierce competition with Pandora, iTunes, and piracy. Message to startups: the world of digital music services is probably not where you want to be.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been busy ramping up operations ahead of the holiday shopping season. Its billion-dollar acquisition of Zappos is helping it expand into shoes and apparel, and its Kindle sales look poised to take off, especially now that Barnes & Noble’s competing e-book reader, the Nook, has sold out until January. Amazon has really become the business and technology model to follow in online retail and product search. While there is still room for e-commerce startups to compete in various niches, they would be wise to study how Amazon built its brand and customer relationships before branching out to the wider world of retail.

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Ryan McBride wrote:

Pilates is famous for shaping up peoples’ buttocks, tummies, and thighs. But what can the popularity of this fitness phenomenon and the market for health products do for investment portfolios? Cambridge, MA-based Lighter Living, which operates a health and fitness website that features Pilates expert and company founder Marjolein Brugman, has raised $3 million in an equity round of financing, according to an SEC filing.

Brugman, who appears to have pioneered an aerobic version of Pilates called AeroPilates, is listed in the regulatory filing as an executive and director of Lighter Living. There’s also a big name in venture investing involved with the firm: Michael Greeley, a founder and general partner of Boston-based venture firm Flybridge Capital Partners, who is listed as a director of Lighter Living. Neither Brugman nor Greeley was immediately available for comment this morning, but a spokeswoman for Flybridge confirmed that the firm is backing the company.

At first glance Lighter Living—which sells fitness and wellness products and offers health tips and insights from Brugman on its website—doesn’t seem like a typical bet for Greeley. However, he’s always told me that he is interested in businesses in which healthcare and information technology intersect. Previously, his interest in healthcare and IT has been manifest in investments he has led for Flybridge in companies such as Bedford, MA-based MicroCHIPS, a developer of micro-devices for medical uses, and business software firm BlueTarp Financial, of Portland, ME.

Yet Lighter Living does address a huge market demand for products that help people look and feel youthful, and there is an emerging trend of interest in this market among venture capitalists. Polaris Venture Partners is backing Cambridge, MA-based Living Proof, a provider of hair-care products based on advances in polymer science at MIT and other research institutions. Investments in the likes of Living Proof and Lighter Living could provide a boost for both consumers’ looks and venture portfolios’ outlooks.

Flybridge’s investment in Lighter Living is “building on [Brugman's] success in the healthy living market,” said Kate Castle, a spokeswoman for the venture firm. She said that Brugman has sold more than $500 million in healthy living products on the TV shopping channel QVC over the past 12 years.

Lighter Living is planning an official launch in 2010, Castle said.

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Cambridge, MA-based Cambridgesoft, which makes software for life sciences companies, disclosed in regulatory documents filed November 17 that it has raised $31.3 million in new equity-based financing. Cambridgesoft first announced the funding round (though not the amount) in a November 16 release that named new investor Health Evolution Partners and existing investor Goldman Sachs as the funders in the round.

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After Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne disclosed last month that it plans to raise more than $15 million in venture funding, I arranged to sit down with Damien Perriman, the company’s vice president of business development.

As it turns out, the startup that was founded in 2005 as CODA Genomics has essentially re-engineered itself over the past 18 months. The company overhauled its core business strategy, recruited a new CEO, E. William Radany, along with a new management team, changed its name, and moved its headquarters from Orange County to Carlsbad, CA, about 28 miles north of San Diego. In changing its name to Verdezyne, the company created an identity that is better aligned with its revised focus on the “green design” of biofuels and industrial chemicals.

The company initially was focused on technology spun out from UC Irvine that used specialized computer algorithms to design synthetic DNA. The company offered its services in Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly, or CODA, to help drug discovery teams at pharmaceutical customers like Eli Lilly and Genentech design synthetic genes that could be used to maximize the production of certain proteins for their biotech drug manufacturing processes.

Perriman, who joined Verdezyne in February, tells me, “Our investors made a decision in 2008 that we could make a lot more money by doing the production ourselves.”

With its extensive experience in computational biology and bioinformatics, Verdezyne saw the value in creating high-diversity libraries of genes, so that various genes could be inserted into fast-dividing yeast cells (and other micro-organisms), essentially programming the microbes to produce enzymes it would not otherwise produce. Verdezyne landed a federal grant last month to help build out its genomic library.

“We prefer to work with yeast,” Perriman says, “but we can work with any fungi or bacterial organism.”

The company, which now has 26 employees, has identified three primary markets for its technology.

The first and most obvious target is an …Next Page »

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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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At least 17 Seattle-area startups rolled out new websites last month, according to the latest edition of Seattle 2.0’s startup index. The index now lists 373 companies, which are ranked on the basis of Web traffic estimates. The top 10 sites didn’t change much from previous months. The startups that are new to the list are HasOffers, BigStartups, Team Apart, Boxoh.com, EnergySavvy.com, Couchsoft (Mentby), Osnapz, Social Kind (TweetToCall, Escape My Date), Fotozio (PicTranslator), Adometry (Veracity), Qbiki Networks (iPhoneSeattle), HotelsOutlook, BuzzMinder (2Reminders), Splitts.com, Data Applied, Baldy Beanbag (The Big Magoo), and Megosi.

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Seattle-based Cozi announced today it has formed a strategic partnership with MeadWestvaco (NYSE: MWV), a Sidney, NY-based maker of school and office supplies and planning tools. Financial terms of the deal weren’t announced, but the partnership will give MWV consumers access to Cozi’s Web-based software for helping families manage their busy schedules. The tools include a family calendar, customized to-do lists, and messaging systems. This is the third partnership Cozi will announce with a Fortune 500 company this year, including a previous deal with Dell to pre-load certain home computers with Cozi’s software.

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It wasn’t so much the predictions as the discussion that was most interesting at last night’s annual predictions dinner, organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association. Will Twitter be acquired in 2010, and why? Who will have the dominant cloud computing platform in the next couple of years? What kind of startup are you looking to build or finance, and which areas are you staying away from?

A panel of Seattle-area tech entrepreneurs and investors gamely took the bait and had some lively exchanges over the course of an hour. OK, these guys all know each other, and we’ll take what they say with a grain of salt since it’s a public forum—but here were some of the most interesting points they made. (You can read more comprehensive recaps of the panel on Brier Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times, and soon on TechFlash by moderator John Cook.)

The panel was split 3 to 2, with the narrow majority guessing Twitter will get bought next year. Andy Sack of seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op predicted Twitter will make more money than Facebook in 2010 (surprising, given the current disparity in the other direction). Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate firm, said Twitter should charge for search (as it has begun to do in partnerships with Google and Bing). Kelly Smith from Curious Office and the startup Pressplane argued that Twitter could be “absorbed by a big company,” but “it’s going to go nowhere.” By the end of the evening, Sack was predicting that Microsoft would buy Twitter next year.

There was a consensus that 2010 could be a big year for acquisitions. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson boldly predicted that Amazon will buy Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu, while opening brick and mortar “Amazon media stores.” Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group said Cisco might buy EMC (for VMware) and Seattle-based F5 Networks, while Microsoft might buy Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. Sack predicted Adobe would pick up Seattle photo-editing startup Picnik. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) would buy Seattle’s Cheezburger Network, and someone would buy Redfin.

Looking back on 2009 for a minute, the big deals that were questioned by the panel included Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture (Gottesman said it just didn’t make sense strategically) and …Next Page »

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Natick, MA-based Corindus has corralled $5.3 million of a proposed $10 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The firm is developing a robotic system that helps surgeons control the position of guidewires in veins in procedures to implant vascular stents, according to the firm’s LinkedIn profile. A call to company CEO David Handler was not immediately returned today, and it’s not stated in the SEC filing who participated in the financing. Prior to this financing, the firm raised $12.8 million in a Series B financing in spring 2008, according to a story I wrote about the deal for Mass High Tech.

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Aptera, the sleek carmaker backed by Google and Idealabs, didn’t respond to my inquiry earlier this week about reports of an internal split in which founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony had left the company. But in an online report published today by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Aptera officials rejected accounts that Fambro and Anthony were ousted in a boardroom showdown.

The company’s status is a keen issue to some 4,000 people, including celebrities Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Shaquille O’Neal, who have put down $500 deposits to be the first to buy one of the three-wheel, two-seater vehicles. The Aptera 2e, the company’s first production vehicle, resembles a wingless plane and is expected to cost between $25,000 and $40,000. Aptera is based in Vista, CA, about 30 miles north of San Diego.

Citing a statement issued by Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur, the Union-Tribune says the carmaker had to adjust its production schedule “to align with financing realities.” Instead of producing its first fuel-efficient model in the fall of 2009, as Aptera announced at the beginning of this year, Wilbur says the company will complete its first vehicles in 2010. About 10 of Aptera’s 40 employees have been laid off.

The company, which has raised at least $27.5 million from Google, Idealabs, and other venture investors, is seeking additional funding, according to Popular Mechanics. Aptera says it also intends to resubmit its application for a $75 million loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentives Program.

Aptera says co-founders Fambro and Anthony were not asked to leave. Fambro remains on the board, but has taken a leave of absence from the company until next year. Anthony is now the CEO of Flux Power, a startup in the San Diego area that is developing battery-management systems. In another online account published by Popular Mechanics magazine, Fambro also voiced his continuing support for CEO Wilbur.

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Ligon Discovery reported today on its website that it has raised $1 milllion in seed financing from incTANK Ventures. The Cambridge, MA-based startup says it uses a small molecule microarray system developed at Harvard University to discover drugs, and the drug-discovery technology has already been put to work at the Broad Institute. The company founders include Benjamin Ebert of Harvard Medical School, Angela Koehler of the Broad Institute, and company CEO Patrick Kleyn, who was previously director of scientific planning at the Broad. As part of the financing, IncTank Ventures general partner Christian Bailey is joining the board of directors at Ligon, according to the company.

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Braemar Energy Ventures, a venture firm focused on investments in the cleantech sector, has named Jiong Ma a partner of the firm, according to a Mass High Tech report. She was previously a principal at the firm, which has offices in Boston and New York City, according to its website. Braemar’s portfolio includes such Boston-area cleantech companies as A123 Systems (NASDAQ:AONE), EnerNOC (Nasdaq:ENOC), and Verenium (NASDAQ:VRNM).

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As startups developing next-generation biofuels emerge in San Diego, Boston, and elsewhere, a business model for rapidly expanding to commercial-scale operations already can be found in the biotech industry, experts said yesterday. The premise of presentations organized by Biocom, San Diego’s life sciences industry group, is that collaborations being formed between biofuel startups and big energy are comparable to the partnerships formed between biotech startups and big pharmaceutical companies.

Biofuels development partnerships will be crucial to meeting renewable fuel standards that the federal government set in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Wain Fishburn, a founding partner of the Cooley Godward law firm’s San Diego office, said the standards require the U.S. biofuels industry to increase its production fourfold—from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons in 2022. Fishburn, who introduced the speakers at the Biocom event, said the ability to meet the federal goal depends on a variety of factors, including the ability to lower the cost of biofuels to be competitive with petroleum-based crude, and the scalability of feedstock, production facilities, distribution, and related infrastructure.

But what it really comes down to, as Verenium (NASDAQ: VRNM) executive William Baum told the audience, is capital.

Baum, who became Cambridge, MA-based Verenium’s executive vice president of business development in 2007 (following the 2006 merger of San Diego’s Diversa and Cambridge’s Celunol) said the need for capital was the theme he heard “over and over again” during a recent meeting that focused on the biofuels industry. “We’ve got hundreds of biofuel companies that are trying to get to the next stage. If you don’t have a big brother with deep pockets, like a BP, Exxon, Shell, or a Chevron, it’s going to be very difficult.”

A number of partnerships already have been established between biofuels startups and major energy conglomerates, Fishburn noted. He listed the following collaborations:

—BP, the London-based global energy conglomerate, has formed two strategic partnerships with Verenium, which has been developing technology to produce cellulosic ethanol using proprietary microbes to accelerate the breakdown of non-edible, high-cellulose plant material into ethanol. Baum described the first collaboration, announced in August 2008, as a technology joint venture for IP. (BP agreed to put up $90 million to develop “low-cost, environmentally sound cellulosic ethanol production facilities in the United States.”) Through a second deal announced nine months ago, BP agreed to provide an additional $45 million and to form a …Next Page »

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Seattle-based venture capital firm Maveron has been in the news a lot this month. There have been reports about its latest stealth startup, which is a new type of e-commerce play. Another report from VentureWire said Maveron will be selling its shares in Motley Fool—a deal that will generate cash for Maveron, which led a $26.5 million financing of the online investing website in 1999. And then, just yesterday, I got a press release about Maveron expanding to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

The VC firm, co-founded by Howard Schultz of Starbucks fame, is used to this sort of attention. But the San Francisco news was a bit confusing to me, because Maveron has been active in the Bay Area for a long time. As usual, the interesting stuff is in the follow-up. I had a chance to connect yesterday with Dan Levitan, a fellow co-founder of Maveron and the mastermind of the firm’s consumer-focused investment strategy. Besides the new San Francisco office, I also asked Levitan about the Seattle e-commerce startup his team is currently building; his outlook and themes in the consumer tech space; and his first fateful meeting with Schultz back in the early 1990s.

First, some basic stats. Maveron was founded in 1998 by Levitan and Schultz, and is best known for its early investments in eBay, drugstore.com, Shutterfly, and Cranium. Its current portfolio companies—there are 22 active around the U.S.—include Potbelly Sandwich Works, Pinkberry, LiveMocha, and Altius Education. The venture firm has about $750 million under management.

Levitan explained that opening Maveron’s San Francisco office has been a two-year process, but it doesn’t signify any shift in the firm’s geographic focus. “I don’t see this announcement as anything more than opening an office where we’ve already done business,” he said. “We’re one firm with two offices.”

The San Francisco office is headed by Amy Errett, a veteran of Olivia.com and E*Trade, who was announced as a Maveron partner last year. She is joined by new principal Ben Choi, who was previously with Storm Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and RRE Ventures. As Levitan puts it, instead of Errett flying up to Seattle four times a month, she’ll fly up three times a month (and the Seattle team will fly down the fourth week).

But Levitan emphasized that he’s looking in his own backyard for new investments as much as ever. “Seattle is an economy and region that’s very rich with groundbreaking, innovative consumer companies,” he said, pointing out obvious examples like Starbucks, Nordstrom, Amazon, and Costco. One less obvious company he mentioned was online real estate broker Redfin, which isn’t in …Next Page »

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Three years have gone by since the region’s top biotech company was taken over by Eli Lilly, so it seemed like a good time to find out where all that talent migrated around the Northwest.

—Icos was once the great hope for Seattle biotech, but now three years have passed since the Bothell, WA-based company agreed to be sold to Eli Lilly for $2.3 billion. I wanted to find out where most of that scientific and business talent went in the wake of the mass layoffs that ensued, so I found a few Icosahedrons (as I’m told some of them like to be called) to help me put together a fascinating list of 270 alumni who have moved on to new opportunities.

—Seattle-based Trubion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: TRBN) said this week that its co-founder and CEO, Peter Thompson, has resigned. He’ll be replaced on a temporary basis by Arch Venture Partners’ Steve Gillis while the company searches for a permanent replacement. I also recapped some of Trubion’s latest tribulations, to give a sense of what Thompson is leaving to his successor.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners wanted a bigger piece of the original action in San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics, and now it grabbed some of that by leading a $30 million Series B venture round in the stem cell company. Carl Weissman, an OVP managing director and the CEO of Accelerator, will take a seat on Fate’s board as part of the deal.

—Seattle-based Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY) said it has decided to advance one of its experimental cancer drugs, PX-866, into mid-stage clinical trials next year. This is another sign of the company’s improving financial health, and its shift from cancer vaccines to cancer drugs, which I described in an in-depth feature earlier this year.

—Seattle-based NanoString Technologies earned a golden word of mouth endorsement this week from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which agreed to buy a couple of NanoString’s gene-expression tools to use them for a three-year research collaboration. Broad director Eric Lander, one of the big names in biology, said NanoString has “exciting” technology.

—People who work in Seattle’s global health cluster love to tell anecdotes about how certain projects can make a difference in people’s lives, but there hasn’t been as much effort to really catalog all the projects going on here and where they extend around the world. That was the goal of the Washington Global Health Alliance, a nonprofit led by Lisa Cohen, who wrote about it in this guest editorial. You can read more about the alliance in a profile I did of Cohen and her fledgling association in January.

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Who says consumer websites are dead? Maybe you don’t need the ridiculous traffic of, say, Seattle-based Cheezburger Network (LOLcats) to survive on advertising revenues. Maybe user-generated content around a targeted niche, especially where there are purchasing decisions being made, can work well after all.

That’s the sense I got after talking with Tom Seery, the founder and president of Seattle-based RealSelf. Launched in 2006, RealSelf.com provides information about cosmetic treatments in an online community format that includes user reviews, doctor listings, and expert advice from cosmetic surgeons, dentists, and dermatologists. The treatments in question—a multibillion dollar market worldwide—run the gamut from nose jobs and tummy tucks to orthodontic braces and breast implants.

RealSelf is particularly interesting because it sits at the intersection of a number of fast-growing (but also challenging) areas for startups—social and community review sites, health 2.0, and ad-supported media sites. The company has gained some traction, growing 150 percent year over year in Web traffic; it now gets more than 700,000 unique visitors per month, Seery says. In terms of local startups with a similar strategy for capturing niches of Internet content (but these are not competitors), I’d mention Avvo, TeachStreet, Raveable, Redfin, Urbanspoon, and Zillow.

Like most promising startups, the story of RealSelf began with some important personal and business observations. Seery was a longtime employee of Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), and he saw the competing startup TripAdvisor plug away at hotel reviews and other user-generated ratings until 2004, when IAC (which then owned Expedia) had to buy it. “That was the ‘aha,’” Seery says. He thought, “Where else can we take this empowerment of consumers?”

Around the same time, Seery’s wife was researching a laser cosmetic treatment, and was having a hard time finding trustworthy reviews. So he thought, “Let’s create TripAdvisor for the cosmetic space.” The key adjustment he made was to introduce medical experts to the user community. The challenge there, as with most e-health sites like WebMD and Revolution Health, is that doctors are …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Voyager Capital has participated in a $5 million investment in 1020, the San Francisco developer of Placecast, a location-based advertising and marketing platform, according to a report in TechCrunch. Quatrex Capital and Onset Ventures also participated in the Series B funding, which will be used to accelerate Placecast’s technology development. Placecast’s algorithms combine data across the Web, mobile, e-mail, and Wi-Fi to try to maximize relevance for advertisers and publishers. In an interview with Xconomy last year, Voyager co-founder Enrique Godreau mentioned 1020 as an example of an intriguingly mainstream mobile startup.

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GenVault wants to bring biological samples in from the cold. For decades, the biological samples used to diagnose or study disease have been stored in freezers, which use a lot of electricity. GenVault markets dry-storage technologies that allow scientists to store samples—such as DNA from a blood test—at room temperature.

GenVault CEO David Wellis argues the company’s technologies free up lab space and are better for the environment. He says that one of GenVault’s desktop storage units can hold as many samples as an average-size lab freezer, which has the same carbon footprint as five automobiles. Freezers have another major drawback: a single power failure can destroy years of work.

Wellis says the time is right for his company. The use of genomic analysis for disease diagnosis, scientific research, and forensic criminal investigations is exploding, thanks in part to technical advances that enable the swift decoding of genes. All these genetic tests start with biological samples, such as blood, urine, or spit. The RAND Corp. recently estimated that more than 307 million tissue specimens are stored in the United States, with more than 20 million specimens added each year. That means more and more freezers are taking up lab space, and running up electricity bills.

GenVault, which is based about 26 miles north of San Diego, in Carlsbad, CA, estimates that sample transport and storage represents a $4.5 billion business opportunity. It is also an area in which innovation has been lacking. “All the technical development has occurred in sequencing and informatics,” says Wellis. “The management of samples has seen no innovation. It is a gaping hole.”

GenVault got started in late 2001 to fill that perceived hole. The venture-backed company has raised more than $32 million to date, and has numerous customers, including the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Genome Québec, and Amgen. The company expects to soon announce a new diagnostic lab customer that expects to store 750,000 samples using GenVault’s technology. Wellis says GenVault, which has 40 employees, could breakeven by the end of next year.

The company markets two products. One is a chemically treated paper that preserves bits of whole samples, such as blood or spit; the other a salt-like mineral matrix that preserves purified DNA. Here is how GenVault says …Next Page »

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