Even as the Republicans and Democrats try a last-ditch effort to agree to raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. Treasury’s cash balance fell to $74 billion this week, less than the $76 billion that Apple has on its balance sheet, as VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar reported recently.

There’s little chance Apple will share that hard-earned money from selling so many iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, and Macs over many years. But stranger things have happened during financial panics over the years.

In 1893, U.S. President Grover Cleveland got a pledge of $60 million in gold from New York financier J.P. Morgan. That gave the markets enough confidence to ward off a financial collapse. Indeed, if a financial collapse looked imminent, it might even be in Apple’s own interest to lend the government some money just to keep it afloat. That could help save Apple’s stock market value from tanking, as it would — along with those of many other U.S. companies — if the debt agreement collapses.

Apple’s overall market value is currently $362 billion, behind only Exxon Mobil’s $395 billion value. If President Obama can’t reach a deal with John Boehner, he might well want to make a call to Jobs. And if that comes to pass, let’s hope that Jobs isn’t so busy working on the iPhone 5 that he can’t be disturbed when the call comes in.

The service lets card carriers connect their credit card accounts online and see just how deep in the hole they are, and offers ways to track and pay off that debt. Users register a certain date when they want to be debt free, or decide on how much they are willing to pay each month. ReadyForZero then sets up a payment schedule and offers a few extra tools to help pay off that debt — such as showing which cards to pay off first or offering loans. ReadyForZero works with a number of independent companies to securely access credit card information and doesn’t store any of that information on its servers.

“Some of this stuff is actionable on your own, we can’t force you to do it,” said ReadyForZero chief executive Rod Ebrahimi. “But we can see whether you’ve done it or not, and we’re able to show [users] some tools they haven’t considered.”

ReadyForZero works with Lending Club to give users a chance to take out loans with a lower interest rate than that on their cards. The loans help users save a little bit of extra cash by effectively cutting the interest rate on part of their debt. For example, a Bank of America credit card might have a 10 percent interest rate, but a Lending Club loan might only have a 5 percent interest rate — so the user shaves off a small amount of debt without doing anything really significant.

The service automatically determines whether its users are able to qualify for Lending Club loans. ReadyForZero is also looking to work with other companies that offer loans and, eventually, the banks that are issuing credit cards themselves. Ebrahimi said the company might add certain milestones for each user that show when they qualify for newer low-interest loans.

ReadyForZero currently makes its revenue by taking a small percentage of each loan. In the future, Ebrahimi said he wants ReadyForZero to serve as a barometer for someone’s credit history — similar to a credit score — when they look to take out a loan by showing statistics and credit history within the service. That’s another service that could also generate revenue, he said.

Ebrahimi also wants to automate debt payments in ReadyForZero so users don’t have to manually track their credit activity. That kind of service could generate revenue through a subscription model, though for the time being ReadyForZero will remain a free service, he said.

“We’re only 6 months old, we’re just sort of figuring this out on the fly as we go along,” he said.

ReadyForZero has raised $260,000 from Y Combinator and a few angel investors like Dave McClure and Steve Chen. It was part of the Summer 2010 Y Combinator class and is manned by “three guys in a garage,” Ebrahimi said.

The site launched in a private test on-stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today in San Francisco. The clean, friendly design reminded me of Mint.com, the startup that offered a simple approach to managing your finances and was acquired by Intuit. And I wasn’t the only one: The first question the startup competition judges asked was how Credit Sesame could compete with Mint.

But Credit Sesame co-founder and chief executive Adrian Nazari insists his company understands debt and loans like no one else does. Based on early users, the service can save you an average of $47,000 across your lifetime, he said.

“There are companies that do lead gen [i.e., recommend loans], but they’re really bad at product knowledge,” he said.

And hey, looking vaguely like Mint isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means that the site is accessible, despite the complex subject matter. It gives you a grade on your first mortgage, your second equity line, and your overall financial fitness. For each loan that’s sub-optimal, Credit Sesame will make three recommendations for replacements. And you can also see how your financial health is affected by potential changes in your life, like a raise.

Credit Sesame is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. It has raised $1.2 million in funding.

[image via Flickr/Alan Cleaver]

UPDATED at 10:30am PT.

APT Pharma raises $22M for transplant and heart drugs — Burlingame, Calif.’s APT Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharma currently focused on a drug to fight organ-transplant rejection, raised $22 million in an extension of its first funding round. Investors included Versant Ventures, Great Point Partners, Vivo Ventures and Charter Life Sciences.

APT, which acquires its drug candidates instead of developing them itself, has raised a total of $30 million to date. Its lead candidate is an inhalable form of the immunosuppressive drug cyclosporine, called Pulmoniq, which is intended to prevent rejection and improve survival in lung-transplant patients.

23andMe reveals size of first funding round — PE Hub reports that Google-backed 23andMe has raised $8.9 million, citing a regulatory filing. Apparently, however, this isn’t new funding. When the personal-genomics startup (see our coverage here and here) announced its funding back in May, all we knew was that Google had invested $3.9 million, with unspecified participation by Mohr-Davidow Ventures and New Enterprise Associates bringing the round to somewhere around $10 million. I’m now told that the $8.9 million figure is just the total of that first round, which also included participation of some angel investors.

Hyperion Therapeutics drums up $15M in debt — The South San Francisco specialty pharma pulled in $15 million in debt financing from Comerica Bank and Life Sciences Capital. Hyperion, which raised $40 million in equity just a month ago (see our coverage in the first item here), in-licenses drug candidates from other companies and runs them through clinical trials.

The company also announced a slate of senior executives, many of them from Ucyclyd, a Medicis Pharmaceutical unit with which Hyperion recently concluded a licensing deal. Hyperion’s lead drug candidates address a gastrointestinal disorder and liver disease.

Drug-delivery company Isis Biopolymer draws $1.5M — Isis Biopolymer, a Warwick, R.I., device maker focused on a new drug-delivery technology, raised $1.5 million in seed funding, VentureWire reports (subscription required). GP Bullhound of London provided the funding.

Isis is exploring ways of using electrophoresis, a low-level electric current that can theoretically drag large, charged drug molecules across barriers like skin, as a new way of delivering drugs without needles via a patch-type device — one the company tells VentureWire is “more of a Band-Aid than an iPod.” The company has launched a $5 million first round of fundraising, and expects to begin human trials of its patch early next year.

Virogenomics gets $2M grant for bio-sensor work — NIST awarded Tigard, Ore.-based Virogenomics a $2 million grant to develop a system that tests for a variety of biological molecules at once, the company said. A closer read of the company’s press release suggests that it is developing a kind of protein chip — essentially a way of scanning for the presence of particular proteins in a sample such as blood serum — that relies on some sort of microelectronic “transducers” to signal detection.

At least from this description, it’s not really clear why this sort of technology would warrant a NIST grant, as any number of companies are developing similar-sounding protein chips. Virogenomics is something between a biotechnology firm and an incubator; the company says it licenses promising technologies and develops them in-house until it can spin them off into new startup companies. (Virogenomics strikes me as a pretty odd name for this sort of tech-development outfit, unless it’s a failed biotech that later developed a new purpose, although that’s just a guess.)