VentureBeat

Featured companies: Ablynx, Avant Immunotherapeutics, BioForm Medical, Celldex Therapeutics, Genomas, High-Throughput Genomics, Orchid Cellmark, ReliaGene Technologies, SarCode, TransMolecular, VisEn Medical

UPDATED: Expanded items on SarCode, Celldex/Avant and Ablynx.
UPDATE REDUX: Added items on BioForm Medical, High-Throughput Genomics and Orchid Cellmark/ReliaGene.

San Francisco’s SarCode draws down $7M for inflammation drugs — The two-year-old startup drew down $7 million as part of a $25 million first funding round the company arranged last December, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Investors in that round included Alta Partners and Clarus Ventures. The company’s post-investment valuation was $30 million in December.

SarCode is focused on developing new treatments for inflammation using technology it licensed from Sunesis Pharmaceuticals in January. The company can still draw another $13 million from its first round, and anticipates that existing funding will carry it through the end of 2009.

Cosmetic-surgery product maker BioForm sets IPO range, aims for $127M — San Mateo, Calif.-based BioForm Medical, a developer of skin fillers and other cosmetic-procedure products, set its sights on an IPO that could raise up to $126.5 million. BioForm now aims to sell as many as 11.5 million shares at a price of $9 to $11 apiece. Should it come in at the high end of that range, the offering would value the company at almost $500 million.

See our previous coverage of BioForm, which sometimes touts itself as more of a medical-device company than one focused on “medical aesthetics,” in the first item here. The company’s main customers are plastic surgeons and dermatologists.

Celldex goes public with $67M Avant acquisition — Privately held Celldex Therapeutics acquired a majority stake in publicly traded Avant Immunotherapeutics for $66.7 million in stock. The release is here.

The deal effectively takes Celldex public via a form of reverse merger. Although the combined company will be known as Avant, Celldex shareholders will own 58 percent of it. Avant’s current CEO, Una Ryan, will remain in that position in the combined company, which will be worth an estimated $115 million following the merger. The new Avant will pursue a number of immune-related treatments for cancer, infectious disease and autoimmune disease.

High-Throughput Genomics raises $10M for gene-expression tools — Tuscon’s High-Throughput Genomics, a biotech focused on tools that measure gene activity, raised $10 million in a third funding round. Investors included Merck Capital Ventures, Solstice Capital, Valley Ventures and Arcturus Capital.

HTS, founded a decade ago as a subsidiary of a combinatorial-chemistry company called Systems Integration Drug Discovery Company, spun out as an independent company in 2001. The company provides tools that let researchers study the activity of genes and proteins in laboratory samples.

Ablynx aims at €99.2 million IPO for “mini-antibodies” from llama DNA — Belgium’s Ablynx, a biotech focused on developing new therapies using miniature antibody molecules derived from llama DNA, said it hopes to raise as much as €99.2 million ($141.5 million) in an IPO. (Its release is here.)

The offering will be launched on Eurolist by Euronext Brussels. You can find our previous coverage of the company here and here.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• DNA-testing co. Orchid Cellmark acquires ReliaGene Technologies for $8.6M (release)
• VisEn Medical raises $7.5M for imaging (PE Hub)
• Genomas pulls in $2.5M for “DNA-guided medicine” (PE Hub)
• TransMolecular names Nicholas Nicolaides chairman (release)

Although I try to stay on top of events in the life sciences, announcements do sometimes manage to slip through the cracks. Some days, in fact, I end up triaging. Because the roots of this site — not to mention many of its readers — are in Silicon Valley, Bay Area events are a priority. Then come announcements from the rest of the U.S., then Asia, then Europe. Also, smaller or partial fundings tend to take a backseat.

Looking back over my notes — it’s the only way I keep anything straight — I see quite a few of these orphans have piled up. So for the sake of completeness, I’m inaugurating this occasional feature to recap the fundings, mergers and IPOs that got away from me. I’ll put all the details below the fold, so only forge ahead if you’re really interested. RSS subscribers, unfortunately, are going to get the whole thing anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Update: Corrected market spending figure to $400 billion)

The search engine revolution continues to ripple through to other parts of the business economy.

SupplyFrame, of Pasadena, Calif. is the latest to offer a specialized search engine for electronic components — and is also offering useful widgets about those components to embed in spreadsheets or Web sites. It has raised $7 million in a second round of funding.

Companies spend $11.6 billion annually in the U.S. to market electronic components, including to influence decisions around design and selection, the company said.

So far, designers, manufacturers and procurement managers have relied on a mishmash of imperfect ways to search for components. They start with a Google search, may consult with eBay, or contact a player such as Partminer.com, which tries catalogs parts and tries to resell them. But searchers have no way to find dynamically updated component specs, pricing, market pricing trends and key vendors all in one place, explained Steve Flagg, chief executive of SupplyFrame

Another player is Octopart, which also lists specs and compares price, and is backed by YCombinator. It lists parts from Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, Newark InOne and more — and has partnerships with some of them.

SupplyFrame has also built relationships with component companies, but gets all its information directly from them, and does not scrape information from Web sites like Octopart does, according to Flagg. SupplyFrame launched its new site in January, and will get a million searches monthly by the end of this year, Flagg predicts. This is a niched market. There are about 2.5 million design engineers in the components industry, making design decisions and influencing about $4 billion $400 billion in spending on components, he said.

The company has been around since 2003, and restarted a year and a half ago when its first strategy — selling business process automation software — foundered. It raised $5 million for the restart, from Clearstone Venture Partners and Arcturus Capital. The latest round includes those investors, and was led by USVP.

See screenshots below for an example of a search for a part called “MAX232.” You can click to see more details about the results. Arrows below show how the site carries the part’s specs, four quarters of pricing, identical components and key vendor information. Compare this to a search on eBay for the same thing

We noted a few bugs on SupplyFrame. After initially being able to search through on results, we were hit by error pages on later tries.

The site plans to make money from targeted advertising.

It also offers a widget: Designers and other industry folks can download a software that allows them to mouse over a part listed in a spreadsheet, which calls up a widget with the latest spec and pricing information. See below. This can also be embedded on Web sites.

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