VentureBeat

Enterprise storage is a market dominated by big companies. But Panasas has found a niche providing parallel storage systems for the biggest supercomputers. The company has raised $25 million in a fifth round of funding, VentureBeat has learned.

The Fremont, Calif.-based company declined to comment on the funding. The round was led by Focus Ventures of Palo Alto, Calif. Other investors included Mohr Davidow Ventures, Carlyle Venture Partners, Centennial Ventures, and Northgate Capital Partners.

The company’s web site says it focuses on the parallel storage market in competition with NetApp, EMC, Sun Microsystems and IBM. It can do so because it has a unique architecture to deliver the best storage performance in high-bandwidth applications such as simulations, modeling, oil and gas exploration, and product design.

Most clusters of Linux servers use an architecture dubbed a “network file system,” or NFS. But such systems with a “serial” architecture bog down when a lot of users are trying to access the same file at the same time. Panasas has a parallel file system that can accommodate all of those users in parallel. It builds a kind of “unified memory” storage system that resembles the kind of unified memory of SGI supercomputers. In fact, SGI is a major reseller of Panasas’ storage systems, as is Dell.

The architecture is the brainchild of Garth Gibson, who was one of the inventors of the popular RAID storage systems that are popular today because they can store data reliably across a bunch of disk drives. Currently chief technology officer, Gibson started Panasas in 1999. The first products shipped in 2003 and the company is now on its third generation of ActiveStor products that can store up to 200 terabytes of data per rack or up to 100 petabytes in a single file system. (Our description: That’s a lot of data).

Among start-ups, the competition included Cluster File Systems, but Sun Microsystems acquired that company in October. Panasas’ storage system was part of Roadrunner, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s supercomputer with a petaflop of computing performance. The supercomputer, announced a few weeks ago, will have 12,900 microprocessors, including the Cell chips that serve as the brains of Sony PlayStation 3 video game consoles.

Featured companies: BioVascular, Carefx, ClinResearch, Healthcare Management Directions, NanoCor, OxyPlus, Revitus, Spotlight Surgical, United BioSource

UPDATED: See below.

Healthcare IT provider Carefx pulls in $17.9M — Carefx, a Scottsdale, Ariz., provider of hardware and software that “aggregates” patient records, has raised $17.85 million in a third funding round, Private Equity Hub reports, citing a regulatory filing. Investors included Carlyle Venture Partners and UV Partners.

Carefx’s pitch is basically the same as that from any system integrator — a term guaranteed to glaze eyes in most circumstances — in that they offer to tie together hospital-patient information that’s currently scattered across disparate computer systems. As with all system-integration pitches, it sounds like a terrific idea, if it works. Of course, many systems-integration efforts often only work after creating a significant amount of chaos and disarray within their respective organizations, which would certainly be interesting in critical-care areas such as the emergency room or intensive care. None of which to say that efforts to make electronic medical records more comprehensive and easier to use aren’t worthy, of course.

Medical imager Spotlight Surgical pulls in $7.4M — San Francisco’s Spotlight Surgical, a maker of medical-visualization software, raised about $7.42 million in a second funding round, Private Equity Hub reports, citing a regulatory filing. Attractor Ventures led the round.

Secretive drug developer OxyPlus gets $8M — OxyPlus, a Boston biotech working on drugs for cancer and heart disease, raised $8 million in a first funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Index Ventures provided the funding, which follows an undisclosed amount of angel seed investment.

From the VentureWire story:

Based in Boston, OxyPlus is developing compounds discovered by Claude Nicolau, a professor at the Universite Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, and Jean-Marie Lehn, a professor at the College de France. [President Conrad] Bletzer said the company is keeping the scientific details under wraps, but the company’s drugs are being targeted for several high-profile indications. “They’re small molecules for the treatment of cardiovascular issues and cancer,” he said.

Medtronic pumps up to $7.5M into heart treater NanoCor — Chapel Hill, N.C.-based NanoCor Therapeutics, a biotech working on gene therapy for heart failure, raised $3.75 million from Medtronic, with another $3.75 million dependent upon certain performance milestones.

For some reason, NanoCor doesn’t want to come right out and say it’s a gene therapy company — instead, it wants to create the first “intracellular genetic protein therapy” for heart failure. That amounts to the same thing, since the company plans to use some sort of nanoparticle to shuttle a “proprietary” and so-far unnamed gene to the heart, where it will be taken up by heart cells in order to begin producing some form of useful protein.

NanoCor plans to use nanoparticle technology from Asklepios BioPharmaceutical, or AskBio, from which NanoCor was spun out in 2005. Medtronic will have certain rights to license any resulting treatment.

Healthcare Management Directions gets almost $1.5M for “smart hospitals” — Brentwood, Tenn.-based Healthcare Management Directions, developer and would-be operator of “smart hospitals” with a heavy emphasis on IT systems and electronic records, raised just under $1.5 million in a first funding round following its 2004 recapitalization, VentureWire reports. Investors included Evergreen Investments and new and undisclosed individual and institutional investors. The funding will cover the firm’s investment in an Oklahoma facility it plans to manage.

Heart-drug developer BioVascular acquires Revitus for platelet drug — BioVascular, a San Diego biotech at work on anti-clotting drugs, acquired Revitus, another biotech working on similar drugs. Terms of the deal weren’t announced. Revitus was founded out of the Oregon Health & Science University in 2004.

United BioSource acquires controlling stake in ClinResearch — United BioSource, a Bethesda, Md., a provider of various services to the life-sciences industry, acquired a controlling stake in ClinResearch, a German firm with expertise in designing and conducting flexible, or “adaptive,” clinical trials. The companies didn’t announce financial terms.

UPDATE (1:00pm PT): Added items on NanoCor, Healthcare Management Directions, BioVascular/Revitus, and United BioSource/ClinResearch.

Zafu, a website is designed to help women find jeans or bras that fit their specific body type — to excruciating detail, as we’ve reported — has raised $4.1 million in a second round of funding.

What’s striking is that this is considered worthy of investment by venture capitalists. Numerous large fashion and retail companies could easily recreate this sort of site with minimal investment. Can Zafu really become a large company of the type that VCs like to bet on? Apparently Carlyle Venture Partners and Wasserstein SBIC Ventures, the investors, think so. Women are still coming online in great numbers, although its possible that trend of gender catch-up may end soon.

The site is also notable for being covered with ads delivered from Glam, another fast-growing woman’s oriented network focused on serving such advertisements. Glam itself is being fueled with millions of dollars in backing, creating quite an ecosystem of sites around it. Are these sites propping themselves up with cross partnerships? A house of cards, or long term sustainable model? We’ll be writing more about Glam Monday. Its July Comscore numbers continue to show growth, but there’s a complex story behind Glam…stay tuned.

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 »

Updated

The advertising revolution continues, in both the Internet and wireless worlds.

Spot Runner, the internet start-up that gives advertisers an easier, cheaper way to insert their ads into local TV programming, has raised $40 million more in backing.

And Rhythm NewMedia, meanwhile, has soaked up $18 million more in venture capital, to claim a stake in the other sexy ad area right now: inserting ads in wireless video clips.

This is a lot of money for both players. For SpotRunner, it is significant because backers include major buyers and sellers of advertising: WPP, CBS Corporation and the Interpublic Group. WPP says it manages about $50 billion in advertising budgets and Interpublic Group says its ad agencies serve 4,000 clients. Existing shareholder Allen & Co. led the third round of financing.

It suggests Spot Runner is getting traction. Its model is compelling: The complexities and cost of producing a video and buying air time are daunting for most small business owners. Spot Runner, which we first wrote about here, has developed a self-serve, web-based ad-buying system for TV.

The service works like this: The local business owner goes to the Spot Runner site, picks a business category and then chooses from among thousands of generic, pre-taped video ads. Each ad comes with pre-written voice-over text that can be customized. Once the business has picked an ad, it tells Spot Runner how much it wants to spend on air time and which media markets it wants the ad to run in.

Also among the latest investors are Tudor Investment and Capital Research and Management, and existing investors Battery and Index Ventures.

Meanwhile, Rhythm NewMedia’s technology, which is still in development, will use its new funding to work with carriers to insert relevant ads in video streamed to their users’ cellphones, the company told VentureBeat Friday. Carlyle Venture Partners led the investment, while existing investors also participated. These include Rembrandt Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures.

Separately, the company told VentureWire (sub required) it is about to launch with two carriers — one in the U.S. and one on the U.K — with one of those as early as this quarter, the second during the first quarter of next year.