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Today’s electrical grid is frustratingly opaque.

Electrical utilities across the U.S. — and the world — often don’t know what the overall grid looks like. The grid is siloed into sections. Electricity can’t be evenly distributed between regions.

So recently, new startups have flocked to try to make the grid more efficient. One company is Optimal Technologies. CEO Roland Schoettle says Optimal wants to provide the “tools” for utilities and other start-ups to do so.

What’s needed, he says, is a centralized “brain” that can orchestrate the grid’s network from bottom to top, whether we’re talking about local utility grids or networks of entire nations.

Only such a brain can help manage the chaos caused by the recent profusion of devices, such as measurement equipment that include intelligent meters in homes and businesses to sensors and switches placed directly on the grid — not to mention the different types of software that hopes to direct them all.

Optimal’s Schoette says his company has a product that can be the centralized brain. Called Aempfast (pronounced Aim-fast), the software product remains constantly aware of where electricity has been allocated and how to move it to where it’s needed. And it can do so without complex or expensive equipment. “Today, we can process the entire West Coast of the US from Alberta to northern Mexico on a hot-rod PC, in a third of a second,” Schoettle says of Aempfast.

To pursue its vision, Optimal hasjust raised $25 million, provided entirely by Goldman Sachs, with $13 million coming immediately, and the remainder in tranches based on progress. The company previously took on about $11 million from private investors. The company was founded in Alberta, Canada in 2000, and just moved into its United States headquarters in Raleigh, N.C.

Today’s electrical utilities is based on local power generation. The utilities have multiple siloed tools that all track their own area, but can’t communicate with each other. And hooking in small, new sources — like solar deployments or wind turbines — presents a serious challenge, because the grid as it’s conceived by existing software doesn’t anticipate electricity flowing back in away from the central generators.

Schoettle says Aempfast can easily solve all those problems, by replacing the existing software to create a new “operating system” for utilities. In the process, it can also reduce electricity usage by 10 percent, he says, and prevent blackouts by rapidly re-routing and optimizing power, and accommodate micro-installations like rooftop solar. All big claims, but then Schoette says the software has been tested by major utilities including Pacific Gas & Electric.

Optimal’s technology rests on mathematical models and algorithms Schoettle says are unique. “There are many universities that teach what we do can’t be done, a lot of technological arrogance,” he says.

Schoette says the development of Optimal’s underlying technology has actually been underway for well over a decade, and that the basic idea can also be applied to other networks, like transportation.

So, one might ask, why aren’t utilities lining up to switch to Aempfast? That’s where the story gets sticky. Schoettle says that utilities have built their business around inefficient practices — including the business of billing people. Remove the Byzantine structure built up around arcane, localized practices, and the finance departments of utilities may fall to pieces, he says: “We’re not focused on the US, because the rules here aren’t favorable — PG&E and the others aren’t incentivized to use this.”

Instead, Optimal is taking its technology to Europe, where Schoettle says they’ll be announcing a big project with a utility in the United Kingdom within a couple months. In the meantime, they’ll also be developing a cousin to Aempfast called Surefast, which will manage homes and businesses, set for release near the end of the year.

Will Optimal can live up to its promise? If so, it will create a serious complication for competing software startups like eMeter and GridPoint, each of which is in late stages of development and funding — eMeter just raised $12.5 million, and GridPoint just took another $15 million, topping $100 million to date. On the other hand, having a truly smart grid could boost startups like Silver Spring Networks, which makes monitoring equipment.

Jingle Networks, a provider of free telephone directory services, has raised $13 million in a third round of funding, according to VentureWire.

The service, called “1-800-FREE-411″, is pretty simple, and it’s completely automated: You dial a number, listen to an ad and then get the information you need. The Boston-based company has signed up around 150,000 advertisers.

When we covered Jingle back in 2006, the startup had just raised $30 million to build out its network — reaching a “critical mass” of between 10 million and 20 million monthly callers was key to attracting advertisers, chief executive George Garrick said. It looks like Jingle’s efforts were successful; it’s gone from around 13.5 million monthly calls (450,000 daily) to 20 million.

Investors include Goldman Sachs & Co., Hearst Corp., IDG Ventures, Liberty Associated Partners and Comcast Interactive Capital, and Jingle’s total funding to date is $70 million.

This is a crowded market, with lots of competitors offering similar free services, and Jingle competing against big players like Google, Microsoft and At&T. (We also hear that V-Enable has a big announcement coming tomorrow.) Google, for example, is better placed to deliver targeted ads, which is key to making ad-supported services pay off. If Jingle wants to take on companies of that scale, it will have to be innovative.

On the other hand, the startup must be doing something right already, because it reached profitability last month. I’m trying to reach Jingle’s investors to find out more about why the company has done so well, and how it will stay competitive in the future.

Next New Networks, the company that publishes thematic channels of video online, including Barely Political (which features Obama-cheering Obama Girl), has raised more capital to keep expanding.

It has taken $15 million more from Velocity Interactive and Goldman Sachs, we’ve just learned. This adds to the $8 million it raised a year ago (see our coverage).

The company now has 12 main channels in its network, with 33 million video views in February, a pace that suggests strong growth from last year, when the site had more than 100 million video views.

We reached a company representative, and she would not comment on how the company’s revenue is coming along. Getting advertisers to pay good money for online video has proven tougher than some have expected, in part because advertisements are disruptive, regardless where they’re placed within a video. However, Next New is pursuing a strategy of distributing its videos as extensively as possible, for example today officially announcing a deal to place its video channels in sidebars along AOL-owned sites. Next New did say it has signed some ad deals in the fourth quarter last year, specifically around its car channel.

Velocity, the new firm formed by former AOL CEO Jon Miller and former News Corp. executive Ross Levinsohn, has focused heavily on video investments. Velocity has backed Motricity (see our coverage), which distributes mobile applications. The firm has also invested in Generate (our coverage) and BroadBand Enterprises (our coverage).

Joining Goldman and Velocity in the round are previous Next New Network investors Bob Pittman, Saban Media Group and Spark Capital.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Affinergy gets $3M in grants for biological “linkers” (release)
• Specialty pharma EUSA raises $50M, spends $23M for public biotech Cytogen (release)
• Calderome takes in $12M for cancer diagnostics (peHUB)
• Pulse Health raises $2M for handheld free-radical device (release)
  
• LifeMasters takes in $15M for wellness, disease-management programs (release)
• Dubai Techno Park launched $300MVC fund for life sciences, other sectors (release)

Affinergy gets $3M in grants for biological “linkers” – Affinergy, a Duke University spinout in Research Triangle Park, N.C., received grants worth more than $3 milllion to support development of biological “linker” molecules with potential uses in coatings for medical devices and the development of new therapeutics. The grants were awarded by the federal National Institutes of Health through its small-business innovation research program.

The startup is developing biological molecules that can selectively bind various substances to particular surfaces. Such linkage molecules could, for instance, attach healing growth factors to surgical meshes or other implanted biomaterials or help target drugs at particular cell-surface proteins. The company hasn’t described its goals in much detail, although it said one of the grants is for work aimed at accelerating a patient’s natural healing process.

Specialty pharma EUSA raises $50M, spends $23M for public biotech Cytogen – In today’s man-bites-dog news, the venture-backed specialty pharma EUSA Pharma agreed to acquire the publicly traded biotech Cytogen for $22.6 million. The EUSA release is here; Cytogen has its own release here.

In one sense, the news isn’t terribly surprising, as Cytogen effectively put itself up for sale last November when it announced it was “reviewing strategic alternatives.” The twist here is that EUSA is taking the biotech private — a sign of just how far Cytogen’s fortunes have fallen since the heady days of the 1999-2000 biotech bubble, when its stock almost touched $200 a share. EUSA, which has offices in Doylestown, Pa., and Oxford, England, is offering 62 cents a share, a 35 percent premium over Cytogen’s closing price yesterday of 46 cents.

On the business front, however, it’s hard to say that the combination will be much more exciting than either company has been individually. Both EUSA and Cytogen traffic in a range of largely unrelated drugs for pain and cancer treatment.

EUSA raised $50 million to finance the cash transaction, for working capital and to restructure Cytogen. Investors included TVM Capital, Essex Woodlands, 3i, Goldman Sachs, Advent Venture Partners, SV Life Sciences, NeoMed and NovaQuest.

Calderome takes in $12M for cancer diagnostics – Calderome (no Web site), a South San Francisco, Calif., developer of cancer diagnostics, has taken in $11.9 million of a $23 million first funding round, peHUB reports. (peHUB identifies the company as located in Menlo Park, Calif., but two Calderome job postings on Biospace indicate its headquarters are actually in South San Francisco.)

In fact, I’m loving job listings at the moment, because the company also advertised one of those positions on Craigslist here. According to that listing:

Calderome, Inc. is an early stage cancer diagnostics company addressing the emerging opportunities in personalized medicine. The Company’s strategic vision is to develop a novel molecular cytology approach to improve the diagnosis of cancer, saving patients thousands of unnecessary surgeries every year. The company has spent the last year validating its business model with key stakeholders: physicians, patients and payers and has recently closed a significant round of private equity financing with premier venture capital investors….

In other words, it sounds very much like the company is developing a cell-based diagnostic, possibly involving a test that can pick up tumor cells that circulate in the bloodstream, that can help diagnose cancer without the need for invasive biopsies. That’s merely speculation, however.

Investors in the round include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, TPG Biotechnology Partners and Versant Ventures.

APX, a Silicon Valley company that certifies carbon and emissions offset certificates, and which is well-placed to support carbon-trading markets when they emerge, has gotten backing from Goldman Sachs in a $14 million investment, VentureBeat has learned.

Carbon trading is a growing business that could someday come to resemble the world’s largest financial markets.

Today’s emissions markets are generally small and fragmented. In regional U.S. energy markets, utilities are already required to buy electricity from alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar or wind. To prove their use of alternative energy, they’re required to file a certificate tracking their acquisition of the energy units. So this is the beginning of a “transfer” regime that could grow into more.

Meantime, carbon offsetting markets that corporations buy credits from are currently voluntary, but in anticipation of future government regulation, they often require similar certifying schemes. However, the source of offsets can vary widely, from alternative energy generation to tree planting projects.

APX acts as part of the intermediary chain between buyer and seller, doing the work of tracking serial numbers on these certificates and the accounts they go into. It’s not glamorous, but having an efficient, scalable back-end will be one of the requirements for building a multi-billion dollar market, as emissions trading may well become.

Such details aren’t always automatically addressed as part of creating a new system. In fact, when California was looking at creating a regional registry in 2006, APX was the only qualified bidder, according to Dr. Reiner Musier, the company’s chief marketing officer.

As today’s small, scattered emissions trading markets grow, they may come to resemble the complex business and regulatory ecosystems of the futures and equities markets, which include various behind-the-scenes businesses similar to APX. Another indicator that some very serious businesses are becoming involved is one of the new investors in the company’s latest funding: Goldman Sachs, a heavyweight in the New York financial markets.

The funding we’re reporting was previously announced by APX as an undisclosed round. It appears to have been about $20 million, although the company may have only raised about $14 million to date (it declined to comment on the amount). Besides Goldman Sachs, previous investors Bechtel Enterprises Holdings, Kinetic Ventures, ONSET Ventures, Technology Partners and Woodside Fund also took part.

APX, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., currently handles tracking for five regional markets in the United States, as well as the Gold Standard, an international carbon trading standard. It makes a small set fee off each certificate that’s traded, and thus its success is relative to the volume of the markets. In the interest of helping these markets develop, the firm also advises newly forming markets on how to set themselves up.

A stealthy Georgia-based startup with plans to manufacture silicon-based solar cells unveiled itself this morning, announcing a hefty $50 million financing that will help it start production.

The company, called Suniva, says its cells operate at about 18 percent efficiency, near 50 percent better than the average cell produced today. CEO John Baumstark told us that there is a “clear roadmap” to boosting their efficiency over 20 percent within a year or two. Just as importantly, they are designed to be cheap.

The company is a spin-off of Georgia Tech’s Center for Excellence in Photovoltaics, a research group founded in 1992 by the university. The company is a little more than a year old, and has technology licensed from the Center and has its director, Dr. Ajeet Rohatgi, as its chief technical officer.

Using established manufacturing techniques including screen printing, Suniva expects to be producing cells for under $1 per watt within two to three years. If true, that would make Suniva’s cells some of the most cost-effective photovoltaics available.

The new funding is planned to go towards a 25 megawatt per year production facility located near Atlanta, Georgia, the company’s homebase. Baumstark said in an interview that the production line would be highly automated, requiring a total of about 40 staff members for round-the-clock production.

If it meets its initial cost targets, this first factory can be scaled up to higher production, although the company is also considering opening facilities in other states depending on the incentives offered. However, plans have yet to be finalized even for the first factory.

The funding is Suniva’s second, and was co-led by New Enterprise Associates and Advanced Equities. Goldman Sachs participated though Cogentrix Energy, alongside HIG Ventures and Quercus Investments. The company previously took $5.5 million in mid-2007 from NEA, HIG and Quercus.

According to a research report cited by Mountain View-based Teneros, the average business experiences seven hours of email downtime each year.

Can you survive without your email? Apparently those businesses can’t, and they hire firms like Teneros to provide “application continuity” for Microsoft Exchange, the software back-end behind the email systems of most corporations.

The product itself is a plug-in appliance, the Application Continuity Appliance (ACA) that kicks in within moments of a system failure, keeping the network moving until it can be repaired.

Teneros launched the ACA in August 2005, and appears to have made good headway since against more expensive competing options. It’s generally used by small- to medium-sized businesses.

The $40 million financing was led by Advanced Equities, with participation from previous investors Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures. It was Teneros’s fourth funding so far; the company has now raised a total of $84.5 million.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Immune-system specialty pharma Circassia raises £11M (release)
• Cancer-biomarker biotech CS-Keys takes in $6.3M (release)
• Neuro-robotic device maker Myomo receives $3M (VentureWire)
• Micropharma draws C$1.8M for nutraceutical delivery (VentureWire)
• Avalon Labs gets $66M for disposable life-support components (release)
• Gloucester Pharma names Alan Colowick as CEO (release)
• ConforMIS names Philipp Lang as CEO (release)
• Pharma-marketing firm TargetRx names Craig Scott as CEO (release)

Immune-system specialty pharma Circassia raises £11M – Circassia, an Oxford, England biotech focused on immune-system disorders, raised £11 million ($21.8 million) in a second funding round. Investors included Goldman Sachs, Invesco Perpetual, Imperial Innovations and Lansdowne Partners.

The company is currently developing a range of allergy treatments by “retraining” the immune system not to react to allergens such as cat dander, dust mites, ragweed and grass. Circassia’s approach is to isolate short stretches of the allergy-causing proteins and expose them to the immune system’s antigen-presenting cells, attracting other cells that, though a complex biochemical dance, teach the immune system to “tolerate” the original protein.

Circassia is “preparing to complete” mid-stage trials ‘of its lead candidate, which is aimed at treating allergy to cat dander. The company says its technology should also be useful in preventing the rejection of transplanted organs.

Cancer-biomarker biotech CS-Keys takes in $6.3M – CS-Keys, an Indianapolis biotech working on protein-based “biomarkers,”, raised $6.3 million in a first funding round. Investors included Triathlon Medical Ventures, Clarian Health Ventures, Prolog Ventures and Ceres Venture Fund.

CS-Keys aims to find proteins that indicate the presence and status of tumors, and which can serve as a diagnostic for early detection or for monitoring the status of cancer patients. The company says its first product will be a pathology stain for detection of proliferating cell nuclear antigen in biopsied tumor samples. As a followup, the company intends to pursue a blood test for detecting the return of tumors in patients whose cancer has gone into remission.

Neuro-robotic device maker Myomo receives $3M – Boston’s Myomo, a “neurorobotics” company designing technology to help patients learn to regain the use of weakened or partially paralyzed limbs, raised $3 million in a second funding round, VentureWire reports. Angel investors provided the funding.

Founded in 2006, Myomo has developed a “smart” elbow brace for aiming to relearn how to move stroke-impaired arms. The brace senses electrical nerve signals in the skin’s surface, generated when patients try to move an arm, and then electromechanically moves the arm as the patient intended. The idea is to provide real-time feedback so that patients can re-educate their muscles in order to regain motor control.

The Myomo device has been studied in six patients, who demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in two measures of movement. The company has two additional studies underway in chronic and sub-acute stroke patients. The device has been cleared for hospital use, although Myomo eventually hopes to win approval for home use as well.

Myomo hopes to add another $8 million from venture capitalists by this summer, in what may either be a third round or an extension of the second. The current funding will allow the company to roll out its device to medical facilities nationwide.

1. EBay CEO Meg Whitman prepare to retire
2. Open Source revolution continues, with Intel
3. Microsoft purchases virtualization co., Calista
4. Cleverset, software recommendation co., sold
5. Yahoo has some small layoffs coming
6. Facebook-branded Nokia handsets?
7. LifeLock, anti-credit fraud co., gets $25M
8. Online ad co., Spotrunner, draws buzz
9. Jobs snubs both Amazon and Google
10. Coventi Pages gives up the ghost
11. Singapore opens search engine contest

EBay chief exec Meg Whitman is preparing to retire — Whitman, the most visible female chief executive of Silicon Valley (where there aren’t many great female role models), could step down within weeks, according to the WSJ. John Donahoe, 47, president of eBay’s auction business unit, has emerged as the leading succession candidate.

Open Source revolution continues, with Intel — In case you haven’t noted, the open source software industry is on fire. We’ve covered a series of investments into open source companies over the past few days, and last week was punctuated by the acquisition of open source MySQL by Sun for $1 billion. Now Intel is crowing about its open source investments. News today emerges that it has backed REvolution Computing, creator of an open source parallel computing software for computational statistics. The amount of the funding round, the New Haven, Connecticut company’s first, was undisclosed

Microsoft purchases Silicon Valley virtualization start-up Calista Technologies – Microsoft is trying to catch up with VMWare, which has opened up a lead in the hot virtualization industry, which lets companies reduce the number of servers they use by letting them run multiple operating systems on a single machine. So it has acquired Calista (see WSJ story for good summary). The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed, but the San Jose, Calif. Calista was backed with an undisclosed amount by Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others (we mentioned the secretive company more than a year ago).

Cleverset, software recommendation service, sold to ATG for $10 million — Cleverset, like many other companies we’ve covered, offers software that presents users of e-commerce sites with relevant recommendations and information. Press release here.

Yahoo has some small layoffs coming — The past few days have featured rumors that Yahoo will be laying off thousands of employees, as it tries to become a leaner, more efficient organization. The actual cuts may not be so drastic, counters reporter Kara Swisher, who has followed Yahoo closely: “[E]xpect the changes to be less bold than has been reported, much in the same way [chief executive and founder] Jerry Yang has been handling other changes at Yahoo–slow and decidedly non-dramatic,” The company will move to places where Yahoo has an advantage — “mobile, communications, like email, and its graphical ad network” — she says.

Facebook discussing Facebook-branded Nokia handsets — If Google is going to have a cellphone strategy, well, by golly, so is Facebook. PaidContent has the report about a possible partnership. The arrangement may also include Nokia buying a small stake in Facebook, according to the report.

LifeLock, the anti-credit fraud company, gets $25M more — This is the controversial Tempe, AZ company co-founded by Robert Maynard, who himself has been accused of deceptive practices, and where CEO Todd Davis publicly discloses his social security number (457-55-5462) to prove his company’s fraud protection product works. AlleyInsider first reported, and the company now confirms that the company has raised $25 million more in a round led by Goldman Sachs, and including Bessemer and Kleiner Perkins. The company previously has raised close to $13 million in round led by the latter two firms.

Spotrunner action — There’s lots of buzz around Spotrunner, the online advertising company. First, large advertising company WPP is looking at possibly acquiring SpotRunner along with another online ad company, VideoEgg, according to the NY Post. Meanwhile, Spotrunner has acquired GlobeShooter, a network of more than 1,200 independent filmmakers, videographers, producers and production companies across the U.S. Spotrunner is backed by venture firms Battery and Index (see our earlier coverage ).

Online word processor Coventi gives up the ghost — Despite actively soliciting users and press attention for much of 2007, online word processor Coventi Pages has apparently failed to gain enough users to continue competing with Google Docs, Zoho and scads of other, lesser-known rivals. The startup sent out an email to users, reported by Web Worker Daily, stating that it will close its doors on February 1st.

Singapore opens search engine contest — Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research has opened a competition, with a $100,000 prize, for a new online search engine. Rather than just fostering yet another competitor for Google, the agency is looking for an engine that can search through text, audio and video. Contestants will have eight months to build their engine following the February 29th registration deadline. [via Physorg].

Jobs snubs both Amazon and Google — Apple’s Steve Jobs wants to own the hot mobile device market, and he takes a shot at both Google and Amazon’s latest efforts in that area. Of the Amazon Kindle reader, he says: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he tells the NYT. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” He’s also critical of Google’s Android project, to develop open cellphones that could compete with the iPhone: “We’ll see how good their software is and we’ll see how consumers like it and how quickly it is adopted.” In seeking not to get locked out of the mobile phone world, “I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It’s just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners.”

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Metaweb Technologies, the San Francisco company developing an open shared database called Freebase to store and edit the world’s information, has just gotten a big boost from Benchmark Capital and Goldman Sachs.

The two firms have invested in a $42.4 million second round of capital for the company, VentureBeat has learned. The company could not be reached for comment. A partner at Benchmark was reached, but he declined comment. [Update: Benchmark followed up Tuesday confirming the news.] This follows a $15 million investment two years ago. Besides Benchmark, the earlier investors also include Millennium Technology Ventures and Omidyar Network.

The investment is considerable, and comes at a time when a number of experts are betting that a more powerful, “semantic” Web is about to emerge, where data about information is much more structured than it is today. People are still waiting for the “killer app” that will exploit this new sort of web, but it’s generally believed that a database such as Freebase or Twine will be needed for this to happen.

[Update: I should clarify: Twine is not so much a database as it is an application. But the linking of data -- through relationships -- is similar, and thus the easy confusion. Conceivably, Twine could use the Freebase database, and is thus complimentary. See comments below. Twine's Nova Spivack says it best: "Twine is more like a semantic Facebook, and Metaweb is more like a semantic Wikipedia." Metaweb is a content repository and Twine is an app that uses content for specific purposes.]

VentureBeat writer Chris Morrison once described Twine:

Let’s dumb this down to a very concrete example. In Twine, I might be identified as “Chris Morrison,” and then labeled with the markers “writer,” “venturebeat,” “male,” “technology,” “charming” and “good-looking” (all true, of course). Twine would set me apart from the many other Chris Morrisons running around.

Both Freebase and Twine have drawn considerable hype (see coverage when Freebase was announced last year). Freebase is essentially building a Wikipedia-like database, but with much more power. While volunteers are madly writing up entries on Wikipedia — and very good one at that — there’s no system on Wikipedia that can tell the functional relationship between two related pages — i.e., something telling it “here are all the entries about males who are good-looking and who write about technology.” Freebase has the ability to do that.

Here’s a video tour of how it works. Freebase categorizes knowledge according to thousands of “types” of information, such as film, director or city. Those are the highest order of categorization. Then underneath those types you have “topics,” which are individual examples of the types — such as Annie Hall and Woody Allen. It boasts two million topics to date. This lets Freebase represent information in a structured way, to support queries from web developers wanting to build applications around them. It also solicits people to contribute their knowledge to the database, governed by a community of editors. It offers a Creative Commons license so that it can be used to power applications, on an open API.

Search is an example of an application it can make more powerful. See the screenshots below, which show you the example of a search at Freebase for the word Manhattan. Freebase lets you further specify that you’re looking for a film, as opposed to a location, and it rearranges the results accordingly — something you can’t do with Google.

Freebase “knows” Woody Allen is an director, and then knows other directors. It also knows Allen’s place of birth, and it can take you to that city, where you can find other people born there, and so on. Everything is connected.

MetaWeb is run by Thomas Layton (pictured here), who became CEO last year, after he left another Benchmark company, OpenTable.

Platform Solutions Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif. maker of mainframe computers that is going after IBM’s near monopoly in the sector, has raised filled its war-chest with more than $37 million in fresh capital from a group of investors including Microsoft.

PSI, as the company is known, has also signed joint sales agreement with Microsoft, giving it some good access to the large data centers of companies Microsoft already serves. It is going after the lower end of the IBM mainframe market, valued in the billions of dollars. It plans to undercut the dominant IBM product on price. Other investors include Blueprint Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, InterWest and InvestCorp.

Late last year, IBM sued PSI alleging patent infringement and breach of contract, and the dispute is still in court.

It’s the company’s third round of capital.

PSI’s computers consolidate z/OS, Windows, and Linux operating system into a single operating environment based on Intel Itanium 2 processor technology.

Featured companies: Algorithme Pharma, Bacchus Vascular, Botaneco, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Ikonisys, Healthcare Management Systems, Illumigen Biosciences, Kilmer Capital Partners, Medical Specialties Distributors, Metastatix, Microphage, Orthosoft, Thomas McNerney & Partners, TranS1, TriReme Medical, Wren Medical, Zimmer

UPDATE: Expanded TriReme Medical, Ikonisys and TranS1 items.

UPDATE REDUX: Added MicroPhage item.

Stent-maker TriReme Medical sails off with $15.6M — Pleasanton, Calif.-based TriReme Medical, a device maker developing a new type of artery-opening stent for blood-vessel junctions, raised $15.6 million in a third funding round. (The company doesn’t appear to have a Web site.) Investors included Three Arch Partners and Adams Street Partners.

TriReme claims that its new stent is easier to use and can be placed more accurately than similar stents now on the market. The product is still undergoing clinical studies.

Ikonisys draws $30M for cancer and prenatal diagnostics — New Haven, Conn.-based Ikonisys, which now makes and sells a cell-based diagnostic for cancer and prenatal testing, raised $30 million in a fifth funding round. Investors included Goldman, Sachs, Trevi Health Ventures, Palisade Capital, Everfin, Lakeview Capital Management, New Science Ventures, Promark Holdings, Saint Simeon - e Investimentos, and WHI Group.

Ikonisys makes an automated microscope-based test that analyzes cells from blood and other bodily fluids. The system can chunk through up to 175 microscope slides in one go, providing an initial diagnosis for each one based on a computer analysis of stained cell samples. The company has received FDA approval to market the test for detection of bladder cancer and to scan for prenatal chromosomal defects.

TranS1 IPO exceeds estimated range, raises $95M for spinal-fusion devices — The Wilmington, N.C., maker of minimally invasive devices for spinal fusion priced its IPO shares at $15 apiece, above its expected range of $12 to $14, raising as much as $95 million on the sale of up to 6.3 million shares. The offering values the company at $281.6 million. Our previous coverage of the firm is here and here.

In early trading Wednesday, TranS1 shares were up 60 percent to $24. That’s more confirmation — as if we needed it — that life-science investors seem excited about everything except biotech.

Infection-diagnostic co. MicroPhage raises $1.6M — Antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus infections are on the rise, boosting the need for ways to detect the bugs at an early stage so as to prevent their spread and treat patients most effectively. MicroPhage, a Longmont, Colo., biotech at work on a diagnostic test of this sort, raised $1.6 million in a second tranch of its first funding round. Private investors provided the funding.

MicroPhage isn’t alone in this market, of course. We wrote earlier about OpGen and AdvanDX — see our coverage here and here — which hope to speed detection of these “superbugs” (technically known as MRSA, for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) using new genome-based tests. MicroPhage, however, takes an ingenious and decidedly low-tech approach: Its tests are designed to detect MRSA by infecting the staph germs with bacteria-specific viruses called bacteriophage. These viruses multiply so rapidly that they should be detectable by simple antibody tests within one to four hours, a solution the company bills as simple and inexpensive compared to its high-tech counterparts.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Botaneco takes in $2.4M for dermatology emulsions, split from SemBioSys Genetics (release)
• Marval Bio raises $1M for less toxic contrast dye for CT scans (VentureWire, sub req’d)
• 7 Health Ventures raises $70M for Israeli medical-device startups (VentureWire)
• Zimmer completes acquisition of OrthoSoft for $51.4M (Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette)
• Cubist buys “exclusive option” to acquire anti-infective developer Illumigen (release)
• Medical Specialties Distributors acquires infusion-product distributor Wren Medical (PE Hub)
• Kilmer takes majority stake in contract researcher Algorithme Pharma (PE Hub)
• Healthcare IT firm Healthcare Management raises funds, recapitalizes (release)
• Clotbuster-device co. Bacchus Vascular names Scott Cramer CEO (release)
• Chemokine specialist Metastatix names Carol Gallagher as CEO (release)
• Thomas, McNerney & Partners names Eric Aguiar partner, Jason Brown as associate (release)