VentureBeat

Two days ago it was Optimal Technologies with $25 million toward software for electrical grids; today, it’s SmartSynch with $20 million for wirelessly communicating meters. I haven’t gone back and done an official count, but with well over half a dozen large fundings in the past few months, the efficiency-focused smart grid space looks to have emerged as the hot cleantech venture space du jour.

“Smart grid” is a catch-all term for a number of technologies that aim at measuring and controlling the process of sending electricity from generation plants to homes and businesses. The former area is SmartSynch’s specialty. The company’s meters are capable of hooking up to networks via any of several wireless standards like WiFi, CDMA or ZigBee to divulge the data they collect.

Fundings may be flooding in right now, but SmartSynch is no newbie. Founded in 2000, the company has taken $80 million to date. It has also deployed about 125,000 meters, and grew 125 percent last year. Meters have turned out to be a particularly bright area to innovate in, because they’re advantageous to several constituencies.

The advantage comes in giving more information to both customers and utilities. Instead of seeing electricity usage as one big block on a bill received once a month, customers can see usage on an almost moment-to-moment basis. Following the old adage “knowledge is power”, that information gives both parties the ability to plan out usage based on when electricity is most available, saving utilities power and both sides money.

SmartSynch’s chief technology officer, Henry Jones, says his firm’s communication technology, which is installed in meters made by Elster, General Electric and Itron, has brought in about $15 billion in additional revenues for utilities so far. That’s good news for the company, because it’s the utilities that buy and install the meters. Their customers include some rather large ones, including Socal Edison, Florida Power & Light, and Canada’s Hydro One.

Other firms, including Silver Spring Networks, have fairly similar technology and strategies. However, Jones claims that’s not a problem: Each firm has its own approach to communicating data, he says, and each approach is useful for different applications, leaving a wide market chunk for each competitor.

But that’s not much use to any new startups who might want to muscle in on the action. After all, several of these firms have years of lead time. So what are the next big opportunities? Jones thinks the next step is getting meters to report not just back to the utility, but also directly into the home or business they’re installed in; he says SmartSynch is preparing to release several meters that do just that.

Hooking into the gas and water meters is also a good opportunity, along with integrating the data from all three major utility streams. On a more granular level, there’s space for companies that measure and control electricity usage by specific devices, like air conditioners and lighting. And of course, there’s opportunity to be had not just in communication and control, but in helping to decipher all the information that’s being generated.

For the present moment, the wave of smart grid startups shows no sign of slackening. Several more announcements that I’m aware of are on their way in coming weeks, and a few in front usually means a pack behind.

The $25 million SmartSynch received was the Jackson, Miss., company’s fourth funding. Credit Suisse, a new investor, led the round, along with another newcomer, Southern Farm Bureau Life Insurance (perhaps they’ll tack “venture partners” onto that name at some point). A heap of previous investors also came along for the ride: Batelle Ventures, Beacon Group, Endeavor Capital Management, GulfSouth Capital, Battelle’s affiliate Innovation Valley Partners, Kinetic Ventures, OPG Ventures and Siemens Venture Capital.

BioNanomatrix, a Philadelphia developer of genome-analysis systems, raised $5.1 million in a first funding round. Investors included Battelle Ventures, Innovation Valley Partners, KT Venture Group, Ben Franklin Technology Partners and21Ventures.

BioNanomatrix is developing a single-molecule imaging and analysis system that the startup says is ideal for reading DNA sequences. The startup still isn’t divulging many details about its system, although the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested that the company’s “nanofluidics” technology could potentially read all three billion bases from a single DNA molecule without chopping it up first — a common step in most sequencing setups these days, albeit one that also increases the complexity of reassembling the fragmented sequences into a coherent whole.

According to that article, in fact, BioNanomatrix has produced a nanofabricated chip with more than a mile of tiny channels that can accomodate the full DNA molecules from all 46 chromosomes of 200 people at a time. That’s pretty spectacular if true, although of course the challenge with this sort of technology is always proving that it does what the company says it should.

We previously covered BioNanomatrix last October, when the company formed a joint venture with Complete Genomics of Menlo Park, Calif. The two companies, which shared an $8.8 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology last year, are aiming to sequence an entire human genome in eight hours for $100, although they haven’t set a date by which they hope to accomplish that feat. It’s a nice bragging point, since that’s about an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than anyone else is predicting at the moment, but it’s also little more than an unsubstantiated claim for the moment.

For more coverage of the high-speed genomics race, see my previous posts onPacific Biosciences and its nanowell technique, Intelligent Bio-Systems’ $5,000 genome challenge, and VisiGen’s promise of a $1,000 genome by the end of 2009. Don’t miss my Q&A with MDV’s Bill Ericson about the medical promise of fast, cheap genome scans.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Cancer stem-cell co. OncoMed strikes GSK partnership worth up to $1.4B (release)
• Kosmix pulls in $10M for health, lifestyle search (release)
• CDI Bioscience pulls in $3M for protein-production improvements (release)
• UroMedica takes in $7M for incontinence devices (VentureWire, sub req’d)
• Draths raises $2.5M for flu drugs (PE Hub)

Cancer stem-cell co. OncoMed strikes GSK partnership worth up to $1.4B – Redwood City, Calif.-based OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, a biotech founded to target and destroy the “cancer stem cells” that researchers believe may lurk at the heart of every tumor, struck a major partnership with GlaxoSmithKline to discover and commercialize new cancer drugs based on OncoMed’s technology.

The deal allows GSK to license up to four of OncoMed’s monoclonal antibody drugs that are directed at multiple cancer stem-cell targets. In turn, OncoMed gets an undisclosed initial payment, an equity investment, and milestone payments of up to $1.4 billion, plus double-digit royalties on any marketed products. The arrangement includes OncoMed’s leading product candidate, OMP-21M18, which is scheduled to begin human testing this year.

Cancer stem cells are, like most stem cells, thought to be progenitor cells that give rise to a diverse population of other cell types. In this case, however, the cancer stem cells theoretically keep tumors alive by constantly producing replacement tumor cells as they are killed off by chemotherapy, radiation or the body’s defenses. Cancer stem cells, in fact, may explain why tumors return so easily after surgery or chemotherapy, since if even a few stem cells survive, they can easily recreate the tumor.

CDI Bioscience pulls in $3M for protein-production improvements – CDI Bioscience, a Madison, Wisc., biotech aiming to improve the efficiency of genetically engineered cells in the production of biotech drugs, raised $3 million in a first funding round. Battelle Ventures and Innovation Valley Partners provided the funding.

CDI has developed a process that forces bioengineered cells into a “senescent” state, which CDI claims is characterized by greater energy production (in terms of increased numbers of mitochondria) and increased protein synthesis and output. The company claims that cells “shifted” into senescence routinely produce three to seven times the amount of engineered protein — the output that biotechs purify into drugs — than their unshifted counterparts.