Aptus takes $30M to repair aneurysms
Aptus Endosystems, a biotech firm working on a device to fix abdominal aneurysms, just brought in $30 million in third-round funding to finish off clinical trials of its Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Repair System, reports VentureWire. Heron Capital led the round, which also included Longitude Capital, Oakwood Medical Investors, Baird Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Prism VentureWorks and US Venture Partners.
The Sunnyvale, Calif. company says the round should be enough to cover the U.S. launch of the… Continue Reading
Force10 and Turin merge, pool their capital and clients
Network builder Force10 Networks has merged with Ethernet services provider Turin Networks to create a powerhouse in both spaces, with an impressive list of clients, numbering 1,300 (including eHarmony and Facebook), reports peHUB. More significant than that is the marrying of two significant pots of venture capital. Since their nearly simultaneous founding a decade ago, Force10 has raised $400 million, and Turin $250 million.
Combined under the Force10 name, the new entity, based in San Jose,… Continue Reading
Solar co. Solyndra shines with $220M
Solar installation maker Solyndra has every reason to celebrate the new year, raising $219.2 million in fifth-round funding from a flock of 23 investors. This is the second largest investment received by any U.S. cleantech company in the last year, coming in behind the $300 million bagged by competitor Nanosolar. The amount breaks down into $96.6 million in working capital and $122.2 million in convertible promissory notes.
The Fremont, Calif. company has not disclosed its plans… Continue Reading
Savings.com banks $4M for coupon aggregation
Savings.com, the Los Angeles-based coupon search engine, announced that it brought in $4 million in a second round of funding led by US Venture Partners. The new money will allow the company to cast a wider net and add to its continuously-updated database of discounts.
The site is just one in a sea of similar services, including Shoppersource, Couponwinner, Coolsavings — and the list goes on and on. So far, it’s unclear whether Savings.com has any… Continue Reading
Panasonic and Samsung invest in SiBEAM to promote WirelessHD
In an endorsement for wireless video networking, Panasonic and Samsung said today they have invested an undisclosed amount into SiBEAM, the maker of high-speed networking chips.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based SiBEAM makes WirelessHD chips that can wirelessly transfer video from one device to another in a living room. The SiBEAM chip sets operate in the 60 gigahertz band of the wireless spectrum. It’s difficult to make radio chips that operate at that frequency, but there is very little… Continue Reading
Force10 rolls out virtualization products
Force10 Networks, a developer of 10-gigabit networking hardware, will be launching a new line of products over the next half year to help companies set up automated and virtual networks. Currently, it provides routers and switches to web companies like Facebook and eHarmony, to help them manage large amounts of data over their local networks, reports VentureWire.
In this pursuit, Force10 faces a full field of competition including Woven Systems, Foundry Networks, Cisco Systems and Juniper… Continue Reading
OncoMed nabs $93M for stem cell programs
OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, a company working to fight cancer using stem cells, added a $93 million tranche to a second round of funding that now totals $154 million. The money will be used to push its lead antibody candidate through phase-two clinical trials.
The Redwood City, Calif. firm specializes in developing treatments to target cancer stem cells — the cells that cause tumor growth and renewal. They are unique in their resistance to chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments…. Continue Reading
Trusteer nabs $6M for financial security software
Financial security software provider Trusteer raised $6M in second-round financing all from U.S. Venture Partners. It plans to use the money to expand its sales and marketing operations and to continue research and development of its fraud-prevention applications.
The Tel Aviv-based company tailors its software to banks, financial brokerages, healthcare providers and retailers to secure communications with their customers and detect identity theft. These institutions provide the Trusteer software, called Rapport, for users to download from… Continue Reading
Intransa gets $15M for video surveillance storage
Intransa, a company that provides network IP storage services for video content, brought in $15 million since the start of 2008 for continued growth and development, upping total venture capital raised to $110 million since 2001.
The San Jose, Calif. company is applying its technology to the video surveillance market, which is always in demand of devices offering longer storage with higher resolution. Transportation surveillance alone will represent $2 billion in revenue, and retail surveillance will… Continue Reading
Savings.com brings in $4M for online coupon service
Savings.com, a website that lets consumers search for coupons and discounts, announced today that it received $4 million in a second round of funding led by US Venture Partners, reported PE Week Wire. The names of other contributors were not disclosed.
The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company also makes some money off sales commissions from the merchants they direct customers to, but that doesn’t influence its coupon search function. Instead, the site’s users are able to rate… Continue Reading
Controversial ad company Jellycloud shuts down
The deteriorating economy, and cloudy horizon for the advertising industry, has claimed one more victim: Jellycloud, the ad company I wrote last month that was the latest incarnation of team that ran the controversial Gator and Claria.
Last weekend, it threw in the towel, sent home its 36 employees, and assigned assets to a liquidator that will sell them off to the highest bidder. The company had raised $5.75M just a few months ago, and will… Continue Reading
Redwood Systems gets $4M for commercial building LEDs
Redwood Systems, a Danville, Calif.-based firm that wants to help businesses conserve energy by converting to LED lighting, has raised $4 million in first round funding, according to PEHub.
While compact fluorescent lightbulbs (or CFLs, as they’re more commonly known) are a major improvement over incandescents, most analysts and building experts believe LEDs are the future of energy-efficient lighting. And if VC investments are any indication, then it looks as though that transition could be coming… Continue Reading
Right90 raises $10 million to sell the world on “bottom-up” sales forecasting
Right90, a Foster City, California, company specializing in “bottom-up sales forecasting” software, has raised $10 million in its third round of financing.
According to salesopedia, a handy glossary for sales and marketing terms, bottom-up sales forecasting is “an approach…which takes market conditions rather than the company’s objectives as its basis.” In practice, this means looking deeper than executives’ predictions and assembling granular data from the people doing the selling, themselves. Instead of projecting that “we’ll do… Continue Reading
The ad network that keeps changing its stripes: Gator, Claria, and now JellyCloud?
Can a tiger change its stripes? JellyCloud, an ad network company with a controversial past, hopes so.
About eight years ago, it operated under a different name: Gator. The Silicon Valley company attracted lots of users with a useful online vault to save all their personal password/login data in a single place. Its logo was a cute little gator head.
Problem was, it extracted a lot of personal information about you and observed your websurfing habits in… Continue Reading
Proteolix raises $79M for cancer treatment
Proteolix, which is developing drugs to treat cancer by disrupting key cell functions, has raised $79 million in a third round of funding, according to VentureWire. That’s the third largest biotech funding this year.
Nomura Phase4 Ventures, a new investor, led the round, with participation from new backer Westfield Capital Management and existing investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Latterell Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners and Vertical Group.
The new funding should allow South San Francisco-based Proteolix… Continue Reading
MediaSixDegrees targets ads using social graph information, raises $9 million
Media6Degrees is the latest company to try to target ads for major brands using the “social graph” of your friend relationships on social networks and other sites. The New York company is in private beta judging by the lack of information on its site about the product itself. The company says it has “patent-pending algorithms and methods” that use demographic and “psychographic” data to target online ads for each individual advertiser.
So far, though, the beta… Continue Reading
Teen social network myYearbook is growing fast and it just raised $13M, but is it more than a teen site?
Teen social network myYearbook has raised $13 million, confirming rumors we were hearing last month. The company has managed to grow in the face of more established competitors, like MySpace, within the pre-college market, according to third-party web measurement firms. Hitwise says myYearbook had 1.54 percent of the overall US social network market share behind MySpace’s 71.92 percent and Facebook’s 16.91 percent in June. ComScore, meanwhile, says myYearbook had more than 4.5 million monthly unique… Continue Reading
PodTech purchased by ViewPartner for less than half a million, ending a bloody story
Updated, including the full press release, below the article.
PodTech, a company that publishes online and downloadable videos about new technology, has been sold — for less than half a million dollars, I’ve learned — to ViewPartner, a communications technology company.
This is sad. In 2007, the Palo Alto, Calif. company was expecting to make $7 million in revenue by the end of the year, mostly through sponsorship deals with large technology companies, from what a source… Continue Reading
CardioKinetix raises $14.5M for catheter-based heart treatment
CardioKinetix, a Redwood City, Calif. life sciences startup working on a heart-failure treatment that could potentially help over a million patients, has raised a third round of funding, according to VentureWire.
The company’s procedure uses a catheter to strengthen parts of the heart, and protect areas damaged following heart attacks. The device is designed to be an alternative to a risky surgery typically only used in high-risk patients.
Previous investors Cutlass Capital, JPMorgan Partners and U.S. Venture… Continue Reading
IPTV company Kasenna sells at a huge loss for investors
Kasenna, which does IP video infrastructure and applications (aka IPTV) is selling for just $6.1 million, according to VentureWire. The purchasing company is another IPTV player, Espial, in what will be an all-stock deal.
This sale is a huge loss for its investors as Kasenna has more than $70 million in funding pumped into it by firms including Intel Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, SGI and Sun Microsystems.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Kasenna was founded in 2000.