It was a relatively light week for deals in the Northwest, with modest activity in business software, Internet, and biotech.
—PivotLink, a software firm specializing in business intelligence with offices in Bellevue, WA, and San Francisco, CA, closed a $10 million Series C round led by StarVest Partners. Other investors included Trident Capital and Emergence Capital Partners. PivotLink was called SeaTab Software until January 2008.
—Seattle-based Ontela, a mobile-imaging startup, closed an undisclosed amount of new funding from Eastven Venture Partners. Ontela has also signed deals with four of the top five handset makers to pre-install its photo-management software on mobile phones.
—Beaverton, OR-based Infinity Softworks raised an undisclosed amount of financing from undisclosed investors. The company makes software for doing calculations and creating reports on the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other mobile devices.
—Luke reported that Helix BioMedix (OTCBB: [[ticker:HXBM]]), a Bothell, WA-based developer of peptide molecules, raised $3.2 million through debt that can convert into shares of stock plus warrants to buy its stock. The company’s peptides are used in skin care and other cosmetic products.
—Bothell, WA-based MDRNA, a developer of RNA interference drugs, agreed to license some of its technology for a one-time, non-refundable execution fee from Roche, the Swiss drug giant. The deal is non-exclusive to Roche, as Luke reported, and the financial terms were not disclosed.
—Seattle-area startup Frugal Mechanic, an online search engine for auto parts, closed a round of seed funding from Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op, a peer-to-peer investment fund. The exact amount was not disclosed, but is between $250,000 and $500,000. Frugal co-founder Eric Peters told me the story behind the company and how it got funded in a difficult climate.
—Smartsheet, a Bellevue, WA-based firm that makes work-management software for businesses, formed a partnership with Amazon to deliver outsourcing services to mass consumers. The new offering is powered by Amazon Mechanical Turk’s 100,000 virtual workers, and rates for outsourced tasks run between $0.01 and $5.
—In a snapshot of Seattle-area tech startups, four companies formed significant new partnerships, though no financial terms were disclosed. Bellevue-based Apptio, an IT optimization firm, made deals to work with Amazon Web Services, Skytap, VMware, and Citrix. Seattle-based Earth Class Mail licensed its online postal-mail delivery software to Swiss Post. Seattle-based Evri is providing its content recommendation widgets to the Washington Post for online news stories. And Seattle’s Redfin announced new partnerships with more than a dozen real estate brokers around the country, representing a shift in the company’s business strategy.
