Just because I’m not going to be Seattle editor anymore doesn’t mean I won’t miss these roundups. In the past week, we’ve seen some very interesting deals news from Northwest companies in the fields of energy, materials, and software. Here were a few of the top highlights.
—Nuclear-power startup TerraPower, based in Bellevue, WA, raised a whopping $35 million in venture funding from Charles River Ventures and Khosla Ventures. OK, $35 million might be chump change to Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, who are also invested in TerraPower, but it could make a big difference in the company’s ability to develop a working prototype of its traveling wave reactor, which promises cleaner, cheaper, safer, and more plentiful nuclear power. Don’t expect that to happen before 2020 though.
—Polaris Venture Partners, which is based in the Boston area and has a Seattle office, closed on $233.8 million of a planned new $400 million fund, as Ryan reported. Polaris is known for its investments in companies like Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Akamai Technologies, and GlycoFi, as well as for starting Dogpatch Labs, a community program to support entrepreneurs in San Francisco, New York, and Cambridge, MA.
—Luke previewed Bellevue, WA-based mobile software firm Motricity’s impending initial public offering this week. The IPO could net more than $85 million, according to investment bank Renaissance Capital. Motricity’s biggest stockholders are Advanced Equities, billionaire investor Carl Icahn, Technology Crossover Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates. The company was founded in 2001 in Oklahoma and moved to the Seattle area in late 2007, when it acquired the mobile division of Infospace for $135 million.
—Has there ever been a less-talked-about $1.4 billion deal in Seattle? That’s what
