They grow up so quick! Zulily, which offers daily “flash sales” on moms-and-kids items, easily led the field for angel and venture financing deals in Washington in August. That’s according to monthly data compiled by our partners at CB Insights, which tallied $79 million in overall financings across tech, biotech and cleantech companies for the month.
The new infusion of cash should help Zulily keep pace with its fast growth—after its public debut earlier this year, CEO Darrell Cavens told me, the startup rocketed from about 15,000 members to more than 4 million as of early August. The company also blew through four headquarters locations in about 18 months.
The August round, led by Meritech Capital Partners, brought Zulily’s total venture financing so far to $53.6 million.
Landing in second place was Vancouver, WA-based nLight Photonics, a supplier of high-powered semiconductor lasers. nLight said existing investors participating in the Series E round included Oak Investment Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Menlo Ventures.
That brings nLight’s total equity financing to $110 million—and the company hinted at an IPO in its future, saying in a press release that its investors have been with nLight for more than a decade and “have a strong record of companies achieving initial public offerings.”
The company also said it is growing in profitability, added more than 100 employees in the previous year, and booked more than $60 million in orders in the first half of 2011.
The third-largest financing for August went to Infinia, a Seattle-based developer of solar power generators. The company raised just over $6 million in equity financing, and could eventually raise a total of $25 million in the round, according to this SEC filing. The company’s listed investors include Black Pearl Capital, Foxconn Technology Group, and Seattle’s Vulcan Capital.
Coming in fourth for the month was Airbiquity, which raised $4 million in debt financing. Seattle-based Airbiquity supplies software and platform services for “connected car” features, with customers like Ford, OnStar, and BMW. Its investors are listed as Acorn Ventures of Bellevue, WA, Ignition Partners, Kirnaf Ltd., and Shell Internet Ventures.
The fifth-largest financing went to Medify, which reported in August that it had raised $1.8 million to date from angels and Voyager Capital, where the company was incubated. (The exact timing on that round is not exactly clear to me, because I couldn’t find it in the SEC filings).
In any case, as CEO Derek Streat told me, the idea behind Medify is to make information about healthcare much easier to navigate for patients and doctors. The team is stocked with veterans from Farecast, including co-founder Jay Bartot.
Rounding out the $1 million-plus financings for August is Presage Biosciences, which added nearly $1.6 million from unidentified investors. The company, which spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has developed a tool that drugmakers are using to get a better sense of which drugs are likely to succeed in clinical trials.
