While this was Zulily’s week, with an $85 million Series D, there were several other more modest deals done in recent days, headlined by Seattle supercomputer maker Cray.
—Cray (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CRAY]]) announced plans to acquire Appro International, a maker of high performance computing (HPC) cluster systems, for $25 million. Appro focuses on medium to large HPC customers seeking lower costs. Appro chief executive Daniel Kim will lead a new Cluster Solutions business within Cray, which will hire about 90 people from Appro.
Cray says the Appro deal bolsters its efforts to serve the breadth of supercomputing market segments. At the extreme high end of the market, Cray finds itself atop the latest TOP500 List of the world’s fastest computers. The Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory employed a Cray XK7 system with 560,640 processors, nearly half of which are NVIDIA GPUs. The machine achieved 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second (Petaflop/s), besting the former No. 1, IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
—Avanade, a Microsoft managed services provider based in Seattle, is acquiring Azaleos, another Seattle-based company in the same field. Avanade is making the buy to gain Azaleos’ leading position in remote managed Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync services. Azaleos has about 200 employees, all of whom will have a chance to join Avanade. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
—Seattle social marketing technology provider Meteor is being acquired by Rio SEO, a San Diego-based business launched by search marketing agency Covario. Meteor, founded in 2009, will continue operating from its Pioneer Square offices and its Meteor Social Audience Marketing Suite will become part of the Rio SEO platform. All Meteor employee received job offers from Rio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Voyager Capital is an investor in Covario.
—Keiretsu Forum Northwest, an angel investing community, pumped $15.8 million into 27 companies — mostly in the region — during the first 10 months of 2012. By category, 39 percent of investments were in tech, 36 percent in life sciences, 20 percent in real estate, and 5 percent in consumer and retail.
