The Amazon phone grabbed the tech headlines this week, with the e-commerce giant unveiling its new 3D instant shopping device here in Seattle on Wednesday.
In other news, Portland, OR-based Puppet Labs pulled down a large Series E funding round; Trupanion, the Seattle pet insurance provider, filed for an initial public offering; and GatheredTable raised $2 million to help people plan dinner. On the cleantech front, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories was tapped as an Energy Frontier Research Center, and the University of Washington took second place in the EcoCAR 2 competition. More details:
—Puppet Labs, which makes IT automation software, has raised $40 million from existing investors Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners, True Ventures, and VMware. The Series E funding round brings total investment in the company to $86 million, according to a press release. The Portland company has more than 300 employees and 18,000 customers. The funding will support hiring, continued product development, and further international expansion. “Puppet is managing more and more of the data center—including network infrastructure—and we’re already seeing Puppet at work in the internet of things. It’s only going to expand from there,” founder and CEO Luke Kanies says in a blog post.
—Trupanion, the Seattle-based pet insurance provider, has filed paperwork for a public stock offering that could raise up to $75 million, though the number of shares and proposed offering price have not been set. The company’s prior investors include Maveron (which owns a third of the company’s outstanding shares, the largest single stake), Highland Capital Partners, and RenaissanceRe Ventures. The company was founded by Darryl Rawlings in 1998 as VetInsurance, serving the Canadian market from its headquarters in Vancouver, BC, before relocating to Seattle in a bid to serve the larger potential market in the U.S. It last raised capital—$9 million—in 2011, following a $22 million round in 2008. In Trupanion’s IPO registration statement, it says it had more than 181,000 pets enrolled through March of this year and 2013 revenue was $84 million. The company has operated at a loss for the last three years as it invested in growth. Trupanion‘s accumulated deficit was $40.9 million through the first quarter of 2014. The company proposes to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TRUP.
—GatheredTable, a Seattle startup that wants to help people cook at home more by organizing their pantries and making weekly meal plans, has raised $2 million from 14 investors, according to an SEC filing. The company feeds your recipes, dietary preferences, time limits, and other factors into a “patented algorithm” that cranks out a unique menu each week. Users pay a monthly fee. It also offers grocery delivery from farms, supermarkets, and other services. GatheredTable’s founder and CEO is Mary Egan, formerly a senior executive at Starbucks reporting to Howard Schultz, who is backing the company along with other angel investors, as The Seattle Times reported when GatheredTable unveiled itself in March.
—Further strengthening its position as a center for basic research in support of new energy technologies, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory this week was assigned one of 32 Energy Frontier Research Centers, a designation that comes with $14 million in Department of Energy funding over the next four years. The PNNL Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis focuses on chemical reactions in solar energy and fuel cells.
—University of Washington students took second among 16 North American teams competing for the last three years to design and build an efficient, clean vehicle powered by biodiesel and electricity. The school’s team outfitted a Chevrolet Malibu with a diesel engine, which drives the front wheels, and an electric motor with 250 horsepower for the rear wheels. That helped the car clock a 0-60 mph time of less than 7 seconds, the best in the EcoCAR 2 competition, which is sponsored by the Department of Energy and General Motors. The UW team will compete beginning this fall in EcoCAR 3, which challenges students to redesign a Chevrolet Camaro.
