We’re catching up this week on a spate of recent acquisitions, rumors of an IPO for Apptio, momentum for the Seattle commercial space cluster, funding for a carbon fiber recycling facility, and a new partner for Cambia Grove. The details:
—Zillow, the Seattle online real estate giant, continues its acquisitive ways, snapping up DotLoop, which provides software for digital document editing, signing, sharing, and storing. The Cincinnati-based competitor to DocuSign will add to the tools Zillow (NASDAQ: [[ticker:Z]]) offers people buying and selling homes, accelerating the document-heavy process of listing a home, managing offers, and closing a transaction. Terms of the acquisition, expected to close this quarter, were not disclosed.
—TUNE, a Seattle mobile marketing company, announced that it has acquired Artisan Mobile of Philadelphia, which makes software for app analytics, testing, and marketing automation. TUNE previously snapped up other marketing tools makers MobileDevHQ and Appfuel, filling out a suite of tools to optimize mobile marketing campaigns.
—Two Seattle-based Techstars companies are joining forces. Remitly, which enables mobile money transfers to India and the Philippines, announced the acquisition of Talio, a mobile messaging service. As noted in a press release, the deal brings all of Talio’s employees, including founders, to Remitly. The company, which raised $12.5 million in March, now has about 50 employees.
—Seattle’s first tech IPO of the year may be in the offing. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Apptio, the Bellevue, WA-based maker of software for managing enterprise IT spending, is working with Goldman Sachs Group, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Bank of America to ready a public equity sale that could value the company at $1 billion.
—More momentum for the Seattle area’s commercial space cluster: Last week, Planetary Resources, the Redmond, WA-based asteroid mining company, announced that its Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft was launched from the International Space Station. The vehicle embarks on a 90-day mission, testing avionics, control systems, software, and other core technologies that will be used on future asteroid-prospecting spacecraft. Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki calls A3R “the most sophisticated, yet cost-effective, test demonstration spacecraft ever built.”
This week, the Space Frontier Foundation announced that it will hold its NewSpace conference in Seattle in 2016. The conference has been in Silicon Valley for the last nine years. The Washington State Space Coalition and state Department of Commerce worked to bring the event, which focuses on the fast-growing private spaceflight industry, to Seattle.
—The Port of Port Angeles, WA, received a $2 million federal grant to advance its plan for the Composite Recycling Technology Center, which we wrote about earlier this summer. The money, from the U.S. Department of Commerce, will help retrofit a building for workforce training and allow for discarded carbon fiber composites to be re-manufactured into new products. The federal funding matches $1 million from the Washington Clean Energy Fund, and $1 million from local government.
—Cambia Grove, the new Seattle space for healthcare entrepreneurs and innovators to connect with large players in the industry, landed a new anchor partner. Tacoma, WA-based CHI Franciscan Health, which has a network of hospitals, clinics, and other medical services, joins other Cambia Grove partners UW Medicine, Regence BlueShield, EvergreenHealth Partners, MultiCare, and Qliance.
