It’s been a busy week already when it comes to acquisitions and venture deals in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. There’s too much going on to write it all up separately, so here’s a quick rundown:
—After operating for just two and a half years and raising $76 million in venture funding, Mountain View, CA-based social gaming giant Playdom will be acquired by Burbank, CA-based Disney (NYSE: [[ticker:DIS]]) for $563 million plus up to $200 million in follow-on payments, dependent on the company’s performance. Playdom games like Bola, Market Street, Social City, and Sorority Life are among the top social titles on MySpace and Facebook. The startup’s investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, New World Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Steamboat Ventures.
–Adobe (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ADBE]]) in San Jose, CA, will buy Day Software, a Zurich, Switzerland-based maker of content management software for companies maintaining large websites, for roughly $240 million. Software made by Day, which went public on the Swiss Exchange in 2000, is behind the websites of many Fortune 1000 companies, including Adobe. I wrote last fall about Day’s decision to move its U.S. headquarters from Newport Beach, CA, to Boston.
—San Francisco-based Nexant, a provider of grid management software to electric utilities, has raised $32.5 million in a venture financing round that could total $50.4 million, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The funders were not identified, but past investors in Nexant include Beacon Group, Bechtel Capital Partners, IBM, MIC Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Nth Power Technologies, according to VentureWire.
—CloudMade in Menlo Park, CA, announced that it has raised $12.3 million in Series B funding. The company creates software tools that allow makers of mobile and Web-based applications to incorporate maps based on data from the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap project, which was started by CloudMade co-founder Nick Black. New investor Greylock Partners led the round, which also included original investor Sunstone Capital.
—San Jose-based BlueArc, which makes network storage systems for large enterprises, has raised $20 million in new financing from a group of 31 investors, according to a regulatory filing and a company announcement. Investor Growth Capital, the venture capital arm of Sweden’s Investor AB, led the round.
