See our story about this South San Francisco, Calif., biotech in Monday’s daily briefing at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

See our story about this Fremont, Calif. company in today’s daily briefing at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

See our story about this San Mateo, Calif., wrinkle-filler maker in today’s daily briefing at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

SiXtron, a company based in Montreal that makes thin film coatings for solar cells, has raised CDN $10 million (about $10.9 million in US dollars) in its first round of financing.

The funding was led by Ventures West. Canadian firms iNovia Capital, Innovatech sud du Québec, and Fonds d’investissement en développement durable (FIDD) also participated. Seed funding of CDN $1 million was provided in early 2004 by MSBi Capital and Innovatech sud du Québec.

Here’s a blurb on the technology from the company’s release:

Founded in 2004, SiXtron is a joint spin-off of technology developed out of Bishop’s University and the Université de Sherbrooke. The company is based in Montreal and is focused on developing highly scalable and cost-effective, amorphous silicon carbide (SiC)-based thin film coatings for the solar industry…

One of the final steps in the fabrication of silicon solar cells is the application of passivation and anti-reflective coatings. The purpose of this manufacturing step is to optimize cell efficiency. SiXtron’s proprietary “silane free” process for the deposition of SiC composite thin films offers several compelling advantages over conventional silicon nitride (SiN) coatings, the current dominant solution within the industry. These include enhanced solar cell and module performance and eliminating the use of extremely pyrophoric silane gas (used in SiN coatings). Since a fatal gas explosion at a Taiwanese solar cell production facility in 2005, the industry has been looking for a reliable alternative.

VeriSilicon Holdings, a provider of a “system-on-a-chip” design technology, said it has raised US$20 million in a fourth round of financing.

The company is based in Santa Clara, Calif, with operations in Shanghai, China.

The company has now raised US$58 million since it was founded in 2001.

From the release:

This round was led by China Investment Fund (CIF), a business alliance between IBM and Lehman Brothers, and joined by VantagePoint Venture Partners and existing investors including Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and CID. The company will use the funding to accelerate its research and development in SoC platforms using advanced semiconductor technology and expand its ASIC turnkey operations internationally. VeriSilicon currently has research and development centers in Santa Clara, California and Dallas, Texas, U. S.; Shanghai and Beijing, China; with sales and customer support offices in Santa Clara, California, US; Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, China; Taipei, Taiwan; Tokyo, Japan; Nice, France; and Seoul, Korea.

“An innovative business model and innovative technology solutions have propelled VeriSilicon to the fore front of the emerging IC design foundry industry with a world wide customer base. The successful acquisition of ZSP division of LSI last year, together with the soft core license of ARM and PowerPC processors, facilitates our development of a variety of SoC platforms for consumer applications, such as multimedia, voice, and wireless communication. Application domain specific and star IP based SoC platforms are critical to making our business repeatable, scalable, and with high barrier of entry.”

See our story about this San Mateo, Calif., drug-discovery company in Tuesday’s daily briefing at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

Silicon Valley company Navigenics has raised more than $25 million to provide people with their genetic profiles, as well as ways to improve their future health based on a reading of those genetics.

David Hamilton, of VentureBeat LifeSciences, has more here.

Innovative Silicon is the developer of Z-RAM, which the company claims has a higher density than DRAM or SRAM. All are different types of random-access memory, a fast form of memory used for temporary storage of information during computer processing functions.

The density of Z-RAM could make it a better choice for use in portable electronics. Innovative Silicon also says its technology is very low in cost. It has so far struck licensing deals with Hynix Semiconductor, a DRAM maker, and AMD, Intel’s major chip-making competitor.

The $25 million investment was led by Wellington Partners Venture Capital, joined by the investors of the first two rounds. The company is based in Santa Clara, Calif., but also has facilities in Japan and Switzerland.

Need a customized voicemail message for when your sweetie calls your cell? YouMail can handle that, although we’re not sure what makes the company compelling enough to take $4.5 million in funding.

The “killer feature” here seems to be the ability to set special messages for specific people, but YouMail also allows web access to your voice mail, as well as saving messages and allowing them to be shared.

What YouMail doesn’t do is anything the carrier networks couldn’t have done themselves, years ago. Then again, they haven’t thus far, so maybe the company is onto something.

VantagePoint Venture Partners made the investment, which is YouMail’s first. It’s based in Aliso Viejo, south of Los Angeles, Calif.

Data virtualization is a way of creating a “virtual” copy of data on a centralized server to make it accessible to more users. Essentially, the data is distributed across a network, allowing companies to avoid investing in expensive servers for better performance.

The company, which counts Genworth Financial, Travelport and United Healthcare among its customers, also brought on new CEO David Patrick, the former head of Ximian, a company acquired by Novell.

The funding was led by GrandBanks Capital, which is located in Boston, along with GrowthWorks Canadian Capital. Xkoto will also move soon, from Toronto to Boston.