Seattle 2.0 Startup Awards: Vote for Deal of the Year

From IPOs to M&A deals to big venture capital financing rounds, today’s featured category in the Seattle 2.0 Startup Awards is Deal of the Year. There certainly were some whoppers in the Seattle area, and this group of companies certainly symbolizes some of the best and brightest in the Seattle tech community.

This is one of more than a dozen categories in this year’s Seattle 2.0 Awards, presented by GeekWire. We’ll be featuring one category a day leading up to the big awards bash May 3 at the Experience Music Project. Public voting began last week after finalists were chosen by our judges from hundreds of nominations received from the community.

We’ve got a great group of finalists in this category, which is sponsored by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. If you haven’t yet registered your vote, here’s your chance. If you need help deciding, see more background on each finalist below the poll.

Apptio: The Bellevue company pulled in $50 million in March, one of the biggest venture capital rounds in the Pacific Northwest in the past five years. CEO Sunny Gupta has said his goal is to build the next big enterprise software company in the Seattle area.

Double Down Interactive: The maker of the DoubleDown Casino game, one of the most popular titles on Facebook, sold to gambling giant IGT for up to $500 million in January.

PopCap: The maker of Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies sold to Electronic Arts for as much as $1.3 billion last summer, marking a huge return for founders John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka who started company in Seattle in 2000.

Swype: Nuance Communications gobbled up the maker of the text-input technology for $102.5 million last October. Swype CEO Mike McSherry called it a “great outcome,” and it marked the second big exit for inventor Cliff Kushler who previously created the Tegic T9 software.

Zillow: The only Seattle area tech company to go public in 2011, Zillow dazzled in its stock market debut and kept the momentum going after turning its first profit. It now boasts a market value of more than $1 billion, and a monthly traffic base of more than 30 million users.

Tickets are still available for the awards show on May 3rd, one party you won’t want to miss.

Thanks to our event sponsors Filter, Protingent, Salad Labs, Silicon Valley Bank, Splunk, Washington Partners, Heinz Marketing, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, PayScale, Bader Martin, SEOmoz, Christensen O’Connor Johnson Kindness, Knoll, AT&T, Cooley, Startup Weekend, and Creativello for their support.

Email rebecca@geekwire.com for available sponsorship opportunities, and learn more here.