Raleigh ranked No. 10 on a list that determined which cities were the most prosperous for businesses.

The ranking by MarketWatch, published by Dow Jones & Co., looked at various economic data, including the performance of publicly traded companies in each metro area, to evaluate business conditions in the country’s 100 largest metro areas, and awarded points.

The top five on the “Top Cities for Business Growth in 2012” list were: Austin, Boston, Houston, San Jose and Portland.

Raleigh rated 1,564 points despite being – in MarketWatch’s words – “a relatively unknown city.”

The city got high marks in economic metrics, education scores and concentration of commerce, according to MarketWatch. But “its companies had a spotty year, with Nasdaq firms posting high profits, but NYSE entries ending up in the bottom 10.”

Mark Sirgo, CEO of BioDelivery Sciences International in Raleigh, told MarketWatch that taxes were favorable but getting venture capital remained a problem.

PowerSecure International, an energy services company based in Wake Forest, said this morning it bought a Connecticut lighting company for $15 million.

PowerSecure intends to continue to market the acquired product lines under the Solais Lighting brand. Solais has about a dozen employees, while PowerSecure while PowerSecure employs about 700 in Wake Forest, Raleigh, Morrisville and elsewhere.

Efficient lighting through LED technology is one of PowerSecure's specialities, particularly for display cases in grocery stores and other retail applications. The company also supplies maintenance crews for electric utilities as well as emergency backup power generators for grocery stores and other institutional customers.

PowerSecure CEO Sidney Hinton said in a statement that the Solais acquisition "will provide us with catalysts to accelerate the growth and profitability of our LED lighting business."

Chimerix, the Durham antiviral drug developer, closed at $18.17 per share to cap its first week as a publicly traded company.

Chimerix shares slipped 3.3 percent in Friday trading after a 34-percent surge Thursday, the day the stock went public. The strong response from investors helped Chimerix raise more than $102 million by offering the stock at $14 a share.

The 13-year-old company doesn’t have a prescription drug on the market, but investors have confidence in its experimental treatments for life-threatening viral infections in patients whose immune systems have been compromised by cancer or by drugs.

Chimerix was one of two Triangle companies that made IPO news Thursday. Morrisville-based ChannelAdvisor told the Securities and Exchange Commission it expects to raise as much as $86 million through a public offering.

Chimerix expects to net about $95 million from the stock sale after paying banking fees and commissions. The 46-employee company will use the money for research and development, debt payments and general operations.

ChannelAdvisor isn't one of those companies that's heavily dependent on just a few customers.

Au contraire, the Morrisville e-commerce technology company's 10 largest customers accounted for just 7.2 percent of its $53.6 million in revenue last year, according to data the company filed with federal regulators Thursday as part of its plans to raise money from investors through an initial public offering of common stock.

Fortunately for Channel Advisor, it has lots of customers: more than 1,900 at the end of last year, up 15 percent from two years earlier. That includes nearly 500 customers based in foreign countries and one quarter of the top 500 online retailers in the U.S., including "traditional" retailers such as Ann Taylor, J&R Electronics and Jos. A. Bank Clothiers as well as manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo, Sony and Under Armour.

Channel Advisor's software makes it easier for companies to integrate and manage their online sales across a multitude of sales channels.

Trinity Frozen Foods will build a sweet potato process facility in Robeson County.

The Charlotte-based company plans to hire 149 workers and invest more than $15 million over the next three years in Pembroke.

The jobs will pay an average annual salary of $23,405 dollars, plus benefits.

The company could receive up to $500,000 from the One North Carolina Fund if it meets job creation requirements, according to the announcement from Gov. Pat McCrory's office. The grant is also contingent upon a local funding match.

The company closed on a first round of equity financing earlier this year and said at the time it planned to build a sweet potato processing facility in either North or South Carolina to be near growers.

Most raw sweet potatoes from the Carolinas are now shipped to Arkansas, Louisiana or Quebec to be processed for food makers, the company's CFO Chip Wilson said a statement in January when announcing the funding.

The 150,000 square foot processing plant is expected to begin operations in July. The company markets sweet potato fries to food service and retail markets. Its fries are sold under the Sweet Sensations and Frizzles brands but it also produces private label products for supermarkets.

The plant will initially produce 12 to 15 million pounds of sweet potato fries annually, but the plans call for expanding to produce 50 million pounds of sweet potato fries each year.

North Carolina is the No. 1 sweet potato producing state in the country, according to the state's Sweet Potato Commission Foundation.

A fledgling agricultural biotechnology company founded by a group of industry veterans and serial entrepreneurs has raised $14.5 million in venture capital financing in spite of a notoriously tough funding environment.

"It's a testament to how good the team is that we've put together and the attractiveness of the ag market right now," said Eric Ward, co-founder and co-CEO of AgBiome, a Research Triangle Park company that was formed in September.

Ward and co-CEO Scott Uknes previously co-founded and ran Cropsolution, a Triangle agbio company that discovered a novel fungicide that it licensed to a major industry player in 2006. Uknes also was a co-founder of Paradigm Genetics and Ward is a former co-president of ag biotech at Novartis in RTP.

AgBiome is focused on improving crop productivity by identifying novel microbes among the community of microorganisms associated with plants --as well as discovering beneficial genes from those microbes. The end products would be "biologicals," or microorganisms that can be applied like a chemical, as well as genes that could be licensed for genetically modified crops.

Ply Gem Industries, a Cary company that makes building products, announced Wednesday that it will expand its Columbus County operations and create 145 jobs over the next three years.

The company will invest $15 million in its facilities in Fair Bluff, about 130 miles south of Raleigh. It is eligible to receive a $150,000 grant from the One North Carolina Fund. The grant is contingent local governments making a matching grant and Ply Gem meeting its hiring and investment goals.

The average annual salaries for the new jobs will be $45,730, plus benefits. The Columbus County average is $31,605.

Ply Gem makes vinyl siding, vinyl windows and doors, and other products for home exteriors. The company's performance has approved as the nation's housing market has recovered.

Ply Gem generated $1.12 billion in sales last year, up 8.4 percent from 2011. Last week, the company revived its plans to raise up to $300 million in an initial public offering.

The company filed plans to go public in June 2010 but never followed through.

Ply Gem had 4,992 full-time employees at the end of December. The company employs more than 100 people in North Carolina.

A Durham animal health company has raised $6 million in new financing to support the launch of its first on-site disease-detection test.
Advanced Animal Diagnostics is gearing up to introduce a product that enables dairy farmers to perform tests themselves to detect mastitis, a disease that limits a cow's ability to produce milk and costs the U.S. dairy industry an estimated $2 billion a year. The test, called Qscout MLD, involves placing a drop of milk from each of a cow's four glands on a disposable cartridge and inserting it into a portable instrument that provides accurate results in less than three minutes.

Early detection of mastitis can head off permanent damage to a cow's ability to produce milk.

AAD, which has 33 employees, expects to ship the first Qscout instruments and test cartridges later this month, said CEO Joy Parr Drach. She declined to disclose how much the company plans to charge for the Qscout instrument and test cartridges.

The funding also will be used to complete the development of a second test that is expected to be available for use by dairy farmers later this year, Drach said. That test, which would use the same equipment but different cartridges, would enable rapid detection of a highly contagious pathogen that afflicts dairy cows.

The market for information technology jobs across North Carolina rose for a third consecutive month but continue to lag behind the pace of a year ago, according to new data from the N.C. Technology Association.

The 3,930 IT job postings in March marked a 5.6 percent increase over the February numbers.

"The current job market expansion is part of the seasonal growth pattern we typically see around this time of the year," the report noted.

But it's unlikely that North Carolina employers will post as many job openings this year as they did in 2012, the report added. Indeed, job openings in March were down 30.7 percent from a year ago.

IT job openings in March varied by industry sector. Demand was weak in the defense industry while the financial services sector enjoyed the greatest surge in openings.

The North Carolina market outpaced the national IT job market, which rose 2.3 percent in March compared to Febrary.

The report was prepared for NCTA by SkillPROOF, which focuses on job market data and research.

Caribou Coffee will close its stores on Cary Parkway and at Triangle Town Center in the coming week as part of a broader corporate cutback, employees confirmed on Tuesday.

The Minnesota-based chain plans to close or re-brand almost 30 percent of its more than 600 stores, it announced this week.

In the Triangle, the 4214 NW Cary Parkway location and the Triangle Town Center shop will close on Sunday or Monday, according to local employees.