Intralase Corp

IntraLase Corp., an Irvine developer of laser technology for vision correction, said Thursday that it has completed its largest financing round to date by raising a total of $22 million. InterWest Partners led the financing for privately held IntraLase, investing $12 million, and Domain Associates LLC invested $6 million. The rest was provided by several others, including prior investors EDF Ventures and Brentwood Venture Capital.

IntraLase Corp., an Irvine developer of laser technology for vision correction, said Thursday that it has completed its largest financing round to date by raising a total of $22 million. InterWest Partners led the financing for privately held IntraLase, investing $12 million, and Domain Associates LLC invested $6 million. The rest was provided by several others, including prior investors EDF Ventures and Brentwood Venture Capital.

Orange County's fledgling businesses garnered a record amount of venture capital funds last year, and the money should continue to flow in. Investors poured $538 million into 72 county start-ups in 1999, nearly double the 1998 total, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Data firm Venture Economics, using a different method for calculating this funding, put the figure at more than $1 billion.

Santa Ana-based Advanced Medical Optics Inc. offered more than $4 billion Thursday for larger rival Bausch & Lomb Inc., topping a previous bid from private equity firm Warburg Pincus. Bausch & Lomb's annual revenue of $2.3 billion is more than double that of Advanced Medical Optics, which has been on an aggressive buying spree to expand its reach.

Eye-care products maker Advanced Medical Optics Inc. of Santa Ana withdrew its month-old bid for rival Bausch & Lomb Inc. on Wednesday, saying it faced unrealistic demands to show that its shareholders supported the deal. In a sharply worded letter to Rochester, N.Y.-based Bausch & Lomb's board of directors, Advanced Medical Optics Chief Executive James V. Mazzo said, "if, in the future, you decide to run a process that is designed to deliver value to your shareholders, please let us know."

The country's leading maker of Lasik eye surgery equipment hopes that a deal it announced Monday will make the vision correction procedure more popular with consumers. Lasik eye surgeries -- which can cost thousands of dollars and usually aren't covered by insurance -- grew in popularity during the 1990s but slowed amid the 2001 recession. The numbers are slowly rising again, but some patients are skittish about having blades inserted into their eyes, experts say.

Advanced Medical Optics Inc., seeking to become the nation's leading provider of eye-care treatments, may need to scale back its growth ambitions after a large-scale recall of one of its bestselling products, analysts said Tuesday. The Santa Ana-based company, spun off in 2002 from Irvine-based Allergan Inc., might do well to focus on the recall and rethink its bid for much bigger rival Bausch & Lomb Inc., analysts said.