A Redmond company with ties to two of the largest multinational corporations on the planet has reeled in $10 million. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Heracles Energy raised a $10 million equity financing round on June 29, with the option to bring in $10 million more if milestones are met in the next nine months.

Very little is known about Heracles, though I’ve been able to piece together some information that connects the company to agricultural giant Cargill and energy titan Shell. An SEC filing also suggest that the company is led by Kirt Montague, who served as CEO of Seattle liquid natural gas upstart Prometheus Energy.

It is unclear whether Heracles is a restart of Prometheus, and calls to Montague’s Redmond office were not returned. But whatever they’re up to, it appears that big money is lining up behind them.

Directors and officers listed on SEC documents include Peter Lee and Guitherme Schmidt. Lee and Schmidt are executives at Black River, a Minnesota private equity shop that happens to be a subsidiary of Cargill.

James Sayre, the founder of Cargill Ventures, now a unit of Black River, also is named as a director. He previously led mergers and acquisitions for Cargill, a food and agricultural producer with 160,000 employees in 67 countries.

Also listed as a director is Jose Alberto-Lima, with an address of One Shell Plaza Houston, Texas. Lima once served as president of Shell Gas & Power, though very little current information could be found about the executive.

Edgar Kuipers, an executive at Kenda Capital, an investment firm which runs the Shell Technology Ventures Fund, also is a director.

As the head of Prometheus, Montague made some waves a few years ago for promising to create a cheap way to produce liquid natural gas from waste gases at landfills.

The company raised $20 million in 2006, and then a few months later started trading on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment market.

After that, Prometheus kind of fell off the map. (Here’s the last press release I could find, which ties the company to Black River). The company’s Web site is still operating, and a message on the site from May indicates that it recently moved to 8411 154th Ave. N.E. in Redmond.

Interestingly, that’s the same address for Heracles Energy.

Cascadia Capital, a Seattle investment bank, was listed as the agent on the $10 million deal for Heracles. Michael Butler, managing director of Cascadia, declined to comment. 

[Flickr photo via ArbyReed]

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and Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft, now can you fix my computer?  

The official @Microsoft account on Twitter stirred to life Wednesday, but so far the company’s foray into microblogging is less interesting than the response to it. The move is getting lots of attention, positive and negative, and Twitter users are taking the opportunity to publicly let Microsoft know it has some glitches in its software — you know, just in case it wasn’t aware.

"Now that you’re finally on here @microsoft let’s talk about all my problems with Outlook. Cool?" writes Geoff Peterson.

"Live Hotmail Mobile log in site has a bug which prevents access on Cricket flashed HTC Mogul Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro smartphone," chimes in John King, apparently hoping for some sort of fix.

Um, yeah, good luck with that.

The four people behind Microsoft’s new Twitter account are from corporate communications, not customer service. That, and the broad scope of the company, means we’re unlikely to see them responding to an individual Twitter user about a problem with a printer driver, for example. In other words, this does not appear to be Microsoft’s version of Comcast’s Twitter initiative.

As of late Wednesday, the new Microsoft account had three posts — one pointing to a new feature, one to a new product, and another to a positive review of Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

At the same time, many individual Microsoft product groups, such as the Windows team, already have their own Twitter accounts. Their narrower focus at least gives them a shot at addressing issues raised on Twitter by people who use their products.

Microsoft also added selected Twitter search results to Bing. At the very least, it’s clear this Twitter thing has gotten Microsoft’s attention.

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