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The five largest fourth-quarter venture deals in Boston (slide show) - Boston Business Journal
Courtesy | Third Rock Ventures #1. Agios Pharmaceuticals , a Cambridge biotechnology start up focused on developing new cancer treatments. Amount raised: $78 million. Backers: Celgene Corp., ARCH Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures and Third Rock Ventures.
VC Rudina Seseri makes partner at Fairhaven Capital - Boston Business Journal
Cambridge’s Fairhaven Capital has promoted principal Rudina Seseri to partner at the firm, she confirmed Thursday. The promotion is effective Jan. 1, and Seseri will be one of the few women to have reached a senior investment position at a Boston venture capital firm. In a brief phone interview, Seseri said she was “happy and humbled” by the promotion. She joined Fairhaven as a senior associate at its inception, in 2007, and moved up to principal in late 2008. Seseri’s board seats include FashionPlaytes of Beverly and CrowdTwist of New York, and she also co-chairs the New England Venture Association. “Considering my partners’ achievements, I have big shoes to fill,” Seseri said.
Managing Startups: Best Posts of 2011
Here's my compilation of 2011's best posts about managing startups. I assembled similar lists at the end of 2010 and 2009 . Please use comments to suggest additional posts. Happy New Year!The Money Moves That Stood Out Ask any venture capitalist what they're looking for when funding a startup, and without fail they'll say they're looking for a "disruptive," idea, i.e., one that will shake up the status quo. With that in mind, we've turned the tables and looked for venture capitalists that were themselves disruptive in 2011. That doesn't necessarily mean they raised the most money or funded the coolest company.
Five Disruptive Venture Capital Plays Of 2011 - Loot - Portfolio.com
OpenView Venture Partners OpenView Venture Partners Latest from The Business Journals Follow this company has raised $99 million toward its third venture capital fund, the firm reported Thursday, and managing director Scott Maxwell said the firm plans to raise additional funding for it. Boston-based OpenView focuses on backing revenue-producing tech firms that need money for expansion — and often re-locates the companies to the Hub after making the investment. OpenView originated as the Boston office of New York’s Insight Venture Partners Insight Venture Partners Latest from The Business Journals Follow this company . Insight’s Boston team, led by Maxwell, broke off to found OpenView as an independent firm in 2006.
Boston's OpenView Venture Partners raises $99M for 3rd VC fund - Boston Business Journal
Monday, November 21, 2011 Wasabi Ventures, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm with an office in Manchester, N.H., is bringing some attention to the New Hampshire tech startup scene. The firm has launched VentureX – New England , a startup pitch competition to be held Jan. 26, 2012, at the abi Innovation Hub . The competition will award $30,000 to a for-profit tech startup that has raised less than $100,000 in funding and brought in less than $100,000 in revenue in 2010.
NH's VentureX startup pitch competition launches - Mass High Tech Business News
Is venture debt the new venture capital? - Mass High Tech Business News
Entrepreneurs often get confused as to when to raise venture capital versus venture debt. Their confusion is understandable as the terms of venture debt and venture capital converge at the margin and misconceptions abound. Equity is permanent and debt must be repaid, right?
Courtesy | Google Rich Miner, partner at Google Ventures in Cambridge, says West Coast tech titan Google can't ignore what's happening on the Massachusetts startup scene. Miner’s Google Ventures practice in Cambridge is aiming to prove it. The firm, whose LP is Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), has invested in six Massachusetts companies since it began investing here in 2009 (two years after Google launched in Cambridge at Miner’s urging.)
6 Google-backed startups in Boston (slideshow) - Boston Business Journal
It’s all about the data, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman recently told the New York Times. He was talking about the next iteration of the web, and the potential for startups — perhaps like Boston’s DataXu — to become big companies by working with data in novel ways. On Monday, DataXu announced another step in its efforts to do just that. The startup said it has launched a new digital marketing management platform, dubbed DX3, that enables marketers to use Big Data in making “fast, intelligent decisions” to drive sales. DataXu said the platform will provide one centralized console for marketers, which will be powered by the company’s machine learning technology.
Boston VC news in brief - DataXu, Wicked Good Angels Fund - Boston Business Journal
How big of a deal is the oncoming "cash crunch" expected to hit the startup scene? The discussion has been heating up for months. In a typical year, investors seed about 2,000 new startups in the U.S., according to venture capitalist Michael Greeley .
Startup cash crunch? 2 Boston VC perspectives - Boston Business Journal
Brown bill would let startups 'crowdfund' a round up to $1M - Boston Business Journal
Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, who met with entrepreneurs at the Cambridge Innovation Center in June, is now looking to allow startups raise up to $1M through "crowdfunding." Boston entrepreneurs hunting for startup money may get a hand from a guy who knows how to scrape together some cash: Scott Brown . The Massachusetts senator said he plans to lead a Senate effort to legalize “crowdfunding” for startups.Pallotta's Raptor Ventures makes first venture capital investment - Boston Business Journal
The Raptor venture capital fund's first investment is a Florida firm that places advertisements at airport security checkpoints. New Boston-based venture capital fund Raptor Ventures has announced its first investment, into a Florida-based company that places advertising at airport security checkpoints. The size of the round for SecurityPoint Media, which provides trays and carts to the checkpoints that feature display advertisements, was not disclosed. The company is operating at 30 U.S. airports, according to the funding announcement. The Business Journal reported in September that Raptor Ventures had launched inside Boston hedge fund Raptor Capital Management, targeting a $75 million fund raise. Raptor Capital was founded by James Pallotta , a minority owner of the Boston Celtics and a former money manager at Tudor Investment Corp.More U.S. companies eye IPOs in foreign markets - Mass High Tech Business News
Companies seeking to go public, such as Lexington-based GI Dynamics Inc., increasingly looked to overseas markets in the third quarter as volatility in the U.S. stock market became the norm. Five of the 10 U.S. venture-backed companies that completed initial public offerings in the quarter did so on foreign exchanges, Dow Jones VentureSource reported on Monday. That’s compared to the first half of the year, when 25 U.S. companies completed IPOs — all of them on U.S. exchanges. Among the companies looking outside the U.S. was GI Dynamics, a developer of treatments for Type 2 Diabetes and obesity. The company, backed by venture capital firms including Advanced Technology Ventures of Waltham, raised approximately $85 million from its IPO in Australia this month.Warren Stephens: Business Regulation vs. Growth—The View from Middle America - WSJ.com
If we ever expect to restart the American economy, we need to focus our attention on the forgotten middle—that is, "middle market" private and public companies, which are the true growth engines of our economy. There are more than 100,000 of these enterprises, each with annual revenues between $25 million and $1 billion. They deliver 40% of our gross domestic product and employ 32 million people, more than the 500 largest U.S. corporations combined, according to U.S. Census data. And several of today's midsize enterprises will be tomorrow's Fortune 500 companies.The venture capital industry is in a lot of pain, saddled with so much money, it can’t invest it properly. With the Internet boom over, and investors pulling back from supporting venture capital firms , we’ll see a lot of the mediocre VC firms finally die (see our list of the walking dead) . Which brings me to Oak Investment Partners . Almost three years ago, I wrote how Oak Investment Partners had become the largest venture capital firm . Despite a very mediocre track record — it hadn’t made real money for its investors for years — the firm managed to raise $2.56 billion from investors. At the time, I wrote how perplexed I was that its investors would cough up that sort of money.