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The five largest fourth-quarter venture deals in Boston (slide show) 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. (Pictured: Agios CEO David Schenkein) Agios Pharmaceuticals and Rapid7 led the Bay State's venture capital deals in the fourth quarter, and incidentally both announced their big checks on the same day, Nov. 17. Click on the photo on the right to open a slideshow with the full list. Massachusetts companies raised a total of $959 million in VC funding in the quarter, across 93 deals according to CB Insights. That made for the state's best quarter of the year in terms of VC deal count, and the second best by dollars raised (behind the second quarter, when Bay State companies raised $1.14 billion in VC).

Technology. VC Rudina Seseri makes partner at Fairhaven Capital. Courtesy photo. Rudina Seseri has been promoted from principal to partner at Fairhaven Capital in Cambridge. 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. But men vastly outnumber women as senior partners in the VC-dense region that is Greater Boston. Technology. Managing Startups: Best Posts of 2011. Boston's OpenView Venture Partners raises $99M for 3rd VC fund. OpenView Venture Partners 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’s Boston team, led by Maxwell, broke off to found OpenView as an independent firm in 2006. The firm has previously raised two funds — $108.7 million in 2006 and $131.7 million in 2008, Maxwell said.

Massachusetts-based companies in the OpenView portfolio include Zmags (e-commerce software), Open-e (enterprise data storage) and Intronis (cloud backup and recovery). All three were founded outside Massachusetts and moved here after taking funding from OpenView. OpenView doesn't do any seed investing, Maxwell said. Technology. IVP Concludes Successful Year -- Three IPOs and Twelve New Investments. NH's VentureX startup pitch competition launches. 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. The one winner of the 10 finalist teams receives $10,000 in Wasabi Angel Fund seed funding, $20,000 in engineering and product management services from Wasabi Ventures, and a free year of residency at abi Innovation Hub’s WV EDGE Acceleration Center in Manchester.

Wasabi Ventures describes itself as a firm that combines venture capital, startup incubation and consulting. Is venture debt the new venture capital? Tim O'Loughlin, director, Eastward Capital 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? The primary difference between venture debt and venture capital is that debt must be repaid. I can already hear the skeptics squirming in their seats saying, “Whoa!? 1. 2. 3. 6 Google-backed startups in Boston (slideshow) 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. Rich Miner says Boston hasn’t historically been thought of as a place where consumer-oriented tech startups blossom.

But that, he said, “is an outdated sort of view of Massachusetts.” 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.) Click on the photo to the right to open a slideshow and find out more about the companies. The six companies are all consumer-facing, or at least have the potential to be, Miner says. If you aren't getting the new Startups & Venture Capital daily, you can sign up here: Technology. Boston VC news in brief - DataXu, Wicked Good Angels Fund. W. Marc Bernsau DataXu and its CEO, Mike Baker, announced a new digital marketing product for making use of Big Data. 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, led by former Nokia executive Mike Baker as CEO, has raised $30 million in venture financing since its founding in 2009. . • Mike Dreese, the CEO of Newbury Comics, is trying his hand at angel investing. Dreese is managing the Wicked Good Angels Fund, based in Newton, according to state records. Technology. Startup cash crunch? 2 Boston VC perspectives. 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. But in the past year, he thinks it was more like 3,000 — and a "small minority of them will raise follow-on capital. " “I think it’ll be quite extreme," said Greeley, general partner at Boston’s Flybridge Capital. Rob Go of Boston’s NextView Ventures generally agrees with the premise. This is an ongoing discussion, and one that’s been heating up for the past few months. Michael Greeley • Cash contraction. . • M&A. . • The cost of building a company.

Technology. Brown bill would let startups 'crowdfund' a round up to $1M. 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. As you know, and probably don’t want to hear about again (too bad), Scott Brown once raised $1,000 for law school by posing for a Cosmo centerfold.

He also did OK raising money on his Senate campaign. Crowdfunding, recently popularized by Kickstarter, holds that the masses on the web can come together to fund good projects that otherwise wouldn’t get off the ground. Brown’s crowdfunding bill would allow startups to sell up to $1 million worth of securities a year to investors — who are capped at investing $1,000 each — without subjecting the startups to many SEC legal hurdles.

Pallotta's Raptor Ventures makes first venture capital investment. 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. Technology. More U.S. companies eye IPOs in foreign markets. Kyle Alspach, Boston Business Journal 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. Just four venture-backed companies went public in August and September, compared to six in July alone, VentureSource reported. Two of those four were Massachusetts-based firms, however. Ten Massachusetts-based companies are in registration with the U.S. Warren Stephens: Business Regulation vs. Growth—The View from Middle America. The bizarre case of Oak Investment Partners. 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. So I was also surprised to find out this week that Oak is trying to raise yet another fund, in this environment, targeted at $1.5 billion.

Surprised, because the firm has continued to struggle. Meanwhile, a 1999 vintage Oak fund was generating a negative 4.2 percent net IRR as of Sept. 30. Dashboard - SecondMarket. Top Boston Companies on SecondMarket: The Marketplace for Alternative Investments | Bostinnovation: Boston Innovation, Start-ups and Tech News. Boston's largest VC & private equity firms. W. Marc Bernsau No. 5, Battery Ventures: In June, Battery (along with 2010's No. 4 firm, HarbourVest Partners) co-led a $165 million investment in CSN Stores, a Boston-based e-tailer that is behind dozens of successful online home furnishings sites.

The investment will fund CSN's effort to bring forth a new, centralized brand. Co-founders Steve Conine and Niraj Shah (above) continue to lead the company. Click the photo to read more. In this week’s List, the Boston Business Journal research department ranks the 25 largest venture capital and private equity firms in the Boston area, by total amount invested in 2010. The full List is available in this week’s print edition (subscribe). No. 5: Battery Ventures (Waltham). 2010: $189 million invested / 53 dealsInvested in Mass. companies: $21 million / 3 deals No. 4: HarbourVest Partners (Boston). 2010: $203 million / 13 dealsInvested in Mass. companies: N/A No. 3: North Bridge Venture Partners (Boston).

No. 2: Summit Partners (Boston). The 5 biggest venture capital deals in Boston, this July. Zafgen's obesity drug candidate is headed into Phase 2 trials, after the company brought down July's biggest round of venture capital financing for a Massachusetts firm, raising $33 million with Atlas Venture and Third Rock Ventures. Massachusetts companies raised $201.4 million in venture capital across 22 deals disclosed in July, according to a Business Journal tally. Though there were no blockbuster rounds, the month continued the steady pace of new equity financings for startups that characterized the first two quarters of the year. The second quarter saw the Bay State raise $1.3 billion in venture capital across 94 deals, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. It marked the strongest quarter for the state since at least 2007, prior to the recession.

The total figure for venture capital funding for Massachusetts was likely higher in July since some rounds are not disclosed immediately, or at all. The top five venture capital investment rounds during the month: kalspach@bizjournals.com. Highland Capital ID's Summer@Highland teams. Venture firm Highland Capital Partners has kicked off its fourth Summer@Highland program by announcing the 10 university-affiliated startup teams selected to participate. Each team receives $15,000 along with free office space at the Cambridge Innovation Center, Highland’s summer office in the South of Market (SoMa) district of San Francisco, or at Highland’s Entrepreneur Center on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif.

The teams are given access to the Highland team, entrepreneurial mentors and other expert resources. Highland said that more than 225 university-affiliated startups applied for the program. The 10 teams include representatives from Babson College, Boston College, Boston University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Participating startups as described by Highland are: