She started her career as a management consultant, but Aubrie Pagano says she always knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur. And she was particularly energized by fashion.

So Pagano spent her free hours assisting local Boston designer Emily Muller in launching her collection, in exchange for the opportunity to get some firsthand experience in the independent fashion design space. There she discovered that designers face a particular challenge—one that would eventually inspire Pagano to create the e-commerce startup Zoora.

“Its hard for independent designers to scale because there’s a discovery issue,” says Pagano. “[Muller] has a great website buts nobody goes to it.”

And as a shopper, Pagano says she’s felt like she’s had to settle for a piece of clothing that just isn’t quite right. Women like her are the perfect customer base for independent designers, she says.

“Something that a lot of people don’t know about independent designers is that they’re really flexible,” Pagano says.

Just last Monday, Pagano opened the Zoora website to the public, to offer women clothing that they can customize to best fit their measurements and taste. Her hope is that the women who feel underserved by traditional retail will bring independent designers the traffic—and business—they so desperately need.

Zoora joins a booming cluster of Boston companies in the space of mass customization, where e-commerce platforms allow shoppers to select and tailor products to better fit their preferences. As my colleague Greg has pointed out previously, these companies offer shoppers personalized jewelry (Gemvara), bags (F. Rock), girls clothing (FashionPlaytes), men’s dress shirts (Boston’s Blank Label and Proper Cloth in New York), and even bras (Zyrra).

Pagano started working on Zoora (a name inspired by “misura,” the Italian word for measurement) last spring, and made hiring a head buyer her first move. Since then, the company has enlisted about a dozen designers (including Muller) to sell garments on the site with options for customization. Another designer is Althea Harper, a former contestant on the Lifetime show Project Runway. (Worth noting, New York fashion tech startup Send the Trend has Project Runway veteran and winner Christian Siriano on staff.)

The customizations to Zoora garments fall into two baskets, says Pagano: “made-to-measure adjustments” and “ready-to-wear tweaks.” With the first category, customers input their specific measurements, which designers take into account to create a garment that’s a perfect fit. With “ready-to-wear tweaks,” meanwhile, garments come in standard sizes, but offer different options for elements like fabric, necklines, sleeves, and hem length.

The Zoora team now consists of … Next Page »

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Plans for IPOs and venture funding dominated the New England deals news this week.

—A new seed fund, backed by venture firm New Enterprise Associates and hosted by Harvard, came out of the woodwork last week. The Experiment Fund will invest up to $250,000 in seed funding in selected startups, with a focus on technologies that come out of Cambridge, MA. The news broke just a few days ahead of Facebook—the one that got away—revealing its plans to go public.

—Radius Health, a Cambridge-based startup working on treatments for osteoporosis, filed paperwork indicating its plans to raise as much as $86 million in an initial public offering.

—A PricewaterhouseCoopers and National Venture Capital Association report shows a mixed picture for life sciences investing in 2011, my colleague Arlene reported. Biotech companies raised $4.7 billion, showing a 22 percent increase over 2010, but the deal volume for the sector dropped 9 percent to 446 transactions. Medical devices companies also showed an increase in funding dollars but a drop in number of deals.

—Cambridge-based Brightcove set the price range of its initial public offering at $10 to $12 per share, according to an amended filing with the SEC. The video hosting startup plans to sell 5 million shares, and give underwriters the option to purchase another 750,000 shares. Brightcove first filed paperwork last August indicating it intended to raise $50 million in an IPO.

—Synchroneuron of Waltham, MA, nabbed $6 million in Series A funding from Morningside Technology Ventures. The startup is developing treatments for movement disorders such as tardive dyskinesia.

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News of FDA drug approvals shone the spotlight on some New England biotechs this week.

—Waltham, MA-based Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) and San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals(NASDAQ: AMLN) won FDA approval for their injectable diabetes drug exenatide once-weekly (Bydureon). This was their third time seeking clearance for the drug, which uses technology from Alkermes to last long enough in the bloodstream to turn it into a once-weekly injection

—Additionally, the FDA cleared a drug developed by Lexington, MA-based Curis and its partner Genentech as treatment for a common form of skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma. The drug, vismodegib (Erivedge), is the first approved product for Curis.

—They say good news comes in threes. Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals also got a faster-than-expected FDA OK to start selling its drug ivacaftor (Kalydeco) as a treatment for a rare form of cystic fibrosis. That’s the second drug approval for Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX), which also sells a treatment for hepatitis C. Bonnie Ramsey, one of the key people involved in developing the drug, talked to my colleague Luke about the implications of the approval.

—But there was some bad news, too: A week after reporting data that its pancreatic cancer treatment saridegib (IPI-926) showed some success in a small study, Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) halted a bigger, mid-stage clinical trial of the drug when it showed patients were living longer in the placebo group. The Cambridge, MA-based company’s shares fell more than 30 percent after the news last Friday.

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Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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This week’s deal news covered a breadth of sectors: biotech, medical devices, mobile applications, software, and robotics. Not to mention a major venture capital fund raise.

—Waltham, MA-based drugmaker Avila Therapeutics was bought by New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) for $350 million, with as much as another $575 million available in milestones. Avila is a maker of “covalent” drugs that are designed to shut down the activity of disease-causing proteins for a prolonged period of time.

—Verastem, a young Cambridge, MA-based biotech working on drugs targeting cancer stem cells, completed its initial public offering, led by UBS and Leerink Swann. The IPO (5.5 million shares sold at $10 apiece) represented a strong showing among investors, as Verastem originally indicated it planned to sell 4.5 million shares priced between $9 and $11 each. The underwriters have a 30-day option to buy another 825,000 shares.

—Burlington, MA-based ConforMIS, a maker of knee implant systems, raised $89 million in a Series E funding from private equity investors and government investment funds abroad. The company said it will put the money toward sales, manufacturing, and expansion of its technology.

—Co3 Systems, a maker of data loss management software, received new funding from Fairhaven Capital. The Cambridge, MA-based startup said it will put the money (whose sum was undisclosed) toward sales, marketing, and engineering.

—Malborough, MA-based medical device startup Navilyst Medical will be acquired by Albany, NY-based AngioDynamics (NASDAQ: ANGO) in a transaction valued at $372 million, based on the company’s $14.20 per share closing stock price Monday. Navilyst, which focuses on … Next Page »

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The blow from getting a higher-than-expected bill from someone like your lawyer could be softened it if came attached to a 60-second video message explaining the special things he or she actually did in detail.

At least, that’s what Dave McLaughlin thinks—and he’s building his new startup Vsnap around the idea.

McLaughlin has been around the block before as an entrepreneur. He co-founded the mobile payments startup Fig Card, which was acquired by eBay last spring. Coincidentally, the 2011 application deadline for MassChallenge fell on the day that acquisition closed, so McLaughlin hurriedly finished the paperwork for the startup accelerator—and nabbed a spot. He’s also joined at Vsnap by chief technical officer Claudia Santoro, former vice president of engineering for the restaurant-focused software startup Exit41.

Vsnap didn’t take home one of the MassChallenge checks in October, but it’s now pulling in early customers—like Suffolk University and Schering Plough’s alumni association—to test out its alpha product and is readying itself to introduce its beta product sometime in February.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Users log into the Vsnap interface, record a 60-second video using their phone or computer camera, add descriptions, and can add attachments such as PDF files or Web URLs. Vsnap sends the package out through e-mail. Users can also record a video “signature” about themselves that will accompany all the messages they send. Currently the technology can be accessed via a Web browser, but Vsnap is developing iPhone and Android apps as part of the beta release.

The customer target for Vsnap is “any industry that has a low conversion rate but a higher price point,” says Joe Nigro, business development manager at the startup. That’s because lower priced products and services typically e-mail and communicate thousands of customers at once, and video messaging that many recipients could land you in a spam folder pretty quickly.

Vsnap was first thought up to fulfill a personal need, says McLaughlin. His cousin, Jim Joyce, lives in Ireland and is from the U.S., while his wife’s family lives in Italy. He started shooting video snapshots of his kids to send to his family in different time zones. When Fig Card sold, McLaughlin decided to join his cousin on this new idea rather than move on to PayPal, he says. Vsnap still offers a free consumer service, but business messaging has become its focus.

Vsnap is currently developing its pricing model, which will vary depending on the number of Vsnaps a user sends and their access to Vsnap analytics. The analytics can measure things like if and when the recipients viewed the video and how they interacted with the attachments. Currently, recipients of the video message have to view the video message in a separate link, but Vsnap is working with PowerInbox, another local startup, to build out the capabilities for video viewing right in the e-mail inbox.

Vsnap recently nabbed a $40,000 investment from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. MTDC had previously said it … Next Page »

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Burlington, MA-based ConforMIS, a medical device company with a newly FDA approved knee replacement system, announced today that it has secured $89 million in a Series E investment.

The money comes from London-based AGC Equity Partners, New York-based Axel Johnson, government investment funds from Asia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as other private equity funds in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East. ConforMIS raised $50 million in Series D financing in July 2009 from sovereign funds of Kuwait and Singapore, and private equity investors such as Aeris Capital of Zurich, Switzerland, and Palo Alto, CA. CEO Philipp Lang says many of the startup’s return backers participated in the newest funding round.

Lang noted that the Series E investors are largely private equity investors focused on public transactions, meaning that if the time comes, they could invest the amount they did in the Series E in an initial public offering. So, is an IPO in the works for ConforMIS?

“This fundraise is very execution focused,” says Lang. “[An IPO] is not the primary objective for us right now.”

Last year, the FDA approved ConforMIS’s patient-specific, total knee replacement system, which Lang says is the first of its kind. The company, founded in 2004, originally sold patient-specific partial knee replacements. Lang says that the FDA approval of its newest system opens up a huge market for the company, as total knee replacements make up 90 percent of the roughly 700,000 knee replacement surgeries that occur each year in the U.S. ConforMIS plans to expand its technology this year to develop implants for another joint, Lang says.

ConforMIS also plans to use the new funding to expand its sales force in the U.S. and abroad to support the new market opportunity. It is planning to move the manufacturing of the implants in-house, and is in the process of looking for a new site in Massachusetts for that purpose. It currently manufactures personalized surgical instruments that go along with the knee implants. ConforMIS has 200 employees in Massachusetts, but that number is “going to increase significantly” in the next year as a result of this expansion, Lang says.

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It was a busy news week in the New England life sciences scene, with acquisitions, clinical data, and partnership deals.

—Thanks to a new co-promotion deal, Genzyme will begin marketing a diagnostic test for thyroid cancer developed by South San Francisco-based Veracyte. Genzyme, the Cambridge, MA-based unit of Sanofi (NYSE: SNY) makes a common drug for treating the disease.

—Cambridge-based Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) presented data from a 16-patient study indicating saridegib, its experimental once-daily pill, could potentially shrink tumors and help people live longer when combined with chemotherapy.

—Millennium, also of Cambridge, nabbed FDA clearance to begin selling a version of the multiple myeloma drug bortezomib (Velcade) that can be injected just under the skin, as well as intravenously. It’s significant because the under-the-skin drug seems to be more tolerable, reducing the drug’s side effect of nerve damage in the fingers and toes.

—Xconomy national biotech editor Luke Timmerman wrote about how Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) and its South San Francisco-based partner Alios Biopharma are positioning themselves to defend their share of the hot growing market for hepatitis C treatments.

—And my colleague Arlene wrote about the family-run business that is Woburn, MA-based Courtagen Life Sciences. Three brothers fill the roles of CEO, president, and chief scientific officer, while their dad chairs the board. Read about more about how it all came together.

—Bedford, MA-based Avila Therapeutics, a maker of so-called covalent drugs for treating cancer, was bought by New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) for $350 million upfront. Potentially $575 million more could come to Avila through milestones. The startup’s venture investors included Polaris Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, Abingworth Management, and Advent Venture Partners. Check out investors’ and friends’ reactions to the deal across the Web here.

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Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … Next Page »

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An acquisition and startup financings made up the New England deals news this week.

—Waltham, MA-based marketing software firm Constant Contact acquired the Boston startup CardStar, the developer of a mobile app for customer loyalty and rewards programs. The deal, whose terms were undisclosed, enables Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT) to expand its marketing offerings for small businesses.

—My colleague Greg rounded up the top 10 venture deals in the Boston area from the fourth quarter of 2011. Rapid7, Warp Drive Bio, and Agios Pharmaceuticals were at the top.

—Hewlett-Packard has spent more than $10 million to set up a new office near the Alewife train station in Cambridge, MA. The office serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the big data company HP acquired last winter (previously based in Billerica). The new facility will also serve as a center for technology development and local outreach.

—Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge-based startup focused on understanding social media conversation surrounding TV, nabbed $12 million in Series B financing. The deal was led by Time Warner Investments, and included new investor SoftBank Capital and return backers Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures. Bluefins says it will put the money toward sales and client services, as well as its social analytics technology and further R&D.

—Mevion Medical Systems, a radiation therapy company based in Littleton, MA, announced it had pulled in $45 million in funding from ProQuest Investments and existing investors Caxton Heath Life Sciences, Venrock, and CHL Medical Partners. The money will go toward development of its proton beam radiation therapy system, which is designed to be smaller and less expensive than existing X-ray radiation therapy devices.

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Boston has no place for “serious, venture-backed startups” to grow from five employees to 25 employees, akin to San Francisco’s RocketSpace, or New York City’s General Assembly, says Mark Kasdorf.

Enter Intrepid Labs, the co-working space he recently established in the former digs of another co-working space (Dogpatch Labs) at 222 Third Street near Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.

Intrepid Labs comes as the answer to a problem Kasdorf himself was facing. His mobile development company Intrepid Pursuits started with three people in the co-working unit (C3) of the Cambridge Innovation Center around the spring of 2010. It grew pretty quickly to eight people, so was kicked out of the C3. The building gave them an attractive “transition” rate to move into the more grownup office space, says Kasdorf, but they outgrew that, too, hitting about 15 employees last fall.

“We had to get real office space, which was more expensive than we could afford as a bootstrapped consulting company,” Kasdorf says. “As we started digging into commercial real estate, we realized how bad it is for startups.”

The Boston area has its share of coffeehouse-style co-working spaces for pre-seed companies with a few employees, but nothing for the more mature (revenues, funded, five employees and up) crowd, says Kasdorf. Traditional office spaces require three-year leases, a time period in which a lot could change for a startup, says Kasdorf. They also require companies to get their own furniture, printers and scanner, and the like. “This whole litany of things that CIC had been offering to us became obvious, but it was still really expensive,” Kasdorf says

In October he started checking out other office space in The American Twine Office Park at 222 Third Street, and saw the vacant fourth floor. “We walk in here and I’m blown away,” he says. “Everything about it screams, ‘This would be a fun place to work.’”

Inspired by General Assembly, he signed a lease for three years, with the intent of creating a co-working space for growing startups like his. Kasdorf and his team moved in during November. While Intrepid Labs has the long lease it originally wanted to avoid, it’s subletting to other startups on a month-to-month basis. So what about that big expense? Kasdorf says it is pre-paying some of the rent, while the “landlord has taken a real interest in what we’re doing and is really flexible with us.”

For startup tenants, a dedicated desk costs … Next Page »

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The vast majority of mobile applications in the marketplace aren’t coming from well-established businesses, but experimental developers. The apps can even accrue a good user following, but those developers don’t exactly have the skills or desire to build a business around their creations.

“It’s laughable how many times I’ve heard, ‘I didn’t get into this to answer support requests,’” says entrepreneur Jonathan Kay.

Kay is the chief operating officer and co-founder of Apptopia, a Cambridge, MA-based startup developing a marketplace that condenses the droves of similar, one-off app projects and puts them in the hands of people looking to turn them into real moneymakers. It looks like the lovechild of eBay and a Web domain brokerage, with hints of a mobile strategy consultancy.

As you can imagine, buying and selling source code for mobile applications is just a bit more complex than auctioning off your used electronics. “I’m spending more time than I’ve ever wanted to with lawyers,” says Kay, who I caught up with this week.

The company is the brainchild of co-founder Eliran Sapir, who jumped on early iPhone trends to create the mobile app GPush, which created push notifications for Gmail on the iPhone. Despite the paid app’s popularity in the iTunes app store, Sapir couldn’t quite figure what business to sell it to for an exit, Kay says. But he kept thinking about the problem, and later toyed with the idea of creating a mobile app brokerage while entrepreneur in residence at Cambridge-based Greatpoint Ventures. Last fall, Sapir connected with the boisterous Kay—a former brand evangelist for local startup the Grasshopper Group—and left the venture firm to work on Apptopia full time.

Apptopia’s first step is to formulate a target price range for app developers to sell at, using market knowledge and algorithms. Developers then must give Apptopia access to their apps that enables the startup to gather accurate, objective data on performance, user base, and other information that will inform prospective buyers.

“Much like in eBay, we provide a professional middle ground where a buyer and a seller can actually negotiate,” Kay says.

Sellers can list their apps to be purchased for a fixed price within that suggested range or set up an auction with a minimum starting point.

Connecting buyer and seller is just part of the challenge, though, says Kay. Apptopia continues to oversee that payment and transition process, and has developed contracts with lawyers outlining the details of the agreement.

“If you put the app up, you legally are bound to send us the source code,” says Kay of the developer responsibilities. Sellers also have to agree not to … Next Page »

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“Money is money, anyone can do that,” says Brian Zimmerman, managing director of Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners.

Go on.

“We have this idea of providing real value to our portfolio companies. If we’re going to call ourselves partners, we really need to be partners.” he says. Plenty of venture capitalists say they like to take that partner approach to their investments. But OpenView is backing that statement up with staff and infrastructure dedicated to sales growth and more.

That comes in the form of what the venture firm calls OpenView Labs. At first mention, OpenView Labs sounds like it would be the name for an incubator arm at the firm. But, as my colleague Greg has written, OpenView brands itself as an “expansion-stage” venture firm, eyeing investments in the more complex business-to-business and cloud computing software spaces. Its target companies already have annual sales between $2 million and $20 million, so, no, its Labs aren’t about helping young mobile or consumer software startups develop their technology or roll out a beta version of their product. Instead the unit is focused on helping its startups tackle the more grown up challenges of recruiting and hiring talent, identifying key markets, and generating sales leads.

To that end, the company has four full-time recruiters, who have filled about 100 jobs across OpenView’s portfolio companies in the last few years, says Zimmerman, who oversees the Labs operation. The goal is to fill another 200 this year.

We said the OpenView Labs is past helping startups toy with their technology. But sales and marketing strategy are another story. Startups at the expansion stage need to work in refining exactly which market their targeting as their customer base, says Zimmerman.

“They’ll say, ‘we sell to small businesses.’ That’s not enough,” he says. So Labs has an entire research and analytics team focused honing and refining exactly which sub-markets and customer segments portfolio companies should be targeting. It starts with Internet research and goes all the way through calling and surveying customers in the potential markets, says Zimmerman.

Once the Labs gets the companies primed with staff and a market to go after, it helps them build their marketing message around those customers, and then find specific sales leads. That third component is what Zimmerman calls the Labs’ “go-to-market” team.

Zimmerman puts companies in three categories: startup (figuring out the technology and idea), expansion (building revenue and refining a target market), and growth (preparing for an exit). “We’re focused on everything it takes for … Next Page »

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Web startups, venture firms, life sciences companies, and a biofuels developer rounded out the deals news this week.

—Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures announced it had closed a $270 million fund, surpassing the $250 million it had originally targeted for its fourth fund.

—Extreme Reach, a Needham, MA-based startup developing cloud storage technology for delivering video ads to TV and Web publishers, said it closed a $9 million credit line from TD Bank. The startup also acquired commercial talent rights management and payment firm Spotlight Business Affairs, in a deal that enables Extreme Reach’s ad distribution system to be in compliance with existing talent and rights agreements.

—Massachusetts regained the number two spot for venture funding and deals in the fourth quarter of 2011, with $959 million invested in 93 transactions, according to a report from the data firm CB Insights. Nationally, venture dollars and deals had their strongest showing in a decade, at $30.6 billion invested in 3,051 deals.

—Cambridge-based Constellation Pharmaceuticals inked a drug development deal with Roche’s Genentech unit that’s worth $95 million in an upfront payment and three years of research support. It’s also eligible for milestone payments and royalties on the products that could potentially result from the deal.

—Bedford, MA-based Joule Unlimited announced it had pulled in $70 million in financing from the aforementioned Flagship Ventures and other new and existing investors whose identities it did not reveal. The money will go to a New Mexico facility that Joule hopes will demonstrate its ability to scale its technology for producing fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide.

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Yesterday Bob told you about a special report we put together by canvassing the Xconomists—some of the world’s leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors—for their thoughts on what students should study to be prepared for the future.

Well, the report is now live, here, with 22 thought-provoking responses. Computing, the scientific method, culture, Chinese, and how to start something are among the areas Xconomists think students can learn to be prepared for a rapidly evolving economy. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, so be sure to delve into the full report to see what innovators like Vinod Khosla, David Baltimore, Lisa Suennen, Robert Langer, and Desh Deshpande have to say on the subject.

And we’d like you to chime in, so please share your answer to the question: What should students be studying now to prepare for 10 years from now?

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Joule Unlimited, a biofuels startup located in Bedford, MA, announced today that it has pocketed $70 million in financing to put toward a facility underway in Hobbs, NM, that will demonstrate Joule’s process for converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuels such as diesel and ethanol.

The new money brings Joule’s funding total to more than $110 million, and comes from founding Joule investor Flagship Ventures, as well as new and existing investors whose identities were not disclosed. Joule will also use the new funding for its technology development and global expansion, according to the announcement. In April 2010, Joule raised $30 million in second-round funding from Flagship and other institutional investors.

The Hobbs, NM, site is expected to be up and running later this year, and is designed to demonstrate how Joule’s technology could scale up to thousands of acres for commercial production. Joule now has 11 patents, covering technology such as  an engineered bacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide, and a method for producing ethanol at high volumes and high efficiencies.

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Development deals, clinical advances, startup funding, and new hires made up the New England life sciences news this week.

—Chelsea, MA-based Civitas Therapeutics, a spinout from the Waltham, MA, biotech Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS), said that its inhaled form of the Parkinson’s disease drug L-dopa performed well in a Phase 1 clinical trial. The study aimed to test the drug’s safety and whether the drug’s delivery to the lungs gets it into the bloodstream in levels that produce a therapeutic outcome.

—Serial biotech entrepreneurs Bob Langer (of MIT) and Omid Farokhzad (of Harvard Medical School) have founded their newest company, Blend Therapeutics, alongside MIT professor Stephen Lippard. Blend is reportedly backed by Flagship Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and NanoDimension.

—Cambridge-based genomics analysis startup Knome named former NormOxys CEO Martin Tolar its new chief executive and landed a new contract from Johns Hopkins University.

—Watertown, MA-based Forma Therapeutics announced a cancer drug discovery partnership with Johnson & Johnson’s (NYSE: JNJ) Janssen Biotech, worth up to $700 million over time. That’s less than a week after Forma’s $65 million partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim was announced.

—Warp Drive Bio came out of the woodwork this week with $125 million in funding, and hopes to examine the genetic makeup of plants, animals, and other organisms to find hot new drugs. Cambridge-based Warp is backed by Boston firm Third Rock Ventures, Greylock Partners, and French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, and has an elite roster of founders, including Harvard genomics expert George Church.

—Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures surpassed its initial $250 million expectation for its fourth fund, announcing the fund closed at $270 million. It will focus on investments in the life sciences and cleantech sectors.

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Boston area software and life sciences startups are starting off the new year right with a slew of financing, acquisitions, and partnerships news.

—Marlborough, MA-based Physicians Interactive Holdings received a $17 million pledge from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund to develop Web and mobile apps for connecting physicians and life sciences companies.

—Repeat biotech entrepreneurs Bob Langer and Omid Farokhzad founded a new startup, called Blend Therapeutics, along with Stephen Lippard. Blend is backed by $2.8 million from Flagship Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and NanoDimension, according a FierceBiotech report.

—Last Friday saw a number of financings, some for quirkily named startups: $4 million more for Cambridge-based GrabCAD and $4.5 million for Cambridge-based Krush, $6 million for Boston- and Nashville-based Moontoast, $8.3 million for Linkwell Health, and $4 million for Novogy.

—Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, acquired Threepress, a Boston area company focused on digital publishing tools. The price tag of the deal wasn’t disclosed.

—Woburn, MA-based LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM), which makes remote access and customer support software, paid $16.5 million to acquire Kansas-based Bold Software, a developer of technology for live-chat systems and click-to-call customer service.

—A cluster of area digital marketing startups inked deals: Newton, MA-based Neolane raised $27 million, Boston-based … Next Page »

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For almost two years, Pyxis Mobile has been restructuring its business to sell platforms for mobile app development, but was lacking the capital to make the switch official, says CEO Steven Levy. That’s over now, with Waltham, MA-based Pyxis announcing today that it has socked away $17 million in new funding and has rebranded as Verivo Software. The deal was led by new investor Commonwealth Capital and included previous Pyxis investors Ascent Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital.

Verivo is taking the mobile app-building platform from Pyxis, which previously created and sold apps to customers in the financial services industry. But around 2010 the company realized that the “platform had more value than the apps,” says Levy, who joined Pyxis in July 2010. Selling platforms for enterprise app development has become a popular business model for mobile startups in Boston and beyond.

“The new business is focused on entirely platform; we secured the capital to really go ahead and pursue this plan aggressively,” he says.

Verivo plans to sell its technology as tools to large and small companies, like grocery stores, that are looking to add a mobile component to their business. The platform is designed to help them build applications that will run on different mobile operating systems, and also address problems that are specifically related to enterprise-level applications, like syncing back-end data, meeting corporate IT requirements for security, and quickly adapting to changes in mobile devices and operating systems.

“We want to solve the problem of helping those businesses go from an idea they have in enterprise mobility to it impacting their bottom line as quickly and as easily as possible,” says Levy.

And what about the financial services companies that were using the apps Pyxis built for them? They always had access to the platform their apps were built on, but often couldn’t use its full line of features because their individual IT departments didn’t recognize it on the platform level. The Verivo rebrand allows its clients to tap into these more fully, says Levy.

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[Updated 1/11/12 5:15 pm. See below.] “Sermo has been my baby, my blood and tears,” its former CEO Daniel Palestrant told me in a phone call last week.

So it was pretty shocking last week when news surfaced that the founder of the Cambridge, MA-based online community for doctors was moving onto a new Web startup, along with Sermo chief medical officer Adam Sharp. It wasn’t always going to be that way, Palestrant said, but more on that later.

Par8o, the new startup, began as a research project within Sermo. Drawing on the insights of its large online physician community (more than 130,000 people strong now), Sermo had formed the opinion a few years ago that the healthcare bill would not achieve its goals of improving patient care and lowering costs, Palestrant said. Among other things, the community thought the bill (signed into law March 2010) needed greater reform to medical malpractice policy and ways to improve patient engagement.

The research team at Sermo hypothesized that to achieve these goals, what’s needed is “the introduction of Pareto dynamics,” where efficiency is created through better matching supply and demand, said Palestrant. The idea comes from the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.

So what exactly does that look like and how can a new health Web startup help? Palestrant explains that in Par8o’s case, it’s about improving the patient referral process. Referrals, he said, are “a critical moment in a patient’s healthcare journey, either a change in diagnosis or an escalation in care.”

Often, this means the general practitioner sees a new health problem in a patient and needs to bring in a specialist to really tackle it, said Palestrant. That should work fine, right? Not exactly, according to Palestrant. Of the tens of millions of patient referrals per year, somewhere between 20 percent and 40 percent never actually result in another appointment or handoff to a new doctor. “The patient never … Next Page »

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