Roundup, deals, Life Sciences
Brightcove Bonds With AOL, Faces Competition With Akamai; Fidelity Backs EnVivo; Dyax to Sell Up To $50M in Stock; & More Boston-Area Deals News
Rebecca Zacks 11/3/08
If you’re like me, you’re to the point where you can’t focus for more than two sentences without pausing to check FiveThirtyEight.com and Intrade, so I kept the roundup of Boston-area deals short this week.
—Battery Ventures of Waltham, MA, led a $17 million Series B round for Sunnyvale, CA-based ZeroG Wireless, a developer of low-power Wi-Fi chips. Morgenthaler Ventures and Greylock Partners participated in the deal as well.
—Andover, MA-based Helium, an online marketplace for writers, reportedly closed a $17 million Series A financing round and slashed its staff by roughly 30 percent, or 18 people. The cuts were distributed across engineering, customer service, and sales.
—Fairhaven Capital Partners, a spinoff of TD Capital in Cambridge, MA, closed its second investment fund with $250 million—$50 million more than it set out to raise. The firm plans to invest the money in early-stage technologies, as it did with its first fund.
—Newton, MA-based biotech firm Clinical Data (NASDAQ:CLDA) acquired Avalon Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:AVRX)of Germantown, MD, for $10 million.
—Video-hosting firm Brightcove of Cambridge, MA, inked a deal with AOL under which the media giant will manage all of its online video using the new Brightcove 3 platform starting in early 2009.
—Adding a bit of confusion to the digital-video space, one of Brightcove’s major suppliers, its Cambridge neighbor Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) forged an agreement with Microsoft to develop an adaptive streaming system for high-definition video that’s nearly identical to a service that will be included in the Brightcove 3 platform.
—Cambridge, MA-based HealthCare Ventures led a $28 million Series B round of financing for Trevose, PA-based InfaCare Pharmaceuticals. Atlas Venture, Longitude Capital, and FirstMark Capital joined the round.
—Drug developer Dyax (NASDAQ:[DYAX) of Cambridge, MA, inked an agreement under which investment fund Azimuth Opportunity will buy up to $50 million of its common stock over an 18-month period, Dyax reports. The money would help Dyax further the development of its lead drug DX-88 for hereditary angioedema.
—Watertown, MA-based EnVivo Pharmaceuticals, a developer of drugs for Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, reportedly raised $65 million in a Series D venture financing from Boston-based Fidelity Biosciences. Fidelity also bought out all of EnVivo’s other investors, including BCM Technologies, Cogene Ventures, and NeuroVentures Capital, according to the report.
