Just when I thought venture deals, especially for software and tech companies, had headed south for the winter (or longer), the Northwest erupted with a slew of financings in the past week.

—But first, some serious biotech. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $30 million Series B round for Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based stem cell company with ties to the University of Washington, as Luke reported. Existing investors Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates also participated in the funding, as well as three strategic corporate investors—Astellas Venture Management and Genzyme Ventures were named.

—Seattle-based DocuSign, a maker of software to automate and control the process of electronic signatures, received a strategic investment from Second Century Ventures, the VC fund of the National Association of Realtors. The funding amount was undisclosed, but the money will be used to accelerate and extend DocuSign’s efforts with real estate customers.

—Beaverton, OR-based Avnera pulled in an $8 million equity round from undisclosed investors, according to a regulatory filing. The company’s previous investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures, Intel Capital, and DAG Ventures. Avnera was founded in 2004, and designs novel chips for wireless audio applications.

—Seattle stealth startup Doxo raised $5.25 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing and media reports. The investors were not disclosed, but David Feinleib of Mohr Davidow Ventures was listed on the SEC form as a director.

—Bellevue, WA-based Enroute Systems, a developer of software that helps companies manage their parcel-shipping logistics, closed a Series A funding round worth $810,000 from Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society, Puget Sound Venture Club, and angel investors. Next up, Enroute is looking …Next Page »

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Well, this does nothing to change the downward trend of early-stage software financings, but it’s good news nonetheless. Seattle-based Redfin, the online real estate broker and information discovery service, has announced a $10 million Series D funding, led by new investor Greylock Partners, the Silicon Valley venture firm formerly based in the Boston area. Existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital, and The Hillman Company also participated in the round, which brings Redfin’s total funding to $30.8 million.

Redfin says it will use the cash “to scale its infrastructure for delivering extremely high levels of customer service, to expand into new markets and to invest in research and development.”

By most accounts, the company has had a very strong year, even as the real estate market has contracted and valuations have fallen. Redfin has generated its first profits, shipped what it says is the highest-rated iPhone app for real estate, and increased its website visits by more than 200 percent.

Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s CEO, talked about the significance of the new funding, and hinted at a goal of taking the company public. “Greylock’s experience developing some of the Internet’s most recognized consumer brands as well as its appetite for building large-scale public companies are a perfect fit for our ambitions,” Kelman said in a statement. “We believe that our ability to invest in technology and our consumer-first commitment give us a shot at reinventing a very fragmented, sales-driven real estate industry.”

Redfin was founded in 2002 and serves home buyers and sellers with real-estate listings, maps, analytics, tax records, and other information. Besides Seattle, it has operations in California, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington DC, and other metro areas. Redfin recently rolled out a new version of its website, which includes near-real-time data and photos of recent home sales, as well as links to blog discussions of listings, all on a national scale.

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Seattle-based Redfin announced today its iPhone app has been approved by Apple and is now available for download. The software lets you search for real estate information, driven by Google Maps. It also lets you take photos and notes if you’re on a house tour, and automatically uploads the data to your Redfin.com account to help you keep track of it.

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I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 WTIA Tech Showcase Fast Pitch Forum yesterday. I was one of four panelists tasked with listening, reacting, and asking questions of the 23 Seattle-area companies that each had eight minutes to present. The day was divided up into six one-hour-long sessions, and I’m ashamed to admit I missed the last two sessions because I had some other meetings in Bellevue that I had to attend. However, after listening to 16 companies spread over four sessions, my brain was overflowing with new info and thoughts, so I’m not sure how much value I would have added during the final two sessions.

In a nutshell, I was very impressed by both the content and the form of the presentations. The presenters did a great job of condensing their pitch into exactly eight minutes. What also struck me was that despite the slow economic times, most of the companies were doing well in the marketplace. All of them had growing customer bases and rising revenue, and many of them were hiring.

It is a hackneyed phrase, but it is true—economic downturns are often the best times to build a startup company. In the chaos and confusion of turbulent times, there always lies opportunity. As industries change and contract, the marketplace is ripe for new solutions. Because despite the negative headlines in the media, people are still going about their daily activities and living their lives, and there will always be opportunities for new products and services, and for new technologies that reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of existing products and services.

Two examples in Seattle are Redfin and TeachStreet. Redfin is an online real estate brokerage. As we all know, the real estate industry nationwide is in a major slowdown. However, Redfin continues to experience strong growth, partly because I suspect that during tough times, people enjoy using technology to make their real estate deals a higher quality experience, not to mention a more efficient and cost-effective transaction.

TeachStreet was also interesting. They have built an online marketplace where people who want to learn can connect with the best teachers and classrooms; and where teachers and tutors can find students and clients. They also are growing nicely. During slow economic times, many folks want to learn new skills (either for professional or personal reasons), and many experts have more time on their hands to provide teaching services.

That being said, I’m sure everyone in the room today would rather the economy was growing at a 3 percent rate as it did from 2002-2007, as opposed to shrinking dramatically as it is this year. However, many of the 23 startups that presented yesterday will emerge from this recession in strong shape and will be well-positioned when the economy starts growing again. I was an active VC investor before, during, and after the dot-com crash of 2000 and the telecom meltdown of 2001. Many of today’s most successful startups were founded during those dark days, and as Tim Draper noted during his lunch speech, many of today’s biggest companies were founded in prior recessions.

So hope springs eternal, and I won’t apologize for finding silver linings in the current clouds.

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Swiss drug giant Novartis has signed a long-term lease on property at 181 Massachusetts Ave.,  in Cambridge, MA, according to a report today in the Boston Globe. MIT reportedly owns the land, where it has a two-acre parking lot. Novartis, which already has the global headquarters of its R&D unit, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, in Cambridge, has no immediate plans to develop the land it has leased, company spokesman Jeffrey Lockwood says.

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As any freelancer or self-employed person will tell you, working alone can be isolating—but the alternative, hanging out at Starbucks all day, can drain your wallet and lead to overcaffeination. Fortunately, if you’re the type who needs a little company, collaboration, and commotion to get real work done, there are a few new places to turn, thanks to a burgeoning “co-working” movement. In spaces like the Hat Factory in San Francisco and Beta House in Cambridge’s Central Square, nomadic workers—mostly young Internet entrepreneurs, to date—typically claim a bit of desk territory, coming and going as their own schedules dictate, freely seeking assistance, advice, or just camaraderie from the people around them.

Now there’s a new co-working space for Boston-area entrepreneurs, on the tenth floor of the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) at One Broadway in Cambridge. It’s called the Cambridge Coworking Center (C3), and it opened for business yesterday.

Tim Rowe, founder and president of the CIC (and an Xconomist), says the co-working space is part of the company’s ongoing experiment with providing different types of work experiences for today’s smaller, more untethered startups. In contrast to the apartment-sized “bays” occupied by most CIC tenants, and the phone-booth-sized “Uno” units that the CIC opened last year, C3 is designed to foster informal interaction—and at an economical price of $250 per month (Beta House charges $225 to $375).

“CIC has been around for almost 10 years, but we have not done a good enough job for the very earliest stage entrepreneurs,” Rowe told me. “With the launch of the Cambridge Coworking Center, we’re excited to truly be able to offer a solution that works for anyone’s budget.”

The atmosphere at C3 is a bit more corporate than Beta House—after all, One Broadway is a Brutalist concrete office building built in 1970 by Badger Engineering (now part of Raytheon), and Beta House is a comfy brownstone in a residential neighborhood. But as with the rest of the CIC, C3’s planners have done a lot of retrofitting to make the space livable, bringing in large tables, soft couches, and plants. There’s a high-speed Wi-Fi network to keep everyone connected, and the amenities include private conference rooms, background music, unlimited coffee and spring water, and Ikea-style cubby bins for storing personal items.

Rowe says CIC is keeping the rent at C3 low by deliberately omitting services like land-line phones, wired Ethernet connections, mail delivery, and individual desks or cubicles (there are large tables with lots of chairs instead). In the age of cell phones, wireless laptops, and Skype, entrepreneurs don’t need wired connections, Rowe says, and if they need a place to pick up mail, there’s …Next Page »

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Alkermes, the Cambridge, MA-based developer of anti-addiction drugs, said today it has signed a lease to move its headquarters to Waltham, MA. The company (NASDAQ: ALKS), which has more than 600 employees, plans to complete the move in early 2010. The move is supposed to save the company $8 million a year starting in fiscal 2011.

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Seattle-based Redfin, an online real estate brokerage, said today it has expanded into New York state (Suffolk County, partners in Westchester County, and search in other areas) and central California (El Dorado, Placer, and Sacramento Counties). The move is part of Redfin’s strategy to reach every major real-estate market in the United States.

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First of all, the terms “downturn” and “recession” don’t do justice to the current climate, says early-stage tech investor Andy Sack. As he puts it, “This is the seminal event of our lifetimes. This is our World War II. I guarantee I’ll be talking to my grandchildren about the Depression of 2009-10: ‘Make sure you save.’”

Sack was speaking at the MIT Enterprise Forum Venture Lab event in downtown Seattle last night. He was joined by Michelle Jacobson Goldberg, a partner at Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners who is on the board of Mpire (maker of Widgetbucks), Visible Technologies, and SEOmoz. The room was packed with scores of entrepreneurs looking for financing advice. “It’s ugly out there, and raising money has never been f-ing harder,” Sack told them.

What’s interesting is that both Ignition and Founder’s Co-op, Sack’s seed-stage fund with Chris DeVore, have made investments in the past 90 days. Founder’s Co-op has made bets on Frugal Mechanic; LookStat, an analytics and workflow-automation startup focused on the microstock photography industry (this was news to me); and a new smartphone company that hasn’t been announced yet. Meanwhile, Ignition announced earlier this week that it has led a $10 million investment in Silicon Valley-based Zenprise, a mobile-management software firm.

Goldberg and Sack spoke for about an hour on their perspective as investors, what startups need to know to get funded these days, and what the hot (and not so hot) areas of investment are. Here’s my top 10 list of takeaways:

10. Valuations are way down. “Anything that’s early, if you used to raise $3 million, you might raise $1 million now,” Sack says. And count on a similar calculation for the valuation, he adds.

9. Investors are seeing more pitches than ever. “There’s been an incredible amount of deal flow,” Goldberg says. To which Sack adds, “Deals are getting done, but more slowly and with a higher bar…Deals getting done really have to resonate with a customer base.”

8. Your next financing is your last. “Everyone wants to see your break-even plan,” says Sack. “Financing risk is higher than technology risk.” And Goldberg adds, “Take the money …Next Page »

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It was a relatively light week for deals in the Northwest, with modest activity in business software, Internet, and biotech.

—PivotLink, a software firm specializing in business intelligence with offices in Bellevue, WA, and San Francisco, CA, closed a $10 million Series C round led by StarVest Partners. Other investors included Trident Capital and Emergence Capital Partners. PivotLink was called SeaTab Software until January 2008.

—Seattle-based Ontela, a mobile-imaging startup, closed an undisclosed amount of new funding from Eastven Venture Partners. Ontela has also signed deals with four of the top five handset makers to pre-install its photo-management software on mobile phones.

—Beaverton, OR-based Infinity Softworks raised an undisclosed amount of financing from undisclosed investors. The company makes software for doing calculations and creating reports on the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other mobile devices.

—Luke reported that Helix BioMedix (OTCBB: HXBM), a Bothell, WA-based developer of peptide molecules, raised $3.2 million through debt that can convert into shares of stock plus warrants to buy its stock. The company’s peptides are used in skin care and other cosmetic products.

—Bothell, WA-based MDRNA, a developer of RNA interference drugs, agreed to license some of its technology for a one-time, non-refundable execution fee from Roche, the Swiss drug giant. The deal is non-exclusive to Roche, as Luke reported, and the financial terms were not disclosed.

—Seattle-area startup Frugal Mechanic, an online search engine for auto parts, closed a round of seed funding from Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op, a peer-to-peer investment fund. The exact amount was not disclosed, but is between $250,000 and $500,000. Frugal co-founder Eric Peters told me the story behind the company and how it got funded in a difficult climate.

—Smartsheet, a Bellevue, WA-based firm that makes work-management software for businesses, formed a partnership with Amazon to deliver outsourcing services to mass consumers. The new offering is powered by Amazon Mechanical Turk’s 100,000 virtual workers, and rates for outsourced tasks run between $0.01 and $5.

—In a snapshot of Seattle-area tech startups, four companies formed significant new partnerships, though no financial terms were disclosed. Bellevue-based Apptio, an IT optimization firm, made deals to work with Amazon Web Services, Skytap, VMware, and Citrix. Seattle-based Earth Class Mail licensed its online postal-mail delivery software to Swiss Post. Seattle-based Evri is providing its content recommendation widgets to the Washington Post for online news stories. And Seattle’s Redfin announced new partnerships with more than a dozen real estate brokers around the country, representing a shift in the company’s business strategy.

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It’s been a busy day for announcements. Here’s a quick snapshot of four Seattle-area tech startups, all in different fields, all trying to make their way in the world:

—Apptio, the Bellevue, WA-based software firm focused on optimizing companies’ IT costs, announced major partnerships with Amazon Web Services, SkyTap, VMware, and Citrix, as well as a new vice president of business development, Stan Shull, who will lead the company’s expanded partner program.

—Earth Class Mail, the Seattle-based mail-digitizing firm, announced a deal with Swiss Post to license Earth Class’s online postal-mail delivery software. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Earth Class says it will roll out its services in 10 more countries in Europe, Asia, and North America by the end of the year. Earlier this week, TechFlash’s John Cook reported the company is looking to sell off its retail operations in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as its mail-sorting facility in Beaverton, OR, as it refocuses on powering national post office services.

—Seattle-based Evri, a maker of innovative Web-browsing software, has partnered with the Washington Post, which has begun adding the startup’s content recommendation widgets to its news stories online. Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times reports that Merrill Brown, a former MSNBC.com editor and RealNetworks exec who once worked for the Post, helped Evri line up the deal.

—Seattle-based Redfin, the online real estate startup, announced new partnerships with more than a dozen real estate brokers around the country. This is a strategic shift for Redfin, which until now has relied solely on its own agents. Redfin has rolled out a new version of its website and has expanded to nine new counties in Washington, California, and Illinois.

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Seattle-based Redfin, an online real estate broker, announced new partnerships with more than a dozen brokers around the country, and unveiled a new version of its website that contains customer-service reviews and transaction histories for its agents and partners. The move represents a strategic shift for Redfin, which previously used only its own agents. The company said it has expanded its reach to nine new counties in Washington, California, and Illinois.

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An ambitious plan by Pasadena, CA-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities to create a 16-acre biotech park in East Cambridge, MA, moved one step closer to being realized last night. By an 8-1 vote, the Cambridge City Council approved a rezoning request from Alexandria that will allow it to build taller, denser buildings than those previously permitted along the Binney Street corridor, just north of Kendall Square.

Luke detailed Alexandria’s ten-year plan for the area back in June. Overall, the $1 billion project spans a six-block area along both sides of Binney Street between First Street and Sixth Street (a stone’s throw from Xconomy headquarters on Rogers Street). It would add five new buildings with 1.5 million square feet of “green” lab and office space for life-science tenants, as well as 220,000 square feet of housing, 30,000 square feet of ground-level retail space, underground parking, 2.3 acres of open parkland, and up to 52,000 square feet of community space (in the form of the “Foundry” building off Third Street, which Alexandria is donating to the city; the city itself will decide how the space is divided up between community and municipal uses).

To make the project viable, Alexandria (NYSE: ARE) needed a change in zoning ordinances to allow it to build mixed-use buildings as high as nine stories tall. Some area residents have opposed the change, saying the buildings will be too high, and raising concerns about construction noise and the risk of exposure to potential pathogens in the new labs. At last night’s city council meeting, almost a dozen East Cambridge residents spoke up against the proposal, some holding signs reading “Too Big, Too Close, Too Toxic,” according to a report today in the Harvard Crimson.

But other residents representing local construction workers’ unions urged the council to accommodate Alexandria, saying the project would bring much-needed jobs. And the Cambridge Planning Board, in a recommendation to the City Council last month, concluded that “there are many very positive aspects to the current scheme.”

“Alexandria is very pleased that the City Council approved the revised zoning in the Binney Street district,” Tom Andrews, Alexandria’s senior vice president and regional market director, told Xconomy. “Over the next several months we intend to prepare and submit a development plan for review and approval by various City and State agencies. We look forward to working closely throughout this process with the East Cambridge community, the Planning Board, and other City and State officials.”

Alexandria, which brands itself as the “Landlord of Choice to the Life Science Industry,” already manages nearly 2 million square feet of lab and office space in Cambridge, including Technology Square area near Kendall Square and the Science Hotel on Memorial Drive.

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A day after the largest layoff in Microsoft history—1,400 jobs cut yesterday, with up to 5,000 in the next year and a half—the ripples are spreading far and wide throughout the technology and business communities. Here’s a snapshot of where the cuts are happening in the Seattle area.

—Microsoft’s ACES studio, the Redmond, WA-based group behind the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, has been shut down, according to Gamasutra. VentureBeat also reports that 30 percent of Microsoft’s video game testers have been let go. And at least two members of the company’s Gamerscore Blog are also casualties. So it looks like the cutbacks are hitting some of Microsoft’s gaming divisions hard.

—Microsoft is cutting back in areas where its growth prospects are small or several years away, such as online services outside the United States. That’s according to Bloomberg, which cites an interview with Microsoft’s chief financial officer, Chris Liddell. Areas in which the company is projecting substantial growth, such as Internet search, mobile software, and Web-based software, will continue to receive investment.

—On the real estate front, the Puget Sound Business Journal reports that office-space rents on the Eastside could drop 15 to 20 percent as Microsoft pulls out of parts of its leased space in Redmond, Bellevue, and Kirkland. With vendors, contract workers, and surrounding businesses also suffering from the Microsoft cutbacks, we’re sure to see the ripples from this week spread even further.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals isn’t going to move its labs and offices anywhere, at least in the near future. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech company has extended leases at two main buildings in Cambridge until 2015.

The leases will keep Vertex’s headquarters at 130 Waverly Street, and in other space at 200 Sidney Street through 2015, according to a statement today from Vertex’s landlord, Biomed Realty Trust (NYSE: BMR).

Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) has grown to about 1,300 employees spread among nine buildings in Cambridge, plus 200 more employees in San Diego and a small group in the United Kingdom, says company spokesman Zach Barber. About 80 percent of its square footage is now leased through 2015 or beyond, he says.

Even though the leases are in place for six years, Vertex will keep its eyes out for real estate opportunities. “Our long-term goal is to consolidate all of our employees into one campus,” Barber says. That applies to the workers spread among nine buildings in Cambridge, not the employees in San Diego or the U.K., he added.

If Vertex’s ongoing clinical trials pan out, it will get quite a bit bigger before the leases expire. Vertex doesn’t have any major moneymaking product on the market yet, but it is in the final stage of development with a hepatitis C drug, telaprevir, that could generate $2.6 billion in U.S. sales in 2013, says Rachel McMinn, an analyst with Cowen & Co.

The company clearly has a bold vision. This week at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Vertex CEO Josh Boger’s presentation featured slides that likened his company’s ongoing efforts to the trailblazing work by Genentech in the 1970s that led to the first genetically engineered medicines, and work by Gilead Sciences in the early 1990s that created HIV treatments that made it possible for patients to take one or two pills a day, instead of 15. Boger’s slides were even accompanied by some of the disco and grunge hits that were popular when those advances were being made—the Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive” from the ’70s and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from the ’90s. No word yet on the anthem that will symbolize Vertex’s hopes for growth in the decade to come.

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For those of you suffering from Microsoft overload these past few days, I’ve put together a quick roundup of the most locally relevant news from the software giant. Most of it happened away from CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last night.

—Microsoft beat out Google and Yahoo to land a deal with Verizon Wireless to provide Internet search services on the carrier’s cell phones. The news was reported by Reuters and other media outlets in advance of Ballmer’s official announcement at CES. The five-year agreement is rumored to be worth more than $500 million (paid by Microsoft to Verizon). It’s not yet clear what the deal means for Medio Systems, the Seattle startup that handles some mobile search for Verizon and was reportedly involved in deal talks between Verizon and Google last summer.

—Closer to home, Microsoft said it is dropping out of negotiations to lease 300,000 square feet of new office space in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. A Microsoft spokesman cited the economy and changing market conditions as reasons for backing out of a possible lease. This comes on the heels of Google looking to sublease parts of its Kirkland offices. We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the next few months, I suspect.

—Lastly, Marcelo Calbucci of the Seattle 2.0 blog site has posted some predictions about what a hypothetical Microsoft layoff would mean to the Seattle startup scene. He predicts an influx of ex-Microsofties into startups, more “silly startups,” and more crowded coffee shops around town—not too surprising. But he also predicts higher costs for office space, not lower, because of increased demand. And further difficulties in the housing market. “It’ll be absolutely tough on the local economy in general,” he writes.

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Microsoft has dropped out of negotiations to lease 300,000 square feet of Seattle office space at 2201 Westlake in South Lake Union, according to a report in the Seattle P-I. The report says a Microsoft spokesman cited the economy and market conditions as reasons for the move. In 2007, Microsoft leased a total of 166,000 square feet of space in South Lake Union, Pioneer Square, and Union Station.

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The Massachsuetts Life Sciences Center—the agency in charge of the $1 billion stimulus plan for the state’s life sciences industry—announced today that it plans to lease 5,855 square feet of office space in Waltham, MA. Susan Windham-Bannister, president and CEO of the center, said in a statement that the new office in the suburbs is accessible and costs less than other locations that were considered. The agency plans to maintain an office in Boston, where it now operates.

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New Delhi, December 10—The housing meltdown in the U.S. got me thinking about the property market in India. With the dramatic urbanization and growth of Indian cities property prices have skyrocketed. In good neighborhoods in Delhi prices have increased 100x in 30 years. I met a small dairy farmer who supplied a neighborhood with milk from a few cows by bicycle who had sold his property for $2 million (see picture below).

Property and property rights, or the lack thereof, is a central theme in free market India. India has national, state and municipal laws supporting intellectual and physical property but enforcement of those laws is weak. This is especially the case in housing. In India possession is more than 9/10 of the law—it is the law. In a situation similar to rent controlled properties in some U.S. cities (remember rent control in Cambridge?), there are millions of tenants who occupy properties, pay nominal rent and cannot be evicted.

Land is an emotional issue in India. Hundreds of millions of farmers still make a living off their land. The size of the average farm has decreased since independence as generation after generation has subdivided land among their children. In the cities single family homes have grown into multi-story apartment buildings with each floor given to a child as inheritance. Even the mighty Tata Motors was forced to move their Nano car plant from one state to another because small farmers protested against having their land taken by eminent domain. While India is a mobile society, people tend to retain their ancestral land. This creates a shortage of properties for sale, especially in old established neighborhoods in cities.

Most Indian families I know have a property dispute within the family, generally resulting from inheritance. The legal system is slow and corrupt and it can take upwards for 10 years to resolve disputes (it is very easy to delay the legal process by bribing clerks and even judges). As a result possession has become the instrument of choice in such disputes. When the second parent passes away the children start moving themselves or their relatives into parts of the property to stake a claim. Naturally this creates discord within families. Feudal India is never far from the surface of 21st century India.

In contrast, intellectual property is well protected in India. Partly as a result of joining the WTO and the fact that most ordinary people are not affected by IP, it is not politicized and the courts generally act quickly to resolve disputes. A colleague who returned from California to take care of an ailing mother with Alzheimer’s is running a product development outsourcing company. A couple of his employees naively showed software source code they were working on to a competitor in the process of a job interview. Subsequently a major U.K. competitor of their U.S. customer came out with an identical product. My colleague was able to sue in the Indian courts and put his employees in jail.

[Editor’s note: This is Part 3 of a travelogue by Xconomist Vinit Nijhawan, who is in India visiting venture capitalists and startups with an eye to bridging the Boston and Indian startup ecosystems. We published Part 1 on December 5 and Part 2 on December 8.]

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Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB) confirmed yesterday that the biotech company plans to move its corporate headquarters from Cambridge, MA, to a site in Weston, MA, in 2010, the Boston Business Journal reports. A company spokeswoman told the BBJ that the firm has recently inked a lease on 350,000 square feet of office space in the Boston suburb, where up to 600 Biogen employees will move from the current headquarters at 14 Cambridge Center.

Rebecca back in October wrote about speculation about the big biotech’s plans to relocate its headquarters, after the story broke in the Boston Globe. The Globe reports this morning that Biogen says its headquarters will be at an undeveloped site at the junction of Routes 20 and 128 in Weston.

Though Biogen’s corporate offices will move, company spokeswoman Jennifer Neiman told the BBJ, the biotech plans to continue operations in 400,000 square feet of lab space and 200,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Cambridge. Biogen will join Waltham, MA-based Immunogen (NASDAQ:IMGN) and other biotechs to recently relocate headquarters from Cambridge to the western suburbs, where office rents and parking costs are generally less expensive than Cambridge rates.

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