New England tech and life sciences firms forged several interesting new partnerships this week.

—Apperian, a Boston-based startup developing enterprise-oriented iPhone applications, raised $1 million in a Series A venture round led by CommonAngels of Lexington, MA.

—Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) teamed with Seattle’s Delve Networks to provide a new online platform for publishing videos and distributing them to any digital media player. The new service will compete against that offered by Cambridge-based Brightcove.

—Cardiorobotics of Newport, RI, and Pittsburgh, PA, raised $11.6 million in a Series A round from Eagle Ventures, the Slater Technology Fund, the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, and others. Eric wrote a nice profile of the startup’s efforts to develop a “snake robot” that would make heart surgeries less invasive.

—Advanced Electron Beams of Worcester, MA, closed a Series C round of financing worth $14.2 million. Flagship Ventures led the deal, which was joined by return investors Agman Partners, Atlas Venture, GE, General Catalyst Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners.

—Cancer drug developer Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARIA) of Cambridge netted $30.9 million in an offering of 19 million new shares of stock-–$3 million worth of which were purchased by CEO Harvey Berger.

—Boston-based data-storage firm Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) announced a planned notes offering worth $450 million.

—IT-focused venture firm Longworth Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, reportedly raised $122 million of a targeted $180 million for its third fund.

—Cambridge-based drug developer Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ALNY) inked a deal with Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals (TSX:TKM) to develop new particles to deliver RNA-interference drugs. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

—Idenix Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:IDIX), also of Cambridge, priced a secondary public offering of 7.25 million shares at $3.14 each. Idenix develops treatments for Hepatitis C.

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This week saw a variety of small-to-medium deals—and one potentially huge one.

—Avila Therapeutics of Waltham, MA raised $5 million from existing investors in a debt and options financing that could reach up to $20 million, according to an SEC fling. Avila is developing drugs that form strong, covalent bonds with target proteins.

—Ashaway, RI-based greenBytes raised $7.5 million of an $8 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The startup, a provider of efficient data storage systems, did not disclose the investors participating in the deal.

—Elixir Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, MA, raised $12 million in a funding round led by MPM Capital and joined by ARCH Venture Partners, Oxford Bioscience Partners, the Omega Fund, and Physic Ventures. The Cambridge firm also granted Swiss drug giant Novartis an option to acquire the entire company should Elixir successfully complete a Phase IIa clinical trial of its oral diabetes drug. That deal, should it come to pass, could be worth more than $500 million in initial and milestone payments.

—Marlboro, MA-based Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ:ESLR) announced a public offering of $60 million in common stock. Evergreen, a manufacturer of low-cost silicon-based solar power products, plans to use the proceeds for the construction of a new factory in Wuhan, China, and the expansion of a facility in Midland, Michigan.

—Stylefeeder of Cambridge, MA, raised $500,000 from return investors Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital. Stylefeeder, which runs an online personalized shopping recommendation service, is profitable—and hiring.

—BigBelly Solar, a Needham, MA-based maker of solar-powered, trash-compacting public waste bins, reported in a filing with the SEC that it has raised $3.2 million in additional financing. The investors were not disclosed.

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San Diego’s Solera Holdings (NYSE: SLH) plans to issue 4.5 million shares of its common stock in an underwritten public offering at a price of $20 a share. The company, which is a leading provider of software used to process automobile insurance claims, announced the deal Friday and expects it to close by Wednesday, Nov. 19. Solera’s share price rebounded almost 3 percent in early trading today, to $18.98 shortly after noon, after than tumbling more than 22 percent Friday following the announcement

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) announced that the underwriters of its stock offering have exercised their option to purchase 1.1 million additional shares, bringing the overall size of the deal to 8.6 million shares worth a total of $220.0 million. The Cambridge, MA-based developer of the hepatitis C drug telaprevir last week priced 7.5 million shares at $25.50 apiece, for a total of $191.3 million.

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Last week saw new filings for both an IPO and an SPO. Could the climate for exits be getting a little better? (Seems like it would be hard for it to get much worse.) Here’s the news on those filings, and the rest of the recent deals.

—Codon Devices, a Cambridge, MA-based startup focusing on applications of synthetic biology, settled a patent suit it filed last March against Bothell, WA-based Blue Heron Biotechnology.

—MIT Media Lab and Bank of America inked a five-year deal worth $15 to $25 million to create a research center at the Lab to study the future of the banking industry. Media Lab director Frank Moss and MIT professor Deb Roy told Wade the deal was perhaps the biggest corporate sponsorship win in the lab’s history.

—Woburn, MA’s BioTrove, an MIT spinoff that makes tools for life sciences research, filed for an IPO worth up to $75 million. BioTrove’s investors include Catalyst Health and Technology Partners, CB Health Ventures, Zero Stage Capital, Echelon Ventures, and Fletcher Spaght.

—Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced it would shell out about $84 million for the UK-based consulting firm Conchango, which specializes in custom implementations of Microsoft enterprise software.

—Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE) of Woburn, MA, filed for a secondary offering worth up to $101 million; all the proceeds will go to selling stockholders of the text-imaging firm.

—Cambridge, MA-based speech-recognition startup Vlingo raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Yahoo.

—Radius Health, also of Cambridge, raised $28.3 million in second Series C closing from MPM Capital, The Wellcome Trust, HealthCare Ventures, Oxford Bioscience Partners, BB Biotech Ventures, and Scottish Widows Investment Partnership. The new financing, which brings the total raised in the round to $67.5 million, was a planned reward for Radius finishing enrollment in a Phase 2 trial of its lead drug candidate, a treatment for osteoporosis.

—Merrimack, NH’s GT Solar signed $91 million contract with The Silicon Mine, a Dutch photovoltaic manufacturer, to supply equipment for the Netherlands’ first solar-grade silicon plants.

—East Providence, RI-based medical device maker IlluminOss Medical closed a Series B financing from New Leaf Ventures and Foundation Medical Partners worth $11.02 million, according to a report in PE Hub.

—An auction of the assets of the defunct Cambridge, MA, e-commerce startup N2N, scheduled for April 11, was postponed until May 2. Before ceasing operations around Christmas last year, N2N had raised $30 million from General Catalyst Partners and Limited Brands (from which it spun off).

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After a somewhat underwhelming IPO back in July, Woburn, MA-based Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE) has filed for a secondary offering of up to 6.9 million shares. Proceeds from the stock sale could total some $101 million and will go to selling stockholders of the text-imaging firm, including TA Associates Funds, which is offering 5.2 million of the 17 million Monotype shares that it currently holds.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) is turning to the market for an infusion of new cash after a series of delays and disappointments that have nudged the Cambridge, MA-based firm’s stock steadily downward for the last several months. The biotech, whose shares were trading around $40 in September, last night priced an underwritten offering of 6 million shares of its common stock at $17.14 per share. At the same time, the firm inked a deal to sell $250 million worth of convertible senior subordinated notes due in 2013. If over allotments are exercised in both categories, the gross receipts from the offerings could surpass $400 million.

Vertex could use the cash. The company announced on Monday after the end of trading that it expects to spend a half billion dollars or so on R&D in 2008—a figure that seemed to concern some analysts and investors. Yesterday’s close of $17.14 was down almost 6 percent from Monday’s close.

The Motley Fool’s Brian Lawler points out that Vertex’s R&D budget is now about half the size of Biogen Idec’s (NASDAQ: BIIB), even though Vertex has only one drug approaching FDA approval—the hepatitis C treatment telaprevir—and an eighth the market cap of its fellow Cambridge biotech. But even so, likely because of the massive potential market for a hepatitis C drug, investors close to Vertex seem to think the company is a smart buy. Research firm Morningnotes wrote in a note yesterday afternoon (funny, I know): “We are hearing the common issue was covered inside of the first hour of marketing by the top shareholders.” The convertible note offering was oversubscribed as well, the note added.

Shares of Vertex opened at $18.41 on the news of the deal, up 7.4 percent from yesterday’s close.

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There used to be a time when almost all the deals in the weekly(ish) roundup involved life sciences companies, but things have been suspiciously quiet on that front in recent weeks. Which is not to say there aren’t plenty of interesting deals to discuss.

—Braving a market that has scared off several local IPOs, Marlboro, MA’s Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) registered for a 20 million-share secondary public offering; the SPO could net the maker of solar-power products some $230 million.

—Waltham, MA’s Liquid Machines, an enterprise rights management firm, raised $10 million in a Series D funding round led by RRE Ventures and joined by return investors Goldman, Sachs & Co.; Atlas Venture; Draper Fisher Jurvetson; and Masthead Ventures.

—Virtualization firm VKernel of Portsmouth, NH, raised $4.6 million in a venture funding round led by Waltham, MA’s Polaris Venture Partners and San Francisco’s Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

—Dynogen of Waltham, MA, announced that it will go public in a reverse merger with Apex Bioventures Acquisition (AMEX: PEX), a subsidiary of California’s Apex Bioventures set up for the purpose of making just such a deal.

—Cambridge, MA-based ThingMagic teamed up with Ford, lending its RFID technology to the car company’s new tool-tracking trucks.

—Archemix, also of Cambridge, pulled its planned $63 million IPO, citing unfavorable market conditions.

—Boston’s uLocate acquired Cambridge, MA’s Zync, in the midst of a flurry of other location-based company news that Wade wrote up on Friday.

—IDG Ventures Boston and Advanced Technology Ventures led a $25 million Series B financing of Mountain View, CA-based PolyRemedy. The startup plays in the “robotic wound care” space—and Bob explains what that is.

—Waltham, MA vision-correction-technology firm Avedro closed an $8 million Series A-1 funding round led by Prism VentureWorks.

—ByAllAccounts of Woburn, MA, closed a $5 million Series A round led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

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Marlboro, MA’s Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) has registered for an underwritten public offering of up to 20 million shares of its common stock. The maker of solar-power products, a greentech success story that went public in 2000, expects to net $231.9 million in the deal, and up to $266.8 million if underwriters exercise a 3-million share over-allotment option.

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Talk about timing. On the very day we post the IPO advice of Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, Jr.—in an article that happens to mention the current tough economic climate for IPOs—Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) announces it is shelving its plans for a secondary public offering. And, you guessed it, the company is citing the current tough economic climate.

Athenahealth announced its SPO, under which the company and selling shareholders that included Oak Investment Partners and Cardinal Partners planned to offer just over 3 million common shares, back in early January. But on the heels of recent decisions by both BG Medicine and Elixir Pharmaceuticals to postpone their IPOs, it is hardly a surprise to see the economic foul weather extending into the secondary market.

Be sure to check out Bush’s IPO pearls of wisdom—you’ll see what I mean when I say I guess he won’t be getting out of his lockup early, and he won’t be taking any cool jet rides with investment bankers and their “really nice scotch” anytime soon. In late afternoon trading, though, Athenahealth’s stock was on a nice little ride of its own, up $1.67, or just over 5 percent, at $33.07.

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It’s been relatively quiet since last we rounded up (on Christmas Eve), but a few local tech companies managed to ink a deal or two—mainly acquisitions—in the waning hours of 2007.

—Dyax (NASDAQ: DYAX) filed a shelf registration statement that, when declared effective by the SEC, will give the Cambridge, MA-based biotech the ability to sell up to $100 million in stock and other securities.

—Southborough, MA-based data-recovery company Double-Take Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) acquired TimeSpring, a Montreal-based data-protection software firm, for $8.3M in cash.

—Medical device firm NeuroMetrix of Waltham, MA, acquired the assets of EyeTel Imaging for $9.9 million in stock and $175,000 in cash. The deal gives NeuroMetrix ownership of EyeTel’s DigiScope technology for detecting diabetic retinopathy and other eye diseases.

—Lexington, MA’s Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CBST) exercised its option to buy Seattle’s Illumigen Biosciences. The deal, originally announced in October, gives Illumigen $9 million in cash and up to some $330 million in milestone payments.

—In the latest in a string of acquisitions that has included backup-services provider Mozy and network-management firm Voyence, Hopkinton, MA’s EMC (NYSE: EMC) forged an agreement to acquire Document Sciences Corporation (NASDAQ: DOCX) for some $85 million in cash. The Carlsbad, CA, firm, a maker of document output management software, will be run as a business unit within EMC’s Content Management and Archiving division.

—Millennium Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MLNM) said it met 2007 milestones for sales of its drug Velcade that entitle the Cambridge, MA-based biotech to a $40 million payment from Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ortho Biotech Products.

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Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), which sells speech and imaging software, announced in a regulatory filing that it planned to cut the number of shares being sold in its secondary public offering of its stock from 15 million to 7 million.

Under its revised plan, the firm will offer 6.8 million shares, down from 9.6 million, while the number of shares offered by shareholder Warburg Pincus and members of Nuance’s management will decrease from 5.4 million to just 227,000 shares.

The company expects net proceeds from the sale of $112.8 million, after deducting commissions and other expenses. The deal is expected to close on December 21.

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The Boston-area biz/tech news was piling up almost as fast as the snow last week, and there were a few deals we didn’t manage to plow through at the time. Here they are, along with a few of the ones we caught the first time around.

—Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), which sells speech and imaging software, announced a 15 million-share secondary public offering of its stock, with 9.6 million shares being offered by the firm, 4.8 million coming from shareholder Warburg Pincus, and 600,000 shares offered by members of Nuance’s management. The stock fell on the news, closing Friday at $19.00 after having closed Tuesday (just before the announcement) at $21.11.

—For the umpteenth time this year, Waltham, MA-based Inverness Medical Innovations (AMEX: IMA) announced it’s making an acquisition. This time the diagnostics giant is picking up U.K. firm BBI Holdings for $170 million.

—North Reading, MA’s Teradyne (NYSE: TER), which produces System-On-a-Chip (SOC) test products, announced it would acquire Nextest Systems (NASDAQ: NEXT), a maker of flash memory test products, for some $325 million.

—RSS feed aggregator firm NewsGator Technologies of Denver closed a $12 million funding round led by Vista Ventures and joined by Mobius Venture and Masthead Venture Partners. The jury’s still out on whether it’s a tattoo-worthy deal.

—Quincy, MA-based Modiv Media, which provides software that delivers relevant ads and other product information to consumers on in-store systems and over cell phones, has raised $8 million in Series A funding, according to peHUB, which cites a regulatory filing. Backers reportedly include Ignition Partners, Oak Investment Partners, and SeaPoint Ventures. Modiv’s customers include Stop & Shop, Giant Eagle, and Subway.

—Andover, MA-based sensor-maker Memsic (NASDAQ: MEMS) had a disappointing stock market debut, gaining only 25 cents in its first day of trading after dropping the price from between $11 and $13 per share to $10 per share.

—Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) inked an agreement to sell the last two of five businesses it had identified as “non-strategic” in a previously announced restructuring plan. The deal, with private equity firm Avista Capital Partners, will bring the Natick-based firm $425 million in cash.

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Waltham, MA-based Inverness Medical Innovations (AMEX: IMA) netted a tidy $806.4 million by selling 13,634,302 shares at $61.49 in a public offering that closed yesterday. All told the deal—which included an over-allotment of 1.8 million shares that was exercised in full—wound up being about twice the size as originally planned. Inverness will likely use the cash to continue its remarkable recent acquisition streak.

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In the middle of an acquisition spree that has hoovered up some $2.5 billion worth of companies in 2007 alone, Waltham, MA-based Inverness Medical Innovations (AMEX: IMA) today priced a previously announced secondary public offering of its stock, in the process nearly doubling the number of shares offered and boosting total value of the deal to $738 million.

This is the second such offering that Inverness—which is out to corner the market on point-of-care diagnostic devices—has made this year. In January, the firm sold 6.9 million shares at $39.65 apiece. The deal announced today includes 12 million shares (some 166,000 of them from stockholders) priced at yesterday’s close of $61.49. Ben Holmes, publisher of research firm Morningnotes, says that’s “pretty aggressive pricing in this environment.” What’s more, the offering includes almost twice as many shares as originally announced; when the firm initially filed for the offering last week it only intended to sell 7 million new shares.

Analysts are by-and-large pretty keen on Inverness (and clearly investors agree, given the recent run-up in the stock’s price). But David Trainer, president of independent research firm New Constructs, calls the firm “a bomb about to go off.” (See Malorye’s profile of Inverness from yesterday.) Inverness’s 2006 net loss was $16.8 million; its 2006 revenue was $569.5 million.

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Insulet (NASDAQ: PODD) a diabetes-management firm in Bedford, MA, priced its secondary offering of 4.9 million shares at $23.25, according to an SEC filing. The shares were offered by Insulet shareholders, so no proceeds will go to the company.

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