Anyone who says cleantech companies are having a tough time raising money should take a look at Boston-Power. The Westborough, MA-based advanced lithium-ion battery maker is announcing today that it’s taken in $30 million in equity funding, just three months after announcing a massive $125 million Series F funding round. The company has now attracted more than $346 million in financing since its founding in 2005.

Of course, that recent money has come with some strings attached. The newest investment was led by Beijing-based GSR Ventures, a firm that led Boston-Power’s $125 million Series F round and is focused on building companies in China. Along with the September financing, Boston-Power announced that it was moving the majority of its operations to China to chase the electric vehicle market, and said it was reducing its 80-person Bay State workforce by about 35 percent.

Boston-Power, which also sells its batteries to customers like Hewlett-Packard for portable electronics, plans to add between 600 and 800 jobs in China across manufacturing and engineering roles. The company has begun construction of a manufacturing facility near Shanghai in Liyang and has established a temporary R&D site in Beijing, which will focus on customer applications of its battery technology. Both sites are expected to be complete in 2012, said founder and international chairman Christina Lampe-Onnerud.

Boston-Power also has an executive search underway, in China, to fill positions like CEO, said Lampe-Onnerud, an Xconomist. In September, Boston-Power’s Westborough-based CEO, CFO, and vice president of marketing left as part of the shift to China. Lampe-Onnerud said the pool of CEO candidates the company is considering is mixed, comprising both engineers earlier in the careers and more senior managers.

For her part, Lampe-Onnerud says she is excited to think about what she’ll do next. Alongside the September financing, Lampe-Onnerud committed to remaining with Boston-Power for at least another year, in the role of international chairman, and is helping to oversee the shift in operations.

“This opens up opportunities for me to do what I love to do, which is executable innovation,” she says of when this one-year commitment period ends. “I’ll have a chance to look at other problems that need attention.”

She says she’s interested in staying in high-tech or cleantech, and that water-related energy and transportation are areas of particular interest. We’ll have to keep our eye on her.

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Merck veteran Keith Gottesdiener will become the new CEO of Boston-based Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, a Boston startup developing experimental drugs for the treatment of metabolic conditions such as obesity and diabetes, according to an announcement today.

Gottesdiener oversaw pivotal clinical trials as Merck’s former vice president and late-sage therapeutic group leader, and is joining Rhythm as it pushes two drug programs through clinical development. The biotech is navigating the crowded therapeutic field with two drug compounds it has licensed from the French biotech company Ipsen.

Rhythm’s compound RM-131 could enter a Phase 2 clinical trial early next year as a treatment for a complication of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes called gastroparesis—a digestive disorder involving the abnormal emptying of the stomach. Rhythm is also aiming to file an FDA application by the end of this year to begin human testing of its compound for curbing food intake in severely obese populations who suffer from diabetes or are at risk of developing the disease.

Rhythm is backed by MPM Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Third Rock Ventures.

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Basho Technologies, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of data storage and management software for enterprise customers, announced today that it has hired a new CEO and sewed up some new funding.

The new chief executive, Donald Rippert, formerly chief technology officer of consulting and technology services firm Accenture, will start on July 1 at Basho, which provides an open source database technology called Riak for Web and cloud-based applications. Rippert replaces former CEO Earl Galleher, who will remain as chairman of the board.

“Don will build upon Basho’s growing customer base, which includes, among others, a number of major companies in the healthcare, cable, telecommunications and software industries,” said Galleher in the announcement of the deal.

Basho said it has completed a $7.5 million Series D financing, having announced the first $3.5 million of the funding round in February. The money came from private equity firm Georgetown Partners, and Trifork AS, a Danish systems integrator that is the European distributor of Riak.

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If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Arboretum Ventures in Ann Arbor, MI, is once again teaming up with serial CEO Jeff Williams to try to spin a University of Michigan-bred company into investor gold.

This time Williams will lead Life Magnetics, a startup developing a desktop diagnostic device that uses disposable cartridges to rapidly test bacterial infections. The device will determine how bacteria responds to antibiotics within eight hours of sample collection, the company says.

Life Magnetics was the first tenant to occupy the university’s new Venture Accelerator, a former Pfizer research and development center located at the school’s North Campus Research Complex.

The team of Arboretum Ventures and Williams has proven to be a winning combination twice before. Becton, Dickinson & Co. recently paid $480 million to acquire Accuri Cytometers and HandyLabs, two Arboretum-funded startups guided by Williams.

Williams was previously CEO of Genomic Solutions, a life science products company in Ann Arbor he co-founded in 1997. The company ultimately went public in 2000 and eventually merged with Harvard Biosciences two years later.

Life Magnetics also named Sundu Brahmasandra its president. Brahmasandra was a co-founder and vice president of product development at HandyLabs.

“With the addition of Jeff and Sundu, we believe we’ve assembled the finest management team possible to lead Life Magnetics,” Arboretum Ventures managing partner Jan Garfinkle said in a statement. “The successful…experience and knowledge both of these leaders bring to the company will help ensure the profitable commercialization of the company’s proprietary technology.”

And if history serves as any guide, we just might be looking at another BD acquisition on the near horizon.

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Cambridge, MA-based Crimson Hexagon, a social media analytics startup, announced today that it has hired Patricia Gottesman as its president and chief executive officer. She joined the company as a member of the board in December, and replaces previous Crimson Hexagon CEO Scott Centurino, who started the position last April. Gottesman previously held marketing, operations, and product management positions during her 28-year tenure at Cablevision Systems (NYSE: CVC) and most recently worked as a technology and media consultant.

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It was a historic week in the Boston biotech field with big acquisition news, but we also saw headlines on stealthier firms and startup financings.

—Ryan took a closer look at H3 Biomedicine, a cancer research house setting up shop in Cambridge, MA, with the support of Japanese drugmaker Eisai. He compared it to the research efforts of other big drugmakers like GlaxoSmithKline, which has also created a entrepreneurial startup in Cambridge, Tempero Pharmaceuticals, to fuel new drug discoveries. Eisai is providing $200 million, access to its scientists, and research and development support to H3.

—Bedford, MA-based Hologic nabbed FDA approval for its 3-D imaging system for breast cancer screening and diagnostics, which is designed to supplement existing scanning technology. The device is said to be the first of its kind to provide 3-D images of the breast.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) of Weston, MA, announced that its board of directors had given the drugmaker permission to repurchase 20 million shares of its common stock to offset stock issuances under its share-based compensation plans.

—Beverly, MA-based drug developer Cellceutix settled a compensation dispute with its former CEO George Evans. The company will buy 4.6 million shares of stock held by Evans and/or his sons over the past three years, for $1 million. Evan had previously sought $1.7 million in back salary and future compensation.

—Ryan tracked down a few more details from Tillman Gerngross, co-founder and CEO of Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, about his stealthy new spinout Arsanis. The startup is focused on using Adimab’s yeast-based antibody discovery system to find drugs that could serve as an alternative to antibiotics for infectious diseases.

—Healthcare companies accounted for a 60 percent chunk of the funding raised by Massachusetts startups in January, according to … Next Page »

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[Clarified. 2 pm Eastern time, 1/25/11. See below.] Dossia’s new chief executive, Michael Critelli, has plans to push personal electronic health records closer to mainstream use. He needs money, though. And that might mean tapping the capital markets.

Cambridge, MA-based Dossia is best known as a nonprofit consortium—with founding members such as BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes, and Wal-Mart—that got started in 2006 to provide personally-controlled digital health records to employees of its member companies. Yet there is also a for-profit company affiliated with the group, giving Dossia the ability to issue shares and raise money to expand.

Dossia has been generating revenue from the companies whose employees use its records for more than two years, Critelli says, but that money doesn’t cover all of its expenses.

Critelli, the former chairman of and CEO of Pitney Bowes, says that he is now talking to outside investors as well as Dossia’s members to raise new funds for the group in the first half of this year. (The group wouldn’t disclose how much it plans to raise.) He says his first preference would be to raise the money from the founding companies, which have already committed $15 million to the group.

“Given where we want Dossia to go and what we want it to be, we will need additional capital,” Critelli says. “We need to build capability in advance of getting revenue to pay for it.”

So far Dossia’s personal digitized health records have only been deployed for six of 10 of its consortium members. To date, a bunch of factors have slowed the rollout. Dossia had a messy breakup with its early technology partner, Omnimedix. Later, the group had to further develop the electronic records platform it adopted from Children’s Hospital in Boston to meet the needs of its member companies. And factors such as key personnel changes and reorganizations at some of the Dossia member companies have slowed their adoption of the records, Critelli says.

Alas, Colin Evans, the previous chief executive of Dossia, was unable to reach his goal of getting all the group’s founding members onto the system during his stint with the group, as he told me he wanted to in November 2009. Yet Evans did at least lead the group during a period of relatively rapid adoption. Only Wal-Mart, which was the first company to deploy the records, was up and running on Dossia’s technology when Evans took leadership as CEO of the group in 2009. When Critelli took over for Evans last month, there were … Next Page »

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The former chief of licensing for the drug giant Pfizer has stepped in as CEO of Karuna Pharmaceuticals, a stealthy Boston startup focused on new treatments for schizophrenia. Ed Harrigan tells me that he started the job at Karuna this month.

Karuna has two novel programs in development for the treatment of schizophrenia, Harrigan says. Karuna has been incubating at the Boston firm PureTech Ventures, whose partner Eric Elenko had been in charge of day-to-day operations before Harrigan took over those duties. Karuna’s founding team also includes PureTech associate Andrew Miller.

Both Elenko and Harrigan declined to reveal any specifics about the science at the startup, yet they did mention that one of the firm’s molecules with a novel mechanism for treating schizophrenia is being tested in humans. Schizophrenia, which affects about 2.4 million American adults, is a mental disorder that impacts people’s ability to tell what is real and not real.

Harrigan, 57, is a neurologist by training whose name gives Karuna lots of credibility in the pharmaceutical world. Before he left Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) in March 2010, Harrigan led the $1 billion deal between the company and Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) that brought Pfizer commercial rights to Bristol-Myers’s blood thinner apixaban. The companies are seeking FDA approval of apixaban, which could be a blockbuster drug for the firms. Earlier in his career at Pfizer, Harrigan also played a key role in the development of the antipsychotic pill ziprasidone (Geodon).

At Karuna, Harrigan is trying to develop innovative medicines for a market now dominated by industry heavyweights. Some of the leading drugs for schizophrenia today include Eli Lilly’s (NYSE: LLY) olanzapine (Zyprexa), Bristol-Myers and Otsuka’s aripiprazole (Abilify) and AstraZeneca’s quetiapine (Seroquel). Yet none of these drugs are perfect, and Karuna’s new CEO says he believes there are opportunities for treatments with novel mechanisms to improve the lives of patients.

The startup’s lead drug is … Next Page »

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Northern Power System, the Barre, VT-based wind energy firm, has made some progress in its years-long pursuit of the lucrative market for utility-grade wind turbines. The company has made much of this progress here in Michigan.

Last month the company shipped its first prototype of a utility-scale, 2.2-megawatt wind turbine to Traverse City, MI-based Heritage Sustainable Energy. Northern Power produced the prototype with the aid of Merrill Technologies Group and a network of suppliers throughout the Great Lake State, company CEO John Danner said. His company has leased manufacturing facilities from Merrill in Saginaw, MI, for future turbine production as well.

The company, which a group of investors purchased out of Chapter 11 in June 2008 after its previous owner went broke, has been working for years to translate the design advantages of its smaller, 100-kilowatt turbines into the large turbines that are typically used on wind farms that supply energy to the grid. Within a few weeks, Danner said, the firm’s partner, Heritage, is expected to complete installation of the 2.2-megawatt prototype turbine at is Stoney Corners project in southern Missaukee County.

Northern Power, which got its start in the mid-1970s, was in the news earlier this month for its role in Michigan’s first large-scale wind turbine manufacturing effort. The company’s turbine production in the state was held out as an example of Michigan’s progress in building up its wind energy sector, which Governor Jennifer Granholm said was key to diversifying the state’s economy and creating clean technology jobs. For its part, Northern Power could employ as many as 137 works in Michigan by 2014, according to the state.

While Danner declined to offer specifics on when his company plans to begin full-scale production of its turbines in Michigan, he did offer some insights on why his company has chosen the state as a hub for its utility-scale wind energy business. One plus he touched on was the state’s standard that 10 … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Idenix Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: IDIX), an antiviral drug developer, announced today that it has promoted Ronald Renaud, Jr. to the position of president and chief executive. Renaud, who previously served as Idenix’s CFO and treasurer and most recently its chief business officer, will also take a seat on the company’s board of directors. He replaces former Idenix president, CEO, chairman, and board member Jean-Pierre Sommadossi, who resigned “in order to pursue other interests in the biotechnology field,” according to the company announcement. Idenix’s drug pipeline includes two treatments for hepatitis C, which the FDA recently put on clinical hold, due to elevated liver toxicity in some patients who received both drugs.

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Wilmington, MA-based startup Advanced Electron Beams announced today that it has hired as its new CEO Richard Feldt, who left his position as chief executive of Marlboro, MA-based Evergreen Solar late last week. Advanced Electron Beams is working on technology that uses high-speed electrons in industrial functions that traditionally require water, heat, or chemicals. Feldt replaces the company’s former CEO Mitch Tyson, who will continue to serve as chairman of Advanced Electron Beam’s board.

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Earlier this year, Salem, NH-based semiconductor company AmberWave Systems Corp quietly shut its doors, and a new company called AmberWave, Inc. has been formed with its assets, according to multiple sources close to the companies.

The news comes to light after an SEC filing on Thursday revealed that AmberWave, Inc., incorporated this year, had raised $800,000 in equity-based funding from one unnamed investor. When I called to follow up that lead, multiple sources noted that AmberWave Systems, whose technology involved “strained silicon” that makes silicon chips faster and more efficient, had closed several months ago. One source then indicated that a group that included at least some employees from the defunct company had purchased the assets of the original firm and used them to reincorporate AmberWave, Inc.

If this is true, it is a likely a significant write off for the original company’s venture backers. The AmberWave Systems website says it raised $91 million and that its investors include 3i, Adams Capital Management, Arch Venture Partners, The Hillman Company and TeleSoft Partners. Our sources did not reveal how much the new owners paid for the assets of AmberWave Systems—but if the new funding amount is any indication, it was likely a tremendous markdown on previous valuations.

While none of these details were immediately confirmed on the record by company leadership or one of its venture backers that we tried to contact, the SEC filing for the newest AmberWave funding lists the same address in Salem as AmberWave Systems, which was started in 1998 by MIT professor Eugene Fitzgerald. The only website I can find on the company still lists the firm name as AmberWave Systems Corp.

Leadership changes have also occurred at AmberWave in the past months. Mass High Tech first observed that the regulatory filing for the new funding lists Anthony Lochtefeld as AmberWave’s president and CEO and Richard Faubert as a director. Lochtefeld was previously vice president of research of AmberWave Systems, while Faubert served as president and CEO—titles still on the company’s website. MHT says Lochtefeld confirmed both the name and leadership changes, but he did not comment further on the state of the company.

I could not immediately reach Lochtefeld for comment, but I’ll be sure to report more on this story if I learn anything new.

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Azuki Systems, an Acton, MA-based maker of software for helping video and other data-rich media content providers deliver their material through mobile devices, has announced that it hired a new president and CEO.

Azuki‘s new leader is John Clancy, a cloud computing exec who most recently served as CEO-in-Residence at Schooner Capital in Boston.

“I’m looking forward to taking great technology and building a highly scalable growth business,” Clancy told me in a phone interview. He says the company, whose backers include Kepha Partners and Sigma Partners, has remained relatively quiet so far, particularly because its products run on the back-end of mobile apps.

“Now it’s time to air it out and that’s why I’m on board,” he says.

Before heading to Schooner, Clancy was president of the digital unit for Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM), the Boston-based storage and data protection company. That’s where he helped the build the company’s cloud-based business data protection and archiving business. Prior to that, he was chief operating officer of Connected Corporation, a cloud-based data security software maker.

Azuki’s technology targets content providers and aggregators who lack the IT expertise needed to distribute to the mobile phone. The company has helped build mobile apps for individual recording artists, Fox, Sony Music, and even Sports Illustrated. Azuki does the heavy lifting to help content applications run across different mobile platforms like the iPhone or Android phones, and look good while doing it, Clancy says.

“If you can take it to a desktop, we can take it from there,” Clancy says. “We make it brainless for the content folks.”

So far, Azuki (formerly called Peermeta) has delivered its product using a software-as-a-service model. But in late September it will be shipping the third version of software, which will be able to run on both the cloud and customers’ own servers. He says adding this outlet will allow the company to focus on selling not just to the makers of mobile content, but also mobile carriers and service providers. For example, companies looking to deliver corporate webcasts to mobile phones can run Azuki’s software on their own servers.

“We’re going to let customers decide how they want to employ the technology,” he says. This greater balance and flexibility in the business will help drive the Azuki growth Clancy is looking for, he says.

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Global automation software developer UC4, which has its U.S. headquarters in Bellevue, WA, said today it has appointed Jason Liu as its new chief executive officer. Liu has a background in software, mobile and cloud systems management, and has served as CEO to several companies, including Callisto Software, Intrinsic Technologies and most recently, Univa UD. Liu also served as chief financial officer at Ravisent Technologies, where according to UC4, he “led the company through multiple acquisitions and spearheaded an IPO that brought the company to a $1 billion market value.”

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If you like to spend your spare time crawling the Internet for pictures of cute animals with silly captions or stories of others’ “fails” (i.e. moments of sheer misfortune caught on camera), odds are you’ve stumbled upon I Can Has Cheezburger. It’s grown into a network of 51 sites that have become the viral ‘it spot’ for online humor. The Seattle-based company has been growing fast—both in page views and employees—since it was founded just three years ago. I met up with Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh earlier this week to chat about the future of the online comedy network and all the new talent the company has been recruiting, including just-hired chief financial officer Pearl Chan.

Chan officially joined the team Wednesday after 18 months working as Cheezburger’s part-time CFO. She brings with her more than 20 years of experience with early stage Seattle tech startups, including Picnik, the hit photo editing service  recently acquired by Google. I had the opportunity to chat with Chan on Tuesday about how being a part-time CFO helped her get the job, the company’s secret to monetization, what makes the Cheezburger community so darn special, and how the company is going about becoming “anyone and everyone’s humor network.” Here are some of the highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: In my interview with Ben, he mentioned that you’ve been working with Cheezburger on a part-time basis for some time now. How did you first get involved with the company, and what was it about Cheezburger that made you want to come on board full-time?

Pearl Chan: The investors at Cheezburger-they are the who’s who as far as angel investors in Seattle…Cheezburger is funded by angel investors as opposed to a traditional venture capital firm. And there were a number of the angel investors that I already knew because I’ve worked with them in other capacities throughout my years in working in Seattle. And when Cheezburger got to a certain size, they needed some more strategic financial help. They [the angel investors] looked around and said, ‘well, who do we know that we could recommend?’ And that’s how my name came up.

At the time I got involved with the company—about a year and a half ago—the company was still fairly early stage. I mean, there were a lot of things that were still yet to be proven, but it was starting to get a lot of buzz and a lot of traction. And it is usually about that time that it’s good to take a look at getting some financial expertise, because prior to that there really wasn’t any internal financial expertise. We had some bookkeeping that was done internally, but not by a certified public accountant or anything.

And I was actually at that time working as a consultant, so I was a part-time CFO. And it’s interesting because there’s quite a need for that in Seattle. We have a very high amount of technology companies. Especially when they’re starting too, instead of funding themselves they take in external money—any kind of external money—from investors. And when you do that it’s important to show your investors and give them comfort that you’re taking good care of their money and doing all the right things with making decisions on how the money is being spent and how it’s being accounted for and that sort of thing. However, most of the companies at that size, they don’t have enough work for a full-time person because they haven’t been able to get big enough to do that. They still need that strategic level of expertise, so a part-time CFO was really ideal. And that’s how I got involved.

The first thing that I did [when she joined Cheezburger part-time] was kind of laid a lot of foundation groundwork on basic block-and-tackle financial stuff. But we had immediately—because the company got so much traction so quickly—we immediately went into some financial strategy-type … Next Page »

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Swaptree, a Boston-based website enabling users to trade used books, DVDs, CDs, and video games, announced today that it has hired Jeff Bennett as its CEO, and said it has completed a $6 million round of funding. Bennett comes from NameMedia, a domain name marketplace, where he served as founder, president, and chief operating officer.  Swaptree’s newest funding round, led by Safeguard Scientifics, will go to new hires and marketing, and brings the company’s total capital raised to $11.95 million.  We wrote about the first $4.8 million of the round that the company pulled in during March.

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Parametric Technology (NASDAQ: PMTC), a Needham, MA-based maker of engineering and product development software that goes by PTC for short, announced that its president and chief operating officer James Heppelmann will replace C. Richard Harrison as CEO, effective October 1, 2010. Harrison will take on the role of executive chairman of PTC. Heppelmann joined the company in 1998 when PTC acquired Windchill Technology, a product lifecycle management software company that Heppelman founded. (Disclosure: the writer of this story is a former employee of PTC.)

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Deborah Besemer has stepped down as CEO of the Lexington, MA-based jewelry customization business Gemvara, Boston Globe blogger Scott Kirsner first reported earlier this week. The company renamed itself last month from Paragon Lake, and shifted its virtual jewelry customization business model from being centered around in-store computer screens to a website that targets consumers more directly, a move the requires someone with that experience at the top of the company, Mass High Tech reported. The company’s founder, Matt Lauzon, will take the reins while the company searches for a new chief executive, a process that Besemer will advise part-time. Besemer, who spoke to Bob of her plans to shift the company to e-commerce when she joined last year, will also remain on the company’s board.

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RainDance Technologies, a Lexington, MA-based microfluidics company, has appointed Sirshendu Roopom Banerjee as its new president and CEO, the company announced today. Banerjee most recently served as director of healthcare investment banking at Leerink Swann and succeeds RainDance CEO Christopher McNary, who has taken the position of chief commercial officer at the company.

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Landslide Technologies, a customer relationship management software company with offices in Burlington, MA, and Pittsburgh, PA, announced today that it has raised $8 million in growth capital and hired a new president and CEO, Rick Faulk, the former CEO of web-based social media and training software company Mzinga. Faulk left Burlington-based Mzinga last March, just as the weak economy forced the company to cut its workforce by 18 percent, leaving it with 170 employees. Faulk will also serve on the board of directors at Landslide, whose financing round was led by Adams Capital Management, headquartered in Pittsburgh.

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