After a slower flow of high-tech transactions last week, dealmaking was back with a bang this week. Companies in industries from energy to e-commerce to life sciences scored early venture rounds, partnership deals, and state contracts.

—Gemvara, an e-commerce site for jewelry customizations, announced it raised $5.2 million in Series B money, bringing the Lexington, MA-based company’s total financing to $11 million since its founding. Return investors Highland Capital Partners and Canaan Partners led the round, which comes as the company searches for a new CEO.

—FloDesign Wind Turbine, of Wilbraham, MA, will get $3 million from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, as it plans to expand with a new headquarters and product development center in Waltham, MA, which should add about 150 jobs in the state over three years. FloDesign, which is developing wind turbines with jet engine-like technology, will keep its Wilbraham location as an aerodynamics research center.

—MedVentive, a Waltham-based electronic medical data software firm, revealed the investors behind its $10 million Series C round. Boston’s HLM Venture Partners and Excel Venture Management led the financing, which included Long River Ventures, as well as new investors Core Capital Partners and Clarian Health Ventures, the venture arm of one of MedVentive’s big customers. Clarian Quality Partners, the physician network of the Indianapolis-based healthcare provider, uses MedVentive’s technology to analyze the quality of doctor care.

—Cambridge, MA-based Metacarta, a maker of software for searching digital text on places, names, and addresses, was acquired by Finland’s mobile hardware giant Nokia. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Nokia plans to use Metacarta’s technology for in-location local searches and other services, according to a statement.

—Newton, MA’s MedMinder Systems, a company that makes Internet-connected pillboxes for tracking patients’ prescription adherence, raised $1.3 million from 11 individual investors. MedMinder is part of a crop of Boston-area companies using IT to get patients to take their meds, including Cambridge-based Vitality, a maker of smart pillcaps.

—The state of Massachusetts was active in this week’s deals list. It announced it had awarded a contract to Boston-based EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC) as part of a $10 million project to target energy inefficiencies in state facilities. The program will … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Metacarta, whose software searches digital text for references to place names and addresses, has been acquired by Nokia, the Espoo, Finland-based mobile hardware giant announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and it’s not yet clear how Nokia will integrate Metacarta’s technology into its mobile offerings, which include navigation services through the Ovi Maps application. Nokia’s terse press release said only that the 30-person startup’s technology will be “used in the area of local search in location and other service.”

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The climate in Boston this week was neither steamy nor stormy. Likewise, the week in deals was a little bit hot and a little bit cold —with not much on either extreme.

—Oracle flexed its muscle in Massachusetts, acquiring Lowell, MA-based Virtual Iron for an undisclosed sum. Virtual Iron specializes in virtualization technology, which allows multiple servers to behave as one, or enables a single server to juggle multiple operating systems.

—Waltham, MA-based drug developer Artisan Pharma raised $9.4 million in a round of debt financing.  The company’s SEC filing did not name the investors.

—Cambridge’s MetaCarta raised $910K in convertible debt with help from Sevin Rosen Funds, FA Technology, and Hunt Ventures. MetaCarta’s software plots the geographic location of news items onto digital maps.

—Wind turbines are coming to the Bay State, though not to the Cape: Massachusetts received $25M from the Department of Energy to build a turbine blade-testing facility in Charlestown. The center will specialize in the testing of large blades up to 300 feet in length and will be the first such facility located outside of Europe.

—MyVu added $3.25 million to the $11.5 million it raised in January 2006. Atlas Venture and Hillman Capital are listed as “related persons” in the latest SEC filing of the Westwood, MA company, a maker of LCD video goggles.

—GrandBanks, a Newton Center, MA-based venture capital firm, continues to support Canadian tech startups. The latest beneficiary is Toronto’s I Love Rewards, developers of an online catalog that allows corporate clients to incentivize employee performance. GrandBanks was joined by JLA Ventures and Lawrence Capital in this Series B round of financing, which totaled either $5.7 million (according to a GrandBanks announcement) … Next Page »

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Documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that Cambridge, MA-based MetaCarta, whose software plots Web news items on digital maps by extracting metadata about locations mentioned in the items, has raised $910,000 in convertible debt. Sevin Rosen Funds, FA Technology, and Hunt Ventures were listed as participants in the financing. MetaCarta raised $10 million in Series C funding in 2005, and previously received funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture wing of the U.S. intelligence community. We wrote about the company’s GeoSearch service in March 2008.

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MetaCarta, a Cambridge, MA-based MIT spinoff funded in part by the CIA’s venture wing, In-Q-Tel, said today that a new software product called the MetaCarta Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP) is ready for sale. The software takes text content that contains place names in English, French, Spanish, Russian, or Arabic and tags it so that it can be displayed on a map. GSRP appears to be essentially a commercial version of the same system that powers MetaCarta’s own GeoSearch News service, a demonstration system that we wrote about back in March.

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Tired of scanning newspapers, websites, and RSS aggregators for relevant news? Try finding it on a map instead.

The new GeoSearch News service, officially launched Monday by Cambridge, MA-based Metacarta, displays news stories in the form of little red icons on a world map. If you’re curious about what’s going on today in, say, Bremen, Germany, just click on the icon for that city, and an information balloon will pop up listing newswire stories mentioning that city.

The seven-year-old startup’s main business is making geotagging software that corporations, intelligence agencies, and other organizations use to sift through Web content and other documents for words that could be place names, estimates how likely it is that the author was referring to a specific geographical location, and marks up the document with a latitude and longitude. GeoSearch News basically takes Web stories from MetaCarta publishing partners, runs them through Metacarta’s geotagger, and places them on a Google map.

MetaCarta says GeoSearch News includes feeds from 1,400 local, national, and international news sources, including Reuters and the Associated Press. The company is pitching it as a way for news junkies to take in stories from a range of locations without having to visit numerous newspaper websites, or for real estate buyers or travelers to learn more about local goings-on in faraway places where they’re considering an investment or a visit.

“GeoSearch News is an entirely new way for people to find news on the web,” said Rick Hutton, Metacarta’s vice president of content services, in a company announcement about the service. “It combines the unique power of geographic search with keyword search and is the single place to find current news stories, from a wide variety of sources, about any place, quickly.”

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If you’re a budding Boston entrepreneur working on a technology such as deeper data mining, longer-lasting batteries, or faster microfluidic DNA screening, you might get a surprise phone call one day soon from the U.S. intelligence community—or at least, from its strategic investing arm. That’s because In-Q-Tel, an Arlington, VA-based private, non-profit group that funds early-stage technology ventures on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence organizations, has come to town. It’s just turned on the lights at its new Waltham office, and it’s on the lookout for Boston-area startups with technologies that could help the nation’s spies and intelligence analysts do their jobs better.

It’s not that Boston has eluded the intelligence agencies in the past—the region is already home to 13 out of the 120 companies In-Q-Tel has funded since its creation in 1999, including Basis Technology, BBN Technologies, Ember, Endeca, Metacarta, Polychromix, Sionex, Spotfire, and Traction Software. But Ben Levitan, a new partner brought on by In-Q-Tel this April to help open the Boston outpost, says “that percentage is about to go up a lot.”

Levitan agreed to meet me for coffee in a snowy Harvard Square yesterday afternoon. With him was Donald Tighe, In-Q-Tel’s vice president of external affairs, who was visiting from Virginia. I’d first met Levitan in an unusual setting—a dinner discussion about virtual items and virtual economies hosted back in October by David Beisel of Cambridge venture firm Venrock—and he’d hinted to me then that In-Q-Tel would have some news in the next few weeks. Over cappuccinos at Legal Sea Foods, Levitan and Tighe told me that the organization has been cultivating local contacts behind the scenes for some time, and that they’re now finally ready to start spreading the word more widely about In-Q-Tel’s presence here.

In-Q-Tel’s mission is to scout for young companies where engineers are working on technologies intelligence agencies might want, but need help getting these technologies off the ground and adapting them for the government’s specific requirements. The organization provides seed money of up to $3 million, as well as a crash course in the structure and requirements of organizations like the CIA, the NSA, or the National Reconnaissance Office. Most often, In-Q-Tel doesn’t even ask for an equity stake in return. “We’re not looking for ‘deals.’ We’re looking for solutions to problems,” says Levitan.

Those problems fall into five specific areas: application software and analytics; bio- and nano-technology … Next Page »

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