Mix one part consultancy with another part incubator and then toss that with an entrepreneur’s passion project. Sprinkle on some academia, too. And there you have New York-based Churnless.

The firm’s founders, Matt Wallaert and Avi Karnani, come from Thrive, a company focused helping consumers make better financial decisions. They sold it to Lendingtree.com in 2009. Wallaert left his PhD program to join Karnani at the startup, and used his behavioral psychology background in his role as lead scientist there. The duo spent several months at LendingTree after the acquisition, but then “came together to start Churnless to create products and partnerships that create behavior change in more than financial services,”says Karnani. They started Churnless in October 2009.

Churnless focuses on companies and products that don’t just offer solo interactions with customers, but long-term engagement and satisfaction. The name is a nod to a business’ churn rate, or rate at which they lose customers. Churnless is looking to slice that for its customers. Churnless started by coaching brands like American Express and AARP, then they began working on their own passion project, GetRaised. The algorithm-based service takes government data and information from job boards to help users determine if they deserve a raise, and then proposes the right way for them to go after it.

Then came the incubator portion of the whole operation, called Churnless Ventures.

“Because we spent so much time thinking about ideas that change behavior, we became a magnet for startups [focused on the same thing],” Karnani says. The team’s goal is to incubate about four pre-seed stage companies per year, offering them workspace, cash, and access to staff. They keep the classes small, and instead get directly involved in launching ventures. So, for example, rather than giving a talk on business development, Karnani will go to customer meetings with Churnless-incubated companies. Or, rather than … Next Page »

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—Cambridge, MA-based Quanterix partnered up with Novartis Diagnostics, the unit of healthcare giant Novartis that tests the safety of 80 percent of the U.S. blood supply. Novartis will run tests to see how effective Quanterix’s device is at pinpointing a protein biomarker in the blood that is linked to an undisclosed neurological disorder. Terms of the arrangement weren’t disclosed.

—New York pharmaceutical company Forest Laboratories (NYSE: FRX) paid $1.2 billion ($30 per share) upfront to acquire Newton, MA-based Clinical Data (NASDAQ: CLDA), a drug developer that won FDA approval last month for its anti-depressant. Forest could pay another $6 per share to Clinical Data shareholders if the drug, vilazodone, hits certain sales goals over the next seven years.

—Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) formed an alliance with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to make the companies’ systems more compatible and easier for healthcare professionals to use together to get a single view of patient records for hospital and outpatient visits.

—Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) announced it had passed a pivotal clinical trial of 161 cystic fibrosis patients who were randomly assigned to the company’s VX-770 pill or  a placebo. Those who received the Vertex drug showed a 17 percent relative improvement in their ability to force out air from their lungs in one second (a measure of lung function). Vertex’s stock shot up 15 percent the morning of the news, to hit $44.03 per share at 10:14am.

—Greg took a look at iAMscientist, a Brookline, MA-based startup developing a global community and resource site for researchers and institutions in science, technology, and medicine. The company has raised $1 million in seed funding from a group that includes famed Harvard chemist George Whitesides, and more than a dozen companies, such as Genzyme.

—Cambridge-based Metamark Genetics is moving out of stealth mode, wrote my colleague Ryan, who caught up with the company’s relatively new CEO Mark Straley. The startup—which was founded by top scientists at Harvard and elsewhere—is out to release a molecular test to provide prognostic information that will help physicians make better treatment decisions.

—Waltham, MA-based lab instruments and services provider Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) announced it had sold off its Athena Diagnostics and Lancaster Laboratories units for a total of $940 million in cash, to boost shareholder value. Madison, NJ-based lab testing firm Quest Diagnostics is paying $740 million for Athena, and Eurofins Scientific of Brussels, Belgium, will shell out $200 million to acquire Lancaster, a provider of contract testing and analysis services to pharmaceutical companies.

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Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels (TCA) says today it is forming a new fund that will allow non-members to collectively participate in startup investments, a move that should add some firepower to TCA deals and could smooth out the funding process for entrepreneurs.

The formation of the Angel Capital Entrepreneurial Fund (ACE Fund) comes at a time when venture capital firms have been contracting—especially in San Diego—and angel investors have emerged as an increasingly critical source of seed stage capital. Former TCA chairman Dave Berkus, who spearheaded the effort, says the new fund offers individual, corporate, and institutional investors an opportunity to join in the wisdom of the TCA crowd—while at the same time providing low management expenses, a faster payback scheme, and improved liquidity.

In designating the first fund as “ACE Fund 1,” Berkus, a prolific angel investor in the Los Angeles area, obviously aspires to follow with a series of ACE funds.

Investing collectively through a fund, though, represents a departure from the way the Tech Coast Angels has operated since 2000, when the San Diego “Band of Angels” combined with the Tech Coast Angels, which was then operating in Los Angeles and Orange County. The organization, which is technically a nonprofit mutual benefit corporation, has expanded over the past decade to Santa Barbara and the “Inland Empire” of Riverside and San Bernardino, and counts more than 250 individual investors as members.

Usually, TCA members invest only as individuals. Members of each chapter typically meet once a month to hear startup presentations and conduct other business. With the ACE Fund, however, TCA members also can pool their resources and invest collectively in the same deals that are presented at chapter meetings. In other words, TCA members now can invest individually in a startup, or collectively through the ACE Fund, or both.

For the first time, the ACE Fund also will be open to investments from TCA non-member individuals (who qualify as high net-worth investors) and institutional investors.

At a presentation last month in San Diego, Berkus said the ACE Fund already … Next Page »

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A University of Virginia team developing miniature power plants that convert rice husks into electricity for use in rural villages throughout India won $250,000 in seed capital for winning a global business plan competition. Husk Power Systems of Charlottesville, Va., was named as the winner today by the sponsors, the Menlo Park, CA, venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and San Jose, CA-based Cisco Systems. Biological Dynamics, a UC San Diego effort headed by bioengineering graduate student Raj Krishnan, was among the 16 finalists that competed yesterday in final online presentations.

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Massachusetts venture investors have long taken heat for the perception, at least, that they shy away from very early-stage (read, risky but potentially game-changing) investments—and many folks have pointed to a relative dearth of venture firms that specialize in seed-stage plays.

In recent months, though, there seems to be a definite uptick in interest in early-stage investments. In February, Wade wrote about the Boulder-CO-based TechStars startup boot camp coming to Cambridge. And just yesterday, we carried the news about Boston’s Spark Capital and its new startup seed fund.

On the heels of the Spark announcement, another venture firm in the early-stage arena, Cambridge, MA-based LaunchCapital, announced its latest round of seed investments. Ryan profiled the firm back in January, and LaunchCapital, as we have disclosed, was an investor in Xconomy’s Series A-1 round last November. The firm, which has offices in New Haven, CT, and San Francisco, in addition to Cambridge, specializes in smallish investments—averaging around $125,000—across a variety of industries. And Elon Boms, a founder and the managing director of LaunchCapital, told Ryan the firm typically makes its decision within 10 weeks of hearing the first pitch (yeah!).

Yesterday’s announcement covered six startups—five in New England—the company has invested in over the past three months. In alphabetical order, they are:

—Cardiophotonics (New Haven, CT) — Develops non-invasive blood monitors used to detect cardiac arrhythmia and dehydration

—FMP Products (Greenwich, CT) — Laboratory automation equipment and related software—initially in fields of sample processing, imaging, and liquid handling—designed to increase researcher productivity

—Helix (Guilford, CT) — DNA therapeutics

—iTeam (Westford, MA) — Seeks to simplify IT and audio/visual installation through Software-as-a-Product model

—SafePorch (Dunnellon, FL) — Like the name sounds, offers specialized storm shelter products in hurricane prone regions of the country

—Vigix (Cambridge, MA) — Next generation kiosk technology for self-service retail sales

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