This week we’ve seen financing news for a mix of New England IT and life sciences startups.

—Massachusetts startups raised $250.5 million across 34 deals in July, down from about $564.7 million the month before. The July drop in funding is a pattern we’ve observed before, thanks to data from our partner CB Insights, provider of FundingFlash, a daily roundup of companies receiving venture capital, angel investment, and growth equity funding.

—Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm HubSpot bought also Cambridge-based Oneforty for an undisclosed sum, scooping up the Oneforty team and bringing the merged company’s head count to 285 employees. Oneforty provides social media marketing tools and a directory of social media apps.

—Hopper, a Montreal-based travel startup looking for office space in Cambridge for the fall, announced it pinned down an $8 million funding round led by Atlas Venture with participation from Brightspark Ventures.

—Natick, MA-based cloud data storage provider TwinStrata nabbed $5.7 million in equity funding from 27 investors. The financing could hit $8.7 million, according to an SEC document.

—Two Cambridge diagnostics technology startups raised money this week. Quanterix—previously funded by Bain Capital Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, and Flagship Ventures—raised $6 million in new equity financing. And Foundation Medicine, a provider of cancer genomics testing, pinned down about half of an equity round that could hit $20.5 million.

—Our VentureDeal feed pulled another slew of New England financing headlines: $1 million for Newton, MA-based TenMarks, $500,000 for Boston-based Nyx Devices, $3 million for Pittsfield, MA-based Nuclea Biotechnologies, $7 million for Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma, and $1.5 million for Glastonbury, CT-based PayVeris.

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Although it’s been another slow week for Seattle-area technology deals, there have been a few notable financings and one pretty sizable acquisition. Of the three deals this week, two fell into the online space, while the third was in the security and software sector. Take a look at this week’s highlights:

—Seattle-based private-sales website Zulily raised $6 million more in Series B financing led by August Capital, and existing Seattle-based Maveron. The 6-month-old e-commerce company offers daily deals for national baby gear, children’s apparel, kid’s toys, and maternity brands. The company rolled out of stealth with a $4.6 million Series A back in December. Since then co-founder and CEO Darrell Cavens says Zulily has grown faster than expected, expanding its product base to offer around 500 available items every day.

—Online youth sports startup Korrio, based in Mercer Island, WA, has raised $3.3 million in equity, according to a regulatory filing. The company, formerly known as iPlaySportz, is developing a cloud-based platform that uses Web technology to organize and automate youth sports information and registration for families, players, coaches, and fans. The company, still in its early stages, is headed up by former Isilon Systems CEO and senior executive at F5 Networks Steve Goldman.

—Texas-based Tektronix Communications, a networking software firm now owned by tech conglomerate Danaher (NYSE: DHR), has agreed to acquire Chelmsford, MA-based security and network management software developer Arbor Networks for an undisclosed amount. Although this doesn’t have a direct Northwest connection, Tektronix Communications is affiliated with Oregon tech institution Tektronix, which was acquired by Danaher for $2.85 billion in 2007.

—This isn’t exactly a deal, but it does speak to venture capital trends in Seattle and other tech hotspots including San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston. In the last week Menlo Park, CA-based VentureDeal released its IPO activity report for the first half of 2010, which indicated that though IPOs are still weak, they show an distinct improvement from the first half of 2009. Although only one of the 21 venture-backed technology or life sciences companies that went public in the U.S. in the first half of 2010 was in Seattle, it brought in a pretty heft amount. Bellevue, WA-based Motricity (NASDAQ: [[ticker: MOTR]]) went public in June with an IPO of $50 million.

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A couple of deals topped the tech news last week, but the development most worth watching might be the formation of a new type of fund by Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels. Find out why, and catch up on the rest of San Diego’s tech news here.

—The angel investor group Tech Coast Angels is creating a new fund that will allow non-members to pool their money to collectively invest in seed stage startups, a move that could prove to be the most important news of the year for San Diego tech entrepreneurs in need of seed capital. This Angel Capital Entrepreneurial Fund (ACE Fund), which will be at least $3 million, is one more sign of the rising importance of angel investors.

—Japanese communications provider NTT DoCoMo said it was paying $111.6 million to acquire the stake in PacketVideo it didn’t already own. DoCoMo paid $45.5 million last year for a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, a 12-year-old San Diego company that provides software and multimedia services for mobile devices.

—St. Bernard Software (OTCBB: [[ticker:SBSW), which specializes in hybrid hardware and software network security technology, acquired the assets of Red Condor, an e-mail security technology specialist in Rohnert Park, CA. St. Bernard did not disclose terms of the Red Condor acquisition.

—Ecotality (NASDAQ: ECTY) CEO Jonathan Read unveiled his company’s plans for a network of 1,500 electric vehicle charging stations that will be installed throughout San Diego County. Ecotality has been working on the charging infrastructure for six months with regional transportation planners, San Diego Gas & Electric engineers, and city and county officials.

—SG Biofuels said it is establishing an advanced research and … Next Page »

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Last week was another busy one for venture fundraising and acquisitions in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Fortunately, I got a lot of help this week from my San Diego colleague Bruce Bigelow, who reported on several stories affecting the Bay Area.

—On Friday, Google confirmed earlier press reports that it had acquired San Francisco-based Slide, which makes social applications for Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks. Google didn’t say how much it had paid for Slide, which was founded by Paypal co-founder Max Levchin; reports put the price tag at $182 million to $228 million.

—I profiled Zendesk, the San Francisco-based help desk software maker that has bounced back from a user revolt this spring over price increases and is busy rolling out new features that make it easier for companies to stay engaged with their customers.

—In the second part of a long conversation with Kate Mitchell and Rory O’Driscoll, general partners at Foster City, CA-based Scale Venture Partners, I explored how the firm works with mid-stage ventures that have a proven idea but need to scale up their operations.

—The IPO market for venture-backed startups is slowly strengthening, according to data from Menlo Park, CA-based VentureDeal. As Bruce reported, nine Bay Area companies have gone public in 2010, as have four more in Xconomy’s other home cities of Boston, San Diego, and Seattle.

—For folks interested in Silicon Valley’s booming angel investing culture, I shared a two-part report from Y Combinator’s July 29 AngelConf event. In Part 1 I excerpted some of the best quotes from Jeff Clavier, Greg McAdoo, Mitch Kapor, Andrea Zurek, and Paul Graham, and in Part 2, I quoted Naval Ravikant, Joshua Schachter, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit, and Sam Altman. We’ve also got an essay today from leading angel investor Ron Conway, based on his AngelConf talk.

—San Francisco-based Ecotality unveiled a plan to install thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles in the San Diego area, as Bruce reported. San Diego is the first of 16 cities where Ecotality is installing EV charging stations over the next two years.

—I took a look at the digital options for getting business cards out of your life, including—my favorite—an iPhone and Android app called Bump, from the Mountain View, CA-based startup of the same name.

—Erin Kutz followed up on news that ThredUP, a swap site for children’s clothing, is packing its bags in Cambridge, MA, and moving to San Francisco’s Union Square.

… Next Page »

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Amid an overall improvement in IPOs, a survey by Menlo Park, CA-based VentureDeal shows 21 venture-capital backed technology or life sciences companies went public in the U.S. during the first six months of 2010, raising a total of $1.9 billion in gross proceeds.

VentureDeal’s IPO activity report is focused on a specific subgroup of technology and life sciences companies backed by traditional venture capital firms, and draws from the firm’s venture capital database. Altogether, 63 companies went public during the first half of this year, according to the running tally on the Renaissance Capital website.

Since July 1, an additional 14 companies of all types have gone public, according to the Renaissance Capital tally—and VentureDeal says five of those are venture-backed tech or life sciences companies. While the overall number of IPOs so far this year is still just a fraction of the 675 U.S. companies that went public in 1996 (which was the IPO peak during the tech boom of the 1990s), the IPO market in 2010 has been on its best pace since 2007, when a total of 160 companies went public through initial stock offerings.

The numbers are obviously better than the first half of 2009, when only three venture-backed tech and life sciences companies held IPOs, raising slightly more than $462 million. (During the first half of last year, a grand total of 14 companies of all types sold shares of their stock to the public for the first time, according to the Renaissance Capital data.)

So what does it all mean?

“Last year was a heart attack,” says Don Jones, VentureDeal’s founder and CEO in an interview. “It’s really sort of a different world [now] because of … Next Page »

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Seattle-based software startup Gist has raised an additional $4 million in equity financing, according to VentureDeal. Gist vice president of marketing Robert Pease confirmed the deal, adding that the latest round came from existing investors, Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Boulder, Co-based firm Foundry Group.

Gist develops online software that helps business people keep track of all of their contacts—from e-mail, various social networks, and other sources—so that they can manage relationships in an easy and efficient way. The company, founded in 2008, has been picking up steam since it moved out of beta and became available to the public back in September. Gist provides a Web-based dashboard that compiles contact information from e-mail inboxes and social networks, and then integrates updates on said contacts gathered from articles, blogs, and networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in one easy online location.

The company raised $6.75 million in Series A financing from both Vulcan and Foundry in May 2009. Since then the company has continued to roll out new functionalities, including incorporating existing services from other companies as plugins in its dashboard. In January Gist’s technology became compatible, though in limited release, with IBM’s communication and collaboration software Lotus Notes. In March the company acquired Learn That Name, a locally born mobile application that helps people memorize the faces and names of LinkedIn contacts through a quick-paced quiz-style association game. Currently Gist services are available through iPhone and Android apps as well.

A request for comment on the deal was put in to Gist CEO T.A. McCann this morning, but was not immediately returned. We will update the story when we hear more.

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Habitual visitors to our Boston and Seattle homepages might have noticed something new about a month ago—a pretty blue box perched right on top of the event-listings box and packed full of headlines about venture financings and M&A deals. Click a headline, and you get a tidy little summary of the transaction, complete with information on the target company, investors, terms, and so forth. Click “More VC/M&A Deals” at the bottom of the box and you get a whole archive of transactions from New England and the Pacific Northwest, respectively.

This fantastic new feature of the site comes courtesy of the very generous folks at Menlo Park, CA-based VentureDeal. They provide a comprehensive nationwide database of corporate intelligence, subscription-based access to highly detailed real-time information about funding and acquisition transactions, and a host of custom research services. They worked with us to create custom, geographically sorted feeds for each of the sites in our network in order to provide a unique resource for Xconomy readers interested in local VC and M&A deals—if a deal goes down in one of the regions that our network covers, you’ll be able to find out about it in the VentureDeal box.

For those of you who are fond of Wade, Greg, Luke, Ryan, and Bob’s intrepid reporting on these kinds of transactions (or my weekly roundups of them and other local biz/tech deals), never fear—we plan to continue covering the news as we’ve always done in a our main blog. The VentureDeal feeds are meant to complement this coverage, by providing a comprehensive, reference-style database of all the transactions in our sphere of interest.

We think both types of information—the journalistic and the encyclopedic—are valuable, and we hope you agree. The VentureDeal archive for the Boston area is here, and the one for the Seattle area is here. Check them out and let us know what you think.

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