Latest Posts

• Google Partners With Zapata on Open-Source Quantum Computing Effort

  Zapata Computing, a Harvard University spinout developing software to enable quantum computers, said Wednesday it’s working with Google to advance quantum computing technologies. Zapata said it’s one of the first users of Cirq, Google’s new open-source software framework for quantum computing.... Read more »

  Jeff Engel7/19/18

• Fresh Off Bristol Buyout, IFM Backers Raise $31M to Plot a Second Strike

  Nearly one year ago, biotech startup IFM Therapeutics sold some of its assets to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $300 million. But IFM’s founders stuck around to try to capitalize on the startup’s remaining research. They’ve formed a Boston business, IFM Tre, that... Read more »

  Frank Vinluan7/19/18

• Global Firm Opens Detroit Fintech Co-Working Hub to Foster Growth

  What do Singapore, Bahrain, and Detroit have in common? If you answered “they’re all home to financial technology hubs,” you win a prize.

  Singapore is a well-known global finance capital, while Bahrain has spent the past four decades positioning itself as... Read more »

  Sarah Schmid Stevenson7/19/18

• E.U. Slaps $5B Antitrust Fine on Google; Tech Giant Plans Appeal

  If top European leaders faced a testy President Donald Trump in a series of meetings this summer, imagine the mood when the president of the European Commission arrives at the White House next Wednesday.

  President Trump and the European Union’s top... Read more »

  Bernadette Tansey7/18/18

• Moonshot Insights Bets on Algorithms to Address Biases in Hiring

  In recent weeks, there’s been some local buzz about a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison students that’s getting set to participate in the 2018 Hyperloop Pod Competition, which will take place next week in Hawthorne, CA. This year, the team... Read more »

  Jeff Buchanan7/18/18

• Rubius Upsizes IPO and Hauls in $241M for Red Blood Cell Therapies

  Rubius Therapeutics has joined the parade of biotech companies going public, raising a whopping $241.1 million to support its approach of engineering red blood cells into off-the-shelf treatments for disease.

  Late Tuesday night, Cambridge, MA-based Rubius priced its offering of 10.4... Read more »

  Frank Vinluan7/18/18

• Introducing the 2018 Innovation at the Intersection Award Finalists

  From artificial intelligence (A.I.) to materials science, this year’s Xconomy Awards finalists in the Innovation at the Intersection category are bringing a variety of disciplines outside of biology to bear on tough problems in life science. The hope is that advanced... Read more »

  Corie Lok7/18/18

• Inari Agriculture Sprouts with Plans to Gene Edit “Personalized Seeds”

  The seeds farmers plant in their fields can carry certain desirable traits, such as drought tolerance or pest resistance. Breeding or genetic engineering can produce such traits, but ag biotech startup Inari Agriculture aims to take trait development to a new... Read more »

  Frank Vinluan7/18/18

• Edge Computing Software Startup Swim.ai Scores $10M from VCs, Arm

  Swim.ai, a startup developing advanced analytics software that can process data in devices at the edge of a network—such as industrial turbines or self-driving cars—announced today it raised $10 million in a Series B funding round.

  The San Jose, CA-based... Read more »

  Bernadette Tansey7/18/18

• Roundup: Accelerate Michigan, U-M, Tetra Discovery Partners & More

  The grind never stops in Michigan’s innovation community, even when the weather is perfect for playing hooky. Here’s a look at recent tech news from around the state:

  —The Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition, the state’s largest startup pitch contest with... Read more »

  Sarah Schmid Stevenson7/18/18

• Drug Developer Kiromic Declines San Antonio’s Cash Offer for HQ Move

  San Antonio — [Updated 7/18/18, 2:58 p.m. See below.] The board of directors for Houston-based immunotherapy biotech Kiromic has decided against taking a $200,000 investment from San Antonio-based economic development group, which would have required the company to relocate to San... Read more »

  David Holley7/17/18

• Walmart, Microsoft Deepen Partnership as Both Grapple With Amazon

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend—even in the retail and cloud computing businesses.

  So says retail giant Walmart (NYSE: WMT) as it announced this morning a five-year partnership with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to use machine learning and... Read more »

  Angela Shah7/17/18

• New Ethics Code Urges Tech Firms and Coders To Avoid Harming Society

  Selling a new Web-connected thermostat or other wired gizmo to consumers without a plan to deliver the necessary security patches is not only bad business—it’s unethical. So is failing to challenge a law or tech company rule that governs work on... Read more »

  Bernadette Tansey7/17/18

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• Security Firm ObserveIT Grabs $33M to Get Ahead of Insider Threats

  Cyber breaches caused by people within businesses and organizations, both accidental and malicious leaks, continue to multiply. Now, a Boston security startup is arming itself with more cash and enhanced technology to try and stop these insider threats.

  ObserveIT announced... Read more »

  Jeff Engel7/17/18

• City of Detroit Tests Real-World Mobility with Innovation Initiative

  Michigan’s government and business leaders have worked diligently over the past few years to position the state that put the world on wheels to be major player in the development of self-driving cars. (According to a June 25 opinion piece in... Read more »

  Sarah Schmid Stevenson7/17/18

• With $45M, HotSpot Takes Drug Research to New Biological Real Estate

  In real estate, location is key. The same holds true in the hunt for new drugs. HotSpot Therapeutics is trying to break new ground in drug discovery by hitting locations on a protein that aren’t the conventional targets of most medicines.... Read more »

  Frank Vinluan7/17/18

• Ex-HubSpot CMO Volpe to Lead Lola, Founder Paul English Is Now CTO

  [Updated 7/17/18, 11:53 am, with comments from English and Volpe. See below.] Lola, the business travel software startup led by Kayak co-founder Paul English, has brought on a new chief executive: Mike Volpe, the former chief marketing officer at... Read more »

  Jeff Engel7/16/18

• Hyperloop, Cellectar, Cheeks & More: This Week’s Wisconsin Watchlist

  Keep up with news from Wisconsin’s innovation community with these recent headlines:

  —A team of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has constructed a third prototype for a vehicle designed to zoom through an above-ground vacuum tube at speeds that can... Read more »

  Jeff Buchanan7/16/18

• Foxconn Buys Eau Claire Office Space, Partners with Advocate Aurora

  Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant, is making more moves in Wisconsin at it prepares to build a massive electronics factory in the southeast corner of the state.

  Foxconn said on Monday that it has agreed to buy one building in downtown... Read more »

  Jeff Buchanan7/16/18

• New Study Shows CRISPR Can Delete Big Chunks of DNA

  [Updated 7/16/18 4:00pm ET, see note below] As CRISPR-based therapeutics inch closer to human tests in the U.S., academic researchers have kept up a steady drum beat about potential risks of the gene editing technique. They recently published two... Read more »

  Corie Lok7/16/18

• High Alpha Raises $100M+ for Two New Funds, Adds Brad Feld to Board

  High Alpha, an Indianapolis venture capital fund and startup “studio,” announced today that it has raised more than $100 million for two new funds called High Alpha Capital II and High Alpha Studio II.

  High Alpha Capital backs companies the... Read more »

  Sarah Schmid Stevenson7/16/18

• Pliant Picks Up $62M to Test Lung, Liver Fibrosis Drug in the Clinic

  The cause of fibrosis, the hardening and thickening of connective tissue in organs, isn’t known and it has few treatments. Pliant Therapeutics aims to bring patients who have this chronic and life-threatening condition in the lungs or the liver a new... Read more »

  Frank Vinluan7/16/18

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• Verge Genomics Nabs $32M For Computation-Heavy Neuro Drug Discovery

  Two years after making her first-ever rounds of business meetings at the J.P. Morgan healthcare conference, Alice Zhang has steered her biotech startup, Verge Genomics, into a $32 million Series A financing.

  Zhang (pictured) was notable then and now for her... Read more »

  Alex Lash7/16/18

• Telkonet Brings on Roth Capital to Explore Sale or Other Deals

  Telkonet, a small Milwaukee-area energy management and connected devices company, said this week it had hired the investment bank Roth Capital Partners “to explore strategic alternatives” with the goal of maximizing shareholder value.

  Jason Tienor, president and CEO of Telkonet (OTCMKTS:... Read more »

  Jeff Buchanan7/13/18

• With New Data, Amgen Tries Again for FDA OK of Osteoporosis Drug

  More than a year after the FDA rejected Amgen’s experimental osteoporosis drug due to safety concerns, the Thousand Oaks, CA, company has teed up a new application.

  The Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) drug, romosozumab (Evenity), is an antibody treatment meant... Read more »

  Frank Vinluan7/13/18

• Best Friday Reads: Social Media Rules Us All, and Mints Billionaires

  Humans have had a drastic physical evolution recently—one that has notably taken only a few years. While the evolution from hunched primates to homo sapiens took tens of millions of years, we needed only about a decade to develop an arched... Read more »

  David Holley7/13/18

• Boston Tech Watch: Autodesk, DataRobot, Starry, Perceptive Automata

  It’s time to catch up on Boston tech headlines. This week, we’re tracking acquisitions by Autodesk and DataRobot, a $100 million investment in upstart wireless Internet provider Starry, a new startup from Runkeeper co-founder Jason Jacobs, details about a stealthy autonomous... Read more »

  Jeff Engel7/13/18

• Bio Roundup: Pfizer’s Prices, Novartis Cuts, Gene Therapy Guide & More

  Drug price changes typically happen either at the start of the calendar year or the beginning of the third quarter. Such changes are routine for many companies, but Pfizer took an unusual step this week by rolling back scheduled price increases... Read more »

  Frank Vinluan7/13/18

• C-Motive, Startup Developing Electric Motor Technology, Raises $750K

  Cobalt is one of the ingredients in a type of rare earth magnet that, along with other rare earth magnets like neodymium and dysprosium, can be found in electric motors, smartphone batteries, and other products that are popular among consumers and... Read more »

  Jeff Buchanan7/12/18

• Broadcom Eyes CA Technologies for $19B After Trump Axed Qualcomm Bid

  Semiconductor maker Broadcom, which ended its effort to buy competitor Qualcomm earlier this year, has a new target: New York-based business software maker CA Technologies.

  The pair announced Wednesday that Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), which moved its headquarters from Singapore... Read more »

  David Holley7/12/18

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