My favorite deal from last week was the last one, but it’s a little hard to capture the idea of core-sampling frozen sperm in a headline. (Or at least a headline suitable for a family publication such as our own.)
—Castile Ventures of Waltham, MA, led a $13 million Series B investment in Sunnyvale, CA’s Agito Networks. Also participating was another Waltham firm, Battery Ventures, which led the 2006 Series A round for Agito, whose technology allows users to easily roam between public cellular networks and internal WiFi networks.
—Hopkinton, MA-based Alseres Pharmaceuticals, (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALSE]]), which develops neurological drugs and diagnostics, raised $5 million in convertible debt from one of its former directors, Robert Gipson of Ingalls & Snyder Value Partners.
—Boston-based .406 Ventures led a Series B funding round for Brooklyn, NY-based Kaltura. The New York startup makes the open-source video platform used by Wikipedia and other online publications.
—Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: [[ticker:TMO]]) of Waltham, MA, acquired RNAi firm Open Biosystems of Huntsville, AL, for an undisclosed sum.
—Progress Software of Bedford, MA, acquired competitor Mindreef of Hollis, NH, for an undisclosed sum. Both firms make software aimed at building and maintaining so-called service oriented architectures (SOA).
—Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CBST]]) inked a deal with AstraZeneca worth at least $20 million to promote the pharma giant’s intravenous antibiotic, Merrem.
—Allied Minds, an investment firm focusing on nascent firms built around university research, backed CryoXtract, a Harvard/Northeastern University startup developing a new way to take out small amounts out of frozen biological materials like blood or sperm. Think of tiny little core samples and you get the idea.
