Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures has managed to keep the existence of one of the companies it has been incubating, Seventh Sense Biosystems, a secret for about a year. But the closing of the startup’s Series A round of financing put some information about the firm in the public domain this week. (PE Hub had this brief based on SEC filing the startup made for its first financing round.)
When I talked to Flagship general partner Doug Cole, a director of Seventh Sense, he was able to say who’s involved in the startup and gave me a general idea of what the company is doing. He also noted that the Series A round—which included investments by Flagship, Polaris Venture Partners, and Third Rock Ventures—was for as much as $4.75 million (a bit higher than the $4.18 million PE Hub reported from the SEC filing).
Still, Cole would barely say anything about Seventh Sense’s technology. “[Seventh Sense is] developing products where people will be able to monitor their own health,” he says. “People who have serious needs to monitor their own health will be able to do so easily.”
Yet Cole did send me an email with the names of the firm’s star-studded board of directors. Some of the well-known directors include: renowned MIT inventor Bob Langer, who Cole says is involved in developing the firm’s technology; R. Rox Anderson, a dermatologist and director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Peter Barton Hutt, former chief counsel of the FDA and one of the top food and drug attorneys in the country.
Seventh Sense is now housed at Flagship’s offices on Memorial Boulevard, with Flagship partner Doug Levinson serving as CEO and director of the company. The new company reunites Levinson with Langer, who were both among the scientific founders of Lexington, MA-based biotech firm TransForm Pharmaceuticals, which medical products giant Johnson & Johnson acquired in 2005 for $230 million. Cole says that Seventh Sense is moving out of Flaghip’s offices to a new home in Cambridge or elsewhere in the Boston area.
