The climate in Boston this week was neither steamy nor stormy. Likewise, the week in deals was a little bit hot and a little bit cold —with not much on either extreme.
—Oracle flexed its muscle in Massachusetts, acquiring Lowell, MA-based Virtual Iron for an undisclosed sum. Virtual Iron specializes in virtualization technology, which allows multiple servers to behave as one, or enables a single server to juggle multiple operating systems.
—Waltham, MA-based drug developer Artisan Pharma raised $9.4 million in a round of debt financing. The company’s SEC filing did not name the investors.
—Cambridge’s MetaCarta raised $910K in convertible debt with help from Sevin Rosen Funds, FA Technology, and Hunt Ventures. MetaCarta’s software plots the geographic location of news items onto digital maps.
—Wind turbines are coming to the Bay State, though not to the Cape: Massachusetts received $25M from the Department of Energy to build a turbine blade-testing facility in Charlestown. The center will specialize in the testing of large blades up to 300 feet in length and will be the first such facility located outside of Europe.
—MyVu added $3.25 million to the $11.5 million it raised in January 2006. Atlas Venture and Hillman Capital are listed as “related persons” in the latest SEC filing of the Westwood, MA company, a maker of LCD video goggles.
—GrandBanks, a Newton Center, MA-based venture capital firm, continues to support Canadian tech startups. The latest beneficiary is Toronto’s I Love Rewards, developers of an online catalog that allows corporate clients to incentivize employee performance. GrandBanks was joined by JLA Ventures and Lawrence Capital in this Series B round of financing, which totaled either $5.7 million (according to a GrandBanks announcement)
