Cisco Snags Starent for $2.9B, Rocket Software Raises $91.9M, & More Boston-Area Deals News

Not much deals news to round up this week, thanks to the Monday holiday and the fact that last week’s roundup slipped to this week. But just in case you missed it…

—Tewksbury, MA-based Starent Networks (NASDAQ:[[ticker:STAR]]) agreed to be acquired by technology giant Cisco (NASDAQ:[[ticker:CSCO]]) for a healthy $2.9 billion. Starent, which went public in 2007, makes wireless infrastructure products used to transfer data to smartphones and other mobile devices. The deal is expected to close in the first half of next year. One burning question: who will get that desirable STAR ticker once Starent is formally absorbed into Cisco?

Rocket Software reported in an SEC filing that it has raised $91.9 million in equity financing. The filing didn’t specify the investor or investors, and the Newton, MA-based firm—which develops enterprise infrastructure products and has partnerships with the likes of IBM, EMC, HP, and others—did not comment on the deal.

—Our friends at ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company developing tools for investors, startups, and aspiring entrepreneurs, gave us all sorts of data on venture investing in Massachusetts companies. We’ve got the low down on September deals, and more charts and graphs about Q3 than you can shake a stick at.

Author: Rebecca Zacks

Rebecca is Xconomy's co-founder. She was previously the managing editor of Physician's First Watch, a daily e-newsletter from the publishers of New England Journal of Medicine. Before helping launch First Watch, she spent a decade covering innovation for Technology Review, Scientific American, and Discover Magazine's TV show. In 2005-2006 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rebecca holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Brown University and a master's in science journalism from Boston University.