The dollar amounts ranged from the modest (FitnessKeeper) to the mammoth (Vertex) for New England tech and life sciences deals this week.
—Boston’s FitnessKeeper, maker of the RunKeeper iPhone application, raised $400,000 from Cambridge, MA-based LaunchCapital and a group of individual investors. Wade chatted with FitnessKeeper founder and CEO Jason Jacobs about his plans for the cash.
—Panraven, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of online image editing tools raised $2.7 million in debt, equity, and warrants, according to regulatory documents. The total planned value of the deal is $3 million.
—Cambridge-based Forma Therapeutics, a drug-development spinoff of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, raised $25.5 million in a Series B venture round. New investor Lilly Ventures took the lead in the deal, which was joined by the Novartis Option Fund and Bio One Capital.
—Falmouth, ME-based Zorap raised $1.35 million of a planned $1.9 million round of equity financing, according to regulatory filings. The startup runs a video chat room website.
—VisibleGains of Waltham, MA, raised $2 million in a new financing deal, according to an SEC filing. Investors weren’t named in the filing but the CEO of the company, a provider of online interactive video technology, told Xconomy in October that the firm was raising money from its previous backers Point Judith Capital and Castile Ventures.
—OwnerIQ, a Boston-based provider of targeted marketing data, raised $5.82 million in Series C funding from Atlas Venture, Common Angels, Egan Managed Capital, Kepha Partners, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation.
—North Billerica, MA-based Contour Semiconductor, a producer of Flash memory chips for mobile devices, reported to the SEC that it has raised $8 million in equity financing.
—Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRTX]]) raised $443 million in an underwritten offering of 11.5 million new shares of stock. The funding is the latest of serveral large deals the company has cut to support the development of its hepatitis C drug, telaprevir, as was as treatments for cystic fibrosis.
—Alkermes (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALKS]) agreed to pay a fellow Cambridge company, Acceleron Pharma, $2 million in upfront license fees for worldwide rights to technology for making biotech drugs last longer in the bloodstream. Alkermes will also make an $8 million equity investment in Acceleron, and will potentially pay milestone payments and royalties on eventual product sales.
