San Diego’s Avalon Ventures Closes Ninth Fund, Raises $200 M

by Avalon Ventures and MPM Capital. Aratana also announced that Linda Rhodes, a veterinarian, consultant, contract researcher and the co-founder of New Jersey-based Alchera Bio, will join the company in February as CEO. Aratana is based at MPM’s office in Kansas City, KS.

—Backupify of Cambridge, MA, provides daily automatic backups, archiving, and export of important information that companies and individuals maintain in social media, Software-as-a-Service data, and other cloud-based applications.

—Bagooba, based in New York, NY, is an emerging company in stealth mode. Kinsella says only that Bagooba “is addressing friendship relationship management by a very experienced group of entrepreneurs.”

—Sova Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, CA, specializes in discovering and developing innovative human therapeutic drugs to treat sleep apnea and other sleep-related breathing disorders.

—RQx Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, CA, is a specialized biotech focused on discovering and developing novel broad-spectrum antibiotics, based on research into a family of natural antibiotic products known as arylomycins, which have been shown to block a particular bacterial signal pathway.

—Standing Cloud, of Boulder, CO, is an application management software company founded in 2009 to offer cloud-based services. The 13-employee company has received at least $5 million from Avalon and Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group through two rounds of venture funding. Kinsella says Standing Cloud is “the easiest way to deploy and manage web applications using public cloud infrastructure. With just a few clicks and in less than five minutes, you can be up and running with any of more than 60 open source applications.”


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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.