BuyWithMe Gets Edhance, LogMeIn Picks Up Pachube, Polaris Backs Two MA Companies, & More Boston-Area Deals News

Acquisitions were big again this week, but we saw a range of financings and transactions across energy, biotech, and IT sectors.

—Waltham, MA-based Tecogen, a maker of natural-gas-fueled, engine-driven combined heat and power systems, inked a $500,000 investment from Southern California Gas.

—Verastem, a Boston-based oncology startup founded by MIT biologists Robert Weinberg and Eric Lander, snagged $32 million in Series B funding, led by Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV) and Astellas Venture Management. Existing investors Longwood Founders Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cardinal Partners, and MPM Capital also participated in the deal.

—Prospectiv Direct, an online marketing firm in Wakefield, MA, was bought by Stamford, CT-based Affinion Group for $30 million plus earn-outs over the next two years, in a deal expected to close sometime this quarter. Read more about Prospectiv and Eversave, the daily deals site it owns, in this story here.

Polaris Venture Partners of Waltham announced it had made its first set of investments from its $375 million sixth fund, which included two Massachusetts companies: Biff Labs and Xtuit.

—In more daily deals news, Boston- and New York-based BuyWithMe bought Edhance of Cambridge, MA, for an undisclosed sum. Edhance provides card-linked offers and customer loyalty programs.

–Waltham-based Affectiva took in $5.7 million in Series B financing led by Kantar (WPP) and Myrian Capital to develop and market its software targeted at emotion recognition.

—LogMeIn (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LOGM]]), a Woburn, MA-based maker of remote access software, acquired Pachube (pronounced Patch Bay) for $15 million in cash.

—Lexington, MA-based drug developer Inotek Pharmaceuticals raised another $9.3 million to bring its latest financing round up to $23.6 million.

Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.