Thursday Deals Roundup: Zagat, Platfora, Lending Club & More

Time for our more-or-less daily summary of key deals news in the Bay Area biztech world.

Google announced that it has acquired Zagat, the venerable and popular crowdsourced restaurant guide. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for local, maps, and location services, said the Zagat operation “will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.” Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

—Platfora, a Palo Alto startup building a business intelligence and analytics software for data stored in the open-source Hadoop data warehousing system, announced that it has secured $5.7 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz and In-Q-Tel, the investing wing of the U.S. intelligence community.

—San Francisco-based Lending Club said that it has brought in strategic investments from Peter J. Thomson, the chairman of Thomvest and director of Thomson Reuters. Thomson has put an unspecified amount into Lending Club directly, and has also invested in the Conservative Consumer Credit Fund, which invests in consumer loans originated by Lending Club. Lending Club raised $25 million in a funding round last month led by Union Square Ventures.

—Powergetics, a San Francisco stealth-mode startup working on energy storage systems, has raised $10.3 million in a round of equity-based financing that could top out at $14.3 million, according to a regulatory filing.

—Redwood City, CA-based Striiv, which is developing a keychain fitness device that measures physical exertion, has closed a $6 million Series A funding round, first disclosed in an August regulatory filing. Backers included iD Ventures and individual investors Colin Angle of iRobot and Dado Banatao of Tallwood Ventures.

—In other news, the CrunchFund saga continues, with Fortune’s Dan Primack now reporting that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has been been really, truly terminated by his employer AOL.

Author: Wade Roush

Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco. Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.) I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia. I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats. My personal site: waderoush.com My social media coordinates: Twitter: @wroush Facebook: facebook.com/wade.roush LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/waderoush Google+ : google.com/+WadeRoush YouTube: youtube.com/wroush1967 Flickr: flickr.com/photos/wroush/ Pinterest: pinterest.com/waderoush/