A few big acquisitions for tech players colored the New England deals news this week:
—Dublin-based pharmaceutical company Shire, which has operations in the Boston area, acquired San Francisco startup Ferrokin Biosciences for an upfront payment of $100 million and a potentially $225 million more in development and commercial milestones. Ferrokin is developing a drug to help patients who have had multiple blood transfusions shed excess amounts of iron in their blood.
—Late last week, Demandware, a Burlington, MA-based digital retail and commerce firm, went public, pricing the shares for its initial public offering at $16, well above its initial expected range. Demandware’s (NYSE: [[ticker:DWRE]]) valuation was a not-too-shabby $450 million.
—Semiconductor firm Lowell-based semiconductor firm M/A-COM raised over $100 million in its initial public offering last week, selling 6 million shares of common stock at $19 per share.
—Good news for the investors of North Reading, MA-based Kiva Systems, whose robotics technology aims to improve the process of moving merchandise around in warehouses. Amazon (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]) said it plans to buy all outstanding shares of the Bay State startup for $775 million in cash. At the time of the last venture funding in 2009, Kiva had raised a total of about $18 million from investors such as Bain Capital Ventures and Meakem Becker Venture Capital.
—Meanwhile, Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:EMC]]) Isilon division, out in Seattle, acquired neighboring startup Likewise Software. Bellevue, WA-based Likewise sells software that helps companies and storage vendors sort through and control access to data generated from modern computing. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
And stay tuned for more announcements later today …
