Boston Deals: Hologic, CustomMade, and the MIT Clean Energy Prize

New England clean energy, life sciences, and Internet startups pulled in funding this week. Plus there was some big acquisition news.

—Hologic (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HOLX]]), a Bedford, MA-based maker of women’s health products, said Monday it will acquire San Diego-based molecular diagnostics company Gen-Probe for $82.75 a share, for a total of $3.7 billion. The deal represents a 20 percent premium over Gen-Probe’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GPRO]]) Friday closing share value of $68.71 and is expected to close in the second half of this year.

—Cambridge, MA-based Mersana Therapeutics nabbed $4 million in debt financing, for a total round size of $10 million, an SEC filing shows. The company is developing technology to deliver cancer drugs to tumors without affecting healthy tissue.

—CustomMade, the Cambridge-based startup whose website connects artisans with shoppers looking for custom goods, said it raised a $4 million funding round led by previous investor Google Ventures, as well as Schooner Capital. Its existing investors, Launch Capital, NextView Ventures, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, and First Round Capital all joined the deal, which comes atop a $2 million funding from last September.

—MIT awarded its $200,000 Clean Energy Prize to Radiator Labs, a startup founded by Columbia University students that seeks to make radiator heating systems more energy efficient with an enclosure that controls the amount of heat transferred to a room.

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.