Boston Deals: Swoop, OwnCloud, Lookout Gaming, Streetwise Media

Updated 2:50 pm
A buffet of small Boston-area fundraising items to whet your appetite as Turkey Day approaches:

—Cambridge-based Swoop, a startup that offers what it calls “native” advertising to help Web publishers make money from their content, has raised $3 million of a financing round that could grow to $5 million, according to a fresh SEC filing.

The company is led by CEO Ron Elwell and CTO Sim Simeonov. Swoop lists US Venture Partners and Valhalla Partners as its investors. I couldn’t reach anyone from Swoop to find out more about the SEC filing by deadline.

The company announced some fundraising last year, when it was operating under a different name. Elwell later told TechCrunch that the fundraising amounted to $4.8 million.

—OwnCloud, a business data software company, has filed paperwork indicating that it’s raised about $2.5 million. OwnCloud’s Joseph Eckert says previous investor General Catalyst Partners led the round, joined by “a few new angels and a few of us old angels/founders.”

OwnCloud is based on an open-source cloud-computing project of the same name, offering customers file-sharing software that can plug into data-storage services like Amazon Web Services. The company’s CEO is Markus Rex. The company has about 50 people, at offices in the U.S. and Europe. [Updated with comment from ownCloud]

—Boston-based Lookout Gaming has raised a $1.3 million seed round from Atlas Venture, Nextview Ventures, and angels. The startup is headed by AisleBuyer founder Andrew Paradise and Casey Chafkin, an early AisleBuyer employee (AisleBuyer was acquired earlier this year by Intuit for an undisclosed price).

Lookout Gaming says it’s developing a software service that will help independent mobile game developers make money more easily, but there’s no detail yet about just what that revenue mechanism will look like.

—Boston’s Streetwise Media, the parent company of local news websites BostInno and InTheCapital, was acquired by American City Business Journals, publisher of websites and weekly newspapers in cities across the U.S. No terms were announced for the deal.

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.