Some awards, financing, and product launches to cover in this collection of Boston-area news items:
—The New England Venture Capital Association hosted its first-ever “Nevy” awards last night, at the hip Sinclair in Cambridge. The full list of winners is available here, but some of the standouts include Spark Capital as tech-sector VC firm of the year, Third Rock Ventures as healthcare firm of the year, Acme Packet CEO Andy Ory as tech entrepreneur of the year (bought by Oracle), former Avila Therapeutics CEO Katrine Bosley as healthcare entrepreneur of the year (bought by Celgene), and Wayfair as tech startup of the year. (Bosley wrote an Xconomy op-ed this week about the innovation supply chain in biotech.)
—VMTurbo, a Burlington, MA-based provider of cloud virtualization software, says it has raised a $7.5 million Series C round of financing. Globespan Capital joined previous investors Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners in the deal. The company also says its revenue more than doubled compared to the first quarter of 2012, and it now has raised about $25 million in total private investment.
—Boston-based Stackdriver, which sells software that helps monitor cloud applications, says its product is now available in a public beta test. The company, founded in 2012 by Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri, raised $5 million from Bain Capital Ventures last year.
—Need more evidence that patent lawsuits are growing? Cue Ball Capital, an unconventional VC fund based in Boston, recently led a $4.8 million investment round in Lex Machina, a Palo Alto, CA-based provider of data and analysis about intellectual property law. The company includes some interesting tidbits in its announcement: patent lawsuits have more than doubled in the past three years, with three verdicts of $1 billion or more being awarded in just the last eight months. Meanwhile, the median award for damages in a patent case now tops $4 million.
