[Updated 12:55 pm] A CEO swap, some corporate M&A, student entrepreneurship, increased sales numbers, fundraising, and general deal-making in this quick trip through some Boston-area innovation headlines:
—Mobile advertising startup Adelphic is getting a new leader. The company says Michael Collins, formerly of mobile marketing agency Joule, has replaced co-founder Changfeng Wang as CEO. Wang will become the company’s CTO. In a release, Collins gets high praise from Adelphic co-founder Jennifer Lum and Google Ventures partner Rich Miner, an investor in the company.
—SoundBite Communications, a Bedford, MA-based voice messaging company, is being acquired for $100 million by Genesys, a private call center software company. SoundBite went public in 2007, after being hit with an 11th-hour patent claim from a competitor. The company’s shares fell, but have stabilized as the country recovers from the Great Recession.
—MIT has selected the winner of this year’s $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition: 3dim, a “gestural interface” startup. 3dim’s technology aims to turn smartphone cameras into sophisticated sensors that can track a user’s hands and fingers, allowing them to control the software being shown on-screen.
Updates follow here:
—Acquia, a Burlington, MA-based website services company, says its sales more than doubled to about $45 million last year. That’s a little bit off previous projections—in November, Acquia said it expected around $56 million in annual revenue. But it’s still a 108 percent increase from 2011’s revenues, which were reported in Inc. at $21.8 million. Acquia helps businesses build and run their own websites using Drupal, a free, open-source content management system. It’s been touted as an IPO candidate, and has raised just shy of $70 million in total private financing.
—Interactions Corp. of Franklin, MA has raised $40 million in a venture round led by SoftBank Capital. Previous investors also participated in the round, which Interactions says will be used for general growth, including a new office in Boston. The company makes call-center software that helps other companies handle customer service functions.
—LevelUp, the Boston startup that offers smartphone-based payments apps, is linking its service with restaurant products from NCR, a huge cash-register provider. The two companies say the deal will allow restaurants to reconcile receipts more easily, and give LevelUp a chance to expand to thousands more merchants.
