A busy morning for Series B tech financings already…
—Cambridge, MA-based CustomMade has pulled in $18 million led by new investor Atlas Venture and previous investor Google Ventures. That brings the company’s total raised to more than $24 million, by my count. CustomMade runs an online marketplace that connects consumers with regional makers of furniture, woodwork, jewelry, ceramics, and other crafts. The approach is part of a wave of Boston-area companies building the “anti-Amazon” in retail/commerce. (More details on the funding at Boston.com and Pando Daily.)
—Boston-based SageCloud has raised $10 million led by Braemar Energy Ventures. Matrix Partners also participated in the round. SageCloud is working on an energy-efficient way to do “cold storage”—storage of data that is written once and accessed infrequently—using commodity hardware and control software. That massive problem is jacking up the costs of data backup and archiving in the IT industry. SageCloud is led by Carbonite co-founder Jeff Flowers.
Author: Gregory T. Huang
Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003.
Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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