in LogRhythm, a growing Boulder-based network security company that’s on the short list of Colorado companies headed for IPOs or substantial exits. Grotech’s other current local investments include Plink, TapInfluence (formerly known as BlogFrog), Spot Right, and GutCheck.
Grotech has been on a roll in Colorado, with two notable exits in 2012: Aztek Networks, a telecom equipment maker, was bought by Genband, and Collective Intellect, a cloud-based social intelligence platform, was bought by Oracle. Each startup was based in Boulder and bought for an undisclosed price.
BIG ROUNDS: By the standards of Silicon Valley or the East Coast, investments in Colorado startups usually are bargains. A couple million in the Series A round followed by a few million more in the Series B round gets you pretty far in this area.
But not far enough for Datalogix and WellTok, which in April closed Series B rounds of $25 million and $18.7 million respectively. Ultimately, those investments might still be bargains.
Datalogix creates and maintains huge databases about consumer behavior and real-world purchasing decisions. According to reports, the Westminster-based company is working closely with Facebook to improve the social network’s performance for advertisers. The Series A round Datalogix closed in 2009 was $15 million.
WellTok is a health IT startup that is developing a social network and game platform to encourage healthier living. WellTok has raised a total of $26 million. The company also announced a major addition to its leadership when Jeff Margolis became its CEO. Margolis founded TriZetto, one of the largest heathcare IT companies, and took it public before it was bought in a $1.4 billion leveraged buyout.
BOOSTER SHOT: The quarter’s biggest winner, though, might be Boulder-based biopharma Clovis Oncology (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CLVS]]), which went from critical condition to riding high in the eyes of clinical investigators and investors over the past eight months.
Clovis had a huge June during which it reported positive results for drugs that treat non-small cell lung cancer and ovarian cancer, saw its share price skyrocket, and raised $275 million in a secondary public offering. The company’s share price has settled in the low $70s after peaking at $86.29 in the days after its results were reported.
That’s a far cry from where the company was at the end of last year. In November, Clovis announced Phase 3 trials yielded negative results for its pancreatic cancer drug. That sent the stock’s price down to a low of $11.19.
Despite the surge, Clovis says there’s a lot of work to be done to prove the two therapies are effective. They remain in Phase 1 and 2 trials, and the company expects to report new findings in the fall.
