We’ve got one company shopping itself for a stock sale, and two more who have raised new money in this end-of-summer collection of innovation headlines:
—Acquia, a website services firm, has hired a new chief financial officer as it prepares for a possible IPO: Dennis Morgan, formerly of Salesforce.com acquisition Buddy Media. The Burlington, MA-based company says its sales more than doubled to about $45 million last year, and told Bloomberg that it projects revenues to grow by another 50 percent this year. Acquia’s services help other businesses build and run websites based on the open-source content management system Drupal. Acquia has raised nearly $69 million in private investment so far.
—908 Devices, a Boston-based maker of handheld mass spectrometry equipment, has raised another $7 million in venture investment. No word on who led the round in the SEC filing, but 908 lists its investors as Arch Venture Partners, Razor’s Edge Ventures, and University of Tokyo Edge Ventures. 908 Devices is also a partner of In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA. 908 Devices filed paperwork for an investment round of about $8 million last September.
—StarStreet, a TechStars company that operates fantasy sports tournaments for cash prizes, has raised about $1.4 million of a round that could grow to $2 million. The new cash comes just as the NFL and college football seasons kick off, prime time for fantasy sports heads. Fellow Boston company DraftKings—which has raised more than $11 million in venture funding—offers a similar service. Betting on fantasy sports is legal in many places, by the way, because it’s not technically a game of chance.
