Check out a few investments, executives coming and going, and busted business deals in this trip through the week’s Boston-area technology headlines:
—Persimmon Technologies, a Wakefield, MA-based developer of advanced motors for high-tech manufacturing, has added about $8 million to its Series B round. The money came from two new investors: the ABB Group and Berwind Private Equity. Persimmon announced a first close of the round in early 2013, a $5.8 million investment led by Intel Capital.
—OwnCloud, a Lexington, MA-based seller of business file-sharing software, has raised another $6.3 million in a Series A investment round. The deal was led by Devonshire Investors and General Catalyst Partners, and follows a $4.4 million investment reported in December. OwnCloud tells GigaOm that its customers include CERN, the giant Switzerland-based particle physics research lab.
—There’s been a sudden executive blood transfusion at database software developer Basho. The company announced former Tier 3 chief Adam Wray would be its new CEO, and former Warner Music engineering vice president Dave McRory would join him as CTO. Left unaddressed were the departures of former CEO Greg Collins, who left in January, and CTO Justin Sheehy and chief architect Andy Gross, who announced this week they were moving to VMWare and Twitter, respectively. Wray tells CIO.com that the departed “have not run companies of this size and with this meteoric growth.”
—Newly acquired music-data company The Echo Nest, which was bought by music-streaming company Spotify last week, is seeing new rivals drop its service. In an interview with CNBC (warning, auto-play video), CEO Anthony Bay of streaming music competitor Rdio says his company will stop using the Echo Nest now that the startup is no longer independent: “We, probably like most people, have multiple sources of data that we use. So we will stop using that source of data and use other sources.”
—Loci Controls, a Boston-based startup working on technology to capture and burn landfill methane for electric generation, has landed a $765,000 seed investment. The money comes from CommonAngels Venture Fund, Launch Capital, and various Boston-area angel investors. The startup was founded by two MIT alums and got its start at Bolt, the Boston-based hardware accelerator program.
