First (and second and third) impressions are important. But it’s also nice to go out on a sweet note.
Yesterday, we brought you a list of Massachusetts’s top 10 venture deals for 2007: you might think of them as great entrances (although most were later- stage deals, so we’re straining a bit). Today we’re looking at the year’s greatest exits for Bay State firms—either through mergers & acquisitions or IPOs.
And there were some doozies. Like the $775 million Britain’s BUPA paid for Boston-based Health Dialog, or the $430 million Bristol-Myers Squibb squibbed out for Adnexus Therapeutics, almost on the eve of the Waltham company’s planned IPO.
Four of the top M&As were in biotech/pharmaceuticals/medicine, but only two of the top 10 IPOs came in that field (although one company on the list, Athenahealth, is an IT support services company for medical practices). Boston’s EnerNOC, which went public to the tune of nearly $92 million, was the only energy company on either list, despite the red hot nature of investment in that field.
The rest of the companies spanned a wide array of sectors, from data storage to wireless to business applications and even a media content company (TechTarget), which we at Xconomy are always glad to see.
By the way, there was one massive New England acquisition—Dell’s purchase of Nashua, NH-based network storage device maker Equallogic for $1.4 billion—that overshadowed all of the Massachusetts deals, and was in fact reported to be the largest all-cash acquisition of a venture-backed company in history. But it’s not included in our list today, which only covers the Bay State. The list also leaves out the spectacularly successful August IPO of EMC subsidiary VMware. While EMC is located in Hopkinton, MA, VMware’s headquarters remain in Palo Alto, CA.
If you can read a trend in all this, please let us know—but maybe all the stats mean is that good companies can be found in every field. So here are the lists,
