Hadapt Gets Series A, Cisco Buys BNI, Cubist Acquisition of Adolor Valued at $415M, & More Boston-Area Deals News

Financing rounds, acquisitions, and business plan prizes have made up the New England deals news this week.

—Continuing the West-Coast-company-buys-East-Coast-company trend of last week, San Jose, CA-based Cisco Systems announced its purchase of Boxborough, MA-based BNI Video, a developer of software for managing cable content on the back end and improving the browsing experience for viewers. Cisco (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CSCO]]) bought the startup, which has raised about $17 million in venture funding, for $99 million in cash and retention-based incentives.

—Yale University spinout Hadapt raised a Series A funding round from Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. The round was reported at $9.5 million, which potentially included seed funding the startup raised earlier. Hadapt, a maker of software enabling businesses to analyze structured and unstructured data, plans to relocate its headquarters to Boston.

—Venture investments in Massachusetts companies totaled $505 million across 95 deals for third quarter of 2011, just over half of the $1 billion total from the quarter before, according to the MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, with data from Thomson Reuters. This year’s third quarter still showed a 10 percent improvement in funding over Q3 2010, though. Check out the deals list and details here.

—MassChallenge awarded a total of $1 million to 17 startups in the second year of its accelerator program and business plan competition. Three companies (one life sciences, one IT, one sanitation) each nabbed $100,000 checks, while the remaining 14—covering the food, Web, window, and shoe spaces (and more)—each won $50,000.

—My colleague Arlene took a look at Lexington, MA-based Cubist Pharmaceuticals’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CBST]]) $190 million cash acquisition of Adolor (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ADLR]]). The deal comes out to $4.25 a share, plus milestones that are achieved with one of Adolor’s experimental drugs, ADL5945, for treating chronic opioid-induced constipation.

Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.