The world is atwitter over the big Facebook-Instagram acquisition, but Boston companies have been proving their muster with deals of their own this week.
—Cambridge, MA-based mobile gaming startup The Tap Lab said it has brought in $550,000 in funding from a crop of angel investors that includes Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, former Harmonix chief operating officer and now CommonAngels member Mike Dornbrook, and Google developer advocate Don Dodge.
—Boundless Learning, a Boston-based maker of interactive online textbooks, had a big week, raising an $8 million Series A round, and revealing that it has been hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit by three major textbook publishers—Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, and Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group (Macmillan Higher Education). The financing was led by new investor Venrock and included return investors like NextView Ventures, Founder Collective, Kepha Partners, and SV Angel. And the lawsuit? Boundless says it’s working with its lawyers on a response.
—Boston-based social media analytics company Cymfony was acquired by Bellevue, WA-based Visible Technologies, another maker of software for monitoring social media. The deal terms were not disclosed, but the acquisition leaves WPP Group, which owned about 24 percent of Visible and all of Cymfony, with 49 percent of the merged company.
—Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures formed a partnership with Merck Research Ventures Fund to identify and invest in companies developing drugs for unmet medical needs. The $250 million Merck (NYSE: [[ticker:MRK]]) fund was created in the fall and has made four fund-to-fund investments so far. It will act as a limited partner to Flagship.
—Yeah, the photo-sharing app Instagram was acquired by Facebook for a cool $1 billion in cash and stock. But no, the sticker price of the deal is not the point, wrote my colleague Wade. The big acquisition of the 551-day-old company really shows how the Apple iTunes App Store can make or break young tech companies, and ultimately means no one is safe. And speaking of deals in the mobile app sector…
—Crashlytics nabbed $5 million in a Series A funding round from existing investors Flybridge Capital Partners and Baseline Ventures (also an Instagram investor). The Cambridge-based startup currently helps more than 500 organizations identify where and how their mobile applications crash.
—AisleBuyer, a Boston-based developer of mobile payment applications, was scooped up by Intuit for an undisclosed sum. Founder and CEO Andrew Paradise said in a brief blog post on the matter that the startup will be staying in its Innovation District offices, and that “by leveraging our technology and talent, together with Intuit’s rock star payments team, we will continue to work on creating the best small business POS [point-of-sale] solutions in the world.”
