Looks like you had to be doing something innovative with data in order to get in on the Boston deals this week.
—Media reports have pegged Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: [[ticker:EMC]]) as on the brink of acquiring San Jose, CA- and Israel based XtremIO, a developer of technology for bringing flash memory to enterprise storage systems. The deal is estimated at between $400 million and $450 million.
—Locu, a Cambridge, MA-based startup focused on organizing unstructured data on the Web, announced that it has brought in $4 million in Series A financing led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from Lowercase Capital, Lightbank and SV Angel. The round also included Locu seed investors like Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi of AngelPool, Quotidian Ventures, and Matt Ocko of Data Collective. Locu, which comes from an MIT course designed to build companies working on so-called linked data technologies, first worked on helping restaurants manage their menu presence on the Web, and is now targeting the structuring of small business data more broadly.
—Avon, MA-based Terascala announced it raised a $14 million Series B venture round, from strategic partners and return investor Ascent Venture Partners. The company sells storage systems and software that allow organizations to better process big batches of data. Terascala has inked partnership deals with Dell, EMC, and NetApp.
—And on a different note, play140, the Cambridge-based social games startup from former TechStars Boston managing director Shawn Broderick, is being acquired by stealth mode startup Oomba, Broderick said in a company blog post. Deal terms weren’t disclosed, but in Broderick’s words: “play140 has deep experience in the markets that Oomba is going after and we felt that the 1 + 1 here would be well larger than 2.”
