Things have been eerily quiet on the venture front lately—and then there was the Mascoma deal. Dare we dream that that, combined with Clarus Venture’s juicy new life sciences fund, bodes better for the coming months? More on those, and the rest of last week’s deals, below.
—East Coast/West Coast Life sciences venture firm Clarus Ventures raised its second fund, worth $660 million. The firm has offices in Cambridge, MA, and South San Francisco.
—Novell (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NOVL]]) of Waltham, MA, entered the virtualization race with the $205 million acquisition of Toronto-based PlateSpin. The Canadian firm makes workload management software for virtualized data centers.
—Organogenesis—a Canton, MA-based developer of biomaterials and tissue-engineered products—announced it will acquire Baton Rouge’s NanoMatrix. Financial terms were not disclosed for the deal, which gives Organogenesis access to NanoMatrix’s technology for making three-dimensional scaffolds for tissue growth.
—Software maker Proficiency of Marlborough, MA, raised $4.25 million in a venture round led by Catalyst Investments of Israel and joined by Carmel Ventures and Pitango Venture Capital.
—Waltham, MA-based Lionbridge (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIOX]]) announced plans to buy back $12 million worth of its stock in 2008. The so-called localization firm translates product documentation such as software manuals from English into other languages.
—Maynard, MA, game development firm 38 Studios announced it will license virtual-world servers and development tools and game servers from Australia’s BigWorld Technology.
—Biomed research toolmaker Caliper Life Sciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CALP]]) of Hopkinton, MA, cut a cross-licensing deal with San Diego’s AntiCancer. The agreement was part of a move to end a long-standing patent battle between the firms.
—Automated voice messaging firm SoundBite Communications of Bedford, MA, and Mobile Collect, of Rochester Hills, MI—which makes software for text-message-based marketing and debt collection—struck a merger agreement worth $500,000 plus up to $2 million in payments contingent on text-messaging revenue.
—Boston cleantech firm Mascoma, which is working on cellulosic ethanol technology, raised $50 million in a Series C financing led by General Catalyst Partners and joined by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vantage Point Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, Pinnacle Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Flagship Ventures. $20 million of the round was in debt financing.
—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]) sold $1 billion worth of senior notes. The sale was a means of converting to permanent debt a bridge loan taken out to finance a $3 billion stock buyback that the Cambridge, MA-based firm completed last summer.
—Arthrosurface of Franklin, MA, which develops less-invasive joint resurfacing systems, raised some $4 million in a Series F financing from Boston Millennia Partners and private investors
