Basho, aPriori, Savitz VC Fund, & More Boston Deals News

Acquisitions, investments, new VC funds, and strategic partnerships have made up the New England deals news in the last week.

—Shareaholic, a Cambridge, MA-based maker of software for sharing and discovering Web content, closed a $3 million round of funding led by Kepha Partners, and joined by returning angel investors, General Catalyst Partners, NextView Ventures, and 500 Startups.

—Waltham, MA-based life sciences company Thermo Fisher Scientific signed an agreement to buy California-based transplant diagnostics technology company One Lambda for $925 million in cash, in a deal expected to close fourth quarter of this year. Analyst firm ISI Group said Monday that the deal should add about $200 million in high-growth revenues for Thermo Fisher in fiscal year 2013.

—APriori said it pulled in another $5 million in funding from return backer Sigma Partners. The money will help the Concord, MA-based maker of cost management software for manufacturers expand its sales efforts in Europe and Asia and build up its supplier network.

—Shoebuy.com founder and former CEO Scott Savitz announced the launch of his new $50 million Boston-based venture capital fund, Data Point Capital. The fund is “stage agnostic” and will invest in startups in mobile, gaming, social networking, online payment solutions, comparison shopping, and e-commerce, according to the release.

—Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: [[ticker:IRBT]]) nabbed a $7.7 million order from the U.S. Navy for updates to its military PackBots.

—Cambridge-based Zipcar (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZIP]]) continues to expand its global reach, acquiring Austria-based Denzel Mobility CarSharing.

—Database software maker Basho Technologies of Cambridge received a $6.1 million investment through a strategic partnership deal with Yahoo Japan subsidiary IDC Frontier. The company will sell Basho’s database and cloud storage technology as part of its computing platform throughout the Asia Pacific region.

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.