Boston Roundup: NABsys, Zeo, CommonAngels, Wiggio

Raising money, shutting down, hiring people and getting acquired—four different entities just about covering all the bases of early stage business and investing news:

—NABsys, a Providence, RI-based gene sequencing startup, says it has raised $20 million in a Series D venture financing. The company says the money will help pay for a commercial introduction of its technology, which it says can help genomic researchers assemble short DNA sequences and quickly analyze their structure. The investment was led by new investor Bay City Capital, along with previous investors like Point Judith Capital and Stata Venture Partners. The Series D brings the total invested in NABsys to about $41 million.

—Zeo appears to be drifting off to eternal slumber. The Newton, MA-based startup, which produced wearable electronics and applications to help track sleep patterns, is reportedly either shut down or close to it. Brian Dolan at Mobihealthnews writes that “it had been something of an open secret” since late 2012 that Zeo “was winding down its operations and searching for a buyer.” He lays out some pretty compelling evidence, and Wired adds a little more to the case. I personally found former CEO Dave Dickinson and former co-founder and CTO Ben Rubin saying they’d left Zeo after 2012, via their LinkedIn profiles.

—CommonAngels, a longtime angel investing group in New England, has a new face in one of its top jobs. Maia Heymann is now serving as a senior managing director, along with James Geshwiler. Heymann has a long record in finance, most recently as managing director at Shott Capital Management, which manages $2.7 billion in private equity and venture limited partnerships. More coverage at Boston.com, the Boston Business Journal, and BostInno. (CommonAngels is an investor in Xconomy.)

—Wiggio, a Cambridge-based maker of educational software, has been acquired by a Canadian education tech company. TechCrunch had the news of Wiggio’s sale to Desire2Learn, which raised $80 million in financing last year. Wiggio had raised about $2.5 million, with New Atlantic Ventures billed as the lead backer.

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.