A 24M technician holds one of the company''s lithium-ion battery cells.
Jacob Belcher
Here are all of the funding deals out of Boston tech and biotech companies this week. We’ll be updating this post as more news comes out.
Thursday, June 25
BitSight Technologies (Cambridge)
- Deal: $23 million, Series B
- Investors: Comcast Ventures (new investor); Menlo Ventures, Globespan Venture Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, BitSight CEO Shaun McConnon and Flybridge Capital Partners (current investors)
- What they do: Service that rates the cybersecurity risk of major vendors
- Other details: Funding will be used to “extend sales and marketing into Europe and APAC, expand engineering and data science teams to accelerate the company’s new data analytics products, and fund potential acquisitions of key data source partners”; BitSight has now raised $49 million since its founding in 2011
Extreme Reach (Needham)
- Deal: $56.5 million
- Investors: Not disclosed; funding was disclosed in an SEC filing
- What they do: Software for TV ad delivery
- Other details: The company had most recently raised $86 million in equity from Spectrum Equity to help fund the acquisition of a competing service, which closed in 2014
Celect (Boston)
- Deal: $5 million, Series A
- Investors: August Capital (led the round), Activant Capital Group
- What they do: Software used by retailers to determine what product assortments to offer in specific stores, using machine learning technologies
- Other details: Company founders are MIT professors Vivek Farias and Devavrat Shah
Wednesday, June 24
Tesora (Cambridge)
- Deal: $4.5 million
- Investors: Rho Canada Ventures (new investor); General Catalyst Partners, CommonAngels Ventures, Point Judith Capital (existing investors)
- What they do: Simplified way to provision and manage databases on demand
- Other details: Formerly known as ParElastic, the company has now raised $13.2 million since its founding in 2010
Barkly (Boston)
- Deal: $12.5 million, Series A
- Investors: New Enterprise Associates (led the round), Sigma Prime Ventures
- What they do: Cybersecurity for business computers and mobile devices, aka "endpoints"
- Other details: The company officially launched Wednesday; it has raised $17 million since its founding in 2013 by industry veterans Mike Duffy and Jack Danahy
SQZ Biotech (Boston)
- Deal: $5 million, Series A
- Investors: Polaris Partners (led the round), 20/20 Healthcare Partners
- What they do: Developer of the "CellSqueeze" platform; enables a variety of materials to enter a cell "with unprecedented efficacy"
- Other details: Technology was discovered by MIT professors Klavs Jensen, Robert Langer and Armon Sharei
Tuesday, June 23
Ecovent (Boston)
- Deal: $6.9 million
- Investors: Not disclosed (SEC filing)
- What they do: Smart, wirelessly controlled heating and cooling system; allows homeowners to control temperature room-by-room
- Other details: Ecovent, a Techstars Boston 2014 graduate, had previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding in October
Monday, June 22
Coravin (Burlington)
- Deal: $13.6 million, Series C-1
- Investors: Windham Venture Partners (led the round), Quadrille Capital
- What they do: Maker of a "wine access system"—a device that lets you access and pour any bottle of wine without pulling the cork
- Other details: Funding will go toward sales efforts and R&D: company has now raised $39 million since its founding in 2013
24M (Cambridge)
- Deal: $40 million in newly disclosed Series B funding (see below)
- Investors: Charles River Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners and unnamed industrial partners
- What they do: Developer of a new type of lithium-ion battery
- Other details: The new semisolid lithium-ion battery will “work with the world’s preferred energy storage chemistry and unlock new opportunities for cost reductions through new cell design and manufacturing innovations”; the battery has “fixed the flaws” of existing lithium-ion batteries, said 24M founder and chief scientist Yet-Ming Chiang, formerly co-founder of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems. Ultimately, "the technology will accelerate the global adoption of affordable energy storage," 24M said. The company disclosed that it has raised $50 million since its founding in 2010, across Series A and Series B rounds; 24M had previously said it raised a $10 million Series A round. The $40 million Series B round was actually closed a year ago—in July 2014, a spokesperson said. The company, which came out of stealth mode on Monday, now employs 50 and operates a 32,000-square-foot facility in Cambridge, where it's running its manufacturing.
Photo courtesy of 24M.
