We rounded up all the funding deals out of Boston tech companies this week. As more news comes out, this post will be updated.
Thursday, July 2
Zagster (Cambridge)
Deal: $3.5 million Series A round
Investors: LaunchCapital, Fontinalis Partners, Clean Energy Venture Group, LaunchPad Venture Group, Otter Consulting and other Boston-area angels
What they do: Zagster provides bike sharing systems with a model of public-private sponsorship. Its easy-to-upgrade technology make it possible to be deployed nearly anywhere and often at a lower cost than other city-wide alternatives. Zagster members receive a code on their mobile phones to unlock the bike at the time of the trip. When their journey is done, they return the bike to a Zagster location, lock it and end the reservation via the Zagster mobile app or a text message.
Other details: Over the past year, Zagster has increased the number of bikes in its program by more than 300 percent and the total number of members by nearly 250 percent. Currently, the company has more than 75 programs in 50 cities in 28 states. In expanding from eight to 28 states, Zagster has also doubled the number of employees and recently doubled its office space. Among its customers are employers such as General Motors, Samsung, and Workday; several top universities, including The Ohio State University, Duke University, Yale University and Princeton University; and leading hotel brands like Hyatt and The Four Seasons.
Wednesday, July 1
Pneuron Corp. (Nashua, N.H.)
Deal: A $5 million Series B funding round
Investors: Safeguard Scientifics, Osage Partners and Scott Group LLC.
What they do: Pneuron’s platform allows businesses to deploy, design, run and maintain high-performance distributed solutions—and, it claims, at half of the time, cost and risk of traditional alternatives. Its mission is to solve traditional problems inherent to disparate and distributed data, systems, business processes and analytics across an organization.
Other details: With this latest round of financing, the total funding the company has raised since being founded in 2010 is $13.25 million. The new funding follows a year of 200 percent revenue and bookings growth in 2014. Pneuron was also named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Big Data for 2015. The firm has also recently formed a global alliance with HP, and a new patent for its “distributed analytics method for creating, modifying and deploying software pneurons to acquire, review, and analyze targeted data.” In a press statement, CEO Simon Moss said that the Series B round will enable Pneuron to focus on hiring across sales, sales engineering, and implementation, and COO Elizabeth Elkins said there is “aggressive projected growth for 2016.”
Tuesday, June 30
VENTUREAPP (Cambridge)
Deal: VENTUREAPP, launched by Streetwise Media founders Chase Garbarino, Kevin McCarthy and Gregory Gomer and DailyBreak founders Boris Revsin and Jared Stenquist, has just closed a $2 million round of initial funding.
Investors: Accomplice, Boston Seed, and several angels.
What they do: The startup is an invite-only concierge service providing on-demand solutions for a startup’s most pressing challenges—from talent hunting and product to finding insurance or accounting assistance.
Other details: VENTUREAPP is currently working out of Accomplice’s East Cambridge office. Down the road, VENTUREAPP plans on partnering with Streetwise Media.
Romulus Capital (Cambridge)
Deal: According to a recent regulatory filing, Romulus Capital is looking to raise for its third fund, called Romulus Capital III, which cofounder and general partner Neil Chheda told The Boston Business Journal will be larger than the previous two, and a “continuation” of what they do.
What they do: Romulus Capital is a seed stage tech investment firm. Some of the companies it has backed include real estate tech startup Placester, human interaction software company (and MIT Media Lab spinoff) Sociometric Solutions, hospital equipment sharing service Cohealo and restaurant tablet provider E la Carte, which just landed a deal with Applebee’s. More recently, Romulus invested in Netflix-for-air travel startup Beacon and barcode scanner tech company Padloc.
Other details: Last year, Romulus raised $50 million for a fund. Chheda told the BBJ that the firm typically does five to eight deals per year, injecting between $100,000 and $500,000 into a startup and then following up with between $1 million and $5 million.
Monday, June 29
Drafted (Boston)
Deal: $2.5 million seed round
Investors: Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Boston Syndicates, Blade and Launch, several unnamed angels.
What they do: Drafted's mobile app allows employers to easily spread the details of a job position they're trying to fill, while incentivizing referrals by offering rewards to those who can recommend qualified candidates.
Other details: Housed by Paul English’s consumer technology foundry Blade, Drafted launched in beta mid-May to the Boston tech community, and accrued more than 50 employers on the platform in just two months. Users include Hubspot, M.Gemi, TripAdvisor, PillPack, Drizly, Wanderu and Codeship. The seed financing will be used to accelerate expansion into other cities later this year, as well as to build out the team. More specifically, the company plans to add a couple of employees to work on product.
