Boston's business elite has been busy this past week. Catch up on who's going where below:
Eric Richard has joined HubSpot as the local inbound marketing giant's VP of Engineering. Though it has yet to be formally announced, Scott Kirsner tweeted Tuesday about the new hire, noting that HubSpot's CEO Brian Halligan said, "We are playing long-ball." HubSpot Chief Product Officer David Cancel confirmed the news via Twitter. Richard comes to HubSpot from Compete, a digital marketing optimization company, where he also served as SVP of engineering.
Highland Capital Partners announced the promotions of Jeremiah Daly and Alex Taussig to partner this week. The move strengthens the VC firm's teams on either coast. Taussig will continue to work from Highland's Menlo Park branch; Daly will remain in the Boston office. After joining Highland as a principal in 2012, Daly identified and led a number of key growth-stage investments in Internet and mobile startups, and is currently involved in Highland's investments in Aereo and Handybook. Prior to joining the team at Highland, Daly served as a principal at Accel Ventures in London and an investor at Summit Partners and Gold Hill Capital.
Scott McKay was officially brought onto the leadership team of ZappRx on Wednesday. McKay will serve as the promising healthcare IT startup's CTO, as the company further refines its digital prescription platform. As one of the founding engineers of ITA Software (acquired by Google for nearly $1 billion in 2011), the new CTO clearly comes to the startup with a wealth of experience in software architecture. Back in September, ZappRx closed its seed round of $1 million led by Atlas Venture, and moved into investor Hakan Satiroglu's ed-tech incubator in the Back Bay.
Mere weeks after Circle Internet Financial announced its $9 million Series A, the company welcomed Raj Date to its board of directors on Thursday. Date, who is the managing partner of Fenway Summer LLC and the former deputy director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), will help advance Circle’s commitment to maintaining the highest standards of consumer protection, privacy and regulatory compliance, according to the release. Date's experience at the intersection of legal and finance will be of paramount importance for Circle as it iterates upon its products that make it easy to exchange, store, send and receive digital currencies, such as Bitcoin. Circle was founded by Brightcove founder and serial entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire, and backed by West Coast investor Jim Breyer, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
