“I’m hoping that the new CEO and I will be right next door to each other, and we can work as a team."
Carbonite's new CEO is former Hewlett-Packard chief strategy officer Mohamad Ali, effective as of Wednesday.
He takes over for David Friend, who co-founded the Boston online backup firm in 2005 and had served as its CEO all along, including through its 2011 IPO.
Friend, 66, will remain with Carbonite as executive chairman of its board. Ali, who'd previously reported to HP CEO Meg Whitman, also held senior positions at IBM in the past. In a news release, Friend said Carbonite "has a big future" under Ali.
The switch in CEOs at Carbonite comes amid a buyout offer for the company from a West Coast tech firm.
I spoke with Friend in April, a few months after it was announced that he would step down once a successor was found. Friend told me he planned to stay involved with Carbonite because there just still too much left to do for the cloud backup firm:
In recent years, Boston-based Carbonite has shifted its focus from consumer backup to providing backup for small and medium-sized businesses, typically those with 150 or fewer employees.
That business has grown from $5.8 million in revenue in 2011 to $21.4 million in revenue last year. “If you looked at that independently, it would be one of the hottest startups in Boston,” Friend said.
Friend added at the time: “I’m hoping that the new CEO and I will be right next door to each other, and we can work as a team."
Here are few of the other major local tech stories to know about today.
Maxwell Health has raised a $26.4 million Series B Round. The Boston company's software powers marketplaces for employees to enroll in insurance benefits. The firm has now raised $34.4 million in total, and its staff has grown from 14 employees at the start of the year to 68 employees now. "We should be well over 100 a few months into next year," a spokeswoman said.
Early-stage startup investing firm Xfund has raised $100 million for its second fund. Initially focused on backing startups with ties to Harvard out of a $10 million fund, the firm said it's now opened as Silicon Valley office as well. The limited partners that "anchored" the new fund are New Enterprise Associates, Breyer Capital and Accel Partners, Xfund said in a news release. Boston-based Polaris Partners had a hand in launching Xfund in 2011; Polaris isn't mentioned specifically as an LP for the new fund in the news release, but Xfund followed up in an email to say that Polaris did in fact contribute to the new fund.
Well-known angel investor Ty Danco is taking a role with Techstars Boston. Scott Kirsner reported that Danco, who lives in Vermont, will now be in Boston four days a week. (“I’ll be the grandfather-in-residence,” Danco told Kirsner.) Danco recently gave some details to BostInno on what went wrong with his latest startup, BuysideFX, which shut down this year.
Commonwealth Capital Ventures appears to be among the VC walking dead. The Waltham VC firm—an early backer of companies including Constant Contact and The Echo Nest—told the BBJ's David Harris that "we don't have a plan to raise another fund." Commonwealth Capital closed its fourth fund at $250 million in 2007.
Boston-based e-commerce software firm Ve Interactive recently made two notable acquisitions. The acquisitions were of London digital advertising company GDM Digital, for $12 million, and of data visualization tech startup qunb, a Techstars Boston grad that returned to Paris after the program (terms of that deal weren't disclosed).
Image of a vintage computer via Shutterstock.
