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BostInno Departed: Boston Startups That Were Acquired or Shut Down in March


Fasten2
Image: The HQ of Fasten was located on the 8th floor of Two Financial Center, near South Station. (Photo by Lucia Maffei / BostInno)

While the list of Boston M&A deals for March is not as long as some of its recent editions (see February or January 2018, for example), we can definitely say that lots of things happened in this space in the past 30 days.

The bigger highlights of the month are the shut down of Fasten, which closed its U.S. offices doors at the beginning of the month, and the acquisition of Kensho Technologies by S&P Global for $550 million.

In March, more details emerged about M&A deals that were announced in 2017 or earlier this year. Thanks to an SEC filing, we learned that Akamai paid $380 million for two 2017 acquisitions (Soasta was purchased for $200 million in April and Nominum was acquired for $180 million in November). Also, it turned out that Carbonite's February acquisition of Mozy from Dell Technologies had a price tag of $145.8 million in cash, subject to potential adjustments.

Overall, in March we tracked down seven M&A deals and one company shutting down.

FYI, we cover M&A news in the BostInno Beat newsletter every weekday. Stay on top of who’s getting funded by signing up right here. See you in the inbox!

Here are the BostInno Departed from March 2018:

The Shuttered:

• Fasten, a ride-hailing company with offices in Boston and Austin, announced the freezing of its U.S. operations following acquisition by Vezet Group, a transportation network in Russia that provides more than 1.4 million rides a day. The company confirmed that Boston-based employees will be laid off. Fasten has approximately 35 employees in the U.S. and 110 in Russia.

The Merged and Acquired:

• Wolters Kluwer Health has acquired Firecracker for an undisclosed amount. The education assessment platform was bootstrapped to 16 full-time employees and is currently being used by 20 percent of U.S. medical students.

• Cambridge-based fintech company Kensho Technologies has been acquired by S&P Global Inc. for $550 million in a deal that Forbes called “the largest A.I. deal in history.”

• Bullhorn, the Boston-based cloud computing company that provides staffing and recruiting software, has acquired two global providers of recruitment software built on the Salesforce platform: Talent Rover, which has its main office in Chicago, and Jobscience, which is headquartered in San Francisco.

• CyberArk acquired Vaultive, which moved its headquarters to Boston in 2015. CyberArk is an Israeli-founded security company with U.S. headquarters in Newton, BBJ reported.

• EPAM Systems, a provider of digital platform engineering and software development services, announced it has acquired Continuum, an innovation design firm headquartered in Boston with studios in Milan, Seoul and Shanghai.

• Crozier Fine Arts, a fine art storage and logistics provider owned by Boston-based Iron Mountainis acquiring Artex Fine Arts Services. The acquisition includes all Artex customer relationships, along with five facilities – one of them located in Boston.

• Illinois-based Infogix, a data and analytics software provider, announced its acquisition of Lavastorm, a data preparation and advanced analytics company that has its U.S. office in Boston. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

If you think there’s a startup missing from this list, email me at lmaffei@americaninno.com


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