Connie Loizos
O'Reilly AlphTech Ventures, or OATV, has secured $84.5 million for a third fund, according to an SEC filing that was processed this morning. The filing states that 51 investors have participated in the fund, and that it intends to raise another $450,000, which will bring its total funding to $85 million.
Billtrust may be in the unglamorous business of outsourced bill processing, but Bain Capital Ventures finds it so irresistible, it's provided the company with $25 million in funding.
Blueprint Medicines, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that's developing cancer therapies, has made Chris Varma, its founding president and an entrepreneur-in-residence at Third Rock Ventures, its permanent president and CEO. The company has also named Daniel Lynch as executive chairman of its board. Lynch spent nearly five years at ImClone Systems, including as CEO and CFO.
Simply Hired, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based job search engine company, has appointed James Beriker as president and CEO. Beriker recently led targeting and performance businesses at Yahoo; he also cofounded Search123, one of the first pay-per-click search engines, which was acquired by ValueClick in 2003.
Recently, the San Francisco-based venture firm Scale Venture Partners began working with the University Venture Fund -- one of the largest student-run funds in the country -- to figure out which mobile business productivity apps are the most popular and why.
Lumension, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based security software company, has completed its acquisition of Austin-based CoreTrace Corporation, whose software tries to battle malware and other "unknown executables." Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Yesterday, New York scribe Kevin Roose asked the question, “Why can’t Silicon Valley take a joke?” But having watched the show last night, I don't believe it’s something that Silicon Valley needs to laughingly endure. In fact, I think it's a slight positive for the Bay Area startup ecosystem.
Venture capitalists will tell you that they never try to time the market, but when they invariably do – in unloading newly public shares, for example – they’re probably not going to gain much of an edge if they adapt their strategy based on academic research. So suggests a new study out of the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Bill Trenchard has joined the early-stage venture capital firm First Round Capital as a partner. Trenchard, who informally joined First Round in June, was previously investing on behalf of the early-stage, entrepreneur-led venture capital fund Founder Collective. Before becoming an investor, Trenchard was a founder at CallCast (which was later merged to form LiveOps) and Jump Networks (acquired by Microsoft).
Sometimes, you just have to take things into your own hands. Such is the thinking of Simrit Parmar, a stem cell transplant physician and assistant professor of medicine who is jumping headlong into the business of turning Houston into a stronger entrepreneurial hub.