Luisa Beltran
Sharp Corp. is buying Recurrent Energy, a portfolio company of Hudson Clean Energy Partners. Other shareholders include Mohr Davidow Ventures. Sharp has agreed to pay $305 million in cash. Recurrent Energy is solar project developer and generating company with a 2 GW pipeline. Sharp, of Japan, designs and makes electronic products like LCD TVs.
TuneUp Media, a leading plugin for iTunes, has raised $4.3 million via a Series C round of funding that was led by IDG Ventures. KPG Ventures, an original see funder, also participated. IDG Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm.
What sort of houses do successful VC and PE execs live in? Really nice ones that are very expensive.
An arbitration case sheds light on the lengths Jeff Drazan, the head of Bertram Capital, went to build a house in Woodside, Calif. Drazan co-founded Sierra Ventures and helped it raise eight funds before founding Bertram Capital in 2006.
This past February, Drazan and his wife Stacy, had to fork over $5.75 million to Vance Brown Inc., a contractor, in a dispute over construction to the Woodside home, according to a story in The Alamanac. The Drazan’s ended up spending $18 million on the house, which initially was slated to cost $11.3 milllion.
The Drazan's made "thousands and thousands and thousands" of alterations when constructing their new home and refused to pay for many of them, says Gregg Dulik, an attorney with Sedgwick, Detert, Moran and Arnold, who represented Vance Brown.
Technology Crossover Ventures has made a minority investment in Merkle, a relationship marketing agency. Merkle, of Columbia, Md., employs more than 1,200 people.
Stockholm-based Volvo Technology Transfer and Industrifonden have sold Illumuniate Labs to Autodesk. Illuminate Labs develops advanced lighting and illumination technology for video games. Illuminate Labs will be part of Autodesk Media & Entertainment and continue its operations in Gothenburg. All employees in the company are being offered a new position within Autodesk, a statement said. Financial terms were not announced.
Menlo Ventures is looking to raise $600 million to $800 million for its next fund, Bloomberg News said.
If it reaches $800 million, the Menlo fund would be the biggest raised in the U.S. this year. It would surpass Battery Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners, which each raised $750 million. But it would be smaller than Menlo's last fund which raised $1.2 billion in 2005, Bloomberg said.
Darby Overseas Investments, the PE arm of Franklin Templeton Investments,said that its Darby Technology Ventures Fund sold Atvi to Euronet Worldwide. Ativi is a Brazilian prepaid payments processor. Financial terms were not announced.
(VentureBeat) -- Virtualization giant VMware announced today that it has acquired an IT analytics startup called Integrien for $100 million.
Irvine, Calif.-based Integrien offers systems monitoring software, similar to IBM’s Tivoli, with an emphasis on up-to-the-minute information about problems with your infrastructure. Microsoft’s Sidekick unit signed up as a customer to make sure it doesn’t have another outage like it did last fall. Itegrien was funded by Clearstone Venture Partners, Tech Coast Angels, Acartha Group, and Mariner Capital Ventures, most recently in an $8 million round announced in May.
Dexcom said Monday that Donald A. Lucas has resigned from its board as well as its audit and compensation committees. Dexcom, of San Diego, develops and markets continuous glucose monitoring systems for ambulatory use. The company has received VC funding from RWI Ventures, Canaan Partners, Federated Kaufman Fund, Fog City Fund, INVESCO, St. Paul Venture Capital, and Windamere Venture Partners. Lucas cofounded RWI.
(Reuters) - Dell Inc (DELL.O:) is widely expected to bow out of a bidding war with Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N:) for data storage company 3PAR Inc (PAR.N:) because of the increased price tag.
A survey of eight technology investors and analysts by Reuters on Monday found most expect Dell to soon give up its pursuit of 3PAR, either ceding to HP's last offer of $30 per share or giving up at a few dollars higher at most.
Dell has until Wednesday to match HP's $2 billion offer for the company, which analysts say would help speed up its expansion from personal computers into more profitable enterprise technology services.