Luisa Beltran
LivingSocial, which is backed by former AOL chairman Steve Case, has created a COO position and hired Eric Eichmann, a former AOL hand and a Rosetta Stone exec, to fill it, according to the Washington Post. Living Social offers daily Web deals with local merchants. In March, the company raised $25 million in a round led by US Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Case’s Revolution LLC.
3Par must feel like the wall flower who gets crowned prom queen and gets to pick her king. Who knew a data storage company could be so wanted?
The bidding war for 3Par got even crazier today with HP sweetening its offer to $30 a share. This came after Dell boosted its own proposal to $27 a share just this morning.
No matter who wins the bidding war, three venture firms will get a nice, big payday. Mayfield Fund owns 9.9% of 3Par, Menlo Ventures has 15% and Worldview Technology Partners holds 13.4%. FMR LLC, or Fidelity Investments, has 12.2%, according to regulatory filings.
At $30 a share, Mayfield could reap $186 million (6.2 million shares), while Menlo Ventures (9.4 million shares) could receive $282 million, Worldview Technology (8.4 million) could get $252 million and Fidelity (7.6 million) could receive $228 million.
ArcSight Inc., a security software maker, is up for sale, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Bidders include Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., EMC Co., IBM Corp., and CA Inc. ArcSight could fetch $1.5 billion, the WSJ said.
Cupertino, Calif.-based ArcSight has received VC funding from firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Integral Capital Partners and New Enterprise Associates.
Foodspotting, which lets people find and share their favorite foods using pictures, has closed a $750,000 seed round.
Investors include former Google executive Aydin Senkut and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund, Path CEO Dave Morin, Google product manager for location-based services Steve Lee and Dipity founder Derek Dukes, according to GigaOm.
Alexa Andrzejewski, Foodspotting’s CEO, said the site is not a social network for foodies. “We’re primarily a local guide, more like Yelp or Citysearch,” she wrote in an email to peHUB.
U.S. VC funds posted their first negative 10-year returns in a decade, according to new data from Thomson Reuters.
As of March 31, VC funds generated a -1.5% pooled horizon return. The results exclude VC valuations from fourth quarter 1999 (which was the height of the dotcom bubble). Prior to this, 1999’s quarterly valuations were the major reason VC 10-year returns were positive, Thomson Reuters said.
Earlier today, I was catching up with Renee LeBran, a partner with RC/Fontis Partners, when I realized she had just given me a bit of news.
It seems that Safe Security, which monitors alarm systems for residential and commercial properties, raised $25 million in debt financing last month. This brings total debt financing to $50 million for the company. The transaction for Safe Security follows an investment from St. Cloud earlier this year, LeBran says.
ISTO Technologies provides hope for anyone with knee injuries or back pain.
ISTO, of St. Louis, has developed cell technology to help repair the cartilage of the knee, back or spine. Dr. Mitchell Seyedin, ISTO’s president and CEO, said the company will be looking for a late-stage investor, or mezzanine funding, later this year.
Seyedin, who was speaking Thursday at the BMO Healthcare Conference in New York, didn’t disclose how much ISTO will be seeking. ISTO has raised $45 million through five rounds of funding, from Ascension Health Ventures, Alafi Capital, Life Sciences Partners, Mid-America Transplant Services and Zimmer Holdings.
Cross Atlantic Capital Partners has led a $6.1 million financing round for Health Market Science, a provider of data, software and regulatory compliance services. Cross Atlantic, for its part, invested $4 million. Other institutional investors includied Edison Venture Fund.
Eli Lilly and Co. has agreed to buy Alnara Pharmaceuticals Inc. Financial terms were not announced. Alnara, of Cambridge, Mass., is a biotechnology company that develops protein therapeutics for the treatment of metabolic diseases. Alnara has received investments from Third Rock Ventures, Frazier Healthcare, MPM Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Longwood Founders Fund. PRESS RELEASE […]
Clean technology venture investments in North America, Europe and China hit $2.02 billion in second quarter, up 43% for the same time period in 2009, according to the Cleantech Group and Deloitte. Solar was the lead sector for investments with $811 million spread across 26 deals.