Monday, June 29, 2009

$8 Million More of 'Under the Mattress' Money for CloudSwitch

Here's an item that'll spark some jealousy in any entrepreneur who finds it tough raising venture capital in the current climate: CloudSwitch has raised a second round of $8 million in venture capital funding, led by new investor Commonwealth Capital Ventures. This follows a first round of $7.4 million that was first reported here on Innovation Economy in January.

I spoke to founder and VP/products Ellen Rubin late on Friday, as the company was moving into new office space in Burlington. (The funding news was under embargo until this morning.) The company now has 18 people, including new CEO John McEleney (formerly CEO at SolidWorks), co-founder and CTO John Considine (formerly of Sun and Pirus), chief architect Fred Oliveira (who formerly worked on EMC's Atmos cloud offering), VP of product management George Moberly (ex of EMC and BladeLogic), and VP of engineering Sean Henry (formerly of RSA.)

"We weren't really actively looking for money," Rubin said. "But there was a fair amount of pre-emptive interest at attractive valuations. Having John McEleney join was the catalyst. He's pretty well-regarded, and had a phenomenal track record at SolidWorks. He knew the Atlas and Matrix guys [who led CloudSwitch's first round], and has known the guys at Commonwealth for a long time." Eliot Katzman is the partner at Commonwealth who will join CloudSwitch's board; Matrix and Atlas participated in the new round. CloudSwitch's objective is to help make the low costs and flexibility of cloud computing services safe for enterprise use.

"This is one of those funny situations," Rubin told me. "We'd just raised the A, and we weren't going to be looking for more money until well into 2010. This is just money to have, so we can focus on getting the product out the door. You just put it in the bank and let it sit there."

Nice situation to be in...

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Monday, May 4, 2009

Clean Energy Council (Quietly) Announces New Class of Fellows

The New England Clean Energy Council has just named its new group of 25 fellows -- experienced execs and investors interested in repositioning themselves for careers in cleantech. (There has been no official press release, though.) The program starts Tuesday at MIT, and runs through July.

This new bunch includes Ahmet Ozalp, formerly an IT investor at Atlas Venture... Paul Sereiko, founder of SensiCast, a sensor networking start-up... Doug Levin, founding CEO of Black Duck Software... and Tan Rao, whose wireless home theater start-up, Radiospire Networks, was funded by Highland Capital but folded last month.

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Monday, March 2, 2009

How the VC Scene in Boston is Changing

Sunday's Globe column dealt with the shrinkage of Boston's VC universe. Column got snipped quite a bit, so I'm publishing the full version below, along with the video.



Venture capital sector makes adjustments

For Boston’s venture capital community, headquartered on the placid plateau of Mount Money in Waltham, 2009 will be a year of wrenching change. The stream of capital flowing to venture capital firms, who invest it in innovative-but-risky private companies, is turning to a rivulet – and that means the firms themselves will have to get smaller.

“Last year, our industry raised about $28 billion in new investment capital,” says Michael Greeley, chairman of the New England Venture Capital Association and managing director of Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston. “I think we’ll raise between $8 billion and $12 billion this year, nationally. That’s a dramatic reduction. My sense is that the average fund size will be cut in half, and they’ll have to cut the number of partners who work for them as a result.”

The shrinkage of Boston’s VC sector will be tough for the VCs, obviously, and also for entrepreneurs who ascend Mount Money with their PowerPoint presentations, looking for funding to launch a company or keep one going. But it could also have a silver lining.

Here’s what’s happening.

Two local VC firms have already put together smaller investment pools than they’d hoped for. Atlas Venture, in Waltham, had aimed to raise about $400 million but wound up with $283 million; as a result, last month Atlas jettisoned two of its partners and shifted two others to less active roles. Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures will likely wind up raising between $475 million and $550 million for its latest fund, rather than the $750 million it had set out to collect. Money in a venture capital fund is typically invested over the course of a decade.

Kodiak Venture Partners of Waltham has reduced the number of investors on its roster and is shifting its focus toward life sciences and medical technology as part of an attempt to burnish its appeal to would-be investors. Andrey Zarur, a partner there, says Kodiak isn’t out looking for new money right now, but plans to be at some point in the future.

“Kodiak just hasn’t had enough liquidity events to make their limited partners say, ‘I’m ready to step up again,’” says Howard Anderson, an MIT lecturer and former venture capitalist. (Limited partner is the term for the university endowments, wealthy individuals, and pension funds that funnel money into venture capital.) One example Anderson cites is Egenera, Inc., a Marlborough company selling technology for data centers that raised $176 million but never managed to go public. Anderson should know: his old firm, YankeeTek Ventures, was an early investor in Egenera.

Many other local VC firms are on the road, talking to prospective sugar daddies. Some have been at it longer than others. Among the firms trying to scare up more money in 2009 are Boston Millennia Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Prism VentureWorks, Oxford BioScience Partners, Charles River Ventures, and North Bridge Venture Partners. New firms, like Genovation Capital and a medical device oriented fund called Makaira Venture Partners, are also out trying to raise their first funds.

Venture capitalists are prohibited by the Securities and Exchange Commission from discussing their fund-raising activities. But one partner at a Boston area VC firm that’s trying to put together its next fund told me last week that fundraising is happening “on a molasses pace,” adding that “universally, everyone is going to be lower than what they’d hoped to raise.”

One reason that the limited partners are avoiding commitments to new VC funds is that many of them have formulas for how they allocate their assets. If a certain percentage is devoted to bonds, a certain percentage to stocks, and a certain percentage to venture capital and private equity, for instance, things start to look out of whack when the stock portion of the portfolio plunges and the value of the VC portion stays roughly the same. (The valuations of the private companies in a venture capital firm’s portfolio isn’t updated very frequently, unlike publicly-traded stocks.)

If a limited partner needs to get their mix of asset allocation back in order, investing in new VC funds simply doesn’t happen. (Some limited partners, including the endowment managers at Harvard, Duke, and Columbia, are actually trying to sell the stakes in VC funds they already own – but there are few buyers.)

And investors who can’t get their money into the best-performing venture firms may simply be disappointed with the financial returns they get. “I’ve heard limited partners say that the VC business, in some cases, is like getting Treasury bill returns with venture capital levels of risk,” says Michael Feinstein, an ex-VC. “If you look at the median venture capital return over the past eight years, it’s about one percent a year.”

Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor who studies the venture capital industry, describes what’s happening among limited partners as “a changing of the guard.” University endowments and U.S.-based pension funds are becoming smaller players in new venture capital funds, Lerner says. But what’s not clear is who will take up the slack – though sovereign wealth funds and pension funds from Australia are two potential candidates. “We can see who’s going out,” Lerner says, “but not who’s going in.”

The upshot is that VC firms will be managing smaller funds, and some firms will go out of business. Anderson, who refers to Atlas’ situation as a harbinger of things to come, predicts that some funds that aren’t in the 25 percent when it comes to delivering financial returns will simply fade into the sunset. “Everyone will swear to be in that top quartile, but this isn’t Lake Wobegon – not everyone is above average,” he says.

Fewer firms and smaller funds will obviously mean fewer jobs for venture capitalists and the staffers who support them. It’ll undoubtedly get harder for start-ups to raise money. It will take longer, and those that do manage to attract an initial jolt of capital will get less of it than before.

“There just won’t be as much money flying around,” says Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital in Boston. “And there’s good in that. If you can raise money for your start-up now, there’s going to be a lot more uniqueness value than there used to be.” In other words, entrepreneurs will run up against fewer well-funded competitors than they once did. That could help the entrepreneurs and their backers both.

Still, a contracting VC universe isn’t going to be as fun to inhabit as an expanding one – at least for most people, at least in the near-term.

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Monday, April 21, 2008

Mascoma: Lone Massachusetts Company in First Quarter's Top Ten Venture Deals

The PriceWaterhouseCoopers/NVCA MoneyTree Report covering Q1 activity just came out.

Part of the news is that there was a worrisome drop in the amount of capital poured into New England companies during the first quarter.

But the other interesting tidbit comes from the list of the top ten money-raisers in the quarter: companies like Slide (developer of Facebook apps), Asthmatx (medical devices for asthma sufferers), and Infinia Corp. (Stirling engines and generators), each of which raised $50 million.

Company #10 on the list is a mysterious Brighton, MA biotech company that raised $44.99 million from firms like Atlas Venture, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla Ventures. It's the only Massachusetts company to make the list.

Though the MoneyTree survey labels the company and its business as "undisclosed," all signs point to Mascoma Corp., a company turning cellulosic materials (plant-based schtuff like wood, straw, and switchgrass) into biofuels. (This was earlier reported as a $50 million combo of equity and debt, but there's no press release on Mascoma's site.)

Interestingly, the #1 money-raiser in the quarter was another cellulosic ethanol company, Colorado-based Range Fuels, which took in an eye-popping $130 million. Range and Mascoma have one investor in common: Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures.

(Both Range and Mascoma are classified by MoneyTree as "biotech" firms, but it seems to me they'd fit better in the "industrial/energy" category, though they do rely on living organisms and biotech processes to make their fuel.)

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Monday, November 19, 2007

Feinstein & Fleming: Dynamic Small-Cap Duo?

I've been curious about what blogger and former VC Michael Feinstein has been up to, ever since I bumped into him over the summer at one of the OpenCoffee Club gatherings in Central Square. Feinstein, formerly at Atlas Venture and Venrock, is also a regular presence at the Web Innovators Group.

At the last Web Innovators Group, Feinstein was wearing a stick-on name tag that linked him to Clear Stream Ventures, and when I asked him if that was the name of a new VC firm he was starting, he told me it was a placeholder.

Things got more interesting last week, when I ran into a VC who told me that Feinstein had been to a Deloitte-sponsored lunch, and talked a bit about what he was up to.

After trying for a time to put together an early-stage fund using the Clear Stream name, Michael has now linked up with Bob Fleming, founder of Prism Venture Partners. (Fleming left Prism as part of Woody Benson's extreme make-over of that Needham firm, now known as Prism VentureWorks.) Feinstein and Fleming are apparently now working together to raise a fund to invest in small-cap public companies, using some space at the Waltham office of Foley Hoag, a law firm.

"I will confirm that we are doing something oriented around small-cap public companies," Feinstein writes via e-mail, adding that he and Fleming won't have anything to announce officially until 2008.

Feinstein did acknowledge that he'd been working earlier to try to set up a seed-stage VC firm, but that he may have missed the right moment for that: "I was probably too late compared to some of the new funds in Boston -- .406, DACE, Kepha, etc."

This will be an interesting project to watch ... and I'm eager to find out more...

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Friday, October 12, 2007

Why Not Think Big?

I am really glad that people are continuing to have the conversation about what it will take to build a new generation of really big, really important companies in New England.

Last week, Atlas Venture held an event in Vermont called the New England Founding Entrepreneurs Summit on Technology. Speakers included Analog Devices CEO Jerry Fishman, Venture Hacks blogger Babak Nivi, Rich Chleboski from Evergreen Solar, and Michael Zane from Kryptonite Locks.

Xconomy founder Bob Buderi moderated a fireside chat with Fishman, and he also blogged about the discussions around what it'll take to create more Analogs (and EMCs and Akamais) here.

I'm glad Atlas is focusing on the issue; I helped organize a dinner last year on the same topic. But both the Atlas conference and our dinner on "Building Billion-Dollar Companies in the Bay State" (which featured the founders of Boston Scientific and Thermo Electron) were top-secret, invitation-only events.

I'm helping to put together a gathering for Wednesday, November 28th, in the evening, in downtown Boston. I'll be doing a fireside chat there with Michael Greeley of IDG Ventures, who also heads the New England Venture Capital Association, and Paul Maeder of Highland Capital Partners, who is on the board of the National Venture Capital Association.

There will be limited comparisons between Silicon Valley and New England - I promise. But we will discuss what the factors are that seem to compel New England companies to cash out, rather than keep on truckin'.

Our venue on the 28th is limited to 50 attendees. We're going to limit attendance to company founders/CEOs and investors (VCs, angels, etc.)

So while this event is theoretically open to anybody who is building or funding companies, we need to be selective. But please e-mail me if you think you ought to be there: kirsner at pobox.com. At the very least, I promise that we'll do an audio or video recording, and you'll hear about it when it is online.

And you don't need to be completely sold on the idea of building big, independent companies -- essential to the mix of attendees will be people who believe that a sweet acquisition price isn't necessarily a bad thing.

For some background, here's a piece I wrote in the Globe back in January, about growing oaks, not saplings.

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Monday, September 24, 2007

Instead of Going Public, Adnexus Shacks Up with Bristol-Myers Squibb

Bristol-Meyers Squibb is paying $430 million in cash for Waltham-based Adnexus Therapeutics, which filed an S-1 statement just last month. The company planned to raise $86 million in an IPO, on top of $76 million it had already raised in VC money.

We included them earlier this year on our list of the ten most-promising New England life sciences start-ups, in the second edition of The Convergence Guide. (The list was compiled by Steven Dickman of CBT Advisors.)

From the AP report:

    The companies said the acquisition of Adnexus will help advance Bristol-Myers's role in biologics and includes an early stage trial for cancer treatment candidate Angiocept. Angiocept is designed to be a so-called anti-angiogenic drug, or one that tries to stop cancerous tumors from developing new blood vessels.

    The deal "is an important step in accelerating the strategic transformation of our pharmaceutical business to a biopharma business model," said Bristol-Myers Squibb Chief Executive Jim Cornelius, in a statement.


Among the local VC firms that backed Adnexus are Polaris Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, and Flagship Ventures. The company did a Series C round of $15.5 million just before filing for its IPO.

Update: Tuesday's Globe has the full story.

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