Semiconductor company Ambiq Micro closed $23.5 million in financing from an undisclosed investor.6/19/2017
Ambiq Micro is a semiconductor company, based in Austin, TX, developing the world’s most energy-efficient integrated circuits. Ambiq is developing a series of ultra-low power products based on its Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT™) Platform. The company’s first product is a standard-setting, energy-efficient real-time clock (RTC) that has gained significant customer traction. The company’s key markets include smart cards, wearables, wireless sensors, smart watches, medical devices, and a wide variety of other wireless devices. (http://newscenter.io/2017/06/) Isagro USA to Market Vestaron Corporation’s Spear®-T Biological Insecticide in Greenhouse Vegetables6/16/2017 MORRISVILLE, NC–(Marketwired – June 15, 2017) – Isagro USA, Inc. (Isagro) has signed an agreement to market Vestaron Corporation’s (Vestaron) Spear®-T biological insecticide for use on greenhouse vegetables in the United States.
Under the terms of the agreement, Isagro will immediately begin marketing Spear-T in the USA as an effective and environmentally conscious choice for the control of the greenhouse vegetable industry’s toughest pests — thrips, whiteflies and spider mites. “Building a dynamic portfolio of biological and organic crop protection in addition to plant beneficial nutrient products has been our priority for several years in the United States,” according to John Paul Du Pre, Executive Chairman of Isagro USA. Spear-T has proven to be highly effective on target pests, and by nature of its design is non-toxic to honeybees, fish, birds, humans and other mammals. Field trials of Spear-T demonstrate results that are equivalent or superior to many conventional control insecticides. John Paul Du Pre added “Spear-T is a biological insecticide that delivers a novel biocontrol solution in a quality formulation for a high degree of consistency and targeted whitefly, thrips and spider mite control. Spear-T is a perfect fit with the Isagro biosolutions portfolio of crop protection and nutrient products.” The product’s active ingredient utilizes a new mode of action to control insects, making Spear-T an excellent fit in a chemical resistance and/or integrated pest management program. It also has a four-hour re-entry interval (REI) and zero-day post-harvest interval (PHI) to maximize grower flexibility. “We are pleased to be teaming with Isagro to bring this product to greenhouse, vegetable growers,” said Vestaron CEO/President, John Sorenson. “Isagro impressed us with its biosolutions portfolio and Spear-T fits well with their strategy.” About Vestaron Corporation Vestaron is a privately-held biotechnology company that specializes in the development of effective bioinsecticides derived from naturally-occurring peptides. More information at www.vestaron.com. About Isagro USA Isagro USA, Inc. is headquartered in Morrisville, NC (Research Triangle Park) and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Isagro S.p.A., based in Milan, Italy. Isagro S.p.A. is a global discoverer, manufacturer, formulator and marketer of crop protection products with a portfolio based on proprietary molecules coming from its own R&D unit. Besides its presence in the U.S. Isagro holds subsidiaries in some key markets and serves customers in approximately 80 countries. For more information, visit www.isagro-usa.com and www.isagro.com. Spear is a registered trademark of Vestaron Corporation. Contact: Mike Allan 919-321-5200 www.isagro-usa.com Less than a year after receiving a sizeable investment from St. Louis-based venture capital firm Lewis & Clark Ventures, Blue Medora, a Detroit startup that develops enterprise cloud software, is set to grow fast as it deals with some of tech’s biggest companies.
Blue Medora raised $8.6 million from investors led by Lewis & Clark in October 2016. Today, according to Crain’s Detroit, Blue Medora has nearly $10 million in revenue with plans on doubling that figure this year. Blue Medora’s software allows a single view of applications, databases and infrastructure to quickly resolve IT issues, increase uptime and optimize performance for business applications. The technology is used by companies such as IBM, Oracle and VMware. The company has grown its product business by more than 240 percent and increased its customer base by 200 percent over the last year. “Our growth is fueled by enterprises shifting their IT budgets to the cloud and demanding simpler, more comprehensive solutions to unite infrastructure, application and database monitoring,” Nathan Owen, CEO at Blue Medora, recently said in a statement. “Our customers are using IT analytics to increase application uptime and decrease engineering and time to market. We look forward to continuing this momentum in 2017 with some exciting new additions the pipeline.” Other investors in the company include VMware, eLab Ventures, Start Garden and Grand Angels. Lewis & Clark Ventures was founded by Tom Hillman in January 2015, shortly after he sold his stake in Answers Corp. for an undisclosed amount. Answers was acquired by Apax Partners in a deal worth $900 million. Brian Hopcraft, another former Answers executive, is Lewis & Clark’s managing director. Hopcraft sits on Blue Medora’s board of directors. Brian Feldt covers technology, venture capital, startups, real estate and sports business. GRAND RAPIDS, MI–(Marketwired – March 13, 2017) – Blue Medora, a leading innovator in IT operational analytics (ITOA) for enterprise cloud and database management systems, today announced continued strong growth with its sixth consecutive record-breaking quarter. Over the past year, Blue Medora grew its product business by more than 240 percent and increased their customer base by 200 percent.
Closing the year with strong Q4 performance, the company expanded the business 254 percent from the previous year, exceeding expected interest in SelectStar, Blue Medora’s native database performance, analytics and health monitoring platform. SelectStar helps data operations and DevOps teams cope with rapid changes in data platforms and analytics, including the costs, complexity and availability risks created by massive data processing demands from business-critical applications that leverage distributed architectures like Hadoop and Cassandra. During Q4, Blue Medora also closed more six-figure deals than in any other quarter in the company’s history. Since 2015, Blue Medora has expanded the number of new customers by 132 percent and increased headcount around the globe by nearly 50 percent. “Our growth is fueled by enterprises shifting their IT budgets to the cloud and demanding simpler, more comprehensive solutions to unite infrastructure, application and database monitoring,” said Nathan Owen, CEO at Blue Medora. “Our customers are using IT analytics to increase application uptime and decrease engineering and time to market. We look forward to continuing this momentum in 2017 with some exciting new additions the pipeline.” “As a market sector, IT monitoring is seeing a lot of innovation,” said John Abbott, 451 Research co-founder and distinguished analyst. “Using a cloud-native SaaS delivery model, Blue Medora’s substantial data analytics engine provides new levels of visibility into the database tier that multiple tools can utilize. There is growing demand from customers for a unified view of the data tier, providing context between the database and the cloud or virtualization layer and helping them move and manage more workloads into the cloud.” In Q4, Blue Medora introduced new solutions and made key executive appointments. Highlights include:
Blue Medora software solutions tie together data from virtualized and cloud-based databases, applications and services with the critical underlying compute, storage and network infrastructure to create a unified view of the infrastructure. These capabilities are delivered as platform extensions for VMware’s vRealize cloud management software. Blue Medora also offers SelectStar, an agile database monitoring platform that helps DBAs, especially those supporting DevOps teams, give speedy feedback and more accurate answers. Blue Medora’s products enable IT operations and DevOps teams to work collaboratively and proactively to avoid downtime, resolve performance problems and make better decisions using more comprehensive analytics. Blue Medora believes true visibility into business critical applications is only achieved when enterprise technology teams communicate without barriers. For more information, visit www.bluemedora.com. Photo by Tom HendersonMike Blue, a veteran executive at oncology-device companies, has been recruited as president and CEO of HistoSonics. HistoSonics Inc., an Ann Arbor-based maker of ultrasonic medical devices aimed at shrinking or destroying cancer tumors, has a new CEO, a new chief medical officer and a new $8.2 million round of venture-capital funding to pay for upcoming human trials.
Mike Blue, a veteran executive at oncology-device companies, has been recruited to the University of Michigan spinoff from Minneapolis, where he had been vice president of sales for NeuWave Medical Inc., a company that made minimally invasive devices that used microwaves to shrink soft-tissue lesions. It was sold last year to a unit of Johnson & Johnson. Previously, Blue had been vice president of sales in the interventional lung solutions division of Covidien and was a regional sales manager for the interventional oncology business at Boston Scientific. “I’ve spent 17 years in interventional oncology, and HistoSonics affords me the chance to continue my career in oncology,” said Blue, who replaced Christine Gibbons as president and CEO. She remains with the company as COO. Blue said the $8.2 million in funding was the first close on HistoSonics’ Series B round, with a second and final close of $5 million scheduled for early in the second quarter. “We’ve got a real opportunity to develop a new platform for cancer care,” he said. Joining him at HistoSonics is Fred Lee, M.D., who had been a co-founder and chief medical officer at NeuWave, a portfolio company of Madison, Wis.-based Venture Investors LLC, which invested $1.55 million of the $8.2 million for HistoSonics and previously led the $14.2 million Series A round the company raised after it was spun off from UM in 2009. Joining Venture Investors in this funding round are the Grand Angels of Grand Rapids; the University of Michigan’s Wolverine Venture Fund; The MINTS (Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups) program at UM; Hatteras Venture Partners of Durham, N.C.; Fletcher Spaght Ventures of Boston; TGap Ventures of Kalamazoo; and Early Stage Partners of Cleveland. Originally, HistoSonics, which employs 12, planned to focus on noninvasively shrinking swollen prostates as well as targeting cancerous tumors but will focus, now, on oncology. “Based on a growing body of preclinical evidence and changing market dynamics, the decision was made to focus all efforts on cancer and, in the short term, specifically liver cancer,” said Blue. Measured by five-year survival rates, liver cancer is the second-deadliest cancer and not very responsive to chemotherapy and radiation. Its five-year survival rate is 17 percent, compared with 7 percent for pancreatic cancer, the deadliest kind, according to the American Cancer Society. “Pancreatic cancer will be our second target after liver cancer,” Blue said. “I’m extremely enthusiastic we were able to recruit Mike Blue as our CEO and Dr. Fred Lee as our senior medical adviser,” said Jim Adox, who runs the Ann Arbor office of Venture Investors. “I know Mike and Fred well and have first-hand confidence in their capabilities.” Lee will remain in Wisconsin, where he runs an animal lab at the University of Wisconsin, where he is doing pre-clinical work for HistoSonics on 30 pigs. He also has a medical practice treating cancer patients. Lee will help oversee a 10-patient study that is scheduled to be done in the third quarter this year by a surgeon in Spain named Dr. Joan Vidal-Jove, a surgical oncologist. Patients will be reviewed two months after their surgery to monitor healing and tumor shrinkage. “We’ll know a lot more about the regulatory pathway after we finish this confirmation study,” said Blue. |
TROUT CREEK VENTUResA regional co-investment fund specializing in angel and early stage private equity. Archives
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