Boston Startup Community News & Content

If you live in Boston or any of more than three dozen other eastern Massachusetts communities, you could be sending vital data to public health officials with each flush of your toilet. Through the end of the year, the sewage arriving at the Deer Island Treatment Plant will be tested three times a week for

BioBright, an 11-person startup based in Boston that automates data flow from laboratory instruments to a secure cloud, has been acquired by Herts, U.K.-based Dotmatics. No financial terms were disclosed. Founded in 2015 and initially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), BioBright’s aim is to create “the smart laboratory of the future.”

Crowd intelligence startup Armored Things has raised an additional $7 million in seed capital, bringing its total funding to $14.8 million. Will Ventures led the round, with participation from Splunk, Glasswing Ventures, Inovia and MassVentures.

Techstars Boston alumn Openly Inc., which is applying artificial intelligence to the home insurance market, said on Wednesday it has closed a $15 million investment with Gradient Ventures as a returning investor. The news comes after Gradient, Google’s AI fund, participated in at least two other recent fundraises of companies based in the Bay State.

Workhuman, a human resources software firm previously known as Globoforce, is the latest Massachusetts tech company to hit a valuation that surpasses $1 billion. The list of local unicorns includes payment technology company Circle Financial Internet Ltd., restaurant management software maker Toast Inc. and 3-D printing competitors Formlabs Inc. and Desktop Metal Inc.

Krishna Gupta’s new firm will launch with a new entrepreneur-in-residence program specifically for Black founders.

MassChallenge, the zero-equity accelerator founded in Boston 11 years ago, has announced the early-stage startups in this year’s MassChallenge Boston program. Of those startups, 52 are based here in Massachusetts—more than half of the 100 total startups in the cohort. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, MassChallenge has pivoted to an all-virtual model. The accelerator

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MassMutual Ventures (MMV) announced today that it has launched a third $100 million venture capital fund to continue its successful strategy of investing in early- and growth-stage companies in the financial technology, cybersecurity, enterprise software, and digital health sectors. With this new fund, the Boston-based team will manage a total of $300 million on