Boston Startup Community News & Content

The Boston biotech scene is at it again, accounting for about $6.2 billion worth of all fundraising in Massachusetts last month. Altogether, Boston startups and tech firms raised about $6.9 billion by our count. It’s not all biotech. The software industry is on fire, too, raising more than $417 million in capital last month. Most

ClimaCell, a Boston-based microweather tech startup, whose platform generates high-definition weather maps, has brought in $23 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Pitango Growth and Square Peg Capital. It’s been a turbulent year for ClimaCell. This spring, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the startup economy, the startup furloughed 10 employees. Co-founder and CEO

The coronavirus caused some disagreement amongst Boston’s venture capital community. Looking back at our mid-2020 survey of its VCs, some saw the city’s strength in biotech and healthcare as a competitive advantage, while others saw Boston’s diverse startup ecosystem as key to its survival. And some were worried that activity was about to clamp down.

Martel Metellus is the founder of Soko, a discovery network for the Black community to connect, collaborate, and find new opportunities. Founded in September 2019, Soko began as a freelance marketplace for Black skillworkers. Like many great startups, Soko was created to satisfy the founder’s own pain points. Metellus developed Soko to solve his need of

Sea Machines, the Boston-based developer of self-driving technology for boats, has raised a $15 million Series B round. The round was led by Huntington Ingalls Industries, America’s largest military shipbuilding company, with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, Brunswick Corp. (through investment partner TechNexus), Geekdom Fund, NextGen Venture Partners, Eniac VC, LaunchCapital and others.

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.