Finance Roundup: Rob Day leaves @Ventures, Excel launches fund

New England Tech Stock Index

Rob Day gets a new job, and Excel Venture Management launches a fund in today’s Finance Roundup.

• Rob Day leaves @Ventures, heads to Black Coral Capital

Day, a principal who specialized in cleantech at @Ventures, will be investing in a broadened scope of asset classes at Black Coral. The firm, backed by a private family office, already invests as a limited partner in private equity firms. Day and managing director Christian Zabbal, who works from Montreal, will begin to make the firm’s first direct investments, ranging from early-stage to late-stage and buyout plays.

• NSF funds UMass Lowell engineering outreach effort

The project, called GK-12: Vibes and Waves in Action, connects graduate-level researchers to high-school teachers and students in Lowell and Lawrence. Participating graduate students will discuss their own research, build experiments for the classroom and become mentors and role models to students

• Excel Venture launches $125M life sciences fund

The fund will be used to support companies in the fields of healthcare IT, diagnostics, medical devices and life sciences platforms that touch on energy, defense, agriculture and chemicals.

• AspenTech settles Honeywell lawsuit

Burlington-based Aspen opted to settle the matter to avoid spending any more time and resources on “issues that in our view were settled in 2004,” said the company’s general counsel, Frederic Hammond, in a prepared statement Monday.

• Northeastern U., Veterans Affairs team on engineering

Northeastern University and the New England Veterans Affairs Health System have teamed up to form a systems engineering center whose mission is to make engineering advances that will help veterans hospitals and potentially others over time.

• Acronis combines storage products to target large biz

Traditionally, the Burlington-based company has made its money selling to small and midsize enterprises, but with the new unified solution, which it calls Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, Acronis is aiming for large enterprise business as well, according to president and CEO Jason Donahue.

Posted by Brendan Lynch

Tags: @Ventures, Acronis, AspenTech, Black Coral Capital, Excel Venture Management, Honeywell, Northeastern University, NSF, Rob Day, UMass Lowell

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 10:20 am and is filed under Defense, Education & Training, Energy, Financial Services, Life Sciences, Massachusetts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.