Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Rockport Capital collects Westerlind from InterWest

By Mass High Tech Staff

Venture-capital investor Victor Westerlind is joining RockPort Capital Partners as a general partner in the Boston-based VC firm’s Menlo Park, Calif., office, according to the firm. Westerlind was most recently a partner at Menlo Park-based InterWest Partners.

RockPort says it hopes to benefit from Westerlind’s experience in semiconductors, advanced materials and the wireless and enterprise hardware industries. Prior to InterWest, Westerlind worked on product marketing and management for semiconductor physical vapor deposition equipment in the flat-panel display industry at Santa Clara-based Applied Materials Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT).

At InterWest, Westerlind’s portfolio included Silicon Valley chip maker T-RAM Semiconductor Inc. and digital signal processing tool-builder AccelChip, a California company sold in 2006 to San Jose-based Xilinx Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX).

Recent additions to RockPort’s California portfolio include Soliant Energy Inc., a Monrovia-based manufacturer of photovoltaic modules, San Francisco-based modular building maker Project Frog, and home energy efficiency startup Sustainable Spaces Inc., also based in San Francisco. The venture capital firm’s New England portfolio includes Barre, Vt.-based distributed power systems developer Northern Power Systems Inc., a subsidiary of Wind Power Holdings Inc., and advanced materials developer Aspen Aerogels Inc. of Northborough. Earlier this month, Rockport signed on as financial advisors with Acton Alzheimer’s detection startup Neuroptix Corp.