
Bankers, lawyers, accountants, investors and entrepreneurs gathered at the Copley Marriott Thursday evening for the second annual Tech Dealmaker Awards presented by Mass High Tech and the Association for Corporate Growth, the capping-off event at the end of the day-long Tech Conference 2008.
Gov. Deval Patrick spoke in the afternoon conference, followed by an awards ceremony that honored eight companies who were party to the past year’s most interesting, most complex and largest financial transactions involving New England-based high tech companies.
“Sometimes there is an aspect of a deal that the dealmakers are most interested in that doesn’t get told by the media,” Mass High Tech editor Douglas Banks told the assembled group. “That’s why Tech Dealmakers was born.”
Rutland, Vt.’s Catamount Energy Corp. was a winner for its $320 million acquisition by Duke Energy Corp. of Charlotte, N.C.
“Duke was just a home run,” compared to some of the other companies that could have bought the Green Mountain State green energy company, said Bruce Peacock, a former Catamount executive, now vice president of Wind Energy at Duke. “It’s good people, lots of money, and a company that’s committed to the U.S. and wind.”
Watertown-based Doble Engineering was recognized in the Philanthropic Deal of the Year category for its sale to ESCO Technologies Inc. of St. Louis, with $272 million of the proceeds going to Tufts University and Lesley University through trusts established in the 1960s by company founder Frank Doble.
Doble died in 1969, and there have been times in the intervening 40 years when the company looked like it wasn’t going to make it, said trustee Howard Nichols. But the trustees held out from selling. “We just thought we can do better than selling by sticking to our knitting and staying with what we knew how to do,” he said.
For a complete list of the 2008 Tech Dealmakers winners, visit this story.
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