Thursday, July 28, 2011

Doug Levin joins MTDC board

By Rodney H. Brown

Software veteran Doug Levin has been named to the Massachusetts Technology Development Council (MTDC) board of directors, according to a release from the state.

Levin is a serial entrepreneur best known for founding Black Duck Software Inc. of Waltham and serving as its president and CEO in 2002. Before founding Black Duck, a company that makes software designed to help companies manage open-source software components, Levin served as CEO of Message Machines and X-Collaboration Software Corp. From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Levin served in various roles at Microsoft Corp., including a stint as marketing manager.

Levin’s most recent startup, social game developer Ayeah Games Inc., shut down its only game, FanSwarm, in May. In a blog post at the time, Levin said that he was considering “selling the assets.” In February, Ayeah raised $530,000 in a seed round, adding angel group CommonAngels and micro-VC LaunchCapital to the company’s list of investors.

The announcement was made by Secretary of Housing and Economic Development and Chairman of the MTDC board Greg Bialecki.

In May, the MTDC added former venture capitalist Vinit Nijhawan, the managing director of Boston University’s Office of Technology Development, to the board of directors. Nijhawan, a 2005 Mass High Tech All-Star, also serves as director of enterprise programs at BU’s Institute of Technology, Entrepreneurship & Commercialization (ITEC), in addition to teaching an entrepreneurship graduate-level course to MBA students at BU.

MTDC, the state’s main venture capital arm created by the Massachusetts Legislature in 1978, announced in December that it planned to distribute $5 million to startups in 2011 – the agency’s first new investments since 2004.