New investments: Spiro Technologies, Armored Things, FairMarkIT, and 20 START companies

As we wrap up a successful fiscal year, we want to share some of what we're doing to help companies thrive here in Massachusetts.

NEW INVESTMENTS

We are excited to announce that we have invested in three Massachusetts companies that are on the cutting edge of their respective industries.

FairMarkIT is a Boston-based, tail spend management firm. FairMarkIT uses clients’ unstructured tail spend data and delivers functional results to drive business value and automate the procurement process for small to medium sized purchases.

On May 24, 2018, FairMarkIT announced its first round of institutional funding. Investors in the round include NewFund Capital, NewStack Ventures, MassVentures, VT Technology Ventures and several prominent Boston and San Francisco-based angel and seed investors. See more in the Boston Business Journal .

Armored Things is a Boston-based start-up building a predictive cyber-physical incident response platform to keep people safe in large shared spaces like schools, stadiums, and streets. They provide security operations with early warnings of risks, better information to assess threats, and faster responses through automation using existing IoT, mobile devices and systems. 

On July 18, 2018, Armored Things announced that it has completed a $5.5 million institutional seed round of financing. Glasswing Ventures and iNovia Capital led the investment round with participation from additional existing and new investors, including MassVentures. See more in Bostinno .

Spiro Technologies is the first Proactive CRM that reminds salespeople who to call, updates itself, and helps sales teams close more deals. Providing sales managers visibility into what deals their reps are working on, Spiro helps sales leaders manage their team more efficiently and effectively.  On average, sales teams using Spiro talk to 23% more customers and prospects during the week, and close 20% more sales.  

On July 17, 2018, Spiro Technologiesannounced the completion of its $1.5 million Series Seed 2 fundraise, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $5 million. New investors include NXT Ventures and Zelkova Ventures with Hyperplane Venture Capital, Geekdom Fund, MassVentures and New Harbour Partners all participating in the over-subscribed round. Since raising a Series Seed in September of 2017, Spiro has more than doubled its customer base and tripled revenue. See more in Bostinno .

2018 START AWARDS

On June 21, 2018, the Baker-Polito Administration awarded $3.4 million to twenty innovative, early-stage, high-growth companies in Massachusetts. These awards, collaboration between the MassVentures START program and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), will help grow employment opportunities, promote manufacturing and commercialization, and stimulate innovation across the Commonwealth. The funding will support companies located across the Commonwealth spanning the technology sector, from robotics to clean energy to defense.

The MassVentures START (SBIR Targeted Technologies) program ensures growing Massachusetts-based companies are able to commercialize technologies developed under SBIR and STTR contracts. The program is a three-year process designed to provide increasing financial rewards to the companies that demonstrate progress on the path toward commercialization. Over the course of the program, each company, with advice and coaching provided by MassVentures and the START ecosystem, strives to execute its product commercialization strategy. 

Now in its seventh year, the START program has awarded nearly $19 million to 74 Massachusetts Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II projects and helped winning companies raise additional capital of $278 million.

See the full release and list of winners here and coverage from the Boston Business Journal here .

Thank you to  Intrinsix (2013 START winner) for hosting the awards event and

to our reviewers & judges for their time and expertise!

MASSVENTURES TURNS 40!

2018 marks 40 years since the founding of MassVentures, the first quasi-public venture firm in the country. We will be celebrating this occasion in November.  Please keep an eye on your inbox and the MassVentures website for more details.  We hope you’ll join us!

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