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Publicly traded Maxim Integrated Products, has acquired the U.K.-based startup Phyworks for $72.5 million in cash. Phyworks, sold by a consortium of investors that includes Add Partners, Advent Venture Partners LLP, Atlas Venture and DFJ Esprit (formerly Esprit Capital Partners, makes high-speed communications chips. PRESS RELEASE: Maxim CEO Tunc Doluca remarked: “Business and consumer appetite for access to information anywhere, anytime, will continue to grow exponentially. The backbone to support the increased data traffic is high-speed optical networks. Additionally, optical networks are now beginnin
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peHUB Second Opinion 9.9
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For the first time, Facebook has passed Google in time spent on the site. Be scared, Google; be very scared.
Scratch that. Google mobile search has grown 4x this year. Things aren't going Craigslist's way these days. A Delaware court judge just ruled in eBay's favor in a shareholder lawsuit against the popular, and increasingly controversial, listings site. The secret to dressing Gordon Gekko, then and now. (H/T: Dealbook) Institutional Investor tries ruining our weekends early with its newest feature, "Paradise Lost, Why Fallen Markets Will Never Be the Same." As the newspaper wars rage on, the WSJ is planning to launch a book review section for the first time in its history. Harvard's endowment rebounds meaningfully for its fiscal year, ended June 30.
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TCV Gives New Meaning To ‘Minority Investment’
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 Turns out it was one hell of a minority investment. According to an SEC filing uncovered by the sleuths at FormDs.com, TCV has sunk $75 million into the company, which works with big-league clients like The Hartford Financial Services Gro...
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Pageonce, the “personal finance assistant” startup, today announced Steve Schultz as its new COO. Schultz joins Pageonce from Yahoo! where he was head of Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Real Estate businesses. Pageonce, based in Palo Alto, is backed by Pitango Venture Capital and Hillsven. PRESS RELEASE: Pageonce, the award-winning personal finance assistant, today announced that the company has named Steve Schultz as its new chief operating officer. Schultz is a demonstrated leader in the consumer finance category, and brings a wealth of experience in product development, strategic partnerships, and business and content strategy. In this role, Schultz will lead Pageonce strategy, distribution partnerships, business deve
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Seed Investors Who Shy From Publicity DO Exist: Meet Inspiration Ventures
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DataSphere Technologies raised a $10 million series C round of funding led by OVP Venture Partners. DataSphere is a Web technology and hyperlocal ad sales company.
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Socowave secured €3 million from a Series A investment. The round led by Balderton Capital. Socowave is a Dublin-based developer of wireless access systems for mobile communications. It plans to use the capital to accelerate development of its technology. Barry Maloney, a partner at Balderton Capital, will join Socowave’s board.
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Matrix hired Vincenzo Narciso as a partner in its private funds group, where he will focus on both originating and raising capital for international private equity and venture capital funds. Prior to joining Matrix, Narciso was head of UBP Private Equity activities.
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G Square, a Paris-based private equity shop that is focused on health care companies, invested €15 million in Zahnarztzentrum.ch, which is a dental services in Switzerland. Zahnarztzentrum.ch operates 10 dental service centers and is expected to generate sales around €28 million in 2010.
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Clairvest Group Inc. sold Casino Marina del Sol, Latin Gaming Chile S.A. and Latin Gaming Osorno S.A. at original cost to a Chile Holdings for $15.9 million and a 35.6 percent stake in the new holding company. Additionally, Clairvest Equity Partners III LP sold its investment in Casino Marina del Sol to Chile Holdings at cost and received a 40.9 percent in the holding company.
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peHUB First Read
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 * Jeff Peek, ex-CIT Chief, has a new gig at Barclays. * Goldman Sachs agrees to pay a fine of £17.5 million ($27.1 million) for failing to make disclosures about trader Fabrice Tourre. * Rebecca Davis O'Brien on her college classmate Mark Zuckerberg. * What happens to President Obama if Rahm Emanuel decides to run for Mayor of Chicago? * Cerberus was the PE shop that made a $2.5 billion bid for Foster's. * Court rules that attorneys can Google potential jurors during jury selection. * Arthur Sulzberger Jr concedes that New York Times will stop being printed sometime in the future.
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Livescribe Joins the $100M Venture-Backed Club
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peHUB Second Opinion 9.8
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Investors Paul Kedrosky, Jason Mendelson, and Brad Feld publicly dress down the authors of a New York Times Op-Ed who argued for speeding up the patent process -- and who may have stretched the truth to make their case.
Google Instant launched today, and the function will shave up to five seconds off the standard 25-second search , says Google VP Marissa Mayer. If only they could do something about my turd ball of a PC to speed it along, too. Rodney Cohen gallops out of Pegasus Capital Advisors to become the head of Carlyle's new U.S. equity opportunity group, which will focus on small and mid-size businesses. Behold, the new Old Spice guy. (You know you want to see this as much as I did.) Amazon is trying to cut down on "wrap rage" with the help of product manufacturers. Investor Chris Sacca has actually raised $40 million, not $20 million, reports Dan from his new perch at Fortune.
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Careerminds Group, a Hockessin, Del.-based startup that makes a Web-based outplacement and career transition services platform, has raised $800,000 from Innovation Ventures, an SBIC fund based in Wilmington, Del. PRESS RELEASE: Careerminds Group, Inc., a North American provider of web-based outplacement and career transition services is pleased to announce it has secured venture capital funding from Innovation Ventures, L.P. Led by Wilmington, Del.-based Innovation Ventures, the Company had its first closing on an $800,000 Series A round of institutional funding following a yearlong track record of growth in its industry. The Company intends to use the proceeds for sales and marketing development, technology and core-platform enha
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Expensify, maker of an expense reporting application, has landed a $5.75 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures and joined by its $1 million seed round investors, Hillsven Capital, Baseline Capital, and angel Travis Kalanick. PRESS RELEASE: Privately-held Expensify, Inc. announced today that it secured $5.7M in Series A financing in July 2010. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, and was joined by all investors from the May 2009 $1M seed round: Hillsven Capital, Baseline Capital, and Travis Kalanick. Additionally, Expensify announced it has soared past 100,000 users, marking three consecutive quarters of accelerating growth. As part of the financing, Redpoint founding partner Tim Haley has joined Expensify as its ne
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Row 44 Inc. secured $37 million from investors through a Series B Funding round. The Westlake Village, Calif.-based provider of Internet connectivity services for airline passengers. The latest round includes participation by two new institutional investors along with PAR Capital Management, which led Row 44's $21 million Series A investment round.
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For $60 million, St. Paul, Minn.-based medical device company St. Jude Medical Signs has acquired a 19% ownership stake in CardioMEMS with an exclusive option to buy the Atlanta-based privately held company for an additional $375 million if certain commercial milestones are met. PRESS RELEASE St. Jude Medical, Inc. (NYSE: STJ), a global medical device company, and privately-held CardioMEMS today announced that they have reached an agreement under which St. Jude Medical will make a $60 million equity investment in CardioMEMS, a medical device company that has developed a wireless sensing and communication technology to assess cardiac performance. The agreement provides St. Jude Medical an immediate 19 percent ownership in CardioMEMS and the exclusive option
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General Atlantic LLC named Gary M. Reiner as a special advisor. Reiner will also serve as a director of, and offer deep operational expertise to, the firm’s portfolio companies. He previously served as General Electric Co.’s chief information officer.
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Industry Ventures Adds Victor Hwang To Focus On Direct Secondaries
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 Last fall, the firm added as managing director Roland Reynolds, an LP and founder of Little Hawk Capital Management, which Industry acquired around the same time. Today, Industry announced that it is adding another LP as its newest managing director: Victor Hwang, who has been a venture partner with Industry sin...
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Kno Inc., a digital textbook maker, secured $46 million through an equity and debt financing. Andreessen Horowitz was the lead investor of the round. Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital participated. Kno plans to use the capital for product innovation and to finance the initial shipments of its product, which is planned for later this year.
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tional Venture Capital Association formed Medical Innovation and Competitiveness (MedIC) Coalition. This is an alliance comprised of both venture capital firms and their life sciences portfolio companies. The MedIC Coalition will lobby for policies and regulations that advance U.S. medical innovation and protect the country's global leadership position in the life sciences industry.
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Benchmark, Others Back 500,000-Strong Social ‘Nerdwork’
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 But at ResearchGATE, it sort of helps if you are a rocket scientist, or at least an academic or a medical researcher. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company, which has more than 500,000 registered users worldwide, operates a social networking site for scientists and researchers to interact with their brainiac peers. Today, ResearchGATE today announced it has raised an undisclosed Series A round of funding, led by Benchmark Capital...
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Zyngenia Inc., a Gaithersburg, Md.-based biotherapeutics company that is developing antibody drugs, completed a $15 million Series A financing extension from New Enterprise Associates.
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iPierian Inc., a South San Francisco, Calif.-based biopharmaceutical company, closed its Series B equity financing at $28 million. GlaxoSmithKline’s healthcare venture capital arm SR One, Biogen Idec New Ventures and other investors participated in this closing. Existing investors (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Highland Capital Partners, MPM Capital, Google Ventures, FinTech Global Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and ATEL Ventures) also participated.
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Sofinnova Ventures named Garheng Kong a general partner. Kong will invest in biopharmaceutical companies from the firm's SVP VII fund. Kong was previously general partner at Intersouth Partners, where he worked for 10 years.
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Rhythm Pharmaceuticals completed its Series A financing at $40 million. The Boston, Mass.-based biotechnology company is developing therapies against metabolic diseases, such as diabetes. The round was led by MPM Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The two first held a first close on the Series A funding at $21 million earlier this year. Third Rock Ventures invested in Rhythm Pharmaceuticals. Lou Tartaglia, a partner at Third Rock, was named to Rhythm Pharmaceuticals’ board.
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peHUB First Read
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 * European shares rebound, while stocks and U.S. index futures rise. * Oracle to pay Mark Hurd $950,000 a year with a $5 million target bonus for 2011. * Profiler of Sarah Palin admits error in Vanity Fair article. * The former co-head of Lehman Brother's real estate investment arm, Raymond Mikulich, is joining Apollo Global Management. * Amazon buys Amie Street but not in a good way. * Justin Bieber has dedicated servers at Twitter. Seriously. * Two-thirds of web surfers fall prey to online crime.
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North Bridge Growth Equity made an investment in Contact Solutions Inc. and will now hold a minority stake in the Reston, Va.-based provider of on-demand contact automation solutions including IVR, email/text messaging and web transactions, and call center analytics. North Bridge Growth Equity will also receive a seat on Contact Solutions’ board.
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Industry Ventures LLC named Victor Hwang as managing director. It also promoted Will Quist to managing director and Dan Stevens to associate. Hwang has worked for the San Francisco-based firm as a venture partner for more than a year.
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Webalo raised $3 million from new and existing investors. The company has developed a mobile connectivity platform. Balch Hill Capital and J.L. Easton Ventures participated in the financing round.
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Kai-Fu Lee Celebrates Launch of 12 Startups
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 Lee, chairman and CEO of the organization, launched Innovation Works shortly after he resigned as head of Google China. So far, the projects coming out of the IT incubator program have a definite Google-like feel. Among the companies under the Innovation Works umbrella are Tapas, which has developed a smartphone operating system based on Android and tailored for Chinese users; Wo...
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Backupify Shows Where Drinks and a Good Idea Can Lead (if You’re Having Drinks with a VC)
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 Over drinks with May’s friend Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital, O’Donnell told May he thought there was a need for a backup tool for Flickr, the photo-sharing site now owned by Yahoo. It’s the kind of haphazard suggestion that typically dissipates into thin air, yet the idea stuck for May. He started ta...
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