“While the company was an innovator in online meetings, and had a core group of enthusiastic customers, it never achieved the traction that would have provided the necessary return on capital, and the investors, patient as they were, eventually called it quits,” he wrote.
The Lexington, Mass.-based company raised about $30 million over three rounds, according to Thomson Financial (publisher of PE Week), from
The company was launched in 2002 to develop messaging software to bring people together for online meetings. Recently, the company was focused on developing a Facebook application, called Spark, that allowed users to contribute and access information from the Web, instant messenging or a mobile phone. Herot says that a framework was in place to add photographs and voice to the Spark program.
Bay Partners, which became a first-time investor in the company in the 2005 round, has earmarked millions of dollars for investments in startups creating applications for Facebook. The program, called AppFactory, was officially launched this year.
Herot says that the company is no longer developing the Facebook app, but the source code and patent portfolio are up for sale and the engineers, including Mark Waks, “are eager to continue the project should a suitable purchaser emerge.”
NanoCoolers feels heat, shuts down
NanoCoolers had raised about $19 million in total VC funding since 2002 from
The company also received a $3 million loan from the
NanoCoolers, which had 15 employees, was started by former IBM Corp. researcher Uttam Ghoshal to deal with the increasing amounts of heat generated by next-generation microprocessors. The goal was to apply the technology to everything from computers to refrigerators and climate-control systems.
“It was a huge market opportunity, but also a huge technical bet,” Krishna Srinivasan, a partner with Austin Ventures, told the Austin Statesman.
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