Biotech companies aren’t exactly household names like Facebook or Groupon, but they can boast one advantage over the Internet giants: better stock performance after their IPOs. The majority of the nine U.S. biotech companies that have gone public this year are trading above their IPO price . Meanwhile, Facebook's stock price is about half of what it debuted at in May, and Groupon’s is even lower. Three companies in the 2012 biotech IPO class are from the Boston area: Verastem, Tesaro and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals. Their performance could attract more investment in early stage biotech startups.
In other innovation news…
---Boston mobile-tech startup Locately has been acquired by Service Management Group, a market research firm in Kansas City. The deal is being hailed as a win for location-based analytics and the Boston tech scene.
---Our deal of the week is a $21.5 million growth financing round for Boston-based Visible Measures. The video-tech company, which has raised more than $60 million to date, makes software for online advertisers and publishers.
---And finally, what’s all the fuss about “big data”? Companies are trying to gather and analyze increasingly huge amounts of information from daily life, and figure out what’s in it for them. To that end, Xconomy is convening a group of top innovation leaders at our “Future of Big Data” conference. It’s all happening on Oct. 24 at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in Boston.
