2013 got off to a fast start with Avis Budget Group’s $500 million acquisition of Zipcar . The Cambridge car-rental company had its IPO in the spring of 2011 but saw its stock fall over the past year. The merger has been met with less rah-rah cheerleading than usual, mostly because an innovative consumer startup might get crushed by big-company bureaucracy . But let’s keep in mind this is a pretty good deal for Zipcar, which started in 2000 and was never profitable until last year.
In other innovation news:
Amazon is on the move in Boston. Less than a year after acquiring warehouse automation firm Kiva Systems , the e-retail giant has dozens of job postings in the area, and is rumored to be opening a new engineering center in Cambridge.
Our startup deal of the week is an $11 million venture funding round for Kyruus , a big-data healthcare firm that calls itself “Moneyball for doctors.” The Boston company has raised just under $20 million since 2010.
And lastly, everyone’s talking about companies to watch this year. How about a company not to watch ? Try EMC. The Hopkinton data- storage giant has a $50 billion market cap---it’s the biggest tech company in New England---but you’d never know it from the local coverage. So, EMC, here’s to transforming enterprise and cloud technology, while the rest of us continue to fawn over the next Facebook wannabe.
