Venture capital deals, acquisitions, and spin-offs made up much of this week’s Boston technology news.
—Boston-based agtech startup Indigo Ag has acquired TellusLabs, an A.I. satellite technology company that was founded in Somerville, MA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Indigo says it plans to integrate TellusLabs’ agricultural technology with its on-the-ground data to hopefully help growers increase crop yields. In September, Indigo raised a $250 million Series E funding round and launched a marketplace for farmers to sell grain online.
“Understanding each field on its own terms, identifying the features that make them unique, and predicting the best products and growing practices for every acre of land are tricky, nebulous agricultural questions,” Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Indigo CIO and co-founder, said in a press release. “With Indigo’s acquisition of Tellus, a farmer looking to grow his or her best crop can receive personalized data and recommendations that change the course of a growing season for the better.”
—General Electric (NYSE: GE) has announced it will spin off its industrial Internet-of-Things platform Predix and other software assets into a new company, which will be wholly owned by the Boston-based conglomerate. GE also agreed to sell a majority stake in service management software unit ServiceMax to tech-focused private equity firm Silver Lake. GE bought ServiceMax in late 2016 for $915 million. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. GE says it expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2019.
—Crypto-focused venture capital fund Algo Capital says it raised a $100 million fundto invest in startups working on Algorand’s digital currency and blockchain-based transaction system. The Algorand system was built by Silvio Micali, an MIT computer engineering professor and cryptographer who has won the prestigious A.M. Turing Award. Arul Murugan, the Boston-based fund’s managing director, said in a press release that Algo Capital will help seed “real business and uses cases” on Algorand and hopefully attract “hundreds of millions of users to wider blockchain adoption.” Algorand, led by former Fuze chief executive Steve Kokinos, closed a $62 million funding round in October.
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