Philly Tech News VentureWatch 10/11/2012

Tom Paine


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Some interesting venture activity in the Philly area lately:

RightCare Solutions said yesterday it had raised a $1.75M Series A financing round. It was led by Compass Partners of New York and Domain Associates of Princeton. RightCare's Discharge Decision Support System, D2S2, was developed during a decade of research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. D2S2 seeks to reduce hospital readmissions by revolutionize the discharge planning process, which is critical not only for patient health but also because the new healthcare act penalizes hospitals for readmissions.

RightCare won the 2012 Wharton Business Plan Competition, and also the Janssen Connected Care Challenge this past spring.

PublicStuff, the First Round Capital-backed startup that is providing the software for the Philly311 system that launched last month, has raised another $5 million, TechCrunch reported. FirstMark Capital (investor in Boomi and appRenaissance) and the Knight Foundation led the round, with previous investors also participating. Although now based out of New York, PublicStuff has some Philly roots, having started out in the GoodCompany Ventures incubator program in 2009.

CorpU announced late last month it had received $4.5 million in funding to help "revolutionize talent development with Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs)". The round was led by Global Silicon Valley Capital (GSVC), Red Eagle Ventures, and Penn Venture Partners. CorpU also announced the addition of two new board members, David Pottruck, former CEO of Charles Schwab, and investor Michael Moe. Pottruck, who also teaches at the Wharton School, will serve as CorpU's Chairman of the Board. Integrating high-definition video, social media, web 2.0, and cloud delivery with live instructor and student interaction, CorpU VLC's include The Art of Negotiation; Leaders-as-Teachers; Leading and Managing People; Leading Bold Change, and Total Leadership.

Although the company is officially headquartered in Mechanicsburg, a company spokesperson told Philly Tech News that "the Philly office is a core center for CorpU and has a dual purpose of being a Customer Visit Center and the company’s primary studio for building course content for our mission critical business applications." Right now CorpU has ten people working out of the Philly office, the spokesperson added.

Digital Life Technologies, whose website indicates it is based in Bala Cynwyd and Bellevue, Washington, says it has received investments from Ben Franklin Technology Partners Southeastern Pennsylvania (although I don't think Ben Franklin has announced it yet), JumpStart NJ Angel Network, and St. John's Capital LLC. The company claims to have "developed the first reprogrammable magnetic stripe card that communicates with an eWallet on a mobile phone via Near Field Communications (NFC)", the GoNow eWallet Card. President & CEO Doug Spodak has had tenures at TruePosition among other places.

TripAdvisors has acquired Wanderfly, a neat site that is like a Pinterest for travel. Co-founder Christy Liu is a Penn grad, and its backers included Penn-associated MentorTech Ventures. Terms were not disclosed.

ThingWorx, the Exton-based M2M, "Internet of Things" startup, announced on Tuesday that it had raised a Series C financing , led by previous investor Safeguard Scientifics. The size of the financing was not disclosed; the Series B was for $5 million. (Update: the SEC filing dated yesterday was for an offering of $8 million of which $5.4 million has already been sold.)

Also, King of Prussia-based clinical trial tracking and payments firm Greenphire said in an SEC filing it had raised another $4.3 million.

Jerry Baker has left Halfpenny Technologies, the Blue Bell-based provider of a SaaS Health Information Exchange platform, were he served as president and chief executive officer, to take an executive position with Wayne-based Medecision. Which may lead some to wonder what is going on at Halfpenny Technologies, which received $2.6 million in funding from Osage Venture Partners, Milestone Venture Partners, and LORE Associates two years ago.



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