Beacon Presenters on Tuesday, Jan. 8th, 2013 will be:

• Collabor, which offers its CLM to help increase customer lifetime value, providing the missing link between CRM and Customer Service to effectively grow existing customers; and
• Newfield Design, which is seeking growth capital to hire engineers to further develop its Expandable Radio Control System (ERCS), which gives plug-and-play interoperability to Land Mobile Radio networks.

Beacon Presenters on Tuesday, Dec. 11th, will be:

• Vaxess Technologies, which employs a unique, silk based method to preserve vaccines indefinitely at room temperature; and
• Purpose Energy, which offers a treatment solution on a pallet to derive energy from brewing and other food waste.

Our Presenters next Tuesday will be:

• Pragya Systems, a development stage company whose technology will allow instructors and students to simplify and accelerate college course development;
• Aquabotix, which sells the HydroView,™ a user-controlled underwater inspectional vehicle for the recreational marine, marine construction, public-water suppl, first responder and environmental monitoring markets; and
• Sialix, which is developing a cancer therapeutic for ovarian, breast, colon and other solid tumors, and an anti-inflammatory nutritional supplement to combat red-meat associated inflammation caused by the incorporation of non-human sialic acids into human tissue.

The presenter at Beacon Angels' October 9, 2012 meeting will be Grove Street Technologies, which aims to save US households thousands by supplying efficient, combined heat/power systems.

Beacon has just completed a follow on investment round in its portfolio company, Crimson Hexagon. Watch for its logo in connection with trend analyses on TV, especially CNN, of the upcoming presidential election.

Beacon Portfolio company Copiun, Inc. is in the process of being acquired lock stock and barrel by pre-IPO VISTO Corporation, d/b/a Good Technology, of Sunnyvale, CA. Copiun's Marlboro, Mass., headquarters will continue as Good's east coast office. Some details here.

Beacon Angels in the news: Slater, others make $525K investment in MoFuse

Mass High Tech
... from Slater Technology Fund, an early-stage fund backed by the state of Rhode Island; Beacon Angels; Angel Street Capital and Cherrystone Angel Group

Beacon Angels participated in a $3m follow-on investment round in debt convertible to the Series B preferred stock of Avaxia Biologics, of Lexington, Mass., a biotech company that refines easily tolerated therapeutics from colostrum produced by immunized dairy cows.

Richard Noyes participated in the “speed dating” of 20 or so start-ups in the Betaspring Incubator of Providence, Rhode Island in February 2012. He attended the follow-up “first look” in April to look at the progress of the ventures.

In May 2012, Richard Noyes helped judge an Entrepreneurship course competition at Babson College in which eight teams of MBA students pitched a term project.

Beacon Angels' Richard Noyes delivered the presentation: “How Much is Too Little or Too Much to Ask For” to start-ups at the Enterprise Center at Salem State College in April 2012.

Beacon Angels' Richard Noyes served as a judge in the "Piranha Pond Pitch Party", where start-up companies pitched to angel groups and venture capitalists at the Enterprise Center at Salem State College in February 2012.

Beacon Angels participated in $775,000 extension round for SepSensor, Inc. that closed April 20, 2012.

Beacon Angels' William F. Swiggart, Daniel Von Kohorn and Norman Meisner participated in the Boston VC and Angel Showcase on April 26, 2012.

Beacon Angels is currently in due diligence for a follow-on, bridge round financing of Providence-based MoFuse, Inc., a vendor to small and medium sized businesses of Web sites specially sized for mobile phones and smartphones.

Beacon Angels recently participated in a $4.1M Series A financing round with start-up company Avaxia Biologics, Inc. along with other angel groups, including Cherrystone Angels, Boston Harbor Angels, Launchpad, North Country, Mass Medical Angels and individual angels. 

Beacon Angels recently closed an extension investment round with Pixability, a company that helps companies manage and display video promotions on the Internet.

In December 2011, Beacon Angels closed an extension of its original round with portfolio company, Innerpass, Inc., which recently introduced its new file sharing and synchronization service, Groupmix™, which offers users a greatly enhanced ability to create and manage work groups on-line.

Beacon Angels is currently participating pro rata to its prior investments in a $1.5M follow-on, Series C investment round in portfolio company, Boston Heart Diagnostics.

In July, Beacon participated pro rata in a $1 million extension of the Series A-1 round in Copiun, Inc., of Copiun, a portfolio company that offers enterprise data storage solutions.

Angels really did fill the "financing gap" here and elsewhere, and continue to do so. See http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/who-saved-silicon-valley-angels-of-course/243983/ for details.

Beacon Angels is currently conducting due diligence in InfoBionic, a medical devices company that is creating a single platform and solution for comprehensive remote physiological monitoring with a focus on arrhythmia detection. InfoBionic recently won the Piranha Pond competition hosted by 128 Innovation Capital Group.

Beacon Angels is currently conducting due diligence in Cytosolve, an in-silico drug development company offering a new paradigm for drug development.

Beacon Angels is currently conducting due diligence in Abroad 101, a web site that provides user-generated reviews of study abroad programs for students and universities.

Beacon Angels is currently conducting due diligence in VoiceFriend, which provides commincations management services to elder communities.

Beacon Angels congratulates Jean Hammond and other Boston area angels on the successful IPO of Zipcar, Inc. (ZIP on NASDAQ: Out at 18, peaked at 29; holding at 24. Could become the Netflix of car rentals.

Observations from this week's national ACA Summit in Cambridge, Mass.:

• Kendall Sq. is looking terrific as a place to work (in biotech) or go to school (at MIT);
• Whilst the same ACA member-managers show up every year, it's the individual investors that add the savor to the ACA soup;
• Locally based angels go up to the microphone the most;
• Valley-based angels do the most bragging, regardless of where the conference is held;
• Midwestern angels express a great deal of pride about their state's angel scene--when the conference is held in the Midwest;
• Boston/New England angels are pretty good about neither bragging nor complaining, but we certainly did talk up SmartCells;
• Canadian angels keep a relatively low profile, unless they're from Vancouver;
• The ACA has been around long enough for its members to report on their own favorite exits;
• Comprehensive, reliable statistics about angels' successes or lack thereof, are still unavailable;
• SmartCells' exit raised the bar for pre-clinical drug exits from $20m to $100m (but not to $500m);
• If the SmartCells milestones prove to be golden, its Boston angels' multiples will surpass those of the Valley's angels without the need for a messy IPO;
• Some messy, angel backed IPOs certainly would be nice to have in Boston/New England.

Some of us will be attending the annual Summit of the Angel Capital Association, which will be held in Boston next week, April 4-6, at the Boston Marriot Cambridge. Here is the complete agenda.

Beacon Members Bill Swiggart, Norm Meisner and Richard Noyes conducted the panel discussion: "Beacon Angels - How We Do What We Do - Stories from the Trenches" before the Rt. 128 Innovation Capital Group at the IBM Innovation Center. http://ow.ly/4bUj9

Beacon's first investment, five years ago, was made in Smartcells, Inc., which invented a form of insulin whose release into the bloodstream is sensitive to the amount of blood sugar in it. Per the company's original plan, it is being acquired by a major pharma, Merck & Co. All payments but the initial one are subject to milestones: The drug has to actually work; it must be approved by the FDA; and Merck must begin selling the drug, mostly to diabetics. Should these milestones be realized, Beacon's members will realize IRR's anywhere from 29x for the first round to 16x for the most recent one.

See http://ow.ly/3iKSV for the press release on the aqcuisition.

Cue balloons and confetti.

The November meeting included a presentation from NetBlazr, which delivers basic broadband service to small and medium sized businesses free for basic service, and premium service at low cost. Please see http://my.brainshark.com/AngelSoft-Pitch-763487094 for NetBlazr's presentation.

Some members will be discussing the terms and conditions of an impending exit, by acquisition, of one of our portfolio companies, which will be Beacon's second ever. Should this exit come to fruition, it will produce a positive return for the investing members.

Tomorrow, Beacon Angels will entertain funding proposals from Pixability, which offers a system to enable small businesses to post promotional videos on the Web, and iQuest Analytics, provider of enterprise search, research and discovery software.

Beacon Angels is in due diligence with Brew1, owner and vendor of a patent protected single serve coffeemaker system, and Castlewood Surgical, which sells a jig to assist heart surgeons to perform bypasses more safely.

We are also in the process of completing a new round of financing for SepSensor, one of our oldest and most promising portfoliio companies.

To close the loop on my post of last May, thanks in part to Sen. Brown, and Rep. Frank, FinReg as passed, left "accredited investor" at $1 million in assets, and only changed the definition to exclude the value of one's primary residence. I believe the "bad actor" provision was deleted.

While skipping our August meeting for the second year in a row personally left a hole in my schedule, it about doubled the number of attractive companies to consider this month: Castlewood Surgical is a promising medical device firm headed by none other than Wolfgang Daum, who successfully handed Boston Heart Lab off to Bain Capital and its new CEO just about a month ago, and Brew1, which offers a multi-patented, eco-friendly, single serve coffee brewing solution to offices and commercial establishments.

More info is available to members at: http://angelsoft.net/deal/beacon/castlewood.surgical.inc, and http://angelsoft.net/deal/beacon/bevcepts.will.change.to.brew1

I'm attending the Angel Capital Association Annual Meeting in San Francicso through May 7th. (Next year, it'll be close to home, in Boston.) There may be some progress on the Financial "Reform" bill. Proposals are being considered by Dodd's committee to retain the $1m assets minimum for accredited investor status, but to exclude the value of the investor's home. Also, a "bad actor" tracking provision would be substituted for bringing all angel investments under the state regulators.

Finally, we should oppose any threat to the current taxation of carried interests as long term capital gain. Changing this would impair investments by angels because: 1) it would discourage VCs' long term investments such as in medical technology, and 2) it would drive VCs out of an industry that is already shrinking; many would become angel investors. Harming the venture capital industry would clog the pipelines to exit for angels. Furthermore, many angel groups themselves take various forms of carried interessts, either directly or through so-called "sidecar" funds, and harming these would limit the incentives that help maintain a healthy angel investment movement in the United States.

Please keep up the pressure on your senators and congressman to oppose these proposed changes. Thank you.

-Bill Swiggart

Senator Dodd's Financial "Reform" Bill would impair angel investing. See http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/01/dodds-financial-reform-bill-ma for details. Call your senator and ask him to vote against this menace to startups and our innovation economy.

Attend the Angel Capital Association Meeting in San Francisco May 5-7, 2010: http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/regional-meetings/

Deepen your knowledge of angel investing via the Angel Capital Assocication Northeast's Angel Education Series at Foley Hoag's Emerging Enterprise Center, 1000 Winter St., Waltham, MA on Monday afternoon, March 29, 2010.

Register at http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=200618.

Investor presentation and info updated for Hy-Syence on Angelsoft to provide Members with:
1) simple overview of technology and solution
2) scaling and commercialization plan.