“Our mission – providing access to health insurance for consumers and groups – has yielded significant sustainable growth, and the result is increased jobs and the development of leading-edge technology in southeastern Wisconsin,” said Dan Maynard, Connecture president.

The large increase in employees in Connecture’s Waukesha office will further establish the area as a hub of technology development and innovation, Maynard said.

To begin filling these jobs, Connecture will hold a recruiting open house from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Feb. 9 at The Iron Horse Hotel, 500 W. Florida St.

Connecture works with carriers, brokers, and states to provide customized technology to streamline the insurance sales and distribution process.

http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2012/02/02/connecture-adding-100-jobs-in-wisconsin.html?ana=twt

For healthcare investors that means the future will require… for the rest of the MedCity News article, please link here.

Norwalk, Conn. (January 24, 2012) — XLerant, Inc., a provider of budget preparation software for mid-sized and large organizations, today announced the close of a $3 million Series B round of financing.   Chrysalis Ventures led the round alongside existing investors, including Connecticut Innovations.  In conjunction with the financing, Chrysalis Principal Wright Steenrod will join XLerant’s board of directors. 

The investment will be used for sales and marketing expansion in North America.  Founded in 2005, XLerant replaces traditional, restrictive spreadsheets with an easy-to-use, yet sophisticated budgeting and planning application called BudgetPak.  This intuitive software provides maximum user flexibility and expanded financial control.  Customers often choose BudgetPak because it drives greater fiscal ownership among managers and allows leaders to align financials with organizational strategy.

“Great organizations strive to get more line manager ownership of budget numbers.  BudgetPak improves line manager flexibility while also expanding financial control.  It’s the best of both worlds,” XLerant CEO Ted Dacko said.  “XLerant takes organizations beyond the days of error-prone Excel spreadsheets and builds budget accountability at all levels.  We facilitate a better budget through a better budgeting process.

“XLerant already has a great product and enthusiastic customers,” Dacko said. “Now it has received funding from what I consider to be the leading venture capital firm in America.  Chrysalis will be an extraordinary partner as we accelerate our growth.”

Dacko formerly served as CEO of HealthMedia, a provider of web-based personalized wellness and disease prevention programs based in Ann Arbor, MI and backed by Chrysalis Ventures and other investors. Dacko grew and led HealthMedia to a successful acquisition by Johnson & Johnson in 2008, delivering a substantial return to investors. Previously, Dacko held senior positions with Hyperion, Orion Micro Systems, Comshare, Corporate Class Software, FAME Software and Interactive Data Corporation.

“Ted has proven he can build and lead successful, profitable companies,” said Chrysalis’ Steenrod. “After his great results at HealthMedia, we are thrilled to partner with him again in his latest venture, which addresses a long-standing market pain point and has already developed a devoted customer base.”

Connecticut Innovations, a leader in supporting entrepreneurial, technology-driven entities in the state, invested in XLerant in 2007. 

“We at Connecticut Innovations are pleased to have supported XLerant in its early years.  We’re delighted it already has grown to the point of earning further investment from a leading venture capital firm,” said Peter Longo, Connecticut Innovations president and executive director.  “Funding from Chrysalis Ventures is a tremendous endorsement.”

About XLerant, Inc.

XLerant is a software solutions company that builds and implements innovative, practical, and incredibly powerful corporate budget preparation software for mid-sized and large organizations, energizing a “Culture of Budget Accountability” among users. The company serves clients in several industries, including higher education.  XLerant’s premiere budgeting and planning application, BudgetPak, replaces spreadsheet-based budgeting and provides maximum user flexibility and financial controls. Improved communication, greater ownership of the numbers and increased transparency enables companies to better manage financial performance throughout the fiscal year.  For more information, please visit www.xlerant.com.

About Chrysalis Ventures

Chrysalis Ventures manages one of Mid-America’s largest funds for early-stage and growth investments with approximately $400 million under management.  Since 1993, the firm has invested in over 65 companies, primarily in the healthcare and technology sectors. With headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, Chrysalis has offices in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Ann Arbor and Houston.  The firm seeks to partner with entrepreneurs to build enduring businesses in industries undergoing significant transformation.  For more information, please visit www.chrysalisventures.com.

About Connecticut Innovations

Connecticut Innovations (CI) is a quasi-public organization dedicated to driving a vibrant, entrepreneurial, technology-based economy in Connecticut. CI stimulates high-tech growth by investing in early-stage Connecticut technology companies, university/industry research collaborations and technology transfer and collaborating with government, business, nonprofit and academic organizations to advance technology growth and promote public policies consistent with CI’s mission. For more information on CI, please visit www.ctinnovations.com.   

Xlerant, Norwalk, CT, a financial services software company licensing budget preparation software for mid-sized and large organizations.

The Mercom study, released on Tuesday, combines its annual and fourth quarter merger and acquisition (M&A) and funding report for the healthcare technology sector for 2011.

For the rest of the article, please click 2011 ‘great year’ for HIT venture capital, study finds.

As 2011 comes to a close, we asked several venture capital investors to reflect on the past year and give us their outlook for 2012. Kicking off our series is Koleman Karleski, managing director of Chrysalis Ventures.

Karleski talks about the survival of the fittest that characterized 2011, and how the venture industry must think back to its origins as it moves forward.

Looking back, how would you characterize 2011? I view it as a Darwinian year–only the strong survived. Only the young companies with great teams and sustainable business models and aggressive growth strategies made it through 2011. The same is true for fund managers. If you’re not continuing to produce exits and attractive returns, you’re not raising a new fund.

What is the most important issue that the venture capital industry faces in 2012? In a word, liquidity. Venture firms have been investing capital at a much faster pace than they’re raising it, and obviously that cannot be sustained. More successful company exits are needed in terms of trade sales and IPOs.

What impact, if any, will the more-difficult fund-raising environment have on the industry in 2012? Fewer venture managers will survive and raise new capital, and those that do survive will have less capital to invest. As a corollary to that, fewer companies will get funded.

What is your New Year’s wish for the venture capital industry in 2012? My wish for the industry is to remember from whence we came. Venture historically has been about investing modest amounts of capital to help tenacious entrepreneurs create enduring, profit-driven enterprises. Over the past two decades, fund sizes have increased dramatically; bets on intellectual property have replaced a focus on profits. That has resulted in lower returns. Hopefully, as an industry we’ll learn our lesson of the past two decades and get back to basics.

–Interview by Brian Gormley

This post is sponsored by Cervilenz Inc.

November is a time for thanks.  Every day, I am thankful for my husband, Jim, and our three healthy children – Emmett, Riley, and Allie. But, this time of year is a mixed blessing for me.

November is Prematurity Awareness Month.   Every minute of every day, a baby is born prematurely.   That’s 1 of 8 babies, and it’s the leading cause of infant death.   On October 29th, 1993, my twin daughters were born three months too soon.  Annabelle died at birth.  Isabelle lived for only 10 months. I’m grateful for all the time and effort of so many people to bring attention to this huge problem of prematurity.

I’ve dedicated endless hours to spreading hope, supporting other families like ours, and helping raise money for research.  This year is different because there’s a new message  — and it’s great news.  Researchers have found a way to prevent prematurity for some pregnant women.   A study sponsored by the NIH ^[1]showed that daily vaginal progesterone started mid-pregnancy for women diagnosed with a short cervix reduced their rate of prematurity by 45%.

For such a complex, multi-factorial disease, this research offers a simple solution.  Measure cervical length to identify high-risk patients.  Treat those high-risk patients with vaginal progesterone.  The result:  fewer premature births and healthier babies.

When I met Dean Koch in 2008, just after he founded Cervilenz Inc., he told me this day would come as he showed me the CerviLenz® device.   This low-tech yet sophisticated device makes it easy to measure cervical length during any prenatal visit.  CerviLenz ^[2] is going to be part of the solution to the worldwide epidemic of prematurity.   That’s why I’m proud to help bring this novel device to market.

The stakes are too high to rely on someone’s finger to estimate cervical length.  There’s plenty of evidence that abdominal ultrasound isn’t reliable either.  Transvaginal ultrasound can provide an accurate cervical length measurement, but this high-tech exam is not available for all pregnant women in the United States, much less abroad.  CerviLenz is cost-effective innovation.

The annual economic toll of prematurity in the U.S. is $26.2 billion.  Preventive medicine saves money.   One cost analysis ^[3]showed a savings of $19.5 million for every 100,000 pregnant women evaluated for short cervix with transvaginal ultrasound and treated with vaginal progesterone as appropriate.  CerviLenz can help save even more.

This November, I’m thankful for Dr. Rosalyn Baxter-Jones who invented CerviLenz, my colleagues at Cervilenz Inc. who all share my passion for fighting prematurity, and the company’s investors (Arboretum Ventures, Chrysalis Ventures, JumpStart Ventures, and North Coast Angel Fund) who give hope to moms like me.

We’ve long believed that the future of video discovery will be based on personalized search results and recommendations, which will not only help viewers find what they’re looking for but will also offer up videos they might be interested in, based on their viewing history. Netflix and others have had success with their own recommendations algorithms, but there’s not really a good way to aggregate video from all the disparate video sources available to online and even traditional video distributors. That’s where Digitalsmiths’ new Seamless Discovery technology comes in.

Until now, Digitalsmiths has mainly been known for its expertise in providing rich, time-based metadata to video providers, allowing them to index, manage and distribute videos based on the data it provides. It uses technologies like facial recognition, scene classification, object identification and closed-captioned time alignment to determine exactly who is in a scene and what is happening, and to tie that information to video on a second-by-second basis.

Now it’s taking all of what it knows about the videos that people watch to help determine what it is that they like and applying that information to create personalized search and recommendations. Its Seamless Discovery technology is being pitched to pay-TV operators, consumer electronics manufacturers and content owners as a way to quickly offer up more-relevant content to their users.

Personalized recommendations are designed to ensure that viewers get the most-relevant results based on their viewing history and can be extremely powerful in keeping users coming back. Netflix might be the best example of this: About 60 percent of its viewing happens based on content it’s recommended, not from user queues or titles they searched for. With personalized search, Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery also provides results that are targeted based on what the user has previously watched or searched for, in the same way that Google search results differ by user when they are logged in.

Digitalsmiths hasn’t just built an algorithm based on its data set and that of its customers; it is leveraging a ton of third-party data as well. It’s also integrated with scheduling information from providers like Tribune Media Services to enable customers to apply its personalized discovery technology to linear TV as well as on-demand videos.

These recommendations are powered by a cloud-based API that customers can hook into, allowing them — the content owners, distributors and device manufacturers — to build their own presentation layer on top of it. That will give them flexibility to build the system into multiple devices and to provide a universal search for various content sources. For pay-TV providers, that can mean universal search between live TV, video-on-demand and even streaming services. Meanwhile, device manufacturers can leverage the technology as a top-layer search or discovery mechanism that would allow users to see recommended content from a number of connected TV apps.

Currently both Cisco and Technicolor are on board (both are also investors, see below), and they plan to offer Digitalsmiths’ personalized search and recommendations technology to their clients. Digitalsmiths is also in testing with some major operators and content owners, Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger told us in a phone interview, but he declined to say who they were.

Earlier this year, Digitalsmiths raised $12.5 million in a Series C round that was led by Technicolor and included existing investors .406 Ventures, Aurora Funds, Chrysalis Ventures, Capitol Broadcasting and Cisco. That brings total funding to more than $30 million. Its customers include Warner Bros, Paramount, Technicolor, Turner, the NBA and NASCAR.

Women’s health medical device company Cervilenz ^[2] has increased its series A round of investment to $8.35 million, thanks to a recent tranche of funding from existing investors.

Cleveland-area Cervilenz plans to use the funding to continue commercialization of its device, which provides a means of accurately and inexpensively measuring a pregnant woman’s cervix. A short cervix is the best predictor of preterm birth risk.

“We’re focused on early adoption of the device and introducing it to the market,” said CEO Dean Koch, who was hesitant to reveal much about the company’s commercialization strategy for competitive reasons.

The company recently hit a significant milestone when it received the European Union’s CE Mark ^[3], giving the company the right to sell the device in the EU, Koch said.

Cervilenz could be poised for big things next year ^[4], when a progesterone drug ^[5] to reduce the rates of preterm birth in pregnant women with a short cervix is expected to hit the market. Cervilenz’s device could be used as a screening tool to identify candidates for the drug, opening up a large and potentially lucrative market for the low-cost device.

The device “is primed for commercial use just at a time when there’s a therapy available to help these women who Cervilenz helps determine are at risk,” said Koleman Karleski ^[6], managing director with Chrysalis Ventures ^[7], one of Cervilenz’s investors.

The CerviLenz device is already on the U.S. market, though Koch stressed in a previous interview that the company hasn’t yet entered “full-scale commercialization mode.”  For those given to speculation, it seems reasonable to infer that Cervilenz is awaiting U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of a progesterone drug before ramping up significant commercialization of its device.

In addition to Louisville, Kentucky-based Chrysalis, Cervilenz’s investors include Arboretum Ventures ^[8] in Ann Arbor, Michigan, plus Cleveland’s North Coast Angel Fund ^[9] and JumpStart ^[10].

There are more than 500,000 preterm births (defined as birth prior to 37 weeks of gestation) every year in the U.S. In a 2006 report, the Institute of Medicine put the cost of these births at $26 billion a year ^[11], which “constitutes a public health concern that costs society” in hardship and grief, not to mention dollars.

Koch imagines the CerviLenz device being used for multiple measurements during a woman’s pregnancy. With more than 4 million American women getting pregnant each year, and the device costing about $50, some simple math shows that Cervilenz stands to pull in substantial revenues if its device achieves the widespread adoption the company and its investors think it will — likely making Cervilenz an attractive acquisition target for a big device firm.