Mini-Notes. Sleep Solutions (SSI) (9/22/2009) raised a respectable $20M led by new money from Quaker BioVentures near Baltimore. SSI is developing technologies for the sleep apnea market, which apparently is quite large. What gets your attention is that the company has been around since 1998 and has raised over $65M total. This needs to be a big market. Finally, we are scratching our heads over a company named Metron Aviation (9/9/24) in Dulles. According to filings, the company raised a highly respectable $14 million in June of this year—and never did a press release. Then it raised a chunk of mezzanine financing from Spring Capital in September—also undisclosed. This is unusual because a Boulder Ventures partner sits on the board, which means Boulder has money in the deal. “Undisclosed” is pretty rare in the institutional venture world. In-Q-Tel invokes it occasionally, but we’d be disappointed if they did not. Metron provides the world with air traffic control management and analysis—very important tech. New management of Metron was involved with Era Corporation, a prior Boulder investment that sold in 2008 to SRA International. ERA was also in a related sector of aviation traffic management. Somewhere in here is the reason why Metron is flying beneath the radar.
