Keep up with the latest news from Wisconsin’s innovation community with these recent headlines:
—The United States Supreme Court will hear a case involving Verona-based Epic Systems and whether organizations can make it mandatory for employees to sign arbitration agreements that keep them from pursuing group claims in court, the Associated Press reported. Groups of current and former employees at Epic, which develops software that hospitals and clinics use to manage patient records, had previously filed multiple lawsuits claiming they were denied overtime pay. Epic settled one of the lawsuits in 2014 by agreeing to pay a set of employees who test the company’s software a combined $5.4 million, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported at the time.
—Investors poured $240.6 million into Wisconsin-based companies last year, across 68 deals tracked by Seattle-based PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. That total was up by about 8 percent from 2015, when businesses in the Badger State raised more than $222.7 million across 87 deals, according to data from the two groups. Some of the largest funding rounds went to six Madison-based companies: EatStreet, Ionic, Midwestern BioAg, Propeller Health, Silatronix, and Understory.
Wisconsin’s increase in funding during the final six months of 2016 as compared with the first half of the year—$154 million versus $86.6 million—bucked the broader national trend.
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