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Before we dive into this week’s news, here’s a recommendation for a more in-depth look at a recent deal. Naspers has invested more than $420m in online food delivery service Delivery Hero at a $3.1bn flat valuation.
Deals
SoftBank is carrying on its Indian deal spree, paying $1.4bn for a 20% stake in One97 Communications, the e-commerce company that owns mobile payment and financial services platform Paytm.
Health insurance provider Clover Health is currently only serving customers in New Jersey but that hasn’t stopped it raising some big funding, most recently a $130m round featuring GV that valued it at $1.2bn.
Alphabet’s CapitalG unit led endpoint security software provider CrowdStrike’s $100m series C round two years ago, and now it’s returned for a $100m series D that also featured telecom group Telstra.
Venture firm Horizon Ventures has provided between $50m and $100m in funding for gaming software and accessories producer Razer at a valuation just short of $2bn, according to TechCrunch.
Google has spun out ProjectLink, its African fibre optic broadband installation project, into a new company called CSquared that is armed with up to $100m of funding.
Tencent has invested another $90m in mobile game developer Pocket Gems, this time at a $500m valuation, and now holds a 38% stake in the company.
Secure messaging platform Symphony Communication Services has raised $63m in a round led by BNP Paribas, the latest bank to join the company’s assortment of financial services investors.
On GUV, Neighborly, a US-based operator of a public finance platform, collected $25m in series A capital on Tuesday from a consortium of investors that included Stanford University.
On GGV, we had interesting news that wasn’t exactly a new investment, but Temasek, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, has been revealed as a shareholder in Snap, the US-based operator of an ephemeral messaging app.
Funds
SoftBank is apparently getting nearer to closing its Vision Fund, at between $95bn and $100bn, and has secured electronics producer Sharp as the fund’s latest corporate backer.
DMG Entertainment is building a diversified media and entertainment business that spans film and TV production, gaming, comics and live experiences, and it’s looking to expand that further through the establishment of a corporate venturing fund.
Google Ventures founder Bill Maris has finally closed his, securing an upsized $150m for his Section 32 firm. The fund will invest not only in healthcare and biotech, which Maris told TechCrunch is “a bit too trendy” right now, but in a wide range of sectors including agritech.
Honeywell has become the latest big firm to enter corporate venturing, setting up a unit called Honeywell Venture Capital that it expects will have an initial fund size of $100m.
On GGV, the Beijing government has joined forces with a host of state-owned enterprises to establish a $21.8bn guidance fund, called State-Owned Enterprises China Innovation Fund, aimed at technologies such as quantum teleportation, clean energy, new energy vehicles, 3D printing, robotics, graphene, biomedicine, energy saving and environment protection sectors.
On GUV, exciting news came from Ireland, where the TTOs of four institutions – University College Cork (UCC), Teagasc, Cork Institute of Technology and Institute of Technology Tralee –launched a new consortium dubbed Bridge Network.
Ireland wasn’t the only country that upped its game last week though: in Italy, a newly launched VC firm, Aurora-TT, is seeking $55m for a fund that would help commercialise biotechnology research conducted at the country’s universities.
Exits
QuantGroup, an AI-equipped online lending platform that graduated from Microsoft’s Beijing accelerator in 2014, is reportedly accepting applications from banks for an IPO in the US that could raise up to $200m.
Apple has reportedly paid about $200m to acquire Lattice Data, a startup developing technology that can convert dark data like images or text into structured data that can be analysed.
Oncology therapy developer G1 Therapeutics has gone public in a $105m IPO that gave MedImmune Ventures, the company’s second largest shareholder, an exit.
We didn’t have any exits on GGV, but on GUV Luxendo, a microscope manufacturer spun out of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), has been acquired by scientific instruments manufacturer Bruker.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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