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Deals
Grab has added Hyundai to a series G round that already includes SoftBank, Didi Chuxing and Toyota which the ride hailing platform aims to close at $2.5bn.
Educational services provider TAL Education has joined investment firm Tiger Management to invest $100m in DadaABC, which provides one-on-one online English lessons to a customer base sized in the tens of thousands.
WeWork and URWork may be taking the headlines and a large part of the funding going into the co-working space but they’re far from the only operators.
Ping An Ventures has contributed to a $76m series A round for KBP Bioscience, which is developing therapeutics for unmed medical needs. The round is part of an uptick in life sciences deals for the unit, a subsidiary of insurance firm Ping An, which has also invested in gene sequencing services supplier Annoroad, pharmaceutical supply chain services company Rogrand and genetic test provider Prenetics in the past three months.
Allianz X has led a $59.2m investment in telehealth technology provider American Well that included another Allianz subsidiary, Allianz Partners’ Health Innovation Center.
Collibra, a data governance and cataloguing software producer spun out of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, has secured $58m in a series D round co-led by Iconiq Capital and Battery Ventures.
Skyword, the content publishing platform backed by Cox Media, has raised $25m from Rho Acceleration to take its equity funding to approximately $52m since it emerged from news and entertainment platform Gather.com in 2010.
You don’t see too many Portuguese startups raising money, but language processing and translation software provider Unbabel has proven a refreshing exception.
Funds
The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance has formally launched its corporate venture capital unit, Alliance Ventures, and plans to invest $200m in mobility technology startups and open innovation projects in the next year, rising to as much as $1bn in five years.
Baidu has partnered Singapore-based mobility and AI software provider Asia Mobility Industries to form a $200m fund that will invest in mobility technology projects in Southeast Asia.
On Global University Venturing, IllinoisVentures, the early-stage investment vehicle established by University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), filed a regulatory document on Thursday indicating that it has raised almost $15.2m for its third fund.
Exits
Dropbox has reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO expected to be the largest for a tech company since Snap. The Salesforce-backed file storage service was valued at $10bn as of its last equity round in 2014, and will hope to follow the example of three other Salesforce portfolio companies – MuleSoft, Alteryx and MongoDB – which floated above their ranges in 2017 before seeing their share price increase significantly afterwards.
When Sanofi transferred a cancer drug called fedratinib to a startup called Impact Biomedicines in 2016, three years after the FDA put it into clinical hold, it couldn’t have imagined it would be celebrating a huge exit so soon afterwards, but Celgene has agreed to pay $1.1bn up front for Impact, which saw the hold lifted in August. Sanofi took an equity stake in Impact as part of the deal, its only other funding coming from corporate-backed VC firm Medicxi.
Just three years ago electronic health record developer Practice Fusion was lining up an IPO that could have valued it at $1.5bn, but now, after being overtaken by its competitors, the company has accepted a $100m acquisition offer from healthcare management software provider AllScripts.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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