Tag: “Funding Circle”

08 October 2018 – Grab Looking To Raise Another $1bn

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Deals

Southeast Asian ride hailing platform Grab closed $2bn in funding just two months ago, but Reuters has reported that it’s looking to raise another $1bn, and that SoftBank is close to putting up half the funding.

SoftBank Vision Fund has also initiated talks to invest $500m in China-based online educational assistance platform Zuoyebang.

Traveloka, an Indonesian company that has grown into a leading holiday and travel services booking platform for Southeast Asia, is in talks with unnamed investors to raise $400m.

Elsewhere in Asia, SoftBank is reportedly in talks to invest between $200m and $250m in India-based Delhivery, one of several companies that have sprung up to feed the rapidly expanding e-commerce sector.

Enterprise cybersecurity software provider Tanium has secured $200m in a round led by Wellington Management that valued it at $6.5bn pre-money. Tanium, whose investors include Citi Ventures, has now raised about $780m altogether, and has amped up its valuation by some $1.5bn in just five months, the company having raised $175m from TPG Growth in a May round that valued it at $5bn.

Tencent and KKR’s KKR Asian Fund III have agreed to lead a $175m investment in Voyager Innovations, a fintech spinoff from telecommunications firm PLDT.

Fast fashion retailer Miniso was only founded in 2013 but has been growing at a rocket-like pace, currently standing at some 3,000 branches worldwide. Now Tencent is getting in on the act, joining Hillhouse Capital to provide $146m in funding for the company.

Education app developer Byju’s is now valued at $2bn following a $100m investment by General Atlantic India. Byju’s has raised a total of $344m from investors including Times Internet and Tencent, but the round is perhaps notable for not including SoftBank, which was said to be in talks with the company a couple of months back.

Call centre software provider Talkdesk closed a $21m series A round backed by Salesforce three years ago, but has taken a bug step forward with a $100m series B round that valued it at more than $1bn.

JHL Biotech has raised an undisclosed sum from investors including Sanoft at a $750m valuation and will put the cash toward further development of its biosimilar cancer therapies.

Drawbridge Health, a US-based medical diagnostics spinout of industrial conglomerate General Electric (GE), received an undisclosed amount of funding yesterday from Kyoto University’s venturing arm Innovation Capital (Kyoto-iCap).

Funds

Biopharmaceuticals-focused venture firm Forbion Capital Partners has closed its latest fund at $415m, a 44% upgrade on its initial target. The fund’s LPs include insurers ASR Insurances, KLP, the EU-backed European Investment Fund and the German government-owned bank KfW.

Excell Partners, a VC fund affiliated to University of Rochester, is to manage a $25m vehicle intended to spur tech activity around Rochester in upstate New York. The vehicle, dubbed Finger Lakes Forward Venture Capital (FLX) Fund, will be managed by Excell’s Technology Ventures division and funded by the New York State government.

Exits

Funding Circle has gone public in London, in a $576m initial public offering that included $184m of share sales by the online lending platform’s shareholders.

Guardant Health had a health first day as a public company, floating above its range to raise almost $238m in its IPO before seeing its share price rise by 69%.

SurveyMonkey has raised less but had a more successful IPO, floating above its range last week to raise an initial $180m.

Sutro Biopharma, a US-based cancer drug developer based on research at Stanford University and backed by pharmaceutical firms Amgen, Celgene, Eli Lilly and Merck & Co, raised $85m in its initial public offering.

NGM Biopharmaceuticals has filed to raise up to $75m in an initial public offering that will give Merck & Co and Takeda the chance to exit.

On GGV, French solar firm Neoen is aiming for a market capitalisation of €1.5bn ($1.7bn) in an initial public offering (IPO) on the Paris stock exchange.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

10 September 2018 – Used Vehicle Marketplace Souche Raises $578m

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Deals

Used vehicle marketplace Souche has attracted $578m in series F capital from investors including Alibaba, Sunshine Insurance Group and CreditEase. The round has brought Souche’s total funding to more than $1.2bn, with Alibaba having also backed a $335m series E in November 2017 and Ant Financial having led a $100m series C in 2016.

Tencent has been an investor in MissFresh since its $10m series A round, and it has just co-led a $450m round for the online grocer that will fund the enhancement of the latter’s cold and supply chain resources and its smart retail technology.

Despite recent difficulties that have seen it significantly cut back on its international ambitions, bicycle rental platform Ofo is reportedly lining up hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including corporates Ant Financial and Didi Chuxing, both existing backers.

Fresh from setting up short-form video platform NewTV, media holding company WndrCo has led a $295m round for mobile VPN provider AnchorFree, its first for six years.

Colombia-based on-demand delivery services provider Rappi, backed by its peer Delivery Hero, has secured $200m from investors including DST Global, achieving unicorn status in the process.

IQiyi Sports, formed by iQiyi and Super Sports Media last month to control their respective sporting rights for streaming, has closed a $124m series A round that will be used to expand its offering.

Caffeine is developing what will be a smart broadcasting platform designed to be a more sociable version of livestreaming services like Twitch. 21st Century Fox is certainly interested and has pumped in $100m that will be divided between equity funding and support for a joint venture that will source high-grade content.

GreyOrange produces robotics systems for use in logistics, helping e-commerce orders to be picked out more quickly and efficiently. Mitsubishi and Flipkart have certainly taken notice, contributing to a $140m series C round that will help the Singapore-based company expand internationally. GreyOrange has now raised almost $180m altogether.

4D Molecular Therapeutics (4DMT), a US-based gene therapy spinout of UC Berkeley, has closed a $90m series B round featuring university venture fund Berkeley Catalyst Fund.

Funds

Saudi Aramco has run its own corporate venturing unit, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, since 2012 but sources have told the Wall Street Journal it is considering plans to put up to $1bn into a new fund that will make large-scale investments in technologies that complement its operations.

Insurance provider Aviva has put its weight behind the $129m Ahren Innovation Capital vehicle, a patient capital fund co-founded by eight scientists from the Cambridge, UK ecosystem.

Politecnico di Milano has unveiled a $70m university venture fund this week in partnership with venture capital firm 360 Capital Partners that will invest in the institution’s spinouts. Poli360 has attracted capital from Itatech, a $208m investment platform backed by the EU-owned European Investment Fund and Italian state-owned national promotional institution Cassa depositi e prestiti.

UC San Diego has unveiled the $65m Poseidon Innovation fund with the money coming from healthcare-focused investment firm Deerfield Management. Poseidon Innovation will push early-stage university drug research and follows similar initiatives that Deerfield launched with Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern universities.

Exits

Reports of Meituan Dianping’s IPO plans surfaced last weekend, and now the local services platform has confirmed it plans to raise as much as $4.4bn at a valuation of up to $55bn – almost twice that at which it last raised funding in October.

Maoyan Weiying, the mobile ticketing platform backed by Tencent, Meituan Dianping and Enlight Media, is reportedly seeking up to $1bn in proceeds and has officially filed documents in Hong Kong.

Funding Circle, a UK-based peer-to-peer lender backed by Rocket Internet, unveiled plans to raise £300m ($385m) in an initial public offering.

Munich Re has acquired industrial internet-of-things technology provider Relayr, one of its existing portfolio companies, for $300m. The corporate bought the startup through its subsidiary Hartford Steam Boiler and Relayr will continue to operate as an independent business but with the added benefit of gaining access to Munich Re’s clientbase and expertise.

Thoma Bravo has agreed to buy a majority stake in CRM automation software provider Apttus for an undisclosed sum, in one of those uncommon cases of a private equity firm acquiring a VC-backed company.

Softgarden, a Germany-based human resources software spinout of Saarland University has been acquired by investment management company Investcorp Technology Partners for an undisclosed sum.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

16 January 2017 – Funding Circle Raises $100m, Starship Technologies Raises $17.2m Seed Funding and Much More

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Deals

Insurance and reinsurance firm Arch Capital Group has contributed to a $510m round that has launched Premia Holdings, a Bermuda-based company that will offer property & casualty runoff insurance to businesses.

Chinese real estate service Lianjia raised more than $920m at a $6.2bn post-money valuation last April, in a series B round backed by Tencent and Baidu.

Hive Box, the logistics station network established by corporates GLP, SF Express, STO Express, ZTO Express and Yunda Express in 2015, has received approximately $360m in series A funding.

Mobile payment platform iZettle has raised $63m in financing to almost double the size of its series D round to $130m.

Much of the activity in the peer-to-peer lending sector has been concentrated in the US and China, but UK-based Funding Circle is proving it’s no slouch, raising $100m from investors including Rocket Internet and Temasek, the investment arm of Singapore’s government.

Zhihu, China’s answer to Quora, has secured $100m in a series D round backed by Tencent, which had previously invested in the company’s $55m series C just over a year ago, and search engine provider Sogou.

Alibaba’s local services subsidiary, Koubei, has co-led a funding round for restaurant table booking platform Meiweibuyongdeng that valued the company at just over $430m. T

Flash storage technology producer Kaminario has secured $75m in a series F round led by private equity firm Waterwood that it will use to expand in regions such as Eastern and Western Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

Ascentage Pharma spun out of oncology drug developer Ascenta Therapeutics in 2009 and has now closed a $72m series B round led by the Chinese government’s Future Industry Investment Fund that will be used to advance its pipeline of small-molecule drug treatments for cancer, hepatitis B and age-related diseases.

Immuno-oncology company Neon Therapeutics has raised $70m in a series B round backed by Access Industries, the conglomerate that took part in its $55m series A round just over a year ago.

Here’s a smaller one by amount but an enormous one for its stage: drone technology and logistics have both been hot areas of late so it’s no surprise that a company that combines the two, Starship Technologies, has raised a huge $17.2m in its seed round.

Another one that doesn’t exactly count as one of the week’s biggest, but is noteworthy nonetheless happened on GlobalUniversityVenturing.com, where Alta Innovations, the tech transfer office of Birmingham University, made a first investment from its £5m Spinout Investment Fund.

Funds

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Development Co has been cited as an investor in SoftBank’s $100bn Vision Fund since November, and people familiar with the matter have told Bloomberg it is set to provide between $10bn and $15bn.

Tekes Venture Capital, the investment arm of Tekes, the state-owned Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, has backed Butterfly Venture Fund III, a €24m ($25m) seed fund aimed at startups in Nordic countries.

The nanotechnology-focused commercialisation firm is set to establish two investment funds in the first half the year and is seeking co-investors from China and the Middle East as well as Japan.

The week’s largest fund on GlobalUniversityVenturing.com meanwhile was healthcare-focused VC firm Versant Ventures closing its sixth investment fund at a hard cap of $400m, with a third of that sum allocated towards the commercialisation of university research.

Exits

Fog Creek Software launched cloud collaboration tool Trello in 2011, spinning it out three years later when it raised $10.3m from VC investors.

SoftBank has had some notable successes through its CVC activity in Asia but it’s fair to say realty listings platform Housing.com is not among them. SoftBank had reportedly invested up to $95m in Housing.com, which has now been acquired by rival PropTiger in an all-share deal that valued it at no more than $75m. The corporate hasn’t given up however, and is investing $5m in the merged company together with a $50m contribution from PropTiger investor News Corp.

People

Akshay Naheta, chief investment officer of Knight Assets, has joined SoftBank to help manage the company’s $100bn fund that is backed by a range of sovereign wealth funds.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0