Moves Stephen Lowery, partner at venture capital firm Frog Capital, has joined Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) UK team to lead it corporate and independent VC relationships. Julia Rebholz, founder and head of Ignite, the UK’s first energy-based corporate impact investment fund, has left to join a consultancy encouraging other companies to set up similar funds. … Continue reading "06 June 2016 – Funds from Microsoft and Romulus, job moves, Alibaba and Uber gain investments and more"

No episode today due to the UK bank holiday. The podcast will be back as usual next week. “Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Funds Four Singapore-based companies – real estate company CapitaLand, data centre provider DeClout, agribusiness Wilmar and logistics provider YCH Group – have been awarded S$40m ($29.2m) to back local startups. Johnson & Johnson expands JLabs to Canada. Invitalia boosts fund to $74.5m. US-based venture capital firm Geodesic Capital closed its inaugural fund at $335m with an … Continue reading "23 May 2016 – Johnson & Johnson, Invitalia, Geodesic Capital, Kaspersky, Slack Technologies, Intel and more"

Funds Global Corporate Venturing Naspers is looking to put down roots in Silicon Valley via a newly formed investment subsidiary called Naspers Ventures. Kuang-Chi makes Israeli pilgrimage for $300m fund. HP has also established a corporate venturing arm, launching HP Ventures to invest in immersive computing, mobility, internet of things, artificial intelligence, smart machine and 3D … Continue reading "16 May 2016 – Naspers, Kuang-Chi, HP, Malaysian Islamic fund, Hyperloop, VenBio and more"

Investments Ford led a $253m round for Pivotal Software, a spinout of EMC and VMWare. These two corporates also joined the most recent round, alongside Microsoft and existing backer GE. Chehejia is now $120m better off after investors including water pump producer Leo Group injected capital. A deal that was simultaneously the biggest for Global … Continue reading "9 May 2016 – Ford invests in Pivotal Software, Chehejai gets charged up, Adobe buys RayVio, Lenovo establishes a fund and many people moves"

Investments Sirin Labs, developer of a smartphone that will combine military-grade security with the features of a consumer device, secured $72m in a seed round. Entertainment ticketing platform Weiying joined an ever-growing list of startups capable of attracting huge stacks of money. The company raised $693m in a series C+ round. Alibaba’s financial services spinout … Continue reading "2 May 2016 – Sirin Labs, Weiying, Ant Financial, Nexthink, HTC, Neva Finventures, European Investment Fund and more"

VC Creation Arvind Sodhani, former president of Intel Capital, has formed a new VC firm called Silver Trail Ventures and, ahead of a keynote speech at the Global Corporate Venturing/DLA Piper Corporate Venture Capital Strategy Seminar in Tokyo, warned that for corporate venturers, innovation and disruption is more important than business development. Deals Digital medicine … Continue reading "25 April 2016 – Arvind Sodhani, Alibaba, JD.com, Baidu, Gensights Biologics, Gree, Mars Petcare, Birmingham University and more"

Deals Global Corporate Venturing Didi Kuaidi is said to be approaching a $1.5bn close for its latest round. It’s also been a particularly busy week for Alibaba, the e-commerce giant that makes no secret out of its ambitions to be a company that will eventually span three centuries. First, the company paid $1bn for a … Continue reading "18 April 2016 – Didi Kuaidi, Alibaba, Khazanah Nasional, Intellia Therapeutics, Novartis, Google Ventures and more"

Deals Global Corporate Venturing By far the biggest deal of the past week comes from China, where Ant Financial, the financial services affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba, is set to raise more than $3.1bn at a valuation of $60bn. Alibaba meanwhile also injected an undisclosed sum in China-based food delivery service Ele.me. The investment was … Continue reading "11 April 2016 – Ant Financial, Alibaba, Human Longevity, Slack, Africa Internet Group, the IFC and more"

Deals In the corporate venturing world, the biggest deal happened in China, where sports media company LeSports closed a massive $1.2bn round backed by HNA Group. Another seemingly big round was closed by online grocer Yiguo, which didn’t reveal an amount but boasted that it’s larger than its competitor Womai’s $220m series C round in … Continue reading "04 April 2016 – LeSports, Yiguo, Betterment, Jucero, Emulate, M-Files, IDG Ventures India, IBM Ventures, Siemens Venture Capital, Imperial Innovations, Oakland University and more"