Rakuten Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of Japanese electronic commerce and Internet company, Rakuten, has led and invested in a $3.5 m series round of funding that will accelerate R&D activities with strategic partner ViSenze, an online visual search technology company.

Online marketplace eBay leads $133.8m in series D funding for Indian peer Snapdeal.com.

The Japanese accelerator programme of France-based telecommunications company Orange has selected 8 startup entrants.

Holiday makers and business travellers from China will have more destinations and offers to choose from now that online travel agency, 17u (also known as TongCheng) has raised $82.5m in expansion capital. The corporate venturing unit of Tencent has taken part in the series C round, as has Oriza Holdings and Boyu Capital.

Fosun Venture Capital Investment, the corporate venturing unit of Chinese industrial conglomerate Fusun Group, has led a $21.5m series B round of funding for game portal operator, Joyme.com. Fosun is no stranger to the gaming world, having already invested in gaming sites Perfect World and LineKong.

The corporate venturing unit of Chinese e-trader Alibaba Group, Temasek and Qiming Venture Partners have invested in a $100m series B round of funding for a China-based tutoring company. The target company, TutorGroup, forecasts the adult English language-learning segment alone within China is growing at 25% annually, and will grow to more than US$21bn by 2016.