Alongside Google Ventures in the seed round were venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and angel investor Mark Cuban.

The other investors were Chris Lynch, the former chief executive of Vertica who left his job at Hewlett-Packard last month, TechStars, a start-up accelerator.

J&J's Cosat and the Rogers Family Foundation jointly fund the Bridging-the-Gap programme, which provides nearly $1m a year for targeted research designed to move projects further along the path to commercialization at the University of California.

NanoFerix has signed an agreement with Vanderbilt's Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization to research technology to market to pharmaceutical companies.

McCann-backed thetime and other angel investors stump up $3m seed funding for cloud services developer Garantia Data

Microsoft begins making investments with its tech angel investor and incubator Bing Fund.

The company plans to invest RMB 200m ($30m) for start-ups to be incubated by China Telecom for two years with between RMB50,000 and RMB100,000 each.

The Oxford University spin-out set up by its technology transfer office raises the funds at the same time as winning a development award from the UK's National Health Service.