Global University Venturing

A round up of all the latest news www.globaluniversityventuring.com for our subscribers.

The first flotation of a ride hailing business, expected in early 2019, will give an exit to a range of corporate investors and will move this business model into public markets.

In the second half of our guide to corporate venturing's biggest trends in 2018, we look at the growth of Chinese tech companies, genomics, advances in transport tech and the growth of the scooter rental space.

Immunotherapy spinout Annexon Biosciences collected funding from Novartis Venture Fund in a series C round that brought its total funding to $154m.

MRL Ventures Fund and Roche Fund have taken part in the intracellular drug developer's series A, which is commercialising research by Prof Dehua Pei at OSU.

Purdue University-backed Elevate Purdue Foundry Fund has picked seven university-linked businesses to share a total of $200,000 in funding.

Synspective has been backed by a University of Tokyo VC vehicle in its bid to launch a constellation of 25 small Earth observation satellites powered by synthetic aperture radar.

In part one of our 2018 trends round up, we examine the ubiquity of SoftBank's Vision Fund, the increased willingness of unicorns to go public, and increased activity in the crypto and agriculture spaces.

4Paradigm has now won backing from Tsinghua University Science Park for its technology, which helps clients build AI apps for purposes including financial services.

Telematics system developer and MIT spinout Cambridge Mobile Telematics has raised $500m from Vision Fund that will be used for product development.

Bristol-linked Graphcore has raised cash from Microsoft, Samsung, BMW i Ventures, Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Dell Technologies Capital at a valuation of $1.7bn.