Global University Venturing

Keren Primor Cohen has been promoted to CEO of Tel Aviv University’s TTO as the successor to Shlomo Nimrodi, who has departed after seven years in the post.

Satt Aquitaine-founded TreeFrog has now raised $11.1m in equity and grant funding, having secured follow-on contributions from investors including the tech transfer office.

The university will team up with City of Long Beach’s municipal government and Sunstone Management for an accelerator.

Warf-backed 4490 Ventures has returned to supply funding to weather analytics service Understory in support of the latter’s international expansion and recruitment strategy.

The immunotherapy developer, which is exploits Yale University research and counts Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Taiho and Ping An as investors, floated in the middle of its range after raising $160m in venture funding.

The series A, led by corporate venturing unit GV, may not have been last week’s largest deal, but Verve’s tie-up with fellow Harvard spinout Beam Therapeutics tells an intriguing story.

Mobile payment platform PayPay raised $419m in funding from SoftBank. This is a deal from a space that has seen much growth in terms of the corporate-backed deal flow in recent years.

The university announced an incubator tie-up with Bangkok Bank that will support entrepreneurial faculty and students, as well as an initiative intended to glean insights from international partners.

University of Wyoming has spun out Wyomics to commercialise an ionic liquid product for extracting valuable materials including rare earth elements from coal and fly ash resources.

Regenerative medicine spinout LifeSprout is advancing JHU research into a nanofibre-fortified gel that can be injected to repair soft tissue.

OUP and Sofinnova Partners invested in 28-7 Therapeutics to take its series A round to $82.8m, enabling the Harvard spinout to pursue accelerated development of its cancer drug pipeline.