Global Venturing Review of the week’s highlights

Welcome to the notes from the Global Venturing Review podcast for the past week. The Global Venturing Review podcast, our weekly roundup from our three titles covering corporate government and university venturing, is available on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud and through our podcast website.

Cisco is the main news of the past week following the walkout of its spin-in team. The division was set up in the 1990s to launch, fund and then acquire startups that produce novel networking technologies and most recently led the $863m acquisition of Insieme in 2013, a startup company Cisco had solely funded. The decision by Soni Jiandani, Mario Mazzola, Luca Cafiero and Prem Jain (left to right, pictured by Fortune,) was reportedly due to an internal power struggle at Cisco as chief executive Chuck Robbins tries to refocus the company on opportunities in the internet of things sector and subscription-based hardware sales. (For a good perspective on them as “responsible for nearly every breakout product Cisco has ever had” see here.)

It is, however, relatively rate for corporations to buy their venture units’ portfolio companies. (Though our GCV analysis last week showed how important M&A is as a route to exits for corporate-backed deals.) 

EXITS

Line may have taken its time to get to a flotation, having initially filed in 2014 before withdrawing in 2015, but it now looks set to complete a dual listing in Tokyo and New York in the coming weeks. The messaging platform, wholly-owned by Naver, is aiming for $1bn in proceeds at a valuation of $5.5bn. That’s only about half of the $10bn it was aiming for way back when, but it’s actually an increase over the $2bn to $3bn reported last week. The company has announced an over-allotment option of 5.25 million shares, so it appears Line is pretty confident it’ll live up to the higher expectations.

Another day, another IPO. This time, it’s the turn of Thailand-based back-office services provider Netbay which is aiming for a $4.5m flotation on the domestic stock exchange, and its corporate backer Internet Thailand is intent on maintaining its 25% stake.

Singapore Press Holdings is also due to celebrate an exit, with its portfolio company Smaato, a mobile advertising company, close to being acquired by Spearhead Integrated Marketing Communication for $148m. Singapore Press participated in Smaato’s series E two years ago, which raised $25m and is the company’s most recent funding round.

Monster’s acquisition of Jobr provides an exit to the corporate venturing arm of human resources software provider Workday.

INVESTMENTS

Information technology is great for automation and simplifying tasks – and of course making some stuff possible that would not be otherwise – but it also presents an ever-growing danger if all those systems aren’t properly protected. Malicious hackers keep finding ways to get around existing solutions, but Cylance is aiming to change that. The company is using artificial intelligence to predict even never-before-seen attacks, stop intrusions before disaster strikes and learn from previous threats – and with a first close at $100m for its series D round, it’s well equipped to bring its software to even more clients.

American Express and HSBC meanwhile are putting their money… where the money is. Tradeshift operates an invoicing platform for companies to get paid by their suppliers and has today increased its total capital by $75m. That’s the same amount of cash that it raised in its series C round in 2014 and follows a $10m injection by Intuit in 2013 and a reported seed round in 2010 that seemingly saw PayPal invest upwards of $16m.

SundaySky, a marketing company with software that produces personalised video campaigns with real-time info such as product pricing, closed a $30m series D round backed by Comcast, an existing backer, and NTT Docomo, which participated as a strategic investor, though further details about this agreement have not emerged. SundaySky now has $67m in its arsenal.

Weka.io meanwhile welcomed Qualcomm Ventures to a series B round that increased the startup’s total funding to $32m. Weka.io hasn’t said how much cash it raised in its latest round or revealed details about preceding deals, and remains largely in stealth mode. It has revealed, however, that it’s working on software-defined storage technology it claims enables the storage of hundreds of petabytes – that’s hundreds of thousands of gigabytes – with a latency of less than a few milliseconds.

A $30m series C round for Moogsoft, a software developer that’s created a platform to detect issues such as outages or failed transactions in real-time. The money was supplied over two tranches by a consortium featuring Singtel Innov8, HCL Technologies and Cisco Investments.

And from our sister site, Global Government Venturing, comes news that Qadium, backed by O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, has attracted $20m in series A capital from Darpa, the US Pentagon’s investment division. Qadium’s technology indexes devices on the internet and is able to generate graphs showing the connections between those devices – the platform is used by a whole range of sectors from financial services to healthcare to retail to, most fittingly for Darpa, defence.

Healthcare marketplace DocPlanner raised $20m from investors including European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as it acquires its peer Doctoralia.

FUNDRAISING

Merck, the Germany-based drug developer, has doubled its commitment to its corporate venturing subsidiary to $340m. The unit is led by Roel Bulthuis, who now manages 14 staff across four teams focused on healthcare, life science, performance materials and new businesses. Bulthuis was listed on the GCV Powerlist 2016 and set up the unit back in 2009 under the name of MS Ventures.

Not to be outdone, Salesforce Ventures has announced a $50m fund and incubator to help its corporate parent establish an ecosystem around its software development platform Lightning. The news comes about 9 months after Salesforce Ventures unveiled a $100m investment vehicle dedicated to European startups and should help push the portfolio value up again – it dropped from $714.1m in January to $706.9m in April.

From our Global Government Venturing title, we see a number of cross-over launches.

Microsoft Accelerator partnered Singapore state-backed Temasek so that six Temasek portfolio companies could joined with Microsoft’s startup accelerator program across four locations in Seattle, Berlin, Tel Aviv and Bangalore.

Jungle returns to bare necessities with SeedPlus. Singapore’s Infocomm Development Agency will join Tata and other strategic investors in the early-stage fund.

 Turkey and the European Investment Fund join with private organisations to create a $224m Turkish Growth and Innovation Fund to operate as a fund of funds.

Separately, The European Commission said it would propose some changes to the venture capital regulatory framework and set up a fund of funds.

Together with Eurostat, the commission said it would “provide further clarity and review, where appropriate, relevant guidance as regards accounting aspects of public-private partnerships”. 

The commission is also working with the European Investment Fund (EIF) to establish a pan-European venture capital fund of funds that would combine public finance and private capital for additional stimulus and scale for new companies.

This follows analysis by the EIF on its impact on the venture landscape over the past 20 years. Its report, The European Venture Capital landscape: an EIF perspective, was the first in a series of publications edited by the EIF’s Research and Market analysis team aiming at presenting the outcome of EIF activities in the venture capital market over the past 20 years, by assessing their economic impact on European startups as well as the entire VC ecosystem.

It found the investment activity backed by EIF represented 41% of total investments in Europe in 2014 (29% in 2007). The share directly attributable to EIF amounts to 10% (5% in 2007), hinting at the significant leverage that characterises EIF-backed investments. Moreover we estimate that fundraising volumes backed by the EIF in 2014 amount to 45% of the overall volumes collected by European VC investors (36% in 2007), against a share directly attributable to the EIF totalling 12% (5% in 2007).

The finding is evidence of the EIF effectively crowding in VC capital, both from EIF co-investors and non-EIF co-investors, in the analysed period. Its estimates show that, on average, a 1% increase in EIF-provided VC capital in a region led to a 1.41% increase in other investors’ activity in the same region, one year later. 

Indonesia’s Bekraf draws VC support for creative upturn. The government agency for the local creative industry is set to receive more funding but levels are still under discussion.

Delft offers a helping hand to $112m fund. Delft University of Technology’s Robovalley centre co-creates a $112m robotics fund managed by VC firm Chrysalix to support companies working to commercialise robotic technology.

From our Global University Venturing title, Pittsburgh joins Osage network. The VC fund will continue its development work with spinouts from Pittsburgh University.

And Oxford rebrands its TTO. Isis Innovation will be renamed to Oxford University Innovation in order to better reflect the tech transfer office’s connection to the institution.