Consumer

Men's styling and fashion e-commerce platform Thread has now raised $40m altogether, having secured funding from H&M Co:Lab among others.

The food ordering platform has reportedly drawn up a term sheet for a $900m primary and secondary round led by Naspers and backed by Tencent.

The grocery delivery service, which counts Amazon, American Express and Comcast as investors, has increased its valuation 75% to $7.6bn in just six months.

Online specialty food retailer Goldbelly has raised cash in a series B round led by Union Square Hospitality's Enlightened Hospitality Investment vehicle.

Fosun RZ Capital supplied $5m for trucking services provider LetsTransport, which reportedly already counts GMO, Flex, CBC Group and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance as backers.

Alibaba will merge its online food delivery subsidiary Ele.me with its local services spinoff Koubei, following earlier reports that SoftBank was joining Alibaba to invest about $3bn of funding in the new business.

Ant Financial has returned to put another $210m into Zomato, after purchasing $200m worth of primary and secondary stock in the food delivery company earlier this year.

Kaloyan Andonov of GCV spoke to Geert van de Wouw, vice-president at Shell Ventures, the venturing subsidiary of Anglo-Dutch oil and gas major Shell about the future of energy and how the rebranded venturing arm under his command tackles it.

This is our data snapshot based on last month’s investment activity. 
The charts and tables have been generated by our data platform GCV Analytics.

A range of new materials and technologies could yield vastly improved batteries for purposes including electric vehicles and grid storage.