Consumer

Each Friday the Global Corporate Venturing Deal Net rounds up the week’s smaller deals and tracks the emerging companies accessing corporate funds.

Tencent has backed another round for the bulk grocery shopping service, which also attracted China Evergrande Group and valued Xingsheng at $6bn pre-money.

Rogue has achieved a first close for its fourth fund, although it is as-yet unclear whether Oregon State University is again an investor.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the round which also attracted SK Networks and will enable Standard Cognition to deploy its autonomous checkout system in hundreds of stores.

BigBasket is reportedly being valued between $1.8bn and $2bn in a transaction that would give Tata Group a majority stake.

Amazon-backed Owlet Baby Care has agreed to a reverse merger with special purpose acquisition company Sandbridge for a post-deal valuation of $1.39bn.

Lee Kum Kee Products’s Happiness Capital has co-led a series A round for the provider of 3D-printed meat substitutes.

Q&A with Itamar Sivan, the co-founder of Israel-based quantum computer orchestration technology developer Quantum Machines.

Nature’s laws of physics are difficult to replicate through an arrangement of binary computer switches, no matter how many of the switches we have access to.

Cloud servers can be thought of humanity’s first truly global infrastructure given they act as the bedrock for executing artificial intelligence (AI), or so went the argument in a November edition of The Economist.

DeepMind Technologies’ achievement of applying machine learning to predict 3D protein structures has certainly got the scientific world excited, with some experts hailing a massive step forward for medical research.