Consumer

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

Introduction to the World of Corporate Venturing 2019

Simon Ventures-backed subscription commerce platform FabFitFun has added $80m in series A capital to its coffers nine years after it launched as a lifestyle newsletter.

Hair colouring supplier Madison Reed, which is backed by Comcast and JF Shea, is pursuing a multi-channel distribution strategy and has now racked up $121m in capital altogether.

After a quarter of a century of healthcare investing, Barbara Dalton, senior managing partner of Pfizer Ventures, has won the Global Corporate Venturing Lifetime Achievement Award 2019.

Introduction to the GCV awards 2019 by James Mawson, editor in chief

A leading company in the e-signature and digital transaction management space, San Francisco-based DocuSign went public in April last year, with a market capitalization of $4.4bn.

Having emerged from the Merck Serono Entrepreneur Partnership Program (EPP) in 2015, Prexton Therapeutics raised a total $41m of funding before it was acquired by pharmaceutical firm Lundbeck for an estimated $1.1bn last year.

Maana recently won GCV’s inaugural award for energy-tech corporate venture capital (CVC) investment of the year, presented during its Venture Houston conference in November. Now, Maana has gone one-stage further and won the Sub-$50m Investment of the Year award across all industries.

In May last year, Severstal announced the launch of Severstal Ventures – a corporate venture fund that would invest directly as well as through other funds in advanced materials and associated technologies, in Russia and abroad.

Launched in July last year, Swisscom Digital Transformation Fund is Swisscom Ventures’ first investment vehicle that is open to third-party institutional investors.