IT

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 has led the API marketplace’s latest round at a unicorn valuation, with returning investor M12 also taking part.

The Global and China L4 Autonomous Driving and Start-ups Report, 2021, found that except for a few companies, such as Waymo and Uber, which performed worse than expected, level four (L4) autonomous driving firms in other fields gained momentum.

Hikma led a $15m extension to surgical robotics developer Activ Surgical's series B round, now sized at $60m, while data collaboration software provider Hex raised $52m from investors including Snowflake and Databricks.

The chipmaker's Snapdragon Metaverse Fund will provide equity financing and grants for metaverse and extended reality technology startups.

The cybersecurity testing software producer's series B round was co-led by Koch Disruptive Technologies and pushed its overall funding to approximately $36m.

The deep tech venture fund linked to Imec has raised $166m for its second fund, more than halfway to its $277m target.

Digital asset exchange Zipmex increased its corporate-backed series B round to over $51m while Digital Garage-backed 1plusX in a $150m acquisition.

Multiple corporates helped call centre software producer Cresta raise $80m at a $1.6bn valuation while agricultural intelligence provider Apollo secured $40m in a round led by Softbank Vision Fund 2.

Slack's corporate venturing subsidiary, now under the Salesforce Ventures umbrella, is looking to lead more rounds after launching Fund III, which is twice the size of its predecessor.

Country Garden Venture Capital was among the investors in the Qualcomm-backed contract chip manufacturing service provider’s latest round, which took its total funding to $630m.

Deutsche Telekom-backed DTCP was among the investors that pushed the cybersecurity management platform developer’s valuation to $2.6bn.