IT

Sector report: Consumer

A host of corporate and government-backed initiatives have been launched to tackle the coronavirus that develops into the Covid-19 disease. In a global, fast-moving pandemic, this can only be a snapshot of the efforts at the end of March 2020.

Princeton University is a long-standing partner of Qiming Venture Partners, having invested in the latter's inaugural fund back in 2006.

The Salesforce-backed, crowd-focused cybersecurity services provider has now raised $80m altogether, VC firm Rally Ventures leading its latest round.

Maxburg Capital Partners paid an undisclosed amount for retail analytics provider Metoda, whose exiting investors included Tengelmann vehicle TEV.

CTC Capital has led an $58m series E round for AISpeech, a natural language processing technology developer already backed by TusPark Ventures.

HPE, Cisco Investments and SoftBank Vision Fund chipped in as the data management platform developer more than doubled its valuation to $2.5bn.

Runcheng Group was among the participants in a $49.4m round for the mobile sensor producer, which will use the cash to expand inertial measurement unit production.

BAIC Group has contributed to a $57.8m round for AISpeech, a natural language processing technology developer already backed by Foxconn, MediaTek and Legend Holdings.

Google for Startups Accelerator will begin on April 21 with an initial cohort that includes concepts related to the UN's environment, inequality and health objectives.

Mutual insurer Sham has led a $20m round for healthcare cybersecurity software provider CyberMDX that expanded its total funding to $30m.