IT

Alex Tepper has departed from a managing director position at General Electric's corporate VC unit to take a senior managing director role at startup studio Human Ventures.

The two rivalling US-based ride hailing platforms Uber and Lyft, both counting many corporates among their backers, are preparing to float on public markets in the coming weeks, with the valuations of the two combined likely to stand well above $100bn

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

KU Leuven has generated 60 spinouts since 2000, the most of any Flemish region university, while digital-focused research centre IMinds topped the bill for Flemish strategic institutes.

CapitalG-backed UiPath is in the process of raising $400m in a round that will be led by an unnamed public institutional investor at a $7bn valuation.

AT&T and Deutsche Telekom-backed wireless internet system developer Tarana added $60m from investors including EchoStar to close the round.

The investment firm, which counts several corporates as backers, has completed the first close for a fund with a $1.48bn target, following commitments from China Everbright Trust and two state-backed funds.

Ahren Innovation Capital has been confirmed as an investor in a round that includes Samsung, BMW, Bosch and Dell, bringing machine intelligence technology developer Graphcore’s total funding to $310m.

The series A funding comes after predictive data analytics companies MoBagel went through a resources-only edition of the SkyDeck accelerator last year.

The Alibaba, Foxconn, Legend Holdings and SK Group-backed image recognition software provider is reportedly weighing up New York and Hong Kong for an $800m initial public offering.

Edge cloud platform Fastly has hired Bank of America to oversee an IPO valuing it at $1bn which would provide exits for Swisscom, Deutsche Telekom and O’Reilly Media.