Telecoms

Two large and important deals above the $1bn mark in the e-commerce and e-retail space in East Asia appeared in the news last week. Both deals involved telecoms group SoftBank as a corporate backer.

Norwest Venture Partners' Vab Goel is overseeing a $500m US fund that has been closed by Japanese telecommunications firm NTT.

The number of flotations of companies that have previously received corporate backing has been growing over the past couple years. More interestingly, it has been companies from the life sciences sector that beat other sectors in going public.

Boehringer Ingelheim and Helsinn helped oncology vaccine developer Amal reach the second close of a series B round that now totals $32.7m.

Innovative region: Brazil

This is our data snapshot based on last month’s investment activity. The charts and tables have been generated by our data platform GCV Analytics.

GCV Analytics defines the financial services sector as encompassing payment technologies and cryptocurrencies, personal finance and wealth management, insurance, alternative lending, crowdfunding, client and risk analytics, firms and funds, social investing and others.

In this short piece, we provide a comparison of our GCV Analytics data with Pitchbook’s data up until the end of the third quarter of 2018.

Global Corporate Venturing’s inaugural award for ‘Energy-tech Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) Investment of the Year’ was announced on November 8th during the Venture Houston conference.

Hotel smartphone provider Tink Labs already counts Foxconn and TCL as investors but has reportedly approached travel and hospitality companies for funding at a $1.5bn valuation.

Travel and accommodation booking service Booking Holdings committed $200m to ride hailing app Grab alongside a partnership deal