March 2021 issue editorial by James Mawson, editor in chief, Global Corporate Venturing

New York Digital Investment Group was among the investors in the Bitcoin payment service’s seed round, which valued it at $71m.

Bonny Simi, pilot and founder of US airline JetBlue’s corporate venturing unit, read the runes correctly in December when she left to join portfolio company Joby Aviation as head of air operations and people.

Top 50 Rising Stars 2021 continued (in alphabetical order by CVC unit): Terri Burns, investing partner, GV

Steve Mitzenmacher spent nine years in corporate development and strategy at NetApp before joining Rackspace earlier this month.

James Fogt has been promoted to lead Harris-Stowe State University's new tech transfer office having been with the historically black public university since 1999.

The ad optimisation platform’s IPO will enable Colopl, Credit Saison, CyberAgent, Dai Nippon Printing, Denstu, Fidelity, GMO, Gree, Mizuho, NTT, SBI and Yahoo Japan to exit.

Terri Burns, formerly a principal at the Alphabet subsidiary, has taken up a partner role having made two Gen Z-focused investments this year.

Twitter has returned to back the social media platform that provides services in 15 Indian languages, which pushed its total funding to about $264m.

Comment from Angela McKane, director of technology intelligence at BP

Sector analysis: Media

GV and CAA Ventures have exited online GIF database Giphy in a reported $400m deal, sized at approximately $200m less than its valuation four years ago.

GV led a series B round for Digits that was disclosed as it publicly launched its business expenditure analysis software, four months after its series A.

Comment from Dominic Hofstetter, director of capital and investment, Climate-KIC

Sector report: Consumer

Naver, Simon Property and O’Reilly Media-backed Foursquare is joining forces with peer Factual to create the world's biggest location intelligence provider.

Every day, Global University Venturing rounds up the smaller investments from across the university innovation ecosystem in its deal net.

Intel Capital has joined various returning investors in a $74m round that will help ZeroFox bolster the artificial intelligence capabilities of its brand protection software.

SoundCloud has received $75m from SiriusXM following an advertising partnership agreement with its Pandora subsidiary in 2019.

Oxford Sciences Innovation has bid farewell to chairman Patrick Pichette, just a few months after also losing CEO Charles Conn.