GUV records a massive October for the university innovation ecosystem.
It’s been a strong month for the university ecosystem, with $427m in new funds announced and a massive $1.82bn in deals.
Some of the more notable deals have been Spin Transfer Technologies, a spin-out of New York University, raising $70m in its series B and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Synlogic welcoming the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the final investor in its $34.4m series A round. However, the standout performance comes via Tsinghua University.
Tsinghua Unigroup, a subsidiary of state-owned and university funded Tsinghua Holdings, has attracted a $1.5bn sum from chip manufacturer Intel so the US tech giant can access two firms, Spreadtrum Communications and RDA Electronics, acquired by the university investor last year.
Tsinghua powered into the mobile chip industry late last when it acquired the two for $1.78bn and $907m respectively. Now, Intel looks to harness Tsinghua’s in-roads to the smartphone industry, something it has been unable to do by itself so far, by utilising the two firms to produce Intel-branded chips to be used in portable consumer products.
The news could also present a challenge to Cambridge University’s ARM, which has a massive hold on the worldwide smartphone microprocessing market. Spreadtrum itself uses ARM-based chips in their offering. However, the new collaboration between Intel and Spreadtrum could well be a move to compete with the jewel of the Cambridge tech cluster.
In new funds, Osage University Partners has stolen headlines this past month. Its second university venturing fund, Osage University Partners II, aims to raise $200m, according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Osage is yet to make a formal announcement of the fund, but documents show that it has already secured $151m of its planned total from 145 investors.
If it is to follow in the steps of the first $100m fund launched in 2011, it will solely focus on investments into university spin-outs or companies which have licensed intellectual property from one of its 60 university partners, which include some technology heavyweights such the University of California, Caltech, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Duke, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre, one of the three institutes behind Global University Venturing’s 2014 deal of the year Juno Therapeutics (see awards).
The first fund’s portfolio now includes 32 spin-outs, and has even seen some early successes, such as the University of California San Diego’s Otonomy, which floated on the Nasdaq earlier this year and raised $100m in the process.