Every day, Global University Venturing rounds up the smaller investments from across the university innovation ecosystem in its deal net.
Artidis, a Switzerland-based cancer diagnostics spinout of the Biozentrum at University of Basel, obtained CHF8.8m ($8.9m) in seed funding yesterday from medical instrument supplier SMD MedicalTrade, investment firm Bernina Bioinvest and unspecified family offices and individuals. The money will prepare Artidis’s nanomechanics-powered diagnostics for lung and breast cancer ahead of a multi-centre clinical study, with the aim of launching to market in 2021. Artidis was formed in 2017 by its chief medical officer Marko Loparic – a product lead at University of Basel’s clinical technology integration program – alongside chief scientific and development officer Philipp Oertle, a former PhD and postdoctoral researcher at the university. It was recently selected for Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute’s medical device accelerator.
Cerebri AI, a US-based customer engagement software developer and portfolio company of University of Texas System, raised $7m on Wednesday from asset management firm Arcis Capital Partners and unspecified existing investors. The company recently released software that facilitates customer engagement and sales through a mixture of artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning. Tailored to the Asian market, Cerebri AI expects to capture revenues from large enterprises in areas such as banking, insurance and telecoms. University of Texas System’s Horizon Fund backed a $5m series A round for Cerebri AI in June 2018 that was led by M12 – the corporate venturing unit for software producer Microsoft – with contributions from WorldQuant Ventures and Leawood Venture Capital. Cerebri AI had previously raised a total of $5m, including about $2.3m of debt over two rounds in 2016 and 2017, according to regulatory filings.
Panda, a Germany-based automated industrial maintenance spinout of Helmut-Schmidt-University and University of the Federal Armed Forces, received €1.3m ($1.5m) of seed financing today from public-private partnership High-Tech Gründerfonds, state-owned innovation fund manager Innovationsstarter Fonds Hamburg and unspecified angel investors. The seed capital will go toward recruiting team members and developing Panda’s predictive maintenance product, which exploits artificial intelligence to extract real-time data from sensors connected to industrial machinery.
