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

Capmo, a Germany-based construction project software developer, has completed a €5m ($5.5m) series A round involving Unternehmertum Venture Capital (UVC) Partners, the venture firm affiliated with Technical University of Munich’s tech transfer arm, Unternehmertum, according to Konii.de. The round was filled out by HW Capital and Capnamic Ventures together with unnamed business angels and members of Capmo’s founding team. Capmo will put the funding towards product development and expansion in Europe, having previously raised $2m of seed cash in December 2018 from both UVC Partners and HW Capital.
Ikarovec, UK-based ophthalmic gene therapy developer with origins in University of Cambridge research, has obtained £2.5m ($3.2m) in a round featuring fund management unit Parkwalk Advisors, medical research charity LifeArc and the UK government-backed UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund. The spinout was forged on intellectual property from University of Cambridge-founded glaucoma therapy developer Quethera, which was bought by pharmaceutical firm Astellas Pharma in 2018.  Proceeds will go to three early-stage gene therapy candidates for ophthalmic indications, building out Ikarovec’s pipeline and setting up its own labs. Ikarovec’s lead therapy will treat diabetic macular oedema, which impairs the eye’s ability to see precise details.
Hprobe, a France-based magnetic device testing spinout of Spintrec, a research collaboration between University of Grenoble Alpes, CEA and CNRS, has closed a €2m-plus ($2.2m) round led by public-private partnership High-Tech Gründerfonds. The round included TEL Venture Capital, BNP Paribas Développement and ITIC – respective VC arms of semiconductor and display supplier Tokyo Electron, financial services firm BNP Paribas and R&D institute Industrial Technology Research Institute – as well as unspecified international investors. Hprobe was founded in 2017 to supply technologies that evaluate magnetic fields in semiconductor applications such as sensors and magnetic random access memory. The cash will go to product development, strengthening Hprobe’s sales team and opening subsidiaries in overseas markets.
Modl.ai, a Denmark-based artificial intelligence (AI) game development testing platform, has closed a $1.7m seed round co-led by Technical University of Denmark-owned PreSeed Ventures, Saltagen Ventures and Norwegian Propagator Ventures. The company’s software deploys AI to help game developers evaluate projects before their release, using computerised player archetypes that mimic human behaviour.
Rejuvenate Bio, a US-based canine gene therapy developer, has been spun out of Harvard University with seed funding from undisclosed investors. The spinout is currently piloting its approach in mitral valve disease, a heart malfunction afflicting most Cavalier King Charles-breed spaniels by the age of eight, having also studied potential impacts in obesity mitigation, type 2 diabetes and renal failure. Rejuvenate Bio extends research from co-founders George Church, lead for synthetic biology at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and Noah Davidson, a former postdoctoral research scientist in Church’s lab and at Harvard Medical School.
Fero Labs, a US-based developer of machine learning technologies for industrial settings exploiting Columbia University research, has raised an undisclosed sum co-led by DIVC and HenkelX Ventures, the open innovation arm of adhesive and coatings supplier Henkel. Henkel plans to help Fero Labs grow its customer base and will equip its own production sites with the spinout’s technology, which relies on machine learning algorithms with explainable methodologies to enhance manufacturing production processes. Fero Labs’ chief scientist is Alp Kucukelbir, an adjunct professor of computer science at Columbia who co-founded the spinout during his postdoctoral research.
Anteros Pharmaceuticals, a US-based drug developer, has launched to target inflammatory diseases, including pulmonary fibrosism leveraging Yale University research. The startup is the result of a strategic partnership between pharmaceutical firm Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and accelerator BioMotiv. BMS will provide IP and other resources as Anteros looks to develop small molecule drugs focused on an undisclosed therapeutic mechanism. The firm also holds an option to buy the spinout, once it has a preclinical drug candidate. BioMotiv meanwhile will take responsibility for research and development, and will collaborate with Yale to set up Anteros’s operations.
Austria-based ParityQC has spun out from University of Innsbruck and Austrian Academy of Sciences to commercialise an architecture for quantum computing. Angel investor Hermann Hauser has provided an undisclosed amount of funding to the company, which was incorporated in December 2019 on the back of research co-led by Wolfgang Lechner, professor at University of Innsbruck’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, Philipp Hauke, a university assistant at Innsbruck, and Peter Zoller, a research director at Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information. The trio claim their Parallel Quantum Computing Architecture can fully program quantum bits while also facilitating performance advances through a technique called algorithm parallelisation.