Every day, Global University Venturing rounds up the smaller investments from across the university innovation ecosystem in its deal net.
ToposWare, a Japan-based blockchain-powered cybersecurity platform company spun out of Digital Hollywood University (DHU), has completed a ¥197m ($1.85m) seed round featuring DHU’s parent company Digital Hollywood and its incubator affiliate D Rockets, as well as angel investors including Ōki Matsumoto and Kenji Kasahara.
Deep Render, a UK-based image compression protocol developer spun out of Imperial College London, has obtained £1.6m ($2m) of seed funding led by Pentech with participation from Speedinvest, TechCrunch reported today. Founded in 2017, DeepRender is building an image and video compression software tool that exploits machine learning to cope with high-bandwidth applications such as live streaming and video-on-demand. Arsalan Zafar and Chri Besenbruch came up with the concept while studying computer science at Imperial College London.
PlayerData, a UK-based wearable athlete tracker company supported by Edinburgh Innovations, the TTO of University of Edinburgh, has secured £750,000 ($928,000) from private investors including Sir Terry Leahy, The Scotsman reported yesterday. The company has devised wearable devices and software that track the speed and positioning of sports teams and individual athletes. The funding will facilitate PlayerData’s first product launch and work toward an iteration tailored to technique-intensive individual sports.
Biologics 4 Life, a France-based bone disease treatment developer aligned to regional TTO Satt Sud-Est, has secured up to €250,000 ($270,000) in funding from state-owned investment bank Bpifrance’s fund French Tech Seed Provence. The company aims to use biomaterials to restore areas of bone destroyed by conditions such as cancer metastases and osteoporosis. Biologics 4 Life collaborates with national research institutes CNRS and Inserm as well as hospital trusts AP-HM and AP-HP. It will use the funding to set up operations with a view to launching its first product by 2021.
SynSense, a Switzerland-based neuromorphic computing technology developer spun out of ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, completed a series A round of undisclosed size on Tuesday with investors including CAS-Star, an investment arm affiliated to Chinese Academy of Sciences. Investment firm CTC Capital led the round with support from M Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of pharmaceutical firm Merck Group, robot vacuum producer Ecovacs, smart developer Yunding and investment manager Archer Investments. The funding is intended to enable SynSense’s expansion to China, where it has opened offices and R&D facilities, later this year. SynSense is working on a neuromorphic computing technology to emulate the human central nervous system for robotics, smart homes and surveillance applications. The spinout was previously called AiCTX, having raised an eight-figure renminbi pre-series A sum in November 2018 led by Baidu Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of internet group of Baidu.
– Additional reporting by Liwen-Edison Fu. This article was updated on May 27 to include the name of Bpifrance’s fund that invested in Biologics 4 Life.
