Every day, Global University Venturing rounds up the smaller investments from across the university innovation ecosystem in its deal net.
Genesis Therapeutics, a US-based developer of small molecule therapeutics exploiting artificial intelligence technology invented at Stanford University, received $4.1m on Thursday in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz that featured Felicis Ventures and unnamed additional investors. Founded earlier in 2019, the spinout will target severe and debilitating diseases using its AI platform, leveraging development partnerships with drug developers. The seed money will help Genesis drive early recruitments focused on scientists, software engineering and artificial intelligence. Genesis Therapeutics builds on the work conducted under Vijay Pande, adjunct professor of bioengineering at Stanford, by his then PhD assistant Evan Feinberg.
Laclarée, a France-based developer of corrective lenses for glasses founded by a former Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon professor and incubated by regional tech transfer office Satt Pulsalys, has obtained €2m ($2.2m) in a round backed by public-private partnership High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and early-stage venture capital firm Kreaxi. The company is working on microfluidics-based technology for prescription eyeglasses to treat presbyopia: age-related long-sightedness that often persists to some degree with existing spectacles. The funding will go towards recruitment ahead of beta testing, with a view to releasing Laclarée’s first product in 2022.
HTGF has also injected €1m ($1.1m) into Datarade, a Germany-based data analytics portal developer and portfolio company of Hasso-Plattner-Institute’s HPI Seed Fund, with the funding going to bolstering headcount and furthering product development. Datarade is working on a software directory linking enterprise clients to the infrastructure of 1,500 data providers to automate and simplify the process of running data analytics on external information. HPI Seed Fund supplied pre-seed funding of undisclosed size in November 2018 to Datarade, which previously graduated from enterprise software producer SAP.iO’s Foundry accelerator run in partnership with Techstars.
Beyond Frontier, a Japan-based drug discovery spinout of Osaka University focused on new oncological medicines, has attracted ¥100m ($920,000) in capital from Osaka University Venture Capital. Founded in May 2019, Beyond Frontier will look to deliver cancer treatments identified using drug discovery technology invented by Kazutake Hirokawa, a professor in the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Osaka University.