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

Invizius, a UK-based University of Edinburgh spinout commercialising anti-inflammatory coatings for medical devices, has obtained £2.8m ($3.4m) in a round involving the university’s Old College Capital and the government-owned Scottish Investment Bank. The round was led by Mercia Asset Management and also featured Downing Ventures. It will go towards pre-clinical work and production of Invizius’s H-Guard product, which helps prevent cardiovascular complications caused by immune system cells treating medical machines as a foreign substance. Invizius, which raised $680,000 of seed capital from Mercia Fund Managers in May 2018, aims to commence clinical testing and secure series A funding within the next 18 months. BiomeSense, a US-based gut microbiome monitor developer aligned to University of Chicago, has closed a $2m seed round led by BioX Clan and backed by Seerave Foundation and SOSV. Founded in 2018, BiomeSense is working on a biosensor that would continuously monitor the gut microbiome to provide clinical insights using cloud-based data analytics. SOSV previously contributed an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding via BiomeSense’s participation in biotech accelerator IndieBio, while Chicago’s Innovation Fund had invested in June 2018. UnitX, a Saudi Arabia-based artificial intelligence and supercomputing spinout of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, obtained $2m yesterday from the university’s Innovation Fund and Wa’ed Ventures Fund – a corporate venturing fund for state-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco. The fresh funding will aid UnitX’s efforts to build supercomputing applications that are accessible to smaller enterprises looking to leverage high-performance data analytics. Raumtänzer, a Germany-based virtual and augmented reality developer spun out of Bielefeld University, has obtained an undisclosed sum from private investor Rolf Schrömgens,  founder of hotel booking platform Trivago, according to Die Glocke. The spinout is focused on VR and AR technologies for mechanical and plant engineering applications, and will put the capital into developing its Fluxsuite software platform geared towards building apps customised with the client’s own videos and animations. Raumtänzer also plans to open new offices in Berlin.

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