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

Fluree, a US-based data management company, has received $6.5m of venture funding in a round led by 4490 Ventures, the venture capital firm aligned to University of Wisconsin-Madison’s tech transfer organisation, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The deal was filled out by Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Engage Ventures, Good Growth Capital and private investor Ray Rothrock. Founded in 2017, Fluree is working on a blockchain-driven data management platform that incorporates semantic graphs as a way of contextualising and conceptualising information. The funding will support product development. 4990 Ventures led a $4.7m seed round featuring Rise of the Rest in June 2019.
Advanced Medical Technologies (AMT), a Netherlands-based coronary bypass technology spinout of University Medical Centre (UMC) Utrecht, has secured €3m ($3.5m) from investors including the centre’s spinout management affiliate Utrecht Holdings. Regional development fund East NL and NextGen Ventures also supplied funding, in what appears to be AMT’s first disclosed round. AMT concurrently received $8.2m in grants. The spinout’s technology, Elana Heart, uses lasers to facilitate heart bypasses for the treatment of coronary heart disease without the need for open-chest surgery. The lasers are channelled through a catheter affixed through the patient’s exterior, puncturing holes in coronary blood vessels which are joined subsequently to form a coronary bypass. Separate tools help maintain the patient’s heart rate and clip the bypass to the intended blood vessel, meaning surgeons do not have to stop the heart and install an artificial machine to maintain its function. Pig models have demonstrated the efficacy of Elana Heart, and proceeds from the latest round will go to conducting a two-site clinical trial of the technology later in 2020. The project is an adaptation of an existing brain surgery device invented by Cees Tulleken, professor emeritus at UMC Utrecht’s Department of Neurosurgery.
Zerynth, an Italy-based industrial internet-of-things technology provider, obtained €2m ($2.3m) in series A funding yesterday led by state-backed tech transfer fund Vertis Venture 3 Tech Transfer. Founded in 2015, Zerynth provides connected hardware and software tools geared to industrial sector clients. The funding will go to scaling up its business.
UTokyo Economic Consulting, a Japan-based economics-focused consultancy formed by University of Tokyo, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from newspaper publisher Nikkei and market research and credit report firm Tokyo Shoko Research.
Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems has spun out Germany-based solar manufacturing company Highline Technology with support from its tech transfer office, Fraunhofer Technologie-Transfer Fonds, and the Federal Ministry of Economics, PV Mag reported on Monday. Highline’s technology dispenses solar cells using an alternative to conventional screen printing said to reduce silver consumption by 20%.
Ben-Gurion University of Negev has spun out Israel-based epileptic seizure prevention device maker NeuroHelp, Ctech reported yesterday. NeuroHelp’s technology spots neurological patterns indicative of epileptic seizures using a machine learning-driven electroencephalogram, before warning the user via their smartphone.  The company is currently preparing a prototype for clinical studies later in 2020. Oren Shriki, principal investigator at BGU’s Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, was responsible for supervising its scientific research.