A round up of the week's new fund and incbuator launches.

Panoramic Ventures, a US-based venture capital firm, has been launched with a fund target of $300m to focus on startups located in the US Midwest and southeast, as well as companies with underrepresented founders. It will aim to tap into university ecosystems and back both spinouts and student startups. Panoramic Ventures is the result of a partnership between BIP Capital and private investor Paul Judge.

University of Oxford

OpenOcean, a UK-based venture firm focused on data and software, has raised €92m ($110m) for its third fund with limited partners including University of Oxford’s Corpus Christi College as well as the EU-owned European Investment Fund, Finnish state-owned investment firm Tesi and its Fund of Fund Growth, pension insurer Elo Mutual Pension Insurance, as wellas unnamed institutions and family offices. OpenOcean is targeting a €130m close in the first half of this year, and it will invest primarily at series A stage in areas including artificial intelligence, automation, open source and data infrastructure.  

IP Group Inc, the US subsidiary of UK-based commercialisation firm IP Group, has raised an additional $50m in capital, including $10m from IP Group itself. The remaining $40m came from an unnamed institutional investor and brought the total capital raised by the US investor to $63.5m over the past year. IP Group now owns a 61.3% stake in the subsidiary. IP Group Inc invests in spinouts from institutions including University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and University of Washington.

IST Cube has increased its size to €40m ($48m) thanks to commitments from the EU-owned investment fund European Investment Fund, insurance group Vienna Insurance, federal development agency Austria Wirtschaftsservice, investment firm Mitterbauer-Beteiligungs-AG, the state of Lower Austria and around 20 private investors. The money was raised at the end of last year and announced yesterday. IST Cube was launched by Institute of Science and Technology Austria and investment management firm Lansdowne Partners with an initial $6.5m in 2017. It is managed by Markus Wanko, who revealed at a press conference on Thursday morning that the fund had an original target of €30m and remained open up to a hard cap of €45m. The fund aims to help commercialise and invest in spinouts from Austrian universities and has backed eight companies to date in sectors including medicine, biotechnology and IT.  Wanko is an upcoming guest on our podcast, Talking Tech Transfer.

University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund VIII has been launched by the institution to be managed by Parkwalk Advisors in conjunction with tech transfer office Cambridge Enterprise. The fund will follow the existing model of backing early-stage, high-growth spinouts emerging out of Cambridge. It will again offer private investors the opportunity to back these companies while relying on the UK government’s Enterprise Investment Scheme that gives favourable tax breaks.

Thierry Heles

Thierry Heles is the former editor-at-large of Global University Venturing and Global Corporate Venturing, and was the producer and host of the Beyond the Breakthrough podcast until December 2024.