A stunning three-month run for spinouts shows large sums flowing in and out of the innovation ecosystem.
There have been five investment rounds in university spinouts worth more than $500m in the past 18 months – three of these occurred this year and two of them in the first quarter. It partially explains the $8.73bn raised in January, February and March – significantly more than the $7.23bn raised over the last five months of 2020.
Databricks, a US-based data analytics software producer based on research at University of California, Berkeley, accounted for a whopping $1bn of the 2021 total thus far. The company’s series G round in early February pushed its valuation from an already respectable $6.2bn to $28bn and the cash came from investors including corporate venture capital units Amazon Web Services, CapitalG and Salesforce Ventures – on behalf of internet and e-commerce group Amazon, technology conglomerate Alphabet and cloud computing firm Salesforce – as well as software producer Microsoft. Despite Databricks’ large round, the top…
Thierry Heles
Thierry Heles is the editor of Global University Venturing, host of the Beyond the Breakthrough interview podcast and responsible for the monthly GUV Gazette (sign up here for free).
