Fundraising

Endowments for Harvard and Princeton have participated in Material Impact’s second fund, which closed at $200m after being oversubscribed.

The universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Glasgow and Aberdeen have all contributed to Epidarex’s latest fund, which will invest in life sciences spinouts.

Uniseed has entered a co-investment pact with BioCurate, a drug discovery fund for early-stage University of Melbourne and Monash University research.

UCeed will target four to eight healthcare projects with a focus on child medicine, investing up to $220,000 per transaction.

Four regional tech transfer offices in France's Satt network have been awarded additional government funding.

Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec has become the second Canadian limited partner to join Theodorus’ fourth fund, which now stands at $47.3m.

Steady is the assessment that comes to mind, rather than remarkable, when probing the year-on-year direction of corporate venture capital investment in university spinouts.

With hundreds of university venture funds, internal commercialisation vehicles and third-party firms the reality in today’s innovation ecosystem, selecting the nominees and the winner for Investment Unit of the Year is increasingly challenging.

One only has to look at the investors in the €117m ($135m) final close for Imec.xpand, the venture fund of nano-electronics research institute Imec, to see why it is worthy of GUV’s Fundraising of the Year award.