Fundraising

The intermediary close of PSL's deep tech-oriented fund comes after additional contributions from the EIF, Bpifrance and Vilmorin & Cie.

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.

MIT-run social enterprise incubator MIT Solve is to gain an impact investment fund with a $30m target size to back participants in its annual Global Challenges innovation contest.

The university faces accusations it used Stanford-StartX Fund to illegally pursue a profit-led investment strategy while using its own funds and personnel to protect the applicability of its tax exemptions as a nonprofit institution.

Motus, which backs spinouts from a range of universities and research institutes, has secured cash from unnamed investors for its Smart World Innovation Fund.

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.