Fundraising

Princeton University is a long-standing partner of Qiming Venture Partners, having invested in the latter's inaugural fund back in 2006.

Deerfield's second Healthcare Innovations Fund is one and a half times larger than its predecessor and will align with more than 15 university ecosystems.

University of Helsinki will invest $10,800 to $54,000 in its student-founded businesses through the newly-launched Helseed initiative.

Academic investors University of Cambridge, Jisc, Nesta and Grupo Tiradentes have all signed up to Emerge Education's edtech venture fund.

Congruent Ventures is raising a second fund two years after a first $92m vehicle closed with an anchor investment from University of California.

The university's endowment has backed Ecosystem Integrity Fund's fourth sustainability-oriented vehicle, slated to raise $200m at close.

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.