Fundraising

Sleeping Giant Capital is raising a buyout fund to retain local ownership of businesses and have them managed by Haworth College of Business alumni.

UGA's Innovation Gateway will have an additional $10m to play with as the university looks to double down on a strong tech transfer performance in recent times.

The UK regional tech transfer alliance's Seed Investment Fund expects to close its first investments in coming months, targeting sectors including healthcare and data.

Unnamed endowments have joined a digital asset-focused fund closed by Electric Capital to bet big on distributed financing models.

UCL Technology Fund 2 has achieved a first close on the way to its $131m target, with a cornerstone investment from UCL itself.

Italian tech transfer fund Eureka has attracted an initial $44.9m from LPs including ItaTech as well as Umbra and Saes to invest in spinouts from domestic institutions.

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.