Last Week in Deeptech - 04/07/2023
Welcome to the Deepsight weekly newsletter, where we run through last week's notable events in deeptech.
Last Week in News:
OpenAI chooses London for its first corporate office outside the US (Bloomberg)
Industrial heat startup Rondo to open the world’s largest battery factory (Canary Media)
Semiconductor manufacturer Wolfspeed Inc has secured as much as $2bn in financing from a group of lenders led by Apollo Global Management (Private Equity Wire)
Parkwalk launch University of Oxford Innovation Fund VI (Parkwalk Advisors)
New Britishvolt owner's offices raided by Australian tax police (BBC)
TL;DR - Venture Markets:
89 deeptech ventures collectively raised $3,409mn from investors.
3 VC funds announced closure, raising a total of $193mn from LPs.
4 companies achieved exits, creating $1,464mn in value for shareholders.
Featured Insights:
Macro market freeze chills climate tech: Venture funding down 40% in H1 2023 (CTVC)
The chip patterning machines shaping computing’s next act (MIT Technology Review)
Announcing the first machine unlearning challenge (Google Research)
Tech Breakthroughs & Partnerships:
Fly above the traffic in a car? First 'flying car' approved by the FAA (USA Today)
Insilico Medicine, a biotech company backed by Chinese conglomerate Fosun Group and private equity giant Warburg Pincus has begun one of the first mid-stage human trials of a drug discovered and designed by artificial intelligence. (Financial Times)
Google has developed a quantum computer that instantly makes calculations that would take the best-existing supercomputers 47 years (The Telegraph)
Australian lunar navigation startup Advanced Navigation has won an AUS$5.2mn (US$3.4mn) grant from the Australian Space Agency to accelerate the development of its lunar lander LiDAV sensors (Advanced Navigation)
Source: Advanced Navigation | LUNA LiDAV technology on board Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander
Our Top 10 Funding Picks:
Helsinki-based Algorithmiq, a startup that uses quantum algorithms to help drug discovery for pharma companies, has raised €13.7mn ($15m) in Series A funding.
Planckian announced it raised over $2.9mn in pre-seed funding led by Eureka! Venture to develop quantum batteries that harness quantum mechanics to be more efficient.
Space computing company Ramon.Space closed a $26mn strategic financing round on the heels of finalizing a manufacturing partnership with Ingrasys - a Foxconn subsidiary.
Celestial AI, the creator of the photonic fabric optical interconnect technology platform, has raised $100mn in Series B funding from a consortium of institutional investors.
University of Cambridge AI spinout RoboK has raised £1.7mn ($2.1mn) in grant and equity funding to create a “third-person view” of workplace incidents captured on CCTV.
Material Evolution has raised $19mn from the likes of KOMPAS VC, Norssken VC and CircleRock Capital to decarbonise the cement industry using low-energy manufacturing.
Inflection AI announced a massive $1.3bn in fresh funding led by current big-name investors, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new investor NVIDIA.
Carthera has closed out their €37.5mn ($41mn) Series B funding round, with the funds going towards the launch of the first multicenter trial using their SonoCloud technology.
Red Cat Subsidiary Teal Drones has secured $1.2mn in additional funding to develop a new sUAS prototype for the US Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program.
Runway announced $141mn in funding to expand AI research and product deployment.
See the full list here.
Announced VC Fund Closes:
Chrysalix Venture Capital has held the initial closing for its $120mn fifth fund, the Carbon Neutrality Fund, with investments from Evonik, LyondellBasell and Siam.
Healthtech investor NLC announced their new €20mn ($22mn) fund to take startups from the lab bench to exit and close the funding gap for spinouts. (Sifted coverage)
Octopus Ventures has launched a new £40mn ($51mn) deeptech fund that will back pre-seed startups across the UK and Europe. (UKTN coverage)
Champagne-Worthy Exits (M&A & IPOs):
Databricks has struck a $1.3bn deal for generative AI startup MosaicML with the aim of connecting the businesses’ data with services to help them build their own LLMs.
Eli Lilly has agreed to buy Sigilon Therapeutics, which it already owns an 8.44% stake in, for $34.6mn in an all-cash deal to expand its portfolio of diabetes treatments.
BorgWarner has agreed to buy the electric hybrid systems business segment of Italy-based Eldor Corporation for a total of €75mn ($80mn).
SK Biopharmaceuticals has taken a controlling stake in US biotechnology company Proteovant Therapeutics for $47.5mn.
Key Hires and People Movements:
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has hired top European lobbyist Sandro Gianella as the company’s new head of European policy and partnerships (Politico Coverage)
National Grid announced that Katie Jackson will join the company as President of National Grid Ventures (NGV), and will also sit on the Group Executive Committee.
The United Nations Secretary-General has appointed Aarti Holla-Maini (Belgium/UK) as the next Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA).
Hy24 has hired Guillaume Lesueur, former Head of EDF Pulse Ventures, as their new Managing Director to lead new investments focused on clean hydrogen equipment.
Quantum VC Quantonation added quantum computing pioneer Will Zeng as Partner.
Policy & Government Initiatives:
Not much to report in the tech policy world from last week as the world looks towards the French protests, but with all the ongoing conversations surrounding the regulation of AI, Politico have put together an interesting piece about “The Pentagon’s endless struggle with AI.”
US trade officials have also been assessing the fallout from the latest escalation in the tech battle between the US and China after Beijing announced that they would impose curbs on exports of critical metals used in chipmaking. (read the Financial Times coverage here)
That’s all for this week!
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If you have any feedback - or want to see more of something covered in the newsletter - please do contact me via email: dan@deepsight.news.
Thanks for reading!
Dan