VC historically hasn’t been much interested in food and beverage, but several aspects in recent years have drawn hundreds of millions of risk dollars including socially conscious healthy food. The category includes companies like plant-based protein maker Beyond Meat, which has filed for an IPO, and Impossible Foods, maker of the Impossible Burger. One of the larger venture firms with […]
Longtime innovator Balaji Gopinath has left corporate VC to launch Twelve Venture Capital and focus on the so-called flyover U.S. regions: the South, Southeast and Midwest. Gopinath and fellow founding GP Ron Yerkes, who formerly led the accelerator programs at RocketSpace, launched the firm this year and are seeking to raise a $50 million inaugural fund, […]
Global IPO markets tumbled in the first quarter, as expected, with activity in the United States and Europe hit particularly hard by trade and other uncertainties. Deal volume worldwide fell 41 percent from last year and proceeds were off 74 percent, according to a study from Ernst & Young and Dealogic. In the United States, […]
The videoconferencing startup Zoom last week filed to go public after several weeks of speculation that it would join the 2019 IPO parade. The company could go out as soon as April on Nasdaq under the ticker ZM. The San Jose, California, company was founded in 2011 and had raised more than $145 million in […]
Presented here is performance data for Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada and its venture capital funds portfolio, vintages 2013 to 2015. The figures from the Nevada LP are current as of September 2018. An expanded spreadsheet with additional data is attached. To download the full version of the spreadsheet below with additional data, click here: Nevada PERS venture […]
OMERS Ventures has taken another step in its plan to create a global platform, launching a €300 million ($342 million) fund to invest in European startups. Capitalized by OV’s parent organization, OMERS, a C$97 billion ($73 billion) Canadian pension fund, the fund will make life-cycle investments in companies in key European tech hubs, Head of Ventures […]
Venture capitalists kept a quick pace to their activity in the first quarter, with U.S. investments already above $22 billion and funds bringing in nearly $12 billion of new capital. However, the momentum is in significant measure thanks to SoftBank. The investments and fundraising totals are more or less on par with those of recent […]
Flagship Pioneering said it raised $824 million for a second special opportunities fund, an almost 3x increase over its initial fund. The capital will support the growth of companies emerging from its foundry, Flagship Labs. In conjunction with the new fund, called Flagship Pioneering Special Opportunities Fund II, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm said in a […]
By Alex Derber, VCJ Correspondent Of the many routes to forming a VC firm, perhaps none is so outlandish as launching one from a TV show. Yet that was considered by Btov Partners (originally Brains to Venture Partners), which was set up in 2000 by students with a vision to bring venture capital to the […]
Alex Furman was 11 when he and his family escaped the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991. He went on to become a software engineer and in 2009 co-founded VC-backed Invitae, a genetic information company, which went public in 2015 and has a current market cap of $1.8 billion. Furman has company: PayPal, Google and WhatsApp were […]