Canada has long had both cash-hungry startups and pension funds with an appetite for direct deals, but only recently have those two things come together. Last week, Lightspeed, a point-of-sale solution for retailers and restaurants, raised $207 million in a Series D financing, the largest for a Canadian IT company in 25 years. Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, a $287 billion pension system, led the round, highlighting a growing interest among formerly standoffish Canadian pension funds to invest directly in tech opportunities at home.
The co-founders of a Silicon Valley social club have obtained a $3.7 million judgement against a company founded by entrepreneur and investor Tony Perkins, but the legal wrangling between the parties continues with Perkins filing a cross-complaint this week against his former business partners seeking $10.3 million in damages. In 2015, AlwaysOn, a company founded […]
Funds from OrbiMed Advisors, Canaan Partners and DCM Ventures head an early-decade portfolio of venture funds at the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System. The portfolio is made up of 2011 to 2013 vintages with a focus on mid-tier and larger funds and a mix of early stage and multi-stage investment strategies. A third of the […]
If there was any doubt that GPs and LPs are interested in finding out more about initial coin offerings, it was dispelled at Buyouts Insider’s PartnerConnect West conference at the Ritz-Carlton on Oct. 10 and 11 in Half Moon Bay, California. A standing-room-only crowd packed a conference room for a panel discussion entitled “Should VCs be […]
The University of California has pared down the number of venture funds in its portfolio amid a wider cost-saving effort to reduce management fees. UC’s Office of the Chief Investment Officer of the Regents, which oversees $109.8 billion in assets across six investments products, has dropped more than 120 PE and VC fund partners over the […]
Intel Capital is focusing on the expanding data ecosystem, investing $60 million in new investments into 15 startups that capture, manage, secure or analyze data. The venture arm of Intel has also expanded its investments into companies led by women and minorities. The investments were announced at the organization’s first-ever Intel Capital CEO Showcase in […]
Can entrepreneurship be taught in a classroom setting, or is it a set of skills learned only by doing? MIT professor William Aulet clearly comes down on the taught side of the debate. But instruction has to be done in the right way. An entrepreneur himself, Aulet describes building a company as a craft and […]
By Jeff Harbach, Kauffman Fellows There are some people who fear the future with robots. Elon Musk has started warning that artificial intelligence could be a real threat to humans. Others fear robots will take jobs away from people and we’ll never get them back. It almost sounds like a new frontier in science fiction. […]
LimeBike, which operates a fleet of lime-green colored bicycles that connect to an app to track their location and collect mobile payments from users, announced today it raised a $50 million Series B round of financing led by Coatue Management. The San Mateo, California-based company is using the funding to expand and maintain its bike-sharing […]
Canada’s top 10 venture-capital financings in the third quarter won $572 million from investors, up 45 percent from the $395 million that went into the top 10 deals a year earlier. The number is based on PE Hub Canada’s list of the largest deals announced in Q3 2017, supplemented by preliminary data from Thomson Reuters. The list is headed by LeddarTech, which accounted for 2017’s fourth $100 million-plus round, Milestone, Absorb Software and Freshbooks. Third-quarter data, when combined with the results of Q1 2017 and Q2 2017, suggest Canadian VC investment activity this year is poised to match or exceed the robust levels of 2016.