Special Weekend Edition: BDC Launches $250M Industrial Innovation Venture Fund

VC Deals

GM Cruise has raised another $1.15 billion in new equity from a group of investors that includes T. Rowe Price Associates, Honda, SoftBank Vision Fund and its parent company GM, as the self-driving vehicle company pushes to launch a commercial autonomous ride-hailing service this year.  More

RxRevu, a Denver, Colorado-based company focused on prescription decision support, has wrapped up a $15.9 million Series A funding round.  More

LevelTen Energy, a marketplace that consolidates renewable energy projects and potential buyers to lower prices for aggregated buyers and expand the market for sellers, has raised $20.5 million in a new round of funding.  More

Toronto-based FinTech startup Koho announced the close of a $42 million Series B round today, led by Portag3 Ventures, with participation from Greyhound Capital and other unnamed strategic investors. Sources familiar with the deal put the company’s post-money valuation north of $100 million. Koho has raised $52.6 million to date.  More

OpenSesame, a Portland, Ore.-based online corporate learning marketplace, has raised a $28 million Series C round of funding. FTV Capital led the round with participation from Altos Ventures.  More

There’s more money racing into India’s increasingly competitive two-wheeler market after electric scooter maker Ather Energy said today it has raised $51 million in new funding.   More

PayJoy, a startup that has developed smartphone technology to facilitate access to credit in emerging markets, has raised $20 million from venture capital firm Greylock Partners, the company said on Thursday.  More

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New Funds

BDC Capital, the investment arm of BDC recently launched the $250 million Industrial Innovation Venture Fund to invest in tech companies and entrepreneurs accelerating the transformation of core Canadian industries including agriculture and food technologies, resource extraction technologies and advanced manufacturing.  More

Willis Towers Watson (NASDAQ: WLTW), a leading global advisory, broking and solutions company, announced today two initiatives targeting organic and inorganic growth. The first is WTW Strategic Ventures, an initiative aimed at creating strategic growth opportunities by investing in emerging digital and technology-enabled businesses across insurance, risk and human capital.  More

IPOs

Exercise tech darling and service provider Peloton has filed for an IPO with a confidential draft submission of its S-1 statement to the SEC on Wednesday. The company announced the news in a press release, and did not disclose the terms of its initial public offering in the release.  More

Exits

If you are among those who thought that the scooter market sounded a little overhyped and overcrowded, we’ve gotten wind of a deal that could point to some impending consolidation. The on-demand scooter business Bird has agreed to acquire Scoot, a smaller two-wheeled mobility startup.  More

AI News

Intel’s Naveen Rao thinks AI will transform health, solve world hunger, and support space travel.  More

Legal News

An executive from the biologics arm of Korean conglomerate Samsung faces arrest as part of a probe into the company’s accounting practices. Korea's news agency Yonhap reported that the executive, surnamed Lee, allegedly decided to tamper with evidence of a plot to inflate the value of Samsung's stake in a joint venture with a U.S. company.  More

It took seven months after online ticketing firm Eventbrite went public before shareholders filed a class-action lawsuit against the company. For Lyft, the lawsuits came just 17 days after its IPO. More

People

Stitch Fix founder and CEO Katrina Lake became $45 million richer in just one day after her e-commerce company delivered another quarter of double-digit growth.  More