Special Weekend Edition: Great North Labs Raises $23.7M To Invest In Early Stage Tech Startups

VC Deals

Great North Labs — headed by a couple of seasoned entrepreneurs — has raised its first fund with $23.7 million in capital to invest in early-stage tech startups across the Upper Midwest in the U.S. The fund is based in St. Cloud and Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a partner located in Silicon Valley. More

India has a new unicorn after BigBasket, a startup that delivers groceries and perishables across the country, raised $150 million for its fight against rivals Walmart’s Flipkart, Amazon and hyperlocal startups Swiggy and Dunzo.  More

Health coaching app developer Noom announced today that it has raised $58 million led by Sequoia Capital. Headquartered in New York City with offices in Seoul and Tokyo, Noom is best known for its direct-to-consumer weight loss app, but it also develops enterprise products, including an app focused on diabetes and hypertension.  More

Vancouver-based Traction Guest, a cloud-based visitor management system, has raised $17 million CAD Series A funding round. The round was led by Silicon Valley-based Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and other private investors. Traction Guest said the funding will be used to expand its team, drive enterprise standardization, and capitalize on market demand for its product. More

Diagram Ventures has announced the close of its second fund, raising $55 million CAD as the firm also brings on Smooch.io co-founder Hamnett Hill as a Partner. The fund marks Diagram’s second since it launched in January 2017 with $25 million from Portag3 and more than 50 angel investors.  More

San Francisco-based virtual health coaching company Vida Health has raised a $30 million Series C financing round from investors GuideWell Mutual Holding Corporation, Teladoc Health and Workday Ventures.  More

Axial Biotherapeutics, a Waltham, MA-based biotechnology company dedicated to building gut-targeted therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases and neurodevelopmental disorders, raised $10m in Series B extension funding. More

Druva, which provides software-as-a-service-based data protection, backup and management solutions, has raised $130 million in a round of funding that CEO and founder Jaspreet Singh says takes the company “well past the $1 billion mark” in terms of its valuation. More

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Acquisitions

Purpose Financial has announced the acquisition of Toronto-based CreditGenie, a startup aiming to disrupt the point-of-sale financing experience for merchants and consumers. The terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.  More

In a bid to expand its educational offerings, iRobot has acquired local Massachusetts-based startup, Root Robotics. The company is the creator of the eponymous coding robot, a two-wheeled device designed to draw on whiteboards and other surfaces, scanning colors, playing music and otherwise playing out coding instructions More

The old guard of advertising networks continues to swap hands. In the latest development, marketing company Fluent has announced that it is buying AdParlor, a company that built early inroads into advertising and advertising strategy on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. According to an 8-K filing, the deal is valued at $10 million: $7.5 million in cash when the acquisition closes, and a further $2.5 million over the next two years. More

New Funds

Dawn Capital has made a name for itself over the last several years for having a sharp eye when it comes to spotting interesting B2B startups in Europe before they become big, with companies like iZettle (acquired by PayPal last year for $2.2 billion), Mimecast (IPO’d and now worth $2.8 billion), Collibra and Showpad among its stable. Today, it’s announcing the close of a new fund that will help it capitalise on those growing bets more directly itself  More

IPOs

Slack’s  public debut is happening Thursday on the NYSE and the company has set a reference price of $26 per share for its direct listing, according to WSJ, which would value the company at around $15.7 billion.  More

Life Science News

Tech giant Google and French pharmaceutical company Sanofi are teaming up to establish an innovation lab that will combine their capabilities. More specifically, the lab will apply technology and analytics to Sanofi’s real-world database. The aim is to better understand diseases and which treatments work for patients, resulting in Sanofi being able to offer more personalized approaches to treatment.  More

Legal News

UnitedHealth Group’s $4.3 billion acquisition of Denver-based Davita Medical Group has received provisional clearance by the Federal Trade Commission after being held up in regulatory red tape for more than a year. The effort by the nation’s largest insurer to become the nation’s largest employer of clinicians received FTC approval with an agreement to divest some of the company’s holdings in the Las Vegas area to address antitrust issues. More