Special Weekend Edition: What Does A Gaming Company Do After Raising $1.25B?

VC Deals

Adjust is announcing that it has raised $227 million in new funding. The company, founded in Berlin back in 2012, has created a variety of ad measurement and anti-fraud tools — CEO Christian Henschel said the goal is to “make marketing simpler, smarter and safer.” Adjust says it’s now being used in more than 25,000 mobile apps for customers like NBCUniversal, Zynga, Robinhood, Pinterest and Procter & Gamble.  More

BetterUp, a company that connects employees with expert career and leadership development coaches online, has secured a $103 million Series C from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Threshold Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Crosslink Capital, Tenaya Capital and Silicon Valley Bank.  More

Three months after announcing an initial $50 million investment in the company, private equity giant KKR is leading an additional $300 million in funding for cybersecurity firm KnowBe4, in a deal that values the startup at $1 billion.  More

Symphony, a messaging platform for Wall Street firms, has been valued at $1.4 billion, according to people with knowledge of the company. Shortly after CNBC reported the new valuation, the start-up announced that it raised $165 million from investors to fuel its global expansion.   More

London-headquartered sports media company MinuteMedia Ltd. has raised a $40 million funding round, the company announced Wednesday. The series G round was led by Nasdaq-listed Hamilton Lane Inc. and Luxembourg-based Maor Investments. Previous investors Goldman Sachs and Tel Aviv-based late-stage venture capital firm Qumra Capital also participated in the round. The latest round brought Minute Media’s total funding raised to date to approximately $120 million. More

Simpo is a startup with a simple idea. It wants to help product managers at large companies get software into the hands of its employee users faster. Today, the company announced a $4.5 million seed investment. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Janvest, UpWest, Seedcamp, Elad Gil and other unnamed investors.  More

MindBridge Analytics Inc., an Ottawa, Canada-based provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that apply risk-based approaches to allow organizations to extract insights from data, closed a $29.6M Series B financing.  More

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New Funds

Seven months ago, TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear reported that LocalGlobe had begun the fundraising process for two separate funds. The London-based seed-stage venture firm was raising yet another seed-stage venture fund, O’Hear said at the time; he also noted that LocalGlobe was also expect to raise its first opportunities fund.  More

Acquisitions

Toronto-based Intelex Technologies, an Environmental, Health, Safety and Quality (EHSQ) SaaS company, has been acquired for $570 million USD by Industrial Scientific, a connected sensing technology company that creates software for worker safety.  More

Kai Innovations, a Toronto-based SaaS company looking to shift health information to electronic medical records (EMR), has been acquired by Vancouver-based Well Health Technologies for approximately $10.75 million. More

What does a gaming company do after raising $1.25 billion? Acquisitions seem like a pretty good place to start. Epic Games — of Unreal Engine and the ridiculously successful Fortnite phenomenon — has just picked up Houseparty.  More

Exits

The amateur esports platform Super League Gaming Inc has acquired the fast-growing social video network Framerate for $2.5 million in cash and stock, according to a corporate filing on Friday. It is the first acquisition for Super League since going public in February and is likely just one of more deals yet to come for the company.  More

Bankruptcy News

An opioid drugmaker whose former executives were convicted last month in a scheme to illegally influence doctors to prescribe its drug and that reached a nearly quarter of $1 billion settlement last week is filing for bankruptcy.  More

Transportation News

Russian tech giant Yandex has been testing autonomous vehicles on public roads since December 2017, starting in Moscow and later expanding to Innopolis and Skolkovo, Russia, as well as Las Vegas. The program’s next phase saw cars reach Tel Aviv’s city limits, and now, after five months of successful testing in Israel, the company is prepping for further expansion.  More

People News

Sunny Balwani, the former chief operating officer and president of Theranos, will fight the criminal fraud charges against him, his attorney told CNBC on Monday. “We’re going to fight it,” Jeffrey Coopersmith said prior to a court hearing connected to the case.

Balwani is facing nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and is awaiting his criminal trial.  More