Automotive
Battery breakthroughs
Volkswagen invested a further $200m into QuantumScape, a US startup developing solid-state batteries. Volkswagen had already invested $100m in the company, and owned a 5% stake, but is now making a bigger bet in the technology which promises to last longer and charge faster than the current generation of batteries.
Solid-state batteries are more expensive than current lithium-ion ones, but Volkswagen and QuantumScope have plans to set up a pilot factory to investigate how to ramp up industrial-scale production.
Meanwhile, researchers at Brown University have discovered a way to use graphene to increase the toughness of solid-state batteries.
Energy
Hydrogen
Enel, Europe’s largest utility, is set to launch a hydrogen business next year. The move comes just as Germany earmarked €9bn to expand its hydrogen capacity and the EU is expected this week to launch a hydrogen strategy with aims to turn this into a €140bn industry by 2030. There is a good summary of the state of play in this Petroleum Economist article.
Financial services
Upgrading
Santander InnoVentures led the $40m Series D funding round into Upgrade Inc, the US mobile bank.
SME insurance
Spanish insurer Mutua Madrileña and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, corporate venture capital of Liberty Mutual Insurance, took part in the €4.47m Series A funding round for SingularCover, a startup offering personalised insurance for small businesses and freelancers.
Healthcare
Swallowed up
Not all healthcare startups are booming. Proteus Digital Health, whose investors include Novartis Venture Fund, filed for bankruptcy. The startup makes pills with sensors that can monitor whether patients have taken them or not.
“Medication adherence” — i.e. getting patients to take pills as prescribed — is a huge problem in medicine. But it seems Proteus’ solution was expensive and patients didn’t react well to the idea of swallowing monitoring devices.
Diabetes hope
Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund was one of the investors in the $4.5m seed funding round for DiogenX, a French biotech company developing a drug that could potentially regenerate insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in type-1 diabetics.
It is one of many approaches being pushed forward to help manage the disease better. We recently wrote about a nanofibre “teabag” that could be used to implant pancreatic cells in diabetic patients.
mRNA vaccines
Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund was also an investor in Belgian biotech eTheRNA, which is developing a vaccine for Covid-19 and recently picked up a €34m Series B funding round. The company uses messenger RNA to develop the vaccine, an approach that is emerging as a front-runner in the race to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
IPO glut
Healthtech initial public offerings are still going strong. Repare Therapeutics, a precision oncology company backed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Celgene, and Forma Therapeutics, a Novartis and Eli Lilly-backed company developing therapeutics to treat rare hematologic diseases and cancers both launched successful IPOs.
Recycling
C4 Therapeutics, which is backed by Roche, Novartis and Kraft Group, raised $170m to start human testing for its treatments that use cells’ own natural recycling mechanisms to combat diseases.
Marketing
Social listening
BNP Paribas Développement was one of the investors putting in a total of $9m into Linkfluence, the French social media listening company. Linkfluence uses natural language processing and image recognition to monitor consumer responses to brands.
Music
Sampling
Swedish music sampling service Tracklib has raised $4.5m from investors including the Sony Innovation Fund. Artists who have used Tracklib’s 100,000+ catalogue of sample-friendly music to create their songs include Lil Wayne, DJ Khaled, Phantogram, Mary J. Blige and J. Cole.
Quantum computing
Suspended ions
IonQ, the quantum computing startup, extended its Series B funding round with an additional $7m, bringing the total invested in the company to $84m. Lockheed Martin and Robert Bosch Venture Capital were among the new investors.
IonQ is developing a version of quantum computing based on ions suspended in a vacuum by electromagnets. Many of the other quantum computing projects have gone for superconducting qubits that need to be cooled to near absolute zero, but IonQ’s trapped ion technology has the advantage it can run at room temperature.
Bosch and Lockheed Martin have both made a number of investments in quantum computing. Bosch invested in quantum software company Zapata last year.
Real estate
Haus sales
Purplebricks and Axel Springer were among investors putting a further €40m into Homeday, the German real estate broker.
Robotics
No code needed
Microsoft’s M12 and Siemens' Next47 investment arm took part in the $30m Series B funding round for Wandelbots, the German robotics startup that allows industrial robots to be taught tasks without the need to write code.
The Covid-19 pandemic is causing demand for robots to surge, and the cost of robots has been coming down dramatically over the past decade. However, the time and effort needed for coding robots has still put them out of reach for many users. A no-code robot could pave the way for much broader adoption.
Spatial awareness
SLAMcore, a UK startup developing spatial awareness algorithms for robots and drones, raised $5m from investors including Toyota AI Ventures.
Security
Attacking the attackers
Red Eléctrica de España, which runs the national grid in Spain, was one of the investors in the $5m funding round for CounterCraft, a US-based cybersecurity company that turns the tables and counterattacks cyber attackers.
Who's hiring?
Kristin Aamodt is leaving Equinor Technology Ventures
Nerida Scott has been appointed Johnson & Johnson’s new head of innovation for EMEA, based in London
Innovation manager, a growing fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business specialising in the petcare sector, Hertfordshire, UK
Director of consulting – Global Hybrid Agency, London, UK
VP strategy, Huge (agency), London, UK
Strategy director, R/GA, Berlin, Germany
Strategic business developer, New Solutions & Propositions, Vattenfall (energy), Stockholm, Sweden
Director of AI, Nordic countries, Huawei, Stockholm, Sweden
Good reads:
The new ways to eat
A fascinating look at how the way we cook and eat is changing by Fast Company. A huge number of new terms will have to be coined for this. Welcome to edu-cooking and the groceraunt.
Innovation no longer a priority
Research from McKinsey suggests that innovation is indeed drying up at companies as other priorities take up executive brainspace. Focus on innovation is down in every industry except for healthcare.
