It was a relatively slow week on the venture capital dealmaking front, as the biggest deals of this past week were SoftBank’s acquisition of chip designer ARM and Unilever’s billion-dollar purchase of Dollar Shave Club. Here’s the rest of what happened:
Capital Gains: Goldman Sachs links up with an ex-Uber exec, and a ‘probiotic seeds’ startup lands another $100M
A big week for ag tech.
Todd Bernard / Recode
- Sprinklr, which makes software to help companies manage their social media activity, raised a new $105 million funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation. Singaporean firm Temasek led the round, with additional cash from Wellington Management, EDBI and others (Wall Street Journal).
- Boston-based agriculture startup Indigo makes “probiotic seeds” that don’t need as much water to survive. The company just raised $100 million of Series C funding led by Alaska Permanent Fund, making it “the largest private equity financing in the agricultural technology sector ever.” Wow! (The Verge)
- Student lending startup CommonBond landed a $30 million equity investment round led by asset manager Neuberger Berman (Bloomberg).
- Israeli mobile software security startup Skycure raised $16.5 million in Series B funding, led by Foundation Capital, with additional funding from Shasta Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital and others (TechCrunch).
- Brazilian startup CargoX, which makes management software for truckers and freight companies, raised $10 million of funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from early Uber employee Oscar Salazar and others (Wall Street Journal).
- Chinese tech giant Baidu invested in and entered into a partnership with the credit score analysis startup ZestFinance. The startup was founded by ex-Google executive Douglas Merrill (Fortune).
And finally, this isn’t a funding announcement, but occasionally we do some venture capital news: Spark Capital has hired a new marketing and communications partner: former Facebook and Twitter exec Rachael Horwitz.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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