CES was this past week, and everyone at the techno show was talking about cars. Predictably, some big car-tech funding news also dropped this week, involving players like Audi and GM. Here’s what went down:
Capital Gains: GM Injects Lyft With Half a Billion, Audi Invests in Rentals, and More
Car tech and cancer tech raised major money this past week.
Todd Bernard
- General Motors, under pressure from Ford, Google, Apple, Uber and just about every other big company doing something car-related, made a $500 million investment in Lyft this week. The deal includes a partnership that will focus on developing a car-hailing service using autonomous driving technology.
- Pharmaceutical giant Roche led a $175 million in Flatiron Health, the biotech startup that sells software related to cancer treatment. Allen & Company, Baillie Gifford and Casdin Capital also kicked in for this latest round; previous investors include Google Ventures and First Round Capital (New York Times).
- Cancer-screening biotech startup Guardant Health raised a $100 million round led by OrbiMed Advisors, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Formation 8 (Bloomberg Business).
- Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is leading a $52 million investment round in the Brazilian financial-technology startup NuBank, which offers something like a digital credit card for smartphones. Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital and Kaszek Ventures also contributed (New York Times).
- Israeli enterprise data analysis startup Sisense scored a $50 million funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Part of the money will be used to open an office in the U.K. (Reuters).
- Toast, a commerce-tech competitor of Square’s that focuses on Android-powered sales systems for restaurants, raised a $30 million Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Google Ventures and other unnamed investors (VentureBeat).
- Audi led a $28 million Series C investment in Silvercar, a car-rental startup that only rents out silver Audi sedans. The point of the service is to simplify the process of renting a car through a mobile app with limited options (Fortune).
- Quartzy, a Y Combinator alum that sells laboratory supplies, raised a $17 million Series B round led by Eminence Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and others (Silicon Valley Business Journal).
- StartEngine, a crowdfunding platform that gives donors equity stakes instead of Kickstarter- or Indiegogo-like rewards, raised $5.5 million from the investment firm of software billionaire Aubrey Chernick (VatorNews).
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
