Venture Capital Deals of the Week is going on holiday break. Check out a new column on January 23 at a new location, the Seeking Alpha Breaking News page.
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) Capital became a strategic investor in Pico, a provider of technology services for global financial markets, and helped close the $135M Series C round. Under the strategic partnership, Pico and Intel will collaborate on delivering a 100Gbps network data capture and real-time streaming analytics platform for financial markets trading.
The companies are also in early-stage development on building a financial services lab, where the companies can work with clients to incubate new concepts around AI processing, machine learning, network and trade analytics, and cloud monitoring.
Pico has used Intel Xeon processors in Corvil Analytics quantitative trading platform for over 15 years and recently introduced the second-gen Xeon Scalable platform with built-in AI acceleration.
"Fintech’s impact on capital markets continues to grow and those who successfully tap technological innovations can transform their competitiveness. Pico’s track record of innovation and strategic roadmap with Intel technology at its foundation should deliver low-latency high throughput process automation, machine learning and advanced analytics for the financial services industry. We look forward to playing an active role in their success," says Andy Fligel, senior managing director at Intel Capital.
Strategic investor EDBI also participated in Pico's latest funding round along with new investors CreditEase. Existing strategic backers and customers include Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Wells Fargo.
Other top VC deals of the week:
ByteDance (BDNCE) closed $2B in funding co-led by KKR and Sequoia Capital at a $180B valuation, according to Reuters sources. The TikTok owner’s valuation stood at as much as $140B in the secondary private equity market. The $40B valuation increase comes as TikTok continues to face an uncertain future in the U.S., though a federal judge last week ruled against the Trump administration’s attempted ban, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.”
PayPal-backed (NASDAQ:PYPL) Swedish open banking platform Tink raised €85M (about $103M) at a valuation of €680M or about $824M. The round was co-led by PE firm Eurazeo and VC firm Dawn Capital with PayPal among the other participants. Tink's platform aggregates data from thousands of banks around the world, which helps developers build new fintech products. Open banking is a hot sector with Visa attempting to purchase U.S. rival Plaid for $5.3B, though the Justice Department sued to block the deal on antitrust concerns.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 (OTCPK:SFTBF,OTCPK:SFTBY) led and Novartis (NYSE:NVS) participated in the $80M Series D for Pear Therapeutics, which develops software-based digital therapeutics platforms. Pear has three prescription digital therapeutics approved by the FDA: reSET and reSET-O for the treatment of substance abuse and opioid use disorder and Somryst for chronic insomnia. The new funds will help Pear accelerate reimbursement coverage for its three commercial products. As part of the round, SoftBank Investment Advisers investor Elena Viboch and former Henry Ford Health System CEO Nancy Schlichting will join Pear's board.
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