Chinaccelerator Daily Digest 2019/11/20

China:

1. China sets up $21 billion national investment fund to upgrade manufacturing

2. Alibaba could raise up to $12.9b in Hong Kong listing

3. “Chinese Quora” Zhihu 知乎 to develop its own Wikipedia-like section

4. TikTok owner ByteDance overtakes Baidu to become second-largest digital ad player in China, behind only Alibaba

5. Xiaomi’s Xiao AI assistant passes 49.9 million users

6. AI firm Megvii to seek approval for $500 million Hong Kong IPO

7. Tencent-backed Yeahka 移卡, Chinese payment technology services provider, to seek US$300 million in Hong Kong IPO

8. Tencent leads $142m Series D+ round in Chinese oncology database Medbanks

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Mobile-only Markets:

1. P2P regulations critical for Vietnam to avoid fallout from Chinese crackdown

2. India’s Fireside Ventures, early-stage venture investment fund focused on consumer brands, announces first close of Fund II at $60m

3. Venture capital firm India Quotient to raise $100m across 2 funds

4. India’s Ola becomes world’s fourth most downloaded ride-hailing app due to global push

5. YouTube sees gaming as its next growth driver in India

6. Vietnam’s C2C online marketplace Sendo banks $61m in series C funding

Cross-Border:

1. Fintech funding tops $8.9b in Q3 but Asia could hit 4-year low this year

2. China’s MSA Capital, Bahrain’s Al Salam Bank set up $50m venture fund

3. Didi expands into Costa Rica

4. Tesla to Unveil Model 3 to the Chinese Market

5. Google launches machine learning course in Indonesia, in collaboration with Gojek, Tokopedia, and Traveloka 

6. Singapore’s food tech startup Eatsy now takes orders in Indonesia

Overseas:

1. The House Fund closes its second fund with $44 million to pour into UC Berkeley grads, alums and faculty

2. Facebook’s DeepFovea AI promises power-efficient VR foveated rendering

3. Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, Teams, passes 20 million daily users, up more than half in 4 months

4. Salesforce launches Service Cloud Voice, Einstein Voice Assistant, and Voice Skills

5. Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, releases data set to help develop AI that detects toxic comments

6. Data backup and recovery SaaS provider Clumio raises $135 million for cloud data backup and recovery tools

7. BlueVine, financial services startup, raises $102.5M more for banking services that target small businesses

8. IntSights, threat intelligence and protection platform, raises $30 million to detect and remediate cyberthreats

9. Office management platform Eden raises $25 million Series B

10. Superpedestrian, company developing long-lasting electric scooters and a cloud-hosted orchestration system, raised $20 million

11. Genomic medicine startup Lucence raises $20 million Series A for its non-invasive cancer screening technology

12. CyCognito, cybersecurity startup that aims to give visibility into a company’s security weak spots, raises $18M in Series A funding

13. Pensa Systems, Austin-based startup developing AI-powered, drone-based inventory tracking system, raises $10 million in seed round

14. Perlego raises $9M Series A for its textbook subscription service

15. Dream Games raises $7.5M seed to develop ‘high-quality’ puzzle games

16. Robotics startup Picnic, known for its automated pizza assembly system, raises $5 million

17. Give InKind’s smarter giving platform brings in surprise $1.5 million in pre-seed funding

18. Airfare and hotel booking platform Hopper’s Price Freeze taps AI to identify and lock in airfare deals

19. LA-based Maslo pivots to professional services, launching an AI product for executive coaching

20. Cerebras Systems deploys the ‘world’s fastest AI computer’ at Argonne National Lab

21. HackNotice Premium taps machine learning to tell you exactly what was exposed for $50 per year

Image Credits: KrAsia