Participated · Series A · May 2021

Esco Lifesciences supplies enabling technologies, products and services to the life sciences and healthcare industries, supporting academic research, clinical practice, and biopharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing. The company operates an extensive sales network in over 100 countries and maintains direct sales and service offices in more than 20 countries. It runs eight manufacturing and R&D hubs across the US, Europe, the UK, China and Singapore, and has over 1,300 employees worldwide. Esco plans to use the new funding to create an innovation hub in Boston focused on cell and gene therapy tools and technologies. Management intends to increase R&D and in-licensing efforts to develop and commercialize novel life-science research tools in emerging domains. The company is led by Chairman and CEO XQ Lin.

Participated · Series C · Jul 2016

Unity builds developer tools and a game engine that the company says is used to create about half of all video games. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and employs more than 2,000 people. Unity’s private valuation reached $6 billion after a $150 million Series E closed in May. Management is arranging a separate up-to-$525 million tender offer to provide liquidity for common shareholders, primarily current and former employees. The tender is being underwritten by several large institutional investors and will depend on employee participation. The move has prompted speculation that Unity may be delaying an IPO timeline; the company had previously been reported to target an IPO in early 2020. The company has previously raised hundreds of millions to buy back employee shares. Recent governance and leadership scrutiny followed a lawsuit filed by a former executive alleging sexual harassment by CEO John Riccitiello. Unity is a 13-year-old, San Francisco–based developer-platform whose core product is a game engine that handles games' basic operations and accelerates development. Its engine powers half of all new mobile games and 70% of virtual- and augmented-reality experiences. Unity's games and apps reach 2.4 billion devices quarterly, and mobile developers using its technology generated $12.4 billion in net revenue over the last two years. The company says the new funding will be used to pursue what it sees next, including increasingly pervasive 3D visuals. Unity competes with entrants such as Amazon's Lumberyard and Autodesk's Stingray. CEO John Riccitiello, a former Electronic Arts chief and early Oculus investor, leads the company. Unity Technologies develops a cross-platform game engine and development platform for building and distributing interactive experiences across many devices. The company has become a de facto choice for game developers, with over 5.5 million registered developers and an estimated 90% share of Gear VR content. Unity has aggressively embraced mobile and is positioning itself to accelerate AR/VR adoption through a 'write once/publish many' approach that supports multiple hardware platforms. High-profile AR experiences and games, including Pokémon Go, have been built on Unity’s engine. Financially, Unity closed a $181 million Series C at a reported $1.5 billion valuation, a round that dwarfs its prior total capital raised of $25.5 million. As part of the financing, DFJ Growth will take a board seat. Unity Technologies builds a 3D game development platform and engine used by game developers worldwide. The company was founded in Copenhagen and is currently headquartered in Silicon Valley. Unity reports about 500,000 registered seats and roughly 150,000 monthly active seats; notable games built on Unity include Bigpoint’s Battlestar Galactica and Gazillion’s Marvel Super Hero Squad, and EA has a broad deal to use Unity tools. Today 12,000 of the company’s active developers are in China, and management expects China-based developers to represent 40% of Unity’s business within 18 months. To support that expansion it raised a $12 million second round of financing from Asian investors. Previous investor Sequoia Capital also participated in the round. Unity Technologies builds a 3D game development platform that lets developers create games for multiple platforms including the iPhone, PC, Mac and Nintendo’s Wii. The company has seen strong growth on the iPhone, where over 250 games now use the Unity toolset and Unity says those games can see up to a 3x performance boost versus other solutions. Notable titles built with Unity include Cartoon Network’s FusionFall and EA Games’ Tiger Woods; the TC50 finalist Hangout.net also uses the platform. Technically, Unity uses Mono (an open-source .NET implementation) for scripting, which the company says allows code to be JIT- or AOT-compiled to native code while remaining sandboxable and easy to use, and it offers extensive documentation and libraries. The company recently moved its home base from Copenhagen to San Francisco while keeping its core development team in Copenhagen. Financially, Unity has closed a $5.5 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital as reported in the article.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2016

Ant Financial operates Alipay and offers digital banking and investment services, claiming to serve roughly 500 million consumers in China and a global footprint of 870 million consumers. The company posted about $1.4 billion in profit over the last year. Ant has been expanding overseas via investments, joint ventures and new businesses across multiple Asian markets. The firm plans to use new capital to extend its global expansion, deepen presence in non-China markets, develop technology and hire. Alibaba spun Ant off before its 2014 IPO and recently took an option to own 33 percent of Ant's shares. Ant previously raised $4.5 billion in 2016 at a reported $60 billion valuation. Ant Financial is an Alibaba affiliate that operates Alipay and provides a range of financial services including micro-loans and Alibaba’s digital bank, MyBank. The company says it reaches 450 million users overall, with payment, insurance and wealth-management services reaching 140 million people in rural China and MyBank having issued 20 million loans to SMEs and entrepreneurs. It has expanded beyond China via its investment in Paytm; at the turn of 2016 Paytm had 122 million users and was processing 52 million transactions a month, up 230% year-on-year. Ant Financial was spun out of Alibaba in December 2014 and has leveraged Alibaba’s e-commerce scale—Alibaba reported $5.3 billion in revenue in the referenced quarter. The company is widely tipped to pursue an IPO and a vice president said he hopes to list on both domestic and offshore exchanges. Ant emphasizes financial inclusion for people in remote areas and says it will work with investors like CIC to expand its footprint overseas. Ant Financial Services Group is Alibaba Group's internet finance affiliate and operates Alipay, the firm's flagship online payments platform. The company has been granted permission to run an internet bank and offer wealth-management products. Beijing has positioned Ant to help shake up China's conservative finance sector and better serve smaller businesses and individual borrowers. Reuters reports the unit was valued at about $45 billion after a private placement. Ant sold stakes to external investors including China Development Bank Capital and a holding company affiliated with David Yu; China’s National Social Security Fund acquired about 5 percent. Following the placement, David Yu and other external investors now hold 12.4 percent of the company. Shanghai Securities News had earlier reported Ant was seeking to raise up to $4 billion in a private placement of shares.

Participated · Series E · Aug 2015

Grab operates as a Southeast Asian "super app" combining on-demand transportation, delivery, and financial services. The company said it will use the latest $300M investment to further strengthen its regional presence and unlock more opportunities across those business lines. Grab is also exploring opportunities and collaborations beyond Southeast Asia, including a recent investment and deeper partnership with London-based Splyt. That partnership and an $8M Series A investment in Splyt allow Grab users traveling outside Southeast Asia to book rides through Grab’s platform fulfilled by Splyt partners. The $300M from US-headquartered Invesco brings that firm's total investment in Grab to $703M, which includes $403M that OppenheimerFunds invested in July 2018. Grab previously raised $1.46B from the SoftBank Vision Fund in March 2019 and is targeting $6.5B in total capital between June 2018 and the end of the year. Invesco, which has a presence across several Asian markets, manages approximately $1.1 billion in assets for its clients worldwide. Grab provides an on‑demand O2O mobile platform across Southeast Asia, offering services such as payments via GrabPay, food ordering through GrabFood, parcel delivery with GrabExpress, and ride‑hailing. The company is aiming to expand the range of everyday O2O services and evolve into a regional "super app." It recently launched GrabFresh, an on‑demand grocery delivery service in Jakarta with plans to roll out to other cities later in 2018. Grab said it will use proceeds from its current financing to broaden partnerships and the universe of services available to users. A significant portion of the funds will be invested in Indonesia. The company raised a large financing round (see deal details) to support these growth initiatives. GrabTaxi is a Singapore-based automated, location-based smartphone booking and dispatch platform for the taxi industry in Southeast Asia. Launched in 2012 and led by Anthony Tan, the company operates in 23 cities across six countries: Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. GrabTaxi raised $350m in this funding round, bringing total funding to over $700m. Backers included Coatue and China Investment Corporation among others. The company is hiring. The platform focuses on taxi booking and dispatch. GrabTaxi, founded in 2012, operates a GPS‑enhanced smartphone taxi‑dispatch service that allows passengers to hail the nearest taxi. The company serves 17 cities across six Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. Tens of thousands of taxi drivers use GrabTaxi’s smartphone technologies to receive bookings, and the app has over 2.5 million downloads and about 500,000 monthly users. GrabTaxi’s stated mission is to revolutionize the taxi industry by creating safer, more reliable rides and improving drivers’ livelihoods. Following rapid growth, the company plans to accelerate regional expansion and leverage partnerships to drive further adoption. GrabTaxi operates a mobile app for booking licensed taxis and has expanded into private car (GrabCar) and motorbike taxi services across 16 cities in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia. The company has seen its app downloaded more than 2.1 million times, with over 400,000 monthly active users and a claimed network of more than 50,000 drivers. CEO Anthony Tan said the new funding will be used to hire talent to build a world-class app, improve driver loyalty programs and generally grow and expand the service. GrabTaxi has been rolling out new service types and plans to announce an additional city expansion before month-end. The company has not disclosed revenue or profitability timelines. It views increased competition, including from Uber, as a way to drive consumer awareness and improve service levels for drivers.