TRIBAL RAISES $60 MILLION IN OVERSUBSCRIBED SERIES B
Tribal, a B2B payments and financing platform for emerging markets, has raised $60 million in Series B funding. To support its growing customer base in over 22 countries and its rapid expansion across Latin America, Tribal will use funds from this round to continue building its local teams in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. “We’ve grown our LatAm volume by 90x in 2021,” said Amr Shady, Chief Executive Officer at Tribal. “We’re thrilled to have value-add investors with strong operating experience who share our vision of democratizing access to world-class financial services for emerging-market SMBs.” More here. Tribal also raised a $40 million debt offering that was funded through fiat and stable coins giving the company additional capital to expand its business services and completed a token sale raising over $31 million. More here. 

E-COMMERCE ENABLER ‘REACH’ SECURES $30 MILLION INVESTMENT
Reach, the premier e-commerce payments partner connecting local businesses to global consumers, announced it secured a $30 million investment as it bids to accelerate its mission of unlocking a global customer base for merchants through a streamlined payment, tax, and fraud platform. The capital will be used to dramatically scale-up Reach’s development teams, with a focus on merchant success and onboarding, as well as expansion into new shopper geographies to help grow local acquiring networks for both merchants and partners. With e-commerce cross-border transactions set to surge to an estimated $1.2 trillion in 2022, consumer trust in foreign merchants has never been higher, with more customers than ever looking beyond their own localities for their ideal purchase. More here.

VOLTA LABS RAISES $20 MILLION IN SERIES A  
Volta Labs, a bio-automation company developing solutions to streamline the upstream workflows in genomic sequencing, announced it raised $20 million in a Series A funding round. Volta Labs’ platform-based solution for sequencing sample preparation is built on a dramatically simplified version of digital fluidics that leverages several novel inventions in fluidic manipulation. The platform integrates components from electronics, automation, and materials industries with a modern software stack. This has led to novel and enabling sample prep advancements that will be unveiled at the genomics conference in June of this year. To date, the company has raised over $25M in funding. More here. 

MOLECULAR ASSEMBLIES ANNOUNCES $25.8 MILLION SERIES B FINANCING
Molecular Assemblies announced that it has raised a $25.8 million Series B financing. The proceeds of the financing will be used to advance the company’s proprietary enzymatic DNA synthesis technology toward early commercialization and start a key customer program later this year. Due to the limitation of current chemistries, genes are routinely assembled using pieces of synthetic DNA of between 50 and 100 bases in length. The Fully Enzymatic Synthesis technology developed by Molecular Assemblies employs a template-independent DNA polymerase, called terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT), which has the ability to synthesize much longer DNA sequences with fewer errors in an aqueous solution. More here. 

ACTIV SURGICAL RAISES $15 MILLION IN SERIES B EXPENSION TO SUPPORT PRODUCT COMMERCIALIZATION
Activ Surgical announced it received a $15 million extension to its Series B financing round, bringing its total Series B to $60 million. Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC (Hikma), the multinational pharmaceutical company, led the round of financing. “Hikma Ventures’ investment in Activ Surgical comes at a critical inflection point in the company’s history as our team is hard at work preparing for the global launch of our ActivSight imaging module later this year,” Activ Surgical CEO Todd Usen said in the release. “This investment will allow us to scale our business quickly and add resources needed to ensure a successful rollout of the ActivSight imaging module, helping to fulfill our mission to empower surgeons’ intraoperative decision-making and, ultimately, enhance patient safety.” More here.

TRUST MACHINES RAISES $150 MILLION TO EXPAND BITCOIN AS A WEB3 PLATFORM 
Trust Machines launched out of stealth mode with $150 million in funding to expand bitcoin as a web3 platform. The company is building an ecosystem of applications and platform technologies aimed at unlocking what it views as bitcoin’s potential as a final settlement layer for computing platforms and applications. Trust Machines wants to extend bitcoin from being only a passive store of value to being the final settlement layer for a powerful new computational platform. The company will build upon the success of Stacks, where Trust Machines CEO was previously chief executive officer, to expand on the Stacks programming layer to make it faster and easier to develop on. The company’s mission is to build the largest ecosystem of bitcoin applications and grow the bitcoin economy. More here.

QUANERGY SYSTEMS ANNOUNCES CLOSING OF BUSINESS COMBINATION
Quanergy Systems, a leading provider of OPA-based solid state LiDAR sensors and smart 3D solutions for automotive and IoT, announced the closing of its previously announced business combination with CITIC Capital Acquisition Corp. (“CCAC”) (NYSE: CCAC), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company. The transaction gives the Company access to approximately $175 million in available liquidity on top of its existing balance sheet, before transaction expenses and debt paydown, consisting of approximately $50 million in cash proceeds from the PIPE and SPAC Trust, as well as up to $125 million in committed funding from a previously announced share subscription facility from Global Emerging Markets Group (“GEM”), a Luxembourg-based private alternative investment group. Quanergy Systems (NYSE: QNGY) began trading on the New York Stock exchange February 9, 2022 and its solutions are deployed by nearly 400 customers across the globe. More here. 

ASTRANIS FIRST MICROGEO SATELLITE COMPLETES FINAL TESTING AND IS READY FOR LAUNCH
Astranis Space Technologies announced that the first MicroGEO satellite is ready for launch after successful completion of final testing. Astranis has now completed all major tests necessary for its first MicroGEO spacecraft to be ready to ship to the launch site, including vibration and vibroacoustic tests, final solar array and antenna deployment tests, propulsion system tests, software tests, and electrical checkouts. This follows a successful thermal-vacuum, or TVAC, test campaign that was concluded late last year. Astranis MicroGEO satellites are 1/20 the size and cost of traditional GEO communications satellites. With a lower price tag and much shorter build times when compared to legacy satellites, Astranis provides dedicated satellite bandwidth as a service, allowing customers to connect people in places that have been overlooked, underserved, or priced-out of the market for fast, reliable broadband Internet. More here.

DAPPER LABS AND UFC LAUNCH ‘UFC STRIKE’: AN ALL-NEW NFT EXPERIENCE FOR MMA FANS EVERYWHERE
UFC®, the world’s premier mixed martial arts organization, and Dapper Labs announced the official launch of their highly anticipated NFT collectible product, UFC Strike. The all-new collectible experience will for the first time give MMA (Mixed Material Arts) fans the opportunity to own the most epic, talked-about fight moments in the history of UFC. UFC® is the world’s premier mixed martial arts organization with more than 625 million fans and 178 million social media followers. The organization produces more than 40 live events annually in some of the most prestigious arenas around the world while broadcasting to approximately 900 million TV households across more than 175 countries. More here. 

EVONETIX DEMONSTRATES NOVEL ENZYMATIC DNA SYNTHESIS
Evonetix the synthetic biology company bringing semiconductor technology to DNA synthesis announced it has achieved enzymatic DNA synthesis capability with its proprietary, thermally controlled synthesis chemistry. The culmination of a three-year development program, supported by Innovate UK and in collaboration with Durham University, the results demonstrate that Evonetix’s unique, semiconductor array-based platform is compatible with both chemical and enzymatic DNA synthesis, enabling the production of scarless DNA sequences that are directly compatible with downstream processing. Synthetic biology is estimated to grow rapidly over the coming years, reaching $40 billion in value in the mid-2020s. Synthetic biology will have a massive impact across many industries and will be fundamental to helping us manage the Earth’s resources. More here.

HPE AND AYAR LABS TEAM UP TO DESIGN FUTURE SILICON PHOTONICS SOLUTIONS
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) and Ayar Labs announced a multi-year strategic collaboration to usher in a new era of data center innovation by developing silicon photonics solutions based on optical I/O technology. The development of these technologies will support future requirements for high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. The two organizations also announced today that HPE’s venture arm, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, has made a strategic investment in Ayar Labs to accelerate the development and adoption of joint future technologies. As part of the collaboration, HPE and Ayar Labs will partner on photonics research and commercial development, building a joint ecosystem of solution providers, and customer engagements. More here.