Owkin and Sanofi have announced that Owkin is now a unicorn – a startup valued at more than $1 billion – through a new $180 million investment from Sanofi. Sanofi will take a $180 million equity stake and alongside the investment, Owkin and Sanofi will enter a strategic multi-year collaboration to seek out new cancer therapies using AI. The project will focus on four types of cancer including non-small cell lung cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, mesothelioma, and multiple myeloma. They will use Owkin's predictive biomedical AI models to find new biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Owkin will also build prognostic models to predict how a patient will respond to a particular treatment.

Founded by the former chief executive of electronics manufacturer Flextronics, Katerra handles everything from design to construction to manufacturing of glued wood beams, while building prefabricated walls and fixtures in indoor factories. The Menlo Park, Calif., startup calls itself a "technology company," emphasizing software aimed at making the process more efficient. A main innovation appears to be a business model that puts architects and construction workers on the same payroll. The deal, which values Katerra above $3 billion, marks the latest investment by the Vision Fund in ground rarely tread upon by tech investors. The fund, anchored by a $45 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia, was initially described by SoftBank as a vehicle to invest in technologies of the future such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

Alphabet Inc's Google has led a $120 million investment in Chinese live-stream mobile game platform Chushou, the two companies said on Friday, as the U.S. firm eyes new inroads to China where its search engine is blocked. Founded in 2015, Chushou is an online e-sports platform where users can live stream their mobile phone games. The service has roughly 8 million streamers and 250,000 live streams a day, said the companies in a statement. Google will help the Chinese firm expand its services to target more overseas viewers, it said. Live stream gaming platforms are a popular form of e-sports in China, part of a growing industry that involves competitive game play viewed by spectators.

SoftBank Vision Fund, the world's largest private equity fund, is considering a $500 million investment in the Hong Kong initial public offering of ZhongAn Online Property and Casualty Insurance Co Ltd, China's first internet-only insurer, IFR reported on Thursday, citing people close to the deal. The fund is likely to be a so-called cornerstone investor in ZhongAn's up to $1.5 billion IPO, added IFR, a Thomson Reuters publication. The IPO, the biggest by a financial technology company in the city, is expected to launch as early as Sept. 18. SoftBank and ZhongAn declined to comment when contacted by Reuters. Vision Fund, which has raised over $93 billion to invest in technology sectors such as artificial intelligence and robotics, is backed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp, Saudi Arabia's main sovereign wealth fund and companies including Apple Inc and Qualcomm

In early May, New York-based tech startup Agolo completed its first seed round of funding, pulling in over $3.5 million in investments from Microsoft Ventures and CRV, with participation from Point72 Ventures and Franklin Templeton. But how did this entrepreneur go from Egypt to snagging such overwhelming corporate interest in the heart of the Big Apple? An interview with Mohamed AlTantawy - Egyptian, AUC graduate, and co-founder of Agolo - reveals how the startup progressed from ideation to actualization. AlTantawy's AI-powered startup provides machine summarisation software that gathers documents from around the web and breaks down key points for the user, eliminating the need to spend hours sifting through information to find the most important details, and works through natural language processing technology. "This is the area of computer science where algorithms try to make sense of human language," the entrepreneur explains.