Over $12b was raised this week

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Hello readers,

Funding for late-stage companies continues to be wild this week. Check out those zeroes:

• Strategic investment: $5.7 billion
• Late stage: $5.6 billion
• Series D: $244 million

It’s also not looking too bad for those in seed and series A rounds, especially when we catch some American investors looking at the tech companies in Asia. 👀

We’re not just talking about the big hauls like Reliance Jio’s $4.5 billion investment from Google or Flipkart’s $1.2 billion from Walmart. Some smaller startups have also caught the attention of Western backers:

• Indian group payment platform GoDutch raised $1.7 million in a seed round from Y Combinator as well asa Tinder co-founder and a Twitch co-founder, among others.

• Malaysian business-to-business wholesale marketplace Dropee raised $1.3 million in a seed round from Y Combinator, Touchpoint Games’ chief operating officer, GooglePay’s machine learning lead, Colopl Next, and others.

You can find all the latest investment deals in our weekly funding news wrap-up article. (🔒)

Let’s dive into the biggest deals plus mergers and acquisitions (M&A) that recently happened.

The biggest deals by country

🇮🇳 Reliance Jio: An Indian conglomerate that owns telecommunications and digital services. Raised US$5.6 billion from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, KKR, Mubadala, Qualcomm Ventures, TPG Capital, and Vista Equity Partners.

🇨🇳 Chezhubang: A Chinese app that enables users to search for nearby gas stations. Raised US$129 million from CICC Capital, Joy Capital, Korea Investment Partners, Nio Capital, and Xiaomi.

🇯🇵 Sensyn Robotics: A Japanese company that provides businesses with industrial drones and other robotics solutions. Raised US$20.6 million from Comture Corp., Drone Fund, Eneos Innovation Partners, Eight Roads (Fidelity Ventures), Future Venture Capital, Globis Capital Partners, Itochu Technology Ventures, Japan Finance Corporation Kashiwabara Corp., and MUFG Bank.

🇮🇱 GoTo Global (Car2Go): An Israeli service provider that offer users shared cars, mopeds, bicycles, kick-scooters, and other vehicles. Raised US$19 million from Shagrir.

M&A

Deep-thinking reads

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