Private Company Edition: June’s eight $100m-plus venture capital rounds already outpace the seven each raised in March, April and May, including €255m ($274.2m) for ITM and $200m for Upstream, but while there were five $25m or less VC financings during the past week, mid-sized deals were lacking.

Private Company Edition: Newpath Partners’ second fund totals $350m, Merck KGaA committed €600m to M Ventures, Eir Ventures raised €122.3m and Breakout Ventures has $112.5m. Recent financings were led by SOTIO ($317.5m), Odyssey ($218m), Avistone ($200m) and Acepodia ($109m).

Private Company Edition: Venture capital mega-rounds continue a brisk pace with machine learning-based drug discovery firm insitro and gene therapy developer Graphite Bio among recent $100m-plus deals. Also, Argobio raised €50m to fund five start-ups in Europe. 

Around 100 executives highlight the hot areas to watch on the R&D front in 2021. From cancer to CNS and from regenerative medicine to real world data, expectations are high on many fronts.