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In this articleSPOTNorthvolt’s battery factory in the north of Sweden in June.NorthvoltNorthvolt, a Swedish battery maker, has raised $2.75 billion from a host of big names to help fuel its global expansion and increase production.The Stockholm-headquartered company makes the lithium-ion batteries that are used to power electric cars and it says it has signed deals worth $27 billion with the likes of BMW and VW. It is aiming to produce “the world’s greenest batteries” by drawing on renewable energy sources and recycled raw materials.The latest funding round, Northvolt’s largest yet, was co-led by Goldman Sachs and VW alongside new investors including Swedish pension funds AP1, AP2, AP3, AP4 and Canadian pension provider OMERS. Previous investors such as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and investment management firm Baillie Gifford are also investing in the round.Total investment in the company now stands at $6.5 billion. The latest round of funding values Northvolt at $11.75 billion, according to a person familiar with the company who asked to remain anonymous as Northvolt has not publicly disclosed the figure.Founded in 2016, Northvolt said it will use the funding to expand capacity at its factory in the far north of Sweden from 40 gigawatt-hours to 60 gigawatt-hours, which is enough to supply batteries for around 1 million electric vehicles. Production is expected to start at the factory later this year.Peter Carlsson, co-founder and CEO of Northvolt, told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday that the company is doing “fairly significant shipments” from a smaller facility that has been in operation for over a year to customers who are now doing their own “validations.”While none of the company’s batteries are in electric vehicles that are on the road today, they’re being used on test tracks, Carlsson said, adding that he expects Northvolt’s batteries to be delivered in vehicles from 2023 and in energy storage applications from the end of next year.VW, which made a $14 billion order with Northvolt earlier this year, said Wednesday it has invested 500 million euros ($609 million) of the $2.75 billion and that its 20% stake in the company remains unchanged.”With this investment, we are strengthening our strategic partnership with Northvolt as a supplier of sustainable battery cells which are produced using renewable energy and are comprehensively recyclable,” said Arno Antlitz, VW’s group board member for finance and IT, in a statement.Northvolt’s batteries are built on a “different chemistry” to Tesla’s and the performance is becoming increasingly similar, said Carlsson, who was Tesla’s vice president of supply chain in Palo Alto between 2011 and 2015.Making the batteries in a sustainable manner is one of Northvolt’s biggest challenges, he added. If the world transitions to electric vehicles with batteries from coal-based economies like China then it would create a new carbon footprint the size of Spain, Carlsson said. “If we do it based on renewable energy … we can prevent this from happening,” he said.The company’s main plant is in Sweden and it is considering building a second in Germany if it can find enough renewable energy sources.By 2030, it wants to achieve 150 gigawatt hours of deployed annual production capacity in Europe.

In this articleMSFTHopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat.HopinMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella laid out his plans in March for a future of hybrid work. Now, his company’s LinkedIn division is wagering that people will continue to convene online even after offices reopen.Virtual conference technology company Hopin, which was valued at $5.65 billion in a $400 million financing round in March, has just added LinkedIn to its roster of investors. The company told CNBC that LinkedIn invested at that same valuation, buying shares from existing stakeholders. The investment was under $50 million, according to two people familiar with the terms of the deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information.”Virtual events are here to stay,” Scott Roberts, LinkedIn’s vice president of business development, said in a statement. “We recognize our customers use many platforms, so we want to make it easy for them to extend the reach of their live events onto LinkedIn.”Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat said the companies will be collaborating in ways that will bring “immersive experiences” to users of both services. With 756 million members, LinkedIn has near ubiquity among workers in industries like tech, finance, consulting and consumer products, creating an easy place for Hopin to potentially connect wide swaths of people. Boufarhat said more details will be coming soon.For LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $27 billion in 2016, the investment is aligned with a view across much of the tech industry that the return to work will look very different from the pre-pandemic world. Remote hiring is skyrocketing, offices are consolidating and the five-day office commute is quickly becoming a thing of the past.Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Monday he expects 50% to 60% of employees to continue working from home. Nadella told Microsoft employees in October that the company will allow for more flexible work schedules. In a LinkedIn post in March, titled “The hybrid work paradox,” Nadella said employees want options to work remotely while also having more in-person collaboration.”Hybrid work represents the biggest shift to how we work in our generation,” Nadella wrote. “And it will require a new operating model, spanning people, places, and processes.”Hopin thrived in the pandemicHopin was in in the right place at the right time when the pandemic hit. The company was created just two years ago in London, and found itself rapidly onboarding users last year as live conferences were canceled and organizers sought a quick fix for going virtual.Hopin’s software lets conference hosts mimic the experience of physical events, with tools for virtual talks and sidebars for networking. It recently acquired video streaming service StreamYard and mobile app development company Topi, and launched its own mobile app in February.The company also rushed to fill its coffers, raising $40 million last June and $125 million in November, before the $400 million it reeled in earlier this year. Its employee base has grown from six at the beginning of 2020 to 550 today. More than 95,000 organizations now use the software, and millions of people attend virtual events every month, the company said.LinkedIn has been actively investing in software, backing at least three other start-ups this year, according to PitchBook. Most recently, LinkedIn was part of an $88 million financing in analytics start-up Piano in May.The company’s most notable investment came in 2014, two years before it was acquired by Microsoft. That’s when the developers of the Apache Kafka open-source software spun out of LinkedIn, creating a company called Confluent. LinkedIn invested about $500,000 as part of a $6.9 million investment, which valued Confluent at $24 million.Confluent is now set to go public with more than $300 million in annualized revenue, according to its prospectus filed last week, and a valuation that hit $4.5 billion last year.— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on remote work plans and passing SAP

In this article9984.T-JPThe logo of SoftBank Group in Tokyo.Philip Fong | AFP via Getty ImagesLONDON — SoftBank is aiming to put its money where its mouth is on diversity.SoftBank Investment Advisers, which manages the Japanese conglomerate’s Vision Fund for tech investing, said Wednesday it will launch its diversity-focused Emerge accelerator program in Europe.The company first introduced Emerge last year in the U.S. with WeWork Labs, the office rental firm’s start-up incubator, to back 14 start-ups whose founders come from underrepresented backgrounds. SoftBank says it has invested $5 million across 13 start-ups in the program so far.Now, SoftBank is bringing Emerge to Europe — but with a twist. This time, it’s bringing in Speedinvest and a number of other notable venture capital investors in the continent to provide access to a broader network of potential investors and partners.”Softbank is a famous investor in the later stages, with massive global successes” such as Uber, Oliver Holle, co-founder and managing partner of Speedinvest, told CNBC in an interview. “But they are not set up for investing in those very early nascent stages of company building.”Other venture funds participating in the European program include Breega, Cherry Ventures, firstminute capital and Kindred.Start-up accelerator programs are a common way for entrepreneurs to get access to mentorship in the early days of building their company. Many well-known tech firms today applied for accelerator schemes and went on to launch successful businesses, including Stripe, Airbnb and Coinbase.Catherine Lenson, managing partner and chief human resources officer at SoftBank Investment Adivsers.SoftBankTwo key differences between conventional accelerator programs and SoftBank’s is that the latter not only focuses on founders from Black and other minority backgrounds — it also invests in the companies.”It changed from being an accelerator about connections, tools, networks and opportunities to being an accelerator which funded the companies at the end of it,” Catherine Lenson, managing partner and chief human resources officer at SoftBank Investment Advisers, told CNBC.Last year, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and racism sparked discussions in boardrooms about how companies should address diversity. Tech is a sector that has gotten a bad rap for diversity, with people working in the industry predominantly white and male.Various tech investors — including SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz — have come up with initiatives aimed at tackling the issue. Some firms, like London-based Ada Ventures, backed new standards for venture capital that bring diversity to the forefront of investment decisions.In Europe, about 91% of venture money went to start-ups with all-male founding teams last year, according to a report from Atomico. And 62% of underrepresented founders found it more difficult to raise cash, up from 31% in 2019.”What we’re seeing is that founders from a diverse background were going through incredible incubators very early in their life,” said Lenson. But “as they came to later funding rounds, what we were finding was that doors were still closing for them,” she added.SoftBank’s Emerge program, which lasts eight weeks, will be open to a cohort of companies at seed stage that already have a viable product with potential to scale, and at least one founder who identifies as non-white, female, LGBTQ+, disabled or a refugee.The investors would then back successful start-ups’ seed rounds, with SoftBank injecting up to $2.5 million and Speedinvest matching this sum, Holle said. The other venture capital firms would participate with smaller commitments.Due to the coronavirus pandemic, SoftBank wasn’t able to run its 2020 program in person as originally planned. Lenson said the same would go for this year, however she hopes there could be an in-person component as travel restrictions ease in the coming months.Emerge isn’t SoftBank’s first diversity-focused investing initiative. The company also created a $100 million “Opportunity Fund” for minority-owned businesses, for example. SoftBank doesn’t have the best track record on backing diverse teams, however, having invested in only a handful of companies created by Black or female founders.