TechWire Rewind: AskBio $4B deal; earnings; corporate expansions; 80+ more headlines from last week

As Monday morning rolls in, we’re providing TechWire readers with a quick recap of the past week’s news headlines.

Notable news stories from last week included: Drug giant Bayer is acquiring RTP startup AskBio for as much as $4 billion, the third-largest deal of its kind for an NC bioscience firm; 16 startups from across North Carolina landed $10,000 grants through NC IDEA’s MICRO grant program; Burlington-based LabCorp returned $76 million it received in federal relief; communication solutions provider Avaya moved its corporate headquarters to Durham from the Silicon Valley area; Amazon opened a brick-and-mortar location at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh; BioAgilytix is adding 878 new jobs to its Durham headquarters; Durham electronics firm Nuvotronics is adding 150 jobs and investing $50 million into its new plant.

A few local companies secured new funding last week, including Raleigh-based Diveplane (amount undisclosed), Raleigh-based Finmark ($5 million), Durham-based Biospatial (over $1.8 million), Raleigh-based Hip eCommerce ($5.3 million), and Raleigh-based Advanced Chemotherapy Technologies ($5.5 million). Read more local startup news in our weekly Startup Rewind edition.

And, in national news: Wells Fargo layoffs are reportedly underway; Amazon is hiring 100,000 seasonal workers; the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google appeared in a Senate hearing to face questions about alleged anti-conservative bias; the stock market plunged as COVID-19 infections surged in Europe; the U.S.’s GDP grew at a 33.1% annual rate in the third quarter.

Keeping with our Monday “TechWire Rewind” tradition, here’s a look back at 86 local, state and national headlines as reported by WRAL TechWire last week: