Circular economy business CauliBox, which is the UK’s first tech-enabled reusable container scheme has secured £250,000 in a seed funding round led by SFC Capital, with Angel investors. CauliBox provides award-winning, digitally-enabled reusable solutions to disrupt the disposable food packaging market, an industry worth £45 billion a year globally. For its endeavours, CauliBox has been named in the FoodTech 500 and co-founder Josephine Liang was recently named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2021 - ‘Social Impact’ category.

Vira Health, a digital health company focused on improving long-term health for women, has raised £1.5M in seed funding from LocalGlobe, MMC Ventures, and angel investors including Megumi Ikeda, Managing Director, Hearst Ventures, Andrea Zitna of Elvie, former Spotify executive Sofia Bendz, founder of GoCardless Matt Robinson, and Simon Lambert, former CTO, MOO.com, and Treatwell. 

Business angel group HBAN Ulster, as part of the Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN), announced today its members have invested £8.5m into 38 early-stage companies in Northern Ireland in less than three years and urged more businesspeople to join its ranks.

Tulipshare is a brand new activist investment platform that empowers individuals to make a positive change within some of the biggest household-name companies in the world. Launching in the UK in July 2021, the platform will enable people to rethink the way they invest in businesses. Essentially allowing people to vote with their money, Tulipshare endeavours to play a tangible role in promoting ethical change in the boardrooms of global companies. 

Legal technology start-up Robin AI has raised $2.5m seed funding from Episode 1 and a number of leading angel investors including Paul Massara, Al Giles  and Oliver Burgel. They are also one of just 30 companies to be selected to receive a portion of the $2m Google Black Founders Fund, a programme set up to support the chosen companies as they work to change the face of start-up culture that currently sees just 0.5% of start-ups with Black founders receive institutional investment.

Edinburgh’s largest plastic free grocery store, The Refillery, has been nominated for the Food Hero Scotland campaign.

GraphCMS - a Berlin-based company whose pioneering content management platform enables enterprises to seamlessly deliver better digital experiences - has raised a $10 million Series A funding round. The round was led by OpenOcean, and previous investors Peak and Paua Ventures also participated, bringing the company’s total funding to $13.7 million. Mango Capital’s Robin Vasan (investor in HashiCorp, Netlify and others), Fauna founder and CTO, Evan Weaver, and Instana (acquired by IBM) founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic also joined this round. GraphCMS will use the funding to expand its commercial footprint within the US and European markets, further supporting businesses to create world-class content experiences in a fraction of time.

Data self-sovereignty is fundamental to a company’s resilience and yet communication platforms, like Whatsapp and Signal, are not sufficient for organisations compliantly handling sensitive information on a daily basis. Worldr is building a new type of communications and messaging platform built around privacy, security and data protection in team communication without compromising usability. It has now announced a $3million seed investment from some of the biggest names in deep tech, defence and finance as it heads into public launch later this year.

Ntropy, a company removing data barriers to understand financial transactions, has announced a $3.2M seed round led by QED Investors, who has previously invested in fintech unicorns Nubank, Klarna, and Current. Ntropy’s API enables businesses to convert raw data into contextualised and structured information understood by both man and machine.  January Ventures also participated in the investment round, along with founders and executives from Ramp, Square and Stripe.

The successful close of the second round of the GAS EIS Climate Change Fund on 15th July suggests that investors are waking up to the seriousness of the climate crisis, according to GAS CIO, Antoine Pradayrol. Exceptional heat waves in Canada, the north-west US, northern Europe and Siberia and raging wildfires, as well as the most recent horrific floods in Germany and Belgium, cannot be ignored.

Multi-family investment office, Arete, has made a significant investment as part of a multi-million-pound deal in North West based, Vivify. The scale-up provides a digital platform as well as a fully managed service where under-utilised school facilities can be listed for hire to maximise social and physical activities within communities and generate much-needed revenue for schools.

Remy Astie, CEO and founder of Vauban, makes the case for joining forces with other angels and highlights some of the benefits (for both investor and the companies they back).

In reaction to a COVID crisis that brought extremely low interest rates and an accelerated digital transformation, investors are increasingly exploring private investment opportunities in startups to enjoy better returns.