Direct to Consumer brand Wild Cosmetics has raised £500K of seed capital from Angel investors to disrupt sustainability in the bathroom with the imminent launch of their natural, refill deodorants. 

HBAN (Halo Business Angel Network), the all-island organisation responsible for the promotion of business angel investment, and an initiative of Enterprise Ireland, InterTradeIreland and Invest Northern Ireland, today announces that business angels invested €16.8 million in 66 Irish start-ups in 2019.

Angel Investment Network (AIN), the UK’s largest online angel investment platform, has revealed its latest ‘State of the Angel Investment Nation’ findings. It is based on the data of more than 100,000 UK registered businesses looking for funding and 30,000 investors. 

A rapidly growing healthtech start-up on a mission to solve the NHS staffing crisis and bring flexible working to thousands of clinicians has secured £3m in a funding round led by Praetura Ventures. The round included additional backing from BMJ, the publisher behind The BMJ, and some existing angel investors. 

Patchwork, which has offices in London, Manchester and Liverpool, was founded by NHS doctors Anas Nader and Jing Ouyang in 2016 to help hospitals fill vacant shifts more cost-effectively and to stem the tide of clinicians leaving the health service due to poor work-life balance.

Eleven fast growing businesses have secured £2m of funding from HBAN (Halo Business Angel Network) Ulster Business Angels during its first year of operation in Northern Ireland.

Thrive, the Belfast-based provider of employee communications software and support, has secured strategic investment to help facilitate its plans to grow users fourfold to one million by 2022. The company is also initially creating 10 new jobs in marketing, software development, and customer care.  Thrive provides software and support to make employee communications easy and cost-effective. Its client-base includes councils, healthcare companies, manufacturing businesses, food firms, retailers and other organisations across the UK, Ireland and internationally.

Glasgow based investment syndicate Kelvin Capital has seen a 19% increase in its total investments in 2019, compared to 2018 levels.  The record figure saw £12.5m being invested, up from £10.5m in 2018, with new syndicate members joining from Europe and the Far East.

In the last quarter of 2019 alone, £2.75m was invested in Scottish based businesses including £1m into hydrogen technology company Logan Energy.  In the first quarter of 2020, £3.3m of new investment has already been committed to portfolio companies.

Placed, a mobile recruitment matchmaking platform for the service industry, has received investment from two members of Henley Business Angels, contributing towards a funding round of £1.2m.

Placed functions through having companies sign up to their platform and display jobs, solving the recruitment problem so many of them face by matching them up with prospective candidates seeking jobs. The idea for Placed came from years of working in the hospitality industry and by addressing each company’s needs Placed has grown rapidly; over 2,000 brands have now signed up to Placed, from Park Plaza Hotels to ROKA Restaurants, Nando’s and many more together with a growing database of over 100,000 job seekers.

HBAN recruited more than 100 business angel investors last year – significantly higher than its projected 75 new angels. The organisation is now aiming to sign up a further 100 angels in 2020, with its recruitment drive kicking off next month at HBAN’s All-Island Conference.

Business angel investment is continuing to grow across the island of Ireland and in December last year, HBAN announced that its members have now invested more than €100M in start-ups since 2007. This represents a doubling of the €50M figure reached in 2015 thanks to increasing angel numbers and activity.

Edinburgh-based bioinformatics company, Fios Genomics, which helps pharmaceutical and biotech companies to analyse the large amounts of data generated during drug development, has announced a strategic partnership with one of the world’s largest contract research organisations, Charles River Laboratories.

Oxford Investment Opportunity Network (OION) and Oxford Angel Network (OAN), part of Oxford University’s commercialisation arm Oxford University Innovation (OUI), are merging, with immediate effect, combining their operations to form a strong and cohesive Oxford-based angel network.

Access to finance for growth is critical to starting and scaling ground-breaking tech companies. This merger will contribute significantly to strengthening the appeal of the Oxford Cluster as a great place for companies to flourish. It is a vital step towards realising Oxfordshire’s potential, as expressed in the Local Industrial Strategy, of becoming one of the leading innovation ecosystems worldwide.

QVentures, manager of 29PP Pre-Seed Fund, will be leading the funding round in Ocyan, a cloud operating system for enterprise blockchains and P2P networks. Joining QVentures in the round is Wayra UK, the open innovation arm of Spanish Telecom giant, Telefónica.