British businesses in the regions are suffering heavily from ensuing disparities in investment. According to the independent report by the UK 2070 commission, the UK is one of the most regionally unbalanced countries in the industrialised world and the disparities will widen unless the government adopts a radical programme of investment.

Machine Labs, has announced £800,000 equity funding received from Techstart Ventures, the founders, angels investors with additional grant funding from Scottish Enterprise.  The seed funding will be used to recruit a team of eight based in offices opposite Edinburgh Castle.

Andrew Veitch, Founder and CEO of Machine Labs said: "For most of us database marketing is spam or junk mail. Machine Labs want to use machine learning to make marketing messages relevant, so consumers get the right offers at the right time instead of being irritated by marketing they are not interested in."

WeGift, the digital rewards platform, has secured £4 million in Series A funding, led by Fred Destin at Stride.vc, who also joins the Board of Directors, and other high-profile investors including SAP.iO fund and Unilever Ventures. WeGift also announced new angel investors including James Hind, founder of Carwow and Eamon Jubbawy at Onfido. This investment round will help WeGift deliver on its vision of creating the world’s first real-time infrastructure for digital rewards and incentives. The funds will be used to further scale WeGift’s operations, as well as to support the company’s expansion to the US, and for further investment in its technology platform. 

With a huge shift in emphasis towards regional funding support, the Connected Investing event series, hosted by the UK Business Angels Association, will lift the lid on the latest initiatives open to both the investor and start-up communities. 

London-based bakery, Orée, has raised £425,000 through Angel Investment Network (AIN) the UK’s largest online platform connecting angel investors with startup businesses.

HBAN, the all-island organisation responsible for the promotion of business angel investment and a joint initiative between Enterprise Ireland, InterTradeIreland and Invest Northern Ireland, today announces that its winning streak at the European Business Angels Network (EBAN) annual congress has continued. Phorest, the HBAN-backed salon software company, was named most successful business financed by early stage investors at this year’s event in Helsinki.

BlockClaim, the first hybrid artificial intelligence and blockchain technology solution developed for the insurance industry, has successfully completed its seed funding round with a £500,000 investment.

London-based insurtech firm Zego has raised $42million in one of the largest funding rounds for a European insurtech start-up. 

The Ticket Fairy, a growth and sales channel partner for the live events industry, has announced the official launch of its cloud-based events platform - an easy-to-use, self-service solution, combining ticketing, marketing and event management, that increases revenue, reduces financial risk, and provides event organisers, venues and tour managers with access to unparalleled data, analytics and intelligence. 

Inzura.ai the UK based global InsurTech has raised a further £1m in a pre-A funding round. This follows a seed investment round in early 2018 and rapid growth in the UK and South East Asian markets.

Inzura works with brokers and insurers to deliver enhanced digital versions of their insurance products through smartphone apps, leveraging telematics, integrated dashcams and artificial intelligence (AI). With some customers already achieving over 30% improvements in loss ratio, Inzura's digital products are customer focussed, cost significantly less to operate, reduce fraud, and enable greater pricing accuracy.

With a huge shift in emphasis towards regional funding support, the Connected Investing event series, hosted by the UK Business Angels Association, will lift the lid on the latest initiatives open to both the investor and start-up communities. 

With the government driven Digital Economy Council announcing that twenty-two Unicorn businesses have originated outside of London, these events focusing on regional investment could not be more timely. The event will feature the latest updates from newly emerging funds, including the British Business Investments £100m fund and Innovate UK’s regional angel investment accelerator.

In partnership with The Invested Investor, this month’s Start-up Spotlight features an interview with Sarah Turner a technologist, entrepreneur and angel investor. She's spent most of her career working in and around digital technology in the UK, Europe, US and Asia. Sarah works as both an advisor and connector for start-ups as well as corporates. In 2014 she co-founded the award-winning angel network, Angel Academe.