The Riverside Company, a global private investor focused on the smaller end of the middle market, has signed a definitive agreement to sell Greenphire, the global leader in financial lifecycle management software for clinical trials, to Thoma Bravo, a software focused private equity firm. 

Keensight Capital, one of the principal private equity managers dedicated to pan-European Growth Buyout1 investments, has reached an agreement to invest alongside management in Symeres, a leading European drug discovery Contract Research Organization (CRO) and Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO). According to the terms of the agreement, Keensight Capital will acquire a majority stake in Symeres from the Gilde Healthcare Private Equity fund, a leading European specialist healthcare investor.

ICAS World Ltd (ICAS), a leading global provider of mental health and employee wellness services has acquired the NHS-commissioned mental health tech startup, Hello Tomo. 

London-based soft prosthetics company, Koalaa, is celebrating after securing investment from British Design Fund (BDF), to help bring its innovative prosthetics to children and adults across the UK and beyond.

Cambridge based biotechnology company, Phico Therapeutics, has announced it has received £7 million in funding from a consortium of investors.  BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active growth capital investor, led the round with a £3 million investment, while a further £4 million was received from existing backers.  Founded in 2000 by Dr Heather Fairhead, Phico is developing a biotechnology platform for a new generation of antibiotics to overcome antibacterial resistance. 

Mogrify Limited, a biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the development of ex vivo cell therapies and pioneer a new class of in vivo reprogramming therapies, has completed the second closing of its Series A financing of $17 million USD, bringing the total raised to $33 million USD in this round. 

Botanical Holdings, the investment holding company focusing on the legal medicinal cannabis industry, comfirms that its Portuguese subsidiary, CECO Wellness (part of the EuroCan division) will receive grant funding of up to €4.3 million ($5.2 million) from the Portugal 2020 Fund. This fund is a partnership between the Portuguese government and the European Commission.

University of Birmingham spinout ChromaTwist Ltd has secured £300k of seed funding to develop a new class of fluorescent materials for use in bio-sensing and bio-imaging tests for diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Growth capital investor, BGF has exited its investment in Nottingham-based life sciences incubation business, BioCity.  

BGF backed BioCity in January 2019 with funding facilitating BioCity’s investment into a number of seed-stage life sciences businesses. BGF has also invested alongside BioCity in deals such as its investment into North West-headquartered proteomic-data science and diagnostics company, Kinomica, in November last year.   

o2h Ventures, a UK based fund manager through investment in its SEIS and EIS human health funds has made an investment into Stingray Bio Ltd, a new spin out from the University of Sussex supported by the Sussex Innovation Centre.

Oxitec Ltd, the leading developer of insect-based biological solutions to control pests that transmit disease, destroy crops, and harm livestock, has received US$6.8 million in funding from the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations, to fund scale-up programs for Oxitec’s just-add-water Friendly™ Aedes aegypti technology.

A team of top scientists from the University of Bristol have formed a new biotech company that is developing ground-breaking and newly patented potential treatments for Coronavirus.

Bristol-based Halo Therapeutics is backed by Charles Grimsdale (former Eden Ventures), Keith MacDonald and Mark Farmer (of Eden Ventures) and a group of Angels from the Bristol area.  It was founded by the team of leading scientists who made a recent breakthrough discovery, which was published in Science Magazine. They found that exposing the SARS-CoV-2 (Coronavirus) virus to a free fatty acid called linoleic acid locks the virus’s spike protein into a closed, non-infective form stopping it in its tracks.