Albion Capital, the leading independent investment manager, has led a £6.5 million Series A investment round in PayAsUGym (‘PAUG’), the online fitness marketplace, alongside existing co-investor Concentric and individual angels. The investment will be used to build the team, further enhance the product, grow the gym network and overall user base.

Foresight Group has invested £3 million into Altrincham-based, DA Languages Limited.

Draper Esprit  has invested  £10m investment in Aircall, a French cloud-based call centre software business.

The London-headquartered venture capital firm led on a Series B funding round that brought Aircall’s total investment to around £30m to date.

Julie Glenny, Investment Director based in Maven’s Glasgow office, sets out her advice on how businesses can make an impression with investors and raise equity finance.

Idinvest Partners, a leading investor in SMEs across Europe, has today announced the final closing of its fourth direct lending Fund (Idinvest Private Debt IV), at €715m, surpassing its initial target of €600m. More than 60% of the investors are from outside France.  Since its launch in 2016, the Idinvest Private Debt IV fund has invested 60% of its total commitments across 17 companies, of which more than 40% based outside France.

Perkbox, UK’s fastest growing employee benefits platform, is today partnering with PensionBee, an online pension manager, to offer Perkbox users the chance to find and combine all their old lost pensions into one brand new online plan managed by the world’s biggest money managers. 

Glownet, a global market leader in cashless payment technology for the live events industry, has secured £2 million funding from venture capital firm Downing Ventures, as it eyes US expansion and further development to its payment technology.

Glownet has developed cashless payment technology which allows a wide range of events and venues to go entirely cashless, including music festivals, nightclubs and sporting events. In addition to enabling cashless payments, the platform can also be used for ticket validation at events and venues, as well as linking with social media and loyalty programs.

Calculus Capital has completed a further investment into a growth capital investment round for Mologic alongside Foresight Group, who led the round.

Downing has announced the successful exit by its funds from a Cornwall-based satellite station site, managed by Goonhilly Earth Station Limited.

Foresight Group has appointed Ray Harris to its Private Equity Investment team, following Ben Dawson’s appointment earlier this year.

Foresight Group has invested £1.58 million into MIRICO Limited from the Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund. 

MIRICO is based in Harwell Oxford, Didcot, where it develops, manufactures and deploys unique spectrometer products for highly precise, accurate and sensitive gas analysis.

MIRICO’s patent-protected proprietary technology is called Laser Dispersion Spectroscopy (“LDS”) and the Company is now commercialising two new analytical instruments. Gas analysis is required in many industrial applications such as monitoring natural gas throughout the oil and gas value chain or monitoring low level contaminants in specialised industrial processes. The dominant approach to gas analysis is currently laser absorption spectroscopy, a technique that is relatively slow and highly susceptible to environmental interference from non-target gases, dust and water vapour.

Hutchinson Networks, an Edinburgh-based global technology business, has received a £2.2m growth capital investment from funds advised by YFM Equity Partners, the private equity fund manager.

 Hutchinson Networks Limited is a leading provider of multi-vendor IT and network solutions to national and international clients offering advanced infrastructure services to a rapidly expanding client base, including a major UK airport, an international consumer brand, several Fortune 100 companies and a global retail technology brand.