London-based VGC Partners is launching its £1m Technology Seed Fund IV, headed by Parminder Basran, which looks to invest in early stage, tech companies which are addressing corporate innovation challenges.

Trojan Energy, an Aberdeen-based green tech start-up, has secured a £4.1 million of seed funding. The funding round includes £1 million investment led by Equity Gap, SIS Ventures, Alba Equity and the Scottish Investment Bank. They also received a further £3.1 million from Innovate UK.

The funding will help Trojan Energy support the roll-out of its on-street flat and flush electric vehicle charging points, which aims to solve the issue for vehicle owners who do not have access to off-street parking.

Middlesbrough-based games developer SockMonkey Studios has secured a £250,000 investment from the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) to fund the launch of its first original game.

Hoxton Ventures has announced the final close of Hoxton Ventures II L.P., an early stage European venture capital fund building on the firm’s record of finding and investing in “unicorns,” which includes seed investments in Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo.  Hoxton’s strategy of finding European companies that can scale globally into large, category-defining leaders in newly forming industries has led it to becoming one of Europe’s top-performing early stage venture capital firms. The firm’s first fund has the highest ratio of unicorns to investments, according to Dealroom.

Louis Dreyfus Company B.V. (LDC) has launched its corporate venture capital program, ‘LDC Innovations’, as an element in LDC’s strategic plans to reinforce its position as a key value chain participant.

SLAMcore, a UK company developing spatial AI algorithms for robots and drones, has secured$5million in a funding round led by Octopus Ventures and MMC Ventures, with participation from Amadeus Capital Partners. The funding will allow SLAMcore to meet the increasing demand of the robotics market, which has seen demand skyrocket due to COVID-19. This has occurred particularly in drone, robots and AR/VR usage, as effective robotics solutions that can support the ‘new normal’ of a post-COVID-19 crisis world are accelerating. Existing investors Toyota AI Ventures continue to provide strategic support to SLAMcore.  

Bubo.AI, a start-up which aims to revolutionise the way companies price their products has raised £650,000 from NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance, which is managed by Mercia and is part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, and private investors.

The UK Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) innovation scheme has awarded a triple-figure contract to Polystream, the Intel-backed deep-tech startup, to develop a prototype deployable ‘plug and play’ synthetic training technology. This highly portable system contains Polystream’s ground-breaking command streaming technology and it can be dropped into any terrain to deliver virtual 3D interactive training to 30 army soldiers, over legacy hardware.

Livingbridge, one of the UK’s leading mid-market private equity investors, has invested in Chill Insurance, one of Ireland’s leading insurance and financial services groups.

Headquartered in Dublin where it employs almost 250 staff, Chill was founded in 2006 by brothers Padraig and Seamus Lynch and has subsequently grown into the largest independent personal lines insurance broker in Ireland with over 200,000 policyholders, representing a 6% market share.

A new survey by Intertrust¹, a global leader in providing tech-enabled fund and corporate solutions, reveals how COVID-19 has impacted the decision making behind carve-outs.

During a recent webinar, addressing how best to create value through carve-outs, a third (33%) of industry professionals said they intended to start looking for acquisition opportunities while 11% planned on initiating a strategic review of potential carve-out opportunities.

The Development Bank of Wales has reported a record 457 investments totalling £103.3 million in the financial year ended 31 March 2020.  

The overall investment figure of £103.3 million is a 29% uplift on the previous year which attracted additional private sector leverage of £75.9 million across 457 individual investments. 3,964 jobs have been created or safeguarded.

IQ Capital, the deep-tech venture capital firm based in Cambridge and London, has appointed Simon Hirtzel as General Partner.