Birmingham-based Zipabout Limited has secured a £650,000 investment from the Midlands Engine Investment Fund (MEIF) Equity Finance Fund, managed by venture capital firm Midven. The MEIF investment closed a £1.35m funding round, which involved participation from First Derivatives and Founders Factory.

NVM Private Equity has invested a further £3 million of growth capital into leading indoor climbing business The Climbing Hangar taking their total investment to £6 million. The investment comes as the company completed its best ever trading year, achieving over 150% revenue growth and announcing the opening of the fifth Hangar in South Liverpool. The additional funds will facilitate the continued site roll-out and ongoing investment in infrastructure and personnel.

Sorted, the global delivery experience platform, is toasting a landmark year after the value of goods it has shipped to date reached the £1 billion mark.

BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active investor in growing businesses, has appointed James Marshall to its Manchester investment team, covering the North West.

British Business Investments, a commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank, has made its second cornerstone commitment this year through its £500m Managed Funds Programme.

The £100m commitment is being made to the Hermes GPE Innovation Fund which is seeking to raise a target of £250m. Investments are expected to be focused on later-stage opportunities in technology-enabled businesses across the UK and Europe with a productivity, people or sustainability theme.

NNAISENSE has concluded its Series B financing round, with a number of high-profile industrial partners having invested in its vision to integrate True AI into intelligent automation. The company, which draws on more than 25 years of expertise in AI, will apply its state-of-the-art machine learning capabilities to deliver bottom-line improvement to the inspection, modelling, and control of complex industrial production processes.

Great Point Media, the London-based media and investment group and MC Credit Partners LP, the US based institutional fund manager, have announced a partnership to finance film and television programming globally. Funds managed by MCCP will invest up to $100 million in the partnership and Great Point has already committed a minimum of $80 million. It represents the first institutional investment for Great Point’s global project finance fund and will be used to finance larger-scale media projects.

The Riverside Company, a global private equity firm focused on the smaller end of the middle market, has invested in HealthTech BioActives S.L. (“HTBA”), a Spanish manufacturer of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), excipients, flavorings and sweeteners for the pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmetic industries, as well as ingredients for human and animal feed with a total sales of €51 million in 2018. The company’s products, derived from citrus and vitamin B12 derivatives, sell in more than 90 countries worldwide. HTBA is a carve-out of Ferrer, a well- known international pharmaceutical company headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. 

UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S), Catapult Ventures’ GM&C Life Sciences Fund and Jonathan Milner have invested in Pencil Biosciences, a novel gene modulation company based at Alderley Park, Cheshire. A further investment by o2h Ventures anticipated shortly will complete a seed round of £500k that will enable the Company to establish proof of concept for its innovative gene modification technology. 

Foresight Group, a leading infrastructure and private equity investment manager, continues its growth trajectory in renewable energy infrastructure, 

Kindred, a new platform that digitises word-of-mouth recommendations on social media, has raised £2.25 million in seed capital investment and has a £35 million valuation pre-revenue. 

Funding from national SPRINT programme provides access to Earth Observation data analysis expertise from University of Leicester

Geospatial Insight, one of Europe's leading providers of geospatial intelligence, has completed a major project with the University of Leicester to develop new methodologies for detecting methane gas emissions and further reduce physical, financial or environmental risk for global businesses. The project, funded by the national SPRINT business support programme, has enabled Geospatial Insight to work with experts from the University of Leicester on Earth Observation (EO) data analysis of high resolution satellite imagery.