Accelerators are a vital part of the UK’s early-stage company ecosystem, going from strength-to-strength in the last few years. Beauhurst has analysed this network of programmes, and the companies that have been through them, to identify trends and future movements in the accelerator ecosystem. 

Seldon, the machine learning deployment specialist, today announced a £2.7m funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside Global Brain Corporation, Techstars and other existing investors.

Seldon is a pioneering global technology business focused on the fast-growing machine intelligence market. Its open-source machine learning deployment platform makes it easier and quicker to manage, serve and optimise machine learning models at scale. The platform is built on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes.

Since its inception in 2014, Seldon has built a global community of loyal users who leverage their diverse industry backgrounds to provide validation and feedback. Seldon’s initial product offering, Seldon Core, had over 170,000 installs in 2018 and recorded 38% month-on-month growth in H2 2018. In 2019, it will release new enterprise-scale software, Seldon Deploy, which enables data science specialists to move into production more easily with compliance, offering audit trails and approvals, advanced experiments, and model explanations.

Alex Sleigh, Investment Director at Newable shares his thoughts on trends from last year, what to expect for 2019 and how the upcoming year will impact businesses at the heart of the economy.

School Space, a leading platform for schools to generate extra funds by hiring out their spaces, has announced that it has secured £800,000 in equity funding with the help of ClearlySo, Europe’s leading impact investment bank.

BGF has announced the exit of its minority investment in Jumpstart, the UK's leading R&D tax credit specialists, as the business is acquired by Visiativ Group. Visiativ’s Consulting division, ABGI, will acquire Jumpstart following a period of acquisitive expansion and growth.

eFront, the leading financial software and solutions provider dedicated to Alternative Investments, has published its latest Quarterly Private Equity Performance report, showing that venture capital funds globally currently offer a highly attractive risk-return profile, with Western European funds significantly outperforming the historical average.

Key findings

• Performance, risk and holding periods of global venture capital funds have both fallen over the last two quarters, hinting at a wave of new investments.
• Risk-adjusted performance, however, has improved markedly, with risk levels returning to pre-2013 levels and returns remaining above 1.4x.
• Western European venture capital funds are setting a “new normal” for returns, with performance consistently higher than the historical average and convergence with US performance on the horizon. Performance is led by the extremely strong 2009 and 2010 vintage years, while 2011-15 funds are also performing well.
• The picture of US venture funds is increasingly contrasted, with vintage years 2009 and 2011 underperforming, while 2010, 2012 and 2015 significantly outperform.
• The average number of years companies are held in portfolios dropped sharply in 2018.

Immersive Labs has announced that Goldman Sachs has led an $8m Series A investment round in its fast-growing cyber security skills platform. The funding, made alongside smaller private investors, will grow an offering which arms enterprise IT and cyber security teams with the latest skills by combining threat data with gamified learning.   The award-winning Immersive Labs platform uses real-time feeds of the latest attack techniques, hacker psychology and technological vulnerabilities to rapidly

Chronomics, a pioneering company in health-tech innovation, has just launched the world’s first consumer epigenetic testing kit. Chronomics has successfully secured more than £1.12 million in funding, including significant investment from venture capital firm Anthemis, and follow on funding from SOSV, one of the world’s most active early stage biotech investors.

The four founders of Chronomics are leading in their respective fields. Dr Tom Stubbs and Daniel Herranz worked at the forefront of epigenetics research at the University of Cambridge, where they collaborated with Dr Toby Call, a Bioenergy and Industrial Biotechnology expert, to define the first models. The team brought on board Charles Ball whose extensive commercial experience has helped to explain the intricacies of epigenetic science to the public.

LettUs Grow, creator of advanced aeroponic technology for indoor farms, has announced it has secured £1 million in funding to build world-leading indoor growing facilities, to help feed the growing global population.

The UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, has awarded the agri-tech company a grant of £399,650 to lead a £700,000 project – which will help increase food resilience and security in the face of climate change. LettUs Grow will work alongside ECH Engineering, industry leaders in controlled environment technology, and urban agriculture experts from Grow Bristol.  This is alongside a further €100,000 from the Green Challenge and several additional research grants.

BGF has announced the exit of its minority investment in Petrotechnics, a global leader of software solutions for hazardous industries, following its acquisition by US-based Sphera Solutions Inc.

BGF invested £6m in the Aberdeen-based company in 2013 to support the development of Proscient – the first software enterprise platform for operational excellence in hazardous industries.

The funding was also used for geographical expansion, with the company’s software now being used by more than 80,000 people from some of the biggest businesses in the oil and gas, rail and petrochemical sectors, across 22 countries. Since BGF’s investment, the company has invested over £15m in creating and bringing to market the broadest and most insightful operational excellence software package in the sector.

UK buyout investor, WestBridge, has promoted Tim Whittard to director and Edward Minton to Investment Manager.

Red Industries, the hazardous and non-hazardous waste management business, has secured a £39m funding package from BGF, the UK’s most active investor in growing businesses, and HSBC.