A trio of Oxfordshire day nurseries have been acquired by a fast-growing independent education provider. Chatsworth Schools, which is itself headquartered in Oxfordshire, has purchased Tiny Toes Day Nurseries in a deal arranged by the childcare business transfer specialist Abacus Day Nursery Sales, a specialist division of Blacks Business Brokers.

Integrated Graphene Ltd,  the Scottish-based tech company, has fired the starting pistol on scaled production of its unique breakthrough 3D graphene foam, Gii, following the completion of a £3.1 million round of investment in the business, led by Edinburgh-based business angel syndicate, Archangels, with co-investment from Par Equity, Techstart Ventures and ESM Investments.

Whiterock Finance has made its first ever equity investment by backing specialist recruitment business Artemis Human Capital.

The Belfast-based investment team, comprising Paul Millar, Rhona Barbour, David McCurley and Neil McCabe, has taken a minority stake in Artemis for an undisclosed sum and will also work with the business in an advisory capacity.

Private equity house, Chiltern Capital, has completed an investment in a leading waste management incinerator manufacturer with support from a multi-million-pound lending facility from Shawbrook Bank.

Inciner8 Ltd, based in Southport, Merseyside, was acquired by Chiltern in a deal that will enable the business to capitalise on its strong market position as well as grow its product range, service offering and global reach.

Inciner8 designs and manufactures incinerators for a range of uses across the waste management industry, supplying incinerators to corporate, government and non-governmental clients globally. Its products are often used to safely reduce the mass and disposal of hazardous waste that would otherwise end up in landfill. Its incinerators are environmentally friendly thanks to their ability to retain and reburn harmful exhaust gases.

In a significant boost for both the German and the wider Central European start-up ecosystem amidst a slow start to 2020, the global early stage capital firm Antler is opening a new office in Berlin.

Graphite Capital has made one promotion and two new appointments to strengthen further its investment team.

Mind Foundry, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company that spun out of the University of Oxford’s Machine Learning Research Group (MLRG), today announced it has raised an additional $13.6 million in Series A funding led by Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Co., Ltd (ANDI) of the MS&AD Insurance Group and includes funding from existing investors Parkwalk Advisors, Oxford Sciences Innovation, the University of Oxford, and the Oxford Technology and Innovations EIS Fund. With the new funding, the company has raised a total of $24.4 million to date. 

Purple Dot, the ‘worth-the-wait’ payment option for fashion brands, today announces its seed round of £1.35 million, led by Connect Ventures, with support from, AI Seed, Moxxie Ventures, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring from AngelList, Vijay Pandurangan (ex-Twitter), Alex Roetter former SVP of Engineering at Twitter and the family office of Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed.com.

QVentures has made an investment into Opsly, a platform that allows software developers to build cloud infrastructure and architecture with no prior coding or cloud knowledge necessary.

Downing Ventures has completed a $35 million Series B funding round in Ayar Labs as the co-lead investor. Ayar Labs is a Deep Tech organisation that is solving semiconductor interconnect (I/O), bandwidth and power bottlenecks by moving data using light, with its TeraPHY™ monolithic in-package electronic/photonic chiplet-based solution. The result is a vast improvement in bandwidth, bandwidth density, latency and power consumption across a wider distance.

ArmaUrto, an innovative provider of protective cycle wear, has secured a £150k equity investment from the Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Investment Fund (CIOSIF), as part of a larger £300k funding round. The investment round was led by The FSE Group, the appointed fund manager of CIOSIF.

Interest in road cycling has long been on an upward trend and during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic cycling activity has been propelled higher by as much as 100%. Whilst overall the activity is extremely beneficial for health and fitness, unfortunately accidents involving bikes in the UK have also risen to more than 25,000 a year.