Motive Partners has announced the appointment of Jeffery W. Yabuki as Chairman and Founding Partner.

London-based Wiserfunding, a leading provider of credit risk assessment for SME lenders, has announced it has secured £3 million investment from BGF – the UK and Ireland’s most active growth capital investor. This investment will support Wiserfunding in accelerating international expansion and strengthening its global position.

cheqd – a start-up whose technology could drive widespread uptake of digital IDs – has secured a £1.9m investment to support the launch of its product later this year.  The latest funding round was backed by Outlier Ventures, Evernym, TitanBlock, Torque, 3GR and a consortium of private investors. It follows their initial investment in March this year and brings the total raised by the company to £2.4m.

Gerard Grech, Founding CEO of Tech Nation, comments on The Global Startup Ecosystem report from Startup Genome:

Birmingham-headquartered Antser, a leading innovator in social care, has announced an £8.5 million investment from growth capital investor, BGF.  Antser delivers transformational solutions to the social care, health, and education sectors, in partnership with local authority and independent providers. The investment will allow the company to continue to scale its business within the children’s social care sector, as well as increase its reach across adult social care and the adjacent markets. Antser employs 150 people across four UK offices.

German-based drinks technology, air up, has successfully closed its latest funding round having raised over EUR 40 million. This is after completing their Series A fundraise at the beginning of the year. The investment round, led by Five Seasons Ventures (co-led by PepsiCo, Ippen.Media, Oyster Bay), was in part based on the rapid growth trajectory in the German speaking countries and across Europe over the past 12 months.

British Business Bank is managing £89bn of finance support to 1.77m businesses, up from £8bn in 2020, with an above target adjusted return of 14.6%

Fintech business lender MarketFinance has announced a £280m debt and equity fundraise and its accreditation under the Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS). This comes after MarketFinance became one of the first fintechs to be accredited under the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), having lent £250m to companies across the UK.

Futures Factory, a marketplace for selling sneakers, that merges both the physical and digital worlds through Augmented Reality (AR) and NFTs, has raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Seedcamp and Stride. Further participation comes from the co-founders of Voodoo, Kima Ventures, RTP Global, along with technology, crypto, and fashion angel investors.

British Business Investments, a commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank, has made a new £15m commitment to Liberty Leasing, 

A crowdfunding bond in partnership between leading rewilding charity Trees for Life and Triodos Bank UK has raised £2 million in less than 48 hours. It will be used to part-fund the world’s first rewilding centre in the Scottish Highlands.  The bond offer was launched on the evening of Monday 13 September and reached its target on Wednesday – making it Triodos Bank’s fastest ever crowdfunding raise to reach £2 million. The average investment size was £4,800, with 8% of investors based in Scotland.

Tyk, a London-based global tech company, has closed a $35M growth equity funding round led by new investors Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), alongside existing investors MMC Ventures.

Tyk’s innovative API management solution helps to build mission-critical systems in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government. It is used by some of the world’s largest enterprises such as Societe Generale, Starbucks and Domino’s.