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.

The number of UK deals announced so far this year has increased 49% to the highest year-to-date tally since our records began in 1980, driven by a 54% increase in the number of deals targeting UK companies according to Refinitiv Deals Intelligence.

Civo, the first pure-play cloud native service provider, and THG plc (THG), a global technology platform that specialises in taking brands direct to consumers, have announced that THG Ingenuity, the technology Division of THG, has invested £1.4 million to take a minority stake in Civo. Civo’s developer-focused Kubernetes platform will strengthen and accelerate development of the technology stack that underpins THG Ingenuity, its cutting-edge proprietary technology platform.

Bowmark Capital has further strengthened its portfolio management and value creation team with the appointment of Ben Hollowood as a portfolio director.