PALATINE Private Equity has exchanged contracts for the sale of its stake in Verdant Leisure,

Gary Stewart, founder and CEO of FounderTribes, looks at the blind spots inherent in early stage investment.

Does anyone still invest in pre-seed and seed-stage start-ups? And does it matter that the decreasing flow of early-stage funding disproportionately locks out women and minority founders?

Leading UK law firm Shoosmiths has advised the shareholders of Go Geothermal Ltd on their sale to the Stockholm exchange listed group, NIBE Industrier AB (publ.). 

Early-stage businesses in Northern Ireland are attracting larger equity funding rounds than in previous years but could raise even higher amounts if more external investors were aware of the quality of companies emerging from the region, according to the managers of Co-Fund NI.

BGF – the UK and Ireland’s most active growth capital investor – has announced a £14 million investment in Victorian Sliders, a South Wales based business which is the UK’s only fully integrated, specialist manufacturer of uPVC sash windows.  Victorian Sliders’ end-to-end production facilities, from recycling of raw materials through to extrusion and fabrication, provides it with an excellent position in the growing home renovation market. The company delivers a high-quality, fully customised, eco product in industry leading timescales.

Foresight Group, an award-winning listed alternative investment manager, has provided a senior secured debt facility of up to £25 million to specialist secured SME lender, Fresh Thinking Capital.

Vectornator by Linearity – the vector-focused platform revolutionising how people design – has raised $20 million of funding led by EQT Ventures together with 468 Capital and business angels including Bradley Horowitz (VP Product, Google), Jonathan Rochelle (Co-Founder Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Slides, Google Drive), Charles Songhurst (Ex. Corporate Strategy, Microsoft) and Lutz Finger (Group Product Manager, Google). 

Versarien PLC, an advanced materials group, has commissioned the University of Gloucestershire to carry out the first academic wearer trial of its kind.

Abtrace, a healthtech start-up which uses machine learning to transform how chronic and long-term health conditions are detected, monitored and treated, has raised £2.1m of seed funding in a round led by Faber and joined by Ganexa Capital.

Livingbridge, one of the UK’s leading mid-market private equity investors, has invested in RealVNC, a leading vendor of remote access and remote support software.  Founded in Cambridge in 2002, by the original inventors of VNC remote access technology, and now led by CEO Adam Greenwood-Byrne, RealVNC is a highly-rated vendor in the large and fast-growing market for remote access and remote support solutions, with customers in 160 countries.

North west based multi-family investment office, Arete, has announced it has led a private investment into business solutions group, Leonard Curtis, in a deal which values the business at £40m. The deal, which saw a £15 million investment into the professional services firm, was a venture led by Arete in partnership with Svella.

Musiversal, a global platform designed for making music creation and production more accessible to musicians and studio producers, has successfully raised a €1,36 million Seed financing round. The funding was led by the Shilling, a venture capital firm, counting also with the participation of existing investors, namely LC Ventures, REDangels and Best Horizon.  In addition to the Seed round, Musiversal also received €310 thousand in funding from the Portugal 2020 Programme, with the support of FEDER/European Union, bringing the company’s total to €2,51 million in funding to-date.