Simon Harryman, Senior Business Development Director at Ingenious argues that performance matters more now than ever in preserving the ‘real’ value of capital while stressing the importance of accessibility and liquidity of investments as a pre-requisite to manage the increasing cost of care.

Gresham House Ventures - a growth equity investor specialising in software and digitally driven businesses in the consumer, healthcare and service sectors - has made a £3.3m investment in Patchworks, a software company helping e-commerce businesses automate and manage data flows across backend systems.

Praetura Group, the Northwest-based debt and equity capital provider to SMEs, is expanding with the launch of a new financial division designed to unlock flexible finance for SMEs.

Oxto Energy has secured a £300,000 loan from the Enterprise M3 Short Term Loan Scheme to cover up-front costs for an overseas contract.  The finance will enable the company, which is headquartered in Guildford, to cover the advance payments for materials and sub-contractors that are required to fulfil its latest project to install ten flywheel batteries in Kenya.

Circular economy business CauliBox, which is the UK’s first tech-enabled reusable container scheme has secured £250,000 in a seed funding round led by SFC Capital, with Angel investors. CauliBox provides award-winning, digitally-enabled reusable solutions to disrupt the disposable food packaging market, an industry worth £45 billion a year globally. For its endeavours, CauliBox has been named in the FoodTech 500 and co-founder Josephine Liang was recently named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2021 - ‘Social Impact’ category.

Gresham House Ventures, a specialist growth equity investor providing development capital to innovative consumer, healthcare and services businesses, has agreed the sale of its stake in Pho, the leading Vietnamese restaurant group, on behalf of the Baronsmead VCTs.

NatWest has launched its Expert in Residence programme across the UK, 

Despite seeing growth significantly impacted during the pandemic, the vast majority of UK startups are now confident about the next 12 months. This was a key finding of a survey of startup opinion, conducted by Angel Investment Network (AIN), the UK’s largest online angel investment platform.

Kitche has become a recipient of £68,000 in UK government funding under the Resource Action Fund to help support its important work to ensure no good food goes to waste.  The money has been awarded to Kitche by WRAP, which administers the fund on behalf of DEFRA. The grant is being used to introduce new features to the Kitche app and platform to further drive behaviour change in home kitchens.

Growth capital investor, BGF has announced a successful exit from J&B Recycling, generating a 2.4x return on its investment. The company is at the forefront of waste management and recycling in the UK, providing an end-to-end service for commercial and local authority customers across the North and England and Scotland. 

Maven Capital Partners, one of the UK’s most active private equity houses, has invested a further £500,000 in GENinCode, a genetic testing company specialising in the risk assessment and prediction of cardiovascular disease. This funding package comes as the company completes its IPO, raising an additional £17 million gross and listing on AIM with a market capitalisation of £42.2 million.

Purchases of investment companies on adviser platforms reached £368m in the first quarter of 2021, setting a new quarterly record, according to data compiled by Matrix Financial Clarity.