Specialist M&A advisory firm Ciesco has confirmed that Chip[s] Board, which develops bioplastics from food waste, has completed fundraising to support the next stage of its development.

Private equity house WestBridge has promoted Peter Barkley to director. Barkley joined WestBridge in August 2019 to head the firm’s newly opened Manchester office and establish the firm in the north west, north east and Yorkshire markets.

Pembroke VCT, the venture capital trust focused on building the brands of tomorrow, has invested £1.75m into OnePlan, the collaborative, real-time platform providing a single source of truth for event planners worldwide. Pembroke is the lead investor in a total fundraise of £2.75m.

Your FLOCK, a remote work tech startup that helps increase employee engagement by discovering a team’s core values, has secured £240k from GC Angels and a private angel to bolster its development team and scale the product’s growth.  Based on pioneering methodology from Stanford University and the University of Manchester, Your FLOCK helps employees become more engaged and businesses to become more productive and successful by helping to develop cohesive and employee engagement driven company cultures. 

Digital training platform Virti has raised $10m in a Series A to further its goal of improving human performance using world-class interactive technology. The round was led by deeptech investors IQ Capital and joined by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a new, UK-based learning technology VC fund.

Launched in 2018 by Dr Alexander Young - an NHS trauma and orthopaedic surgeon - Virti helps organisations optimise learning, training and performance using interactive simulations and AI-powered data analysis. The technology turns traditionally subjectively-assessed skills (such as communication, teamwork and decision-making under pressure) into objective and measurable data to improve performance.

The Emirates Angel Investors Association has launched the Business Directory on their mobile app. The directory will include a list of tech startups, making it easier for angel investors to search for investment opportunities in these startups, while at the same time allowing these startups to reach angel investors.

Private equity firms invested in a record 566 companies in Central and Eastern Europe in 2020, as the industry supported dynamic SMEs and start-ups that will fuel the recovery from the impact of COVID-19 and underpin long-term economic and social development across the region.

Translated, an Italy and US-based company that pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to support professional translators, announces that the world-leading private investment house Ardian has invested $25 million via its Ardian Growth fund, leading a $30 million investment round.

Thymia has raised a £780k/$1.1m pre-seed round to scale its platform to assess for and monitor depression. The Thymia technology removes the subjectivity from mental health assessments: instead of answering questionnaires, patients play specially designed video games which use cutting-edge Neuropsychology, Linguistics and Machine Learning to detect signs of depression, as well as monitor whether symptoms are improving or worsening over time. 

NPIF - Maven Equity Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) and managed by Maven Capital Partners, has invested £250,000 in Boiler Plan to support the company’s growth and training centre in Featherstone, West Yorkshire.  The transaction also includes a £500,000 investment from the North East Development Capital Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund also managed by Maven, and a further £750,000 was invested on behalf of the Government’s Future Fund.

BGF, the UK & Ireland’s most active investor, has announced the creation of a specialist advisory board to accelerate its investment activity in companies engaged in carbon reduction and the energy transition. The advisory board will be chaired by Baroness Brown of Cambridge, one of the UK’s leading specialists in the field of climate change and carbon reduction.

Fast-growing private equity house YFM Equity Partners (YFM), which has an expanding network of regional offices across the UK, is strengthening its presence in the Thames Valley with the opening of a new office in Reading to be closer to businesses and professional advisers in the region and build its reach across the South West where it has undertaken a raft of recent investments.