Foresight Group and Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE) have made an investment into Machine Discovery, an innovative University of Oxford spin-out commercialising new machine learning technology.

The investment  will be used to support the senior management team in taking Machine Discovery through its next stage of growth, assisted by Foresight Williams’ expertise in the sector. During the process, Oxford Technology introduced Bijan Kiani to the business.  Bijan was previously VP Product and Marketing at Synopsys, a NASDAQ listed Electronic Design Automation company focusing on advanced technologies for chip design, validation and application ($3.7bn revenue in 2020) and will take over as CEO.

Toy innovator and distributor Wow! Stuff has secured a £4.5 million facility from Independent Growth Finance (IGF) to help support its ongoing growth aspirations. As a company working with global brands, the Wolverhampton-headquartered business, with offices in LA and Hong Kong, were looking for funding to assist growth in the European market. The additional funding will allow the business to expand its branded range on a commercial-led timeline throughout the pandemic and beyond.  

Par Equity has led an investment of £2m in Datactics, a leader in the field of data management.  Belfast-based Datactics provides software and services to large organisations that need to improve and control the quality of the data held in their computer systems. The AI-enabled platform allows staff who are not IT experts to efficiently deduplicate, clean-up and enrich the information in their lines of business. For businesses that have information spread across many databases, the products enable them to give their customers a better quality, more joined-up service, while reducing their costs.

Charlotte Arneaud of Envestors looks at parallels in consumer spending with angel investor decision-making. 

UK-founded marketing technology platform ContentCal has secured $6.2 million in Series A investment from Fuel Ventures and Guinness Asset Management.

The investment will be used to drive growth of its content marketing and intelligence platform: making new hires; developing a proprietary content intelligence platform; and opening a new US headquarters as well as expanding its UK headquarters.

Mogrify Limited, a biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the development of ex vivo cell therapies and pioneer a new class of in vivo reprogramming therapies, has completed the second closing of its Series A financing of $17 million USD, bringing the total raised to $33 million USD in this round. 

NorthEdge has launched its first ESG report in which it reviews the progress made by the firm in 2020 across sustainability, D&I and community, as well as setting out ambitious plans for the year ahead.

The report, titled Taking Responsibility, looks back on the achievements made at the private equity firm and across its portfolio.

These including gaining the United Nations supported Principles for Responsible Investment A+ status for Strategy and Governance for the third year running, placing NorthEdge in the top 12% of all private equity firms with <$1bn AUM in this category, and gaining A status for the Direct Private Equity Assessment for the sixth consecutive year.

Percival Menswear, a London-based contemporary menswear fashion brand, has secured a further £3m investment from growth capital investor VGC Partners, following an initial investment of £150,000 in 2018.

The Hackney-based brand, which employs eight people, has set itself apart in recent years by creating collections that subvert the classics of the male wardrobe. This includes featuring in the David Beckham Eyewear campaign and curating a custom tour wardrobe of Niall Horan, as well as more recently collaborating with Brighton-based artist and illustrator Sophy Hollington.

A new report from eFront, the leading financial software and solutions provider dedicated to Alternative Investments, shows that holding periods extended in 2020 to a record 5.4 years on average, at the same time as returns dipped. The data also showed that investments held for longer periods tend to produce higher returns – though this was not the case in 2020.

YFM Equity Partners is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the launch of its first Venture Capital Trust. 

Bilal Gokpinar, Professor of Operations, Technology and Innovation at the UCL School of Management looks at the benefits of Equity Crowdfunding beyond the purely financial.

Crowdfunding is traditionally viewed and understood to be a tool to raise funds for start-ups. Indeed, reward crowdfunding, where individuals donate to a project with the expectation of receiving a non-financial reward in return, has been successfully used to raise money in the early stages of financing for start-ups. This view of crowdfunding is beginning to expand. With established companies such as P&G, Coca-Cola and Lego now using reward crowdfunding, they have uncovered that it is potentially a powerful tool to capture valuable and honest customer input during product development.

PortalOne, the world's first hybrid games platform, has raised $15m in an oversubscribed total seed funding round. The round included U.S. investors like Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and TQ Ventures, the investment fund led by Scooter Braun, Schuster Tanger and Andrew Marks. Coatue Management´s investment was led by Arielle Zuckerberg, the Rogue Ventures investment was led by Alice Lloyd George. Sunny Dhillon led the investment from Signia Venture Partners whose LPs include Warner Bros., Disney and Tencent. European investors include Seedcamp , Talis Capital and SNÖ Ventures.