The UK’s first online marketplace for building supplies is relocating to Wales having completed a seed funding round with £500,000 secured from the Development Bank of Wales and BSKG Holdings.

Established in 2016 by the late Rami Naori, Go Banana has relocated from London to Brunel House, Cardiff. Featuring an online platform where tradesmen can buy building supplies from hundreds of trusted merchants, the rapidly growing tech business already lists over 100,000 products on its platform and has over 10,000 customers.

o2h Ventures, a UK based fund manager through investment in its SEIS and EIS human health funds has made an investment into Stingray Bio Ltd, a new spin out from the University of Sussex supported by the Sussex Innovation Centre.

Bristol-based entrepreneurs, who have developed techniques to incorporate graphene into Li-ion batteries to improve battery life and charging times while reducing their cost, have raised roughly £1.2 million from investors in a new funding round. 

Anaphite, based in Unit DX in St. Philip's, Bristol, was founded to look at ways to exploit the potential of graphene by scientists Sam Burrow and Alexander Hewitt after they left university. Their impressive work to develop an inexpensive and scalable process to incorporate graphene into battery materials (improving charge time and battery life) on existing cell production lines has excited investors. 

NorthEdge has made a series of appointments and promotions across its Manchester and Leeds offices.

The lower mid-market private equity specialist, which manages more than £900m of funds, has promoted Partner Prem Mohan Raj to Chief Operating Officer. Prem joined the business in 2016 as Chief Financial Officer and has since played a key part in the firm’s success. His new role will see him take on increased responsibility for Investor Relations and fundraising alongside his responsibilities for finance, operations and marketing.

Bowmark Capital has announced a series of promotions.  Antonia Cheong and Tom Elliott become partners while Tom Keen has been promoted to investment director and Alex McRae to investment manager.

Jenson Funding Partners has completed an investment in Paperound.com, a marketplace for busy business owners to access intern resource on-demand. Paperound has launched at a time where 66% of small business owners are spending their time on activities that are not important, and more than half of founders look to improve their business by delegating more tasks (Source: Pulse Survey, The Alternative Board). To answer this problem, Paperound provides UK Students ('Taskers' on the platform) that are booked for as a little as one hour to work on the company tasks founders don’t have time for, and businesses only pay when the work is done. For founders, Paperound gives them access to extra resource at the times they need it most, without needing to commit to a full-time hire. For students, it is a way to earn money and build their experience.

Seraphim Space Camp today reveals the startups that are participating in Mission 7 of its accelerator, the UK’s first dedicated programme for global startups in the SpaceTech industry. Featuring seven new startups, the latest cohort has attracted founders from all over the world who hope to take their startup to the next level.

Committed Capital has sold its equity interest in Fairstone, the acquisitive full-service wealth management and chartered financial planning firm, to global private equity house TA Associates.

Financial Services Capital, the private equity investor dedicated to the European financial services sector, has completed $15 million in new financing for NYMBUS®, a leading provider of banking technology solutions, doubling its total investment in the company to more than $31m.

The month of March proved to be an extremely successful one for Newable Ventures, the UK’s leading early stage investment network, which deployed circa £2m in six companies to round off a busy financial year, which also saw the group secure £10m from British Business Investment’s Regional Angel Programme.

Oxitec Ltd, the leading developer of insect-based biological solutions to control pests that transmit disease, destroy crops, and harm livestock, has received US$6.8 million in funding from the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations, to fund scale-up programs for Oxitec’s just-add-water Friendly™ Aedes aegypti technology.

Maven Equity Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) and managed by Maven Capital Partners, has led a £600,000 funding round for YR Free Labs Limited, a business providing secure technology for digitally recorded media via a video collaboration platform called ‘eviid’. The NPIF - Maven Equity Fund invested £600,000, alongside £225,000 from the Government’s Future Fund.