Cornerstone Partners has invested £170,000 growth capital investment into East Yorkshire based Coordinate Sport.

Founded in August 2016 by husband and wife team, James and Rochelle Moore, Coordinate Sport provides business tools to organisations within the sports and coaching industry.

FW Capital has invested £20 million to support Greater Manchester-based businesses through NPIF - FW Capital Debt Finance which launched in 2017.

This brings NPIF's total Microfinance, Debt and Equity investments in Greater Manchester to £45.3m, with 176 investments into a total of 141 businesses across the region. Additional investment from private sectors investors alongside the NPIF investment amounts to an additional £51.2m bringing the total amount to £96.5m

Middlesbrough-based games developer SockMonkey Studios has secured a £250,000 investment from the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) to fund the launch of its first original game.

Hoxton Ventures has announced the final close of Hoxton Ventures II L.P., an early stage European venture capital fund building on the firm’s record of finding and investing in “unicorns,” which includes seed investments in Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo.  Hoxton’s strategy of finding European companies that can scale globally into large, category-defining leaders in newly forming industries has led it to becoming one of Europe’s top-performing early stage venture capital firms. The firm’s first fund has the highest ratio of unicorns to investments, according to Dealroom.

Bamboo Capital Partners , an impact investing platform which provides innovative financing solutions to catalyse lasting impact, has announced the formation of a new Latin America Board of Directors.

It took a global pandemic to accelerate remote working to where the world is today; nobody could have foreseen the profound impact that COVID-19 would have. For Rockstart, a global VC/Accelerator, the lockdown changed the company’s strategy to move to a remote-first company. With the rapid shift of society adapting to ‘digital as the new normal’, Rockstart believes the tools and mindset are now in place to embrace virtual connectivity for the long term. From this summer onwards, the company will implement a flexible and digital work style.

HYCM has commissioned an independent survey of more than 900 UK-based investors (all with investments in excess of £10,000) to find out how they are investing amidst the coronavirus:

Louis Dreyfus Company B.V. (LDC) has launched its corporate venture capital program, ‘LDC Innovations’, as an element in LDC’s strategic plans to reinforce its position as a key value chain participant.

Matt Weston, Managing Director of Robert Half UK, comments on the UK employment market. 

SLAMcore, a UK company developing spatial AI algorithms for robots and drones, has secured$5million in a funding round led by Octopus Ventures and MMC Ventures, with participation from Amadeus Capital Partners. The funding will allow SLAMcore to meet the increasing demand of the robotics market, which has seen demand skyrocket due to COVID-19. This has occurred particularly in drone, robots and AR/VR usage, as effective robotics solutions that can support the ‘new normal’ of a post-COVID-19 crisis world are accelerating. Existing investors Toyota AI Ventures continue to provide strategic support to SLAMcore.  

Bubo.AI, a start-up which aims to revolutionise the way companies price their products has raised £650,000 from NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance, which is managed by Mercia and is part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, and private investors.

The UK Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) innovation scheme has awarded a triple-figure contract to Polystream, the Intel-backed deep-tech startup, to develop a prototype deployable ‘plug and play’ synthetic training technology. This highly portable system contains Polystream’s ground-breaking command streaming technology and it can be dropped into any terrain to deliver virtual 3D interactive training to 30 army soldiers, over legacy hardware.