BGF-backed Kids Planet has raised new funds to support its next growth phase and has acquired North West-based Kids Allowed in a deal which makes it the UK’s third biggest nursery group. 

Brand management platform Frontify has raised a $22.3 million Series B funding round led by the EQT Ventures fund with participation from existing investors, including Blossom Capital, Datartis Ventures and Thomas Dübendorfer, Tenderloin Ventures, and Myke Näf. The funding will be used for global expansion, particularly across North America and Europe, alongside continued product innovation in the company’s movement to trailblaze the brand management category; an increasingly critical tool for building long-term business and brand value.

A rapidly growing healthtech start-up on a mission to solve the NHS staffing crisis and bring flexible working to thousands of clinicians has secured £3m in a funding round led by Praetura Ventures. The round included additional backing from BMJ, the publisher behind The BMJ, and some existing angel investors. 

Patchwork, which has offices in London, Manchester and Liverpool, was founded by NHS doctors Anas Nader and Jing Ouyang in 2016 to help hospitals fill vacant shifts more cost-effectively and to stem the tide of clinicians leaving the health service due to poor work-life balance.

Eleven fast growing businesses have secured £2m of funding from HBAN (Halo Business Angel Network) Ulster Business Angels during its first year of operation in Northern Ireland.

Thrive, the Belfast-based provider of employee communications software and support, has secured strategic investment to help facilitate its plans to grow users fourfold to one million by 2022. The company is also initially creating 10 new jobs in marketing, software development, and customer care.  Thrive provides software and support to make employee communications easy and cost-effective. Its client-base includes councils, healthcare companies, manufacturing businesses, food firms, retailers and other organisations across the UK, Ireland and internationally.

Half of UK firms (51%) expect geopolitical tensions, such as Brexit, to have a positive effect on their business in 2020, 

Barclays has launched of a new cashback scheme for term loans to eligible SME borrowers in the UK. Supported by a £450m ENABLE guarantee from the British Business Bank, this scheme is the largest of its kind to launch in the UK. 

The British Business Bank’s ENABLE Guarantee programme helps banks to increase their lending to smaller businesses by reducing the amount of capital required to be held against such lending[1]. 

One of the key benefits of the ENABLE programme for customers is that Barclays will offer qualifying SMEs cashback on eligible lending, with the intention of supporting SME growth in the UK. 

Blackfinch has invested c.£650,000 in Oxford-based company Cyance, founded in 2007. Cyance helps business-to-business (B2B) clients forecast customer buying behaviour through its predictive analytics software.

Cyance’s pioneering behaviour-based marketing technology platform ‘Nexus’ is an Artificial Intelligence-powered platform for intent marketing. It enables businesses to target their customers with laser focus. Nexus can interpret and understand the behaviour of users browsing over 50,000 partner websites. It detects the digital footprints that businesses are leaving online, allowing clients to accelerate their sales along with their marketing return on investment (ROI).

Foresight Group and Williams Advanced Engineering have made a £1.5 million investment into enterprise collaboration and virtual reality /augmented reality software company Masters of Pie Ltd.  The Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund led the funding round, which included Robert Bosch Venture Capital, and follow-on funding from existing investor Downing Ventures.  The Masters of Pie technology allows VR and AR to be more efficiently used by professionals working in immersive design, production, review and training, across multiple enterprise verticals.

proSapient, the Expert Network and Primary Research Platform, has raised new equity capital to support its rapid growth. The round was led by 24Haymarket and existing investors.

BGF is to appoint Stephen Welton, founder CEO of BGF, to the new role of Executive Chairman. 

Glasgow based investment syndicate Kelvin Capital has seen a 19% increase in its total investments in 2019, compared to 2018 levels.  The record figure saw £12.5m being invested, up from £10.5m in 2018, with new syndicate members joining from Europe and the Far East.

In the last quarter of 2019 alone, £2.75m was invested in Scottish based businesses including £1m into hydrogen technology company Logan Energy.  In the first quarter of 2020, £3.3m of new investment has already been committed to portfolio companies.