Foresight Group is supporting the MBO of Signature Private Finance Holdings Limited from private equity firm, Cabot Square Capital, with an investment of £16.8 million to secure a majority stake in the Company.  Foresight will also provide an initial £5 million revolving credit facility for the specialist property lender.  Signature has also updated its brand, becoming Signature Property Finance, to better reflect its market offering.

Independent Growth Finance (IGF), a leading independent commercial finance provider, has entered the new decade in style with seven new clients signed in December and £126 million funds in use. Despite a turbulent year for SMEs across the UK, IGF’s funds in use have continued to grow at pace.

Private equity firm WestBridge has promoted Tim Whittard to partner. 

Placed, a mobile recruitment matchmaking platform for the service industry, has received investment from two members of Henley Business Angels, contributing towards a funding round of £1.2m.

Placed functions through having companies sign up to their platform and display jobs, solving the recruitment problem so many of them face by matching them up with prospective candidates seeking jobs. The idea for Placed came from years of working in the hospitality industry and by addressing each company’s needs Placed has grown rapidly; over 2,000 brands have now signed up to Placed, from Park Plaza Hotels to ROKA Restaurants, Nando’s and many more together with a growing database of over 100,000 job seekers.

24Haymarket leads £1.1m investment in MWS Technology, a leader in the apprenticeship technology space, has raised new equity capital to support its rapid growth.

HBAN recruited more than 100 business angel investors last year – significantly higher than its projected 75 new angels. The organisation is now aiming to sign up a further 100 angels in 2020, with its recruitment drive kicking off next month at HBAN’s All-Island Conference.

Business angel investment is continuing to grow across the island of Ireland and in December last year, HBAN announced that its members have now invested more than €100M in start-ups since 2007. This represents a doubling of the €50M figure reached in 2015 thanks to increasing angel numbers and activity.

Seneca Partners have appointmented Siobhan Pycroft as Investment Executive in their expanding Growth Capital Team as they target new investment of £15 million during 2020. Seneca is seeking to support well-managed businesses with strong leadership that can demonstrate established, proven concepts and are seeking an injection of growth capital and expertise to support their continued development.

Edinburgh-based bioinformatics company, Fios Genomics, which helps pharmaceutical and biotech companies to analyse the large amounts of data generated during drug development, has announced a strategic partnership with one of the world’s largest contract research organisations, Charles River Laboratories.

Intertrust, a global leader in tech-enabled corporate and fund solutions, has signed a strategic agreement with Round Hill Capital, a leading global real estate investment, development and asset management firm. The deal sees Intertrust acquire the legal, corporate and accounting services team of a subsidiary of the global firm.

Oxford Investment Opportunity Network (OION) and Oxford Angel Network (OAN), part of Oxford University’s commercialisation arm Oxford University Innovation (OUI), are merging, with immediate effect, combining their operations to form a strong and cohesive Oxford-based angel network.

Access to finance for growth is critical to starting and scaling ground-breaking tech companies. This merger will contribute significantly to strengthening the appeal of the Oxford Cluster as a great place for companies to flourish. It is a vital step towards realising Oxfordshire’s potential, as expressed in the Local Industrial Strategy, of becoming one of the leading innovation ecosystems worldwide.

Antler, the global startup generator and early-stage venture capital firm, will today reveal the thirteen companies that were founded during its first London program. The companies have raised a total of £1.56m from Antler (£120k per company), and will be revealed on stage at Antler’s London ‘Demo Day’, which will be hosted at The Royal Institution.

Maven Capital Partners, one of the UK’s most active SME finance providers, has invested £8.5 million in nine dynamic growth businesses across the North East in 2019, driving economic prosperity, and creating over 80 jobs. Since opening offices in Newcastle and Durham in 2017, Maven has invested over £17 million in businesses across the region, providing funding packages tailored to the growth needs of local companies.  Maven has participated in investments ranging from £150,000 to £7 million in local businesses across the North East and has also successfully leveraged an additional £7 million in private sector finance last year.