In its 20th year, MMC appoints two new partners alongside another four promotions within the team.

QVentures, manager of 29PP Pre-Seed Fund, will be leading the funding round in Ocyan, a cloud operating system for enterprise blockchains and P2P networks. Joining QVentures in the round is Wayra UK, the open innovation arm of Spanish Telecom giant, Telefónica. 

Free Spirit Fund managed by Sanford DeLand Asset Management (SDL), home to the Buffettology Fund, has celebrated its third anniversary with strong performance; ranking 10^th out of the 243 funds in the IA UK All Companies Sector over the same three year period.

Philanthropic food and drink start-up accelerator, The Seed Fund will open for entry on Saturday 1 February, with 12 spots up for grabs on its game changing summer Academy. For the first time ever, marks will be set aside for socially responsible initiatives during the initial application stage and judging process, so the project’s organisers are particularly keen to hear from value-driven businesses across the UK.

Elder, a leading care home alternative, has raised another £8.2m funding round as its technology-enabled live-in care service gains nationwide popularity, bringing the total raised to £16.5m.

Elder is one of the UK's fastest-growing startups and has delivered more than 350,000 days of care in more than 300 towns and cities across the UK since 2016 – with the Outer Hebrides being the only remaining area where care is yet to be delivered.

FeedStock, an AI-driven SaaS business that leverages the latest natural language processing technologies to enable financial services companies to meet both their compliance requirements and commercial goals, has secured a £2.5m investment in a funding round led by Praetura Ventures.

Coniq has secured £6.4 million of growth equity to meet the growing demand for its award-winning CRM and loyalty platform used by the world’s leading shopping malls, outlets and brands.

The round was led by Guinness Asset Management with Maven Capital Partners, and participation from existing investors Venrex Investment Management. High profile angel investors, including Greg Marsh the founder of OneFineStay, also invested as part of this round.

Albion Capital, the leading independent investment manager, closed its 2019/2020 VCT top up offers earlier than scheduled 

Par Equity had a record-breaking final three months in 2019, securing one exit, battery technology expert Dukosi, and orchestrating 11 investments. Par, which specialises in investing in young, high-growth companies, saw London-based managers join them in putting money into two of its existing portfolio companies, Current Health and Novosound.

Simon Blakey gives us the benefit of his 20 years experience as an Angel Investor.

Now, 20 years later, I have invested in over 35 companies in 75 funding rounds with eight profitable exits to date (with a similar number of failures) and am well ahead return-wise. I also have more experience than I had back then, but I am forever grateful to people such as Nitin and Milan Shah (founder of Pepe Jeans), James Gordon of Gordon Solicitors and Modwenna Rees-Mogg of AngelNews for their guidance and support in those initial years (and of course my amazing brother Michael, who I have angel invested with throughout this time under the Avonmore Developments umbrella).

Withers tech, working with experienced VC legal teams in France, Germany and Switzerland, has carried out the first analysis of how venture capital deals are structured across Europe.

Dataseat, a London-based tech startup, helping mobile app advertisers to manage programmatic media buying in-house, has launched with its first seed round of funding of £1.75m through Play Ventures, Backed.vc and SAATCHiNVEST. The impressive funding syndicate also includes angel investors, ex Criteo, Eric Eichmann (CEO) and Jonathan Wolf (CPO).