NVM Private Equity has invested a further £3 million of growth capital into leading indoor climbing business The Climbing Hangar taking their total investment to £6 million. The investment comes as the company completed its best ever trading year, achieving over 150% revenue growth and announcing the opening of the fifth Hangar in South Liverpool. The additional funds will facilitate the continued site roll-out and ongoing investment in infrastructure and personnel.

Sorted, the global delivery experience platform, is toasting a landmark year after the value of goods it has shipped to date reached the £1 billion mark.

BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active investor in growing businesses, has appointed James Marshall to its Manchester investment team, covering the North West.

Octopus Investments, part of Octopus Group, has led a £3.6 million funding round, alongside Calculus Capital, into FISCAL Technologies, a world leading provider of forensic solutions and services headquartered in Reading.  FISCAL Technologies’ solutions empower purchase-to-pay teams across the globe to protect their organisational spend. Its NXG Forensics® enterprise solution provides continuous protection through transactional risk analysis, supplier risk profiling, anti-fraud controls and ongoing reporting.

British Business Investments, a commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank, has made its second cornerstone commitment this year through its £500m Managed Funds Programme.

The £100m commitment is being made to the Hermes GPE Innovation Fund which is seeking to raise a target of £250m. Investments are expected to be focused on later-stage opportunities in technology-enabled businesses across the UK and Europe with a productivity, people or sustainability theme.

NNAISENSE has concluded its Series B financing round, with a number of high-profile industrial partners having invested in its vision to integrate True AI into intelligent automation. The company, which draws on more than 25 years of expertise in AI, will apply its state-of-the-art machine learning capabilities to deliver bottom-line improvement to the inspection, modelling, and control of complex industrial production processes.

Great Point Media, the London-based media and investment group and MC Credit Partners LP, the US based institutional fund manager, have announced a partnership to finance film and television programming globally. Funds managed by MCCP will invest up to $100 million in the partnership and Great Point has already committed a minimum of $80 million. It represents the first institutional investment for Great Point’s global project finance fund and will be used to finance larger-scale media projects.

Keensight Capital, one of the leading private equity managers dedicated to pan-European Growth Buyout investments, has appointed Amit Karna as Senior Director and Carlo Cartapani as Analyst. Amit brings more than 15 years of finance experience across both the USA and Europe, notably in the Healthcare sector, while Carlo has a strong background in Corporate Finance.

Foresight has invested £2 million investment as part of a £3.3 million round into award-winning novel thin film ultrasound technology company Novosound Ltd. 

The Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund led the round, investing £1.5 million alongside £500,000 from the Foresight Scottish Growth Fund, financed by the Scottish Growth Scheme through a combination of Scottish Government funds and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and £1.3 million from existing shareholders including Par Equity, Kelvin Capital, Gabriel Investments, the University of the West of Scotland, and the Scottish Investment Bank, the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise.

Crowdcube is announcing a record-breaking year for overseas businesses raising funds on Europe’s leading equity crowdfunding platform. Despite Brexit uncertainty, investment into businesses based outside the UK has doubled since 2018. 

In 2019, Crowdcube’s overseas raises drew in €26.6m, which marked a massive 100% hike from 2018. ID Finance, a Spanish based fintech, scoops the No. 1 place in terms of investment raised, pulling in €5.2m in November. More than 4,500 people also backed Bnext, the Spanish challenger-bank, which stands in second place. European entrepreneurs are matching their British counterparts in terms of investment raised and number of investors they attract, as they realise the benefits of building loyal communities alongside raising growth finance.

OurCrowd, the global venture investing platform and Israel’s leading venture investor, has announced that it is part of a consortium that has won a tender to run a start-up incubator in New Zealand. This represents the first time that OurCrowd has participated and won an international tender of this kind, and reflects the growing international focus of the Israel based investment platform.

The Riverside Company, a global private equity firm focused on the smaller end of the middle market, has invested in HealthTech BioActives S.L. (“HTBA”), a Spanish manufacturer of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), excipients, flavorings and sweeteners for the pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmetic industries, as well as ingredients for human and animal feed with a total sales of €51 million in 2018. The company’s products, derived from citrus and vitamin B12 derivatives, sell in more than 90 countries worldwide. HTBA is a carve-out of Ferrer, a well- known international pharmaceutical company headquartered in Barcelona, Spain.