Matt Weston, Managing Director of Robert Half UK, looks at the latest ONS Families and the Labour Market statistics.

Creative England will inject £24million of growth finance into the creative industries.  The scale-up finance will be directed to post-revenue creative businesses presenting promising growth potential.

Serving as the first initiative of its kind, the loan facility – backed by Triodos Bank UK – will be deployed across the length and breadth of the British Isles, encouraging sustained growth of a £100billion industry in which 75% of SMEs are predicted to grow in the next 12 months.

Victoria Maby of Envestors discusses the wider effects of Crowdfunding.

The latest data on equity investment trends in the UK. Beauhurst has analysed every publicly-announced equity fundraising in Q3 2019, to spot emerging trends and patterns in the market. Its yearly edition of The Deal gives in-depth analysis and features on key market trends.

Latest market analysis from the British Business Bank finds that, contrary to widespread misperceptions, UK Venture Capital produces similar returns to that of the US.

The new report, Analysis of UK Venture Capital Financial Returns, draws together data from existing data sources including PitchBook and Preqin, and from the Bank’s own programmes, to provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the asset class and its performance.

OpenLegacy, the leader in delivering microservices-based API integration and management for core and legacy systems, has expanded into Asia Pacific/Japan and hired General Manager Joseph Wong, who has spent decades building Asian success for international technology companies.

63% of UK venture capital firms have no women at all in senior investment positions, according to a report released in Diversity VC back in July. 

In a time when we’re struggling to give pay rises or bonuses more employers are investing in employee benefits to encourage retention and loyalty as well as maintaining a positive and enthusiastic workforce. 

Cybersecurity company for connected vehicles Upstream Security has announced that a prominent syndicate of investors, including some of the world’s largest OEM automotive vehicle manufacturers, insurance and fleet operators, invested $30 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the company’s total investment to date to $41 million.  The round was led by Alliance Ventures and included Volvo Group Venture Capital, Hyundai, Hyundai AutoEver, Nationwide Ventures and others. Original Upstream investors Charles River Ventures, Glilot Capital and Maniv Mobility all participated in the round.

Children are naturally creative, but these entrepreneurs capitalised on their ideas by creating huge businesses from scratch. 

Disperse, the leader in AI-powered construction transformation systems, has raised $15 million of Series A funding in a round led by Northzone. The company’s solutions capture and process visual data from physical sites and deliver actionable insights, freeing project teams from repetitive administrative tasks and providing management with the resources and digital capabilities to fundamentally change the way their companies operate. 

Foresight Group has made its thirteenth investment from the Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund into Additive Manufacturing Technologies Limited, a developer of technology designed to unlock the potential of industrial additive manufacturing.  The investment is part of a £4.2 million round led by DSM Venturing.  Sheffield-based AMT was founded in 2017 by CEO Joseph Crabtree.  It was set up with the aim of developing industrial technologies to enable the deployment of 3D printing for mass production, especially to address the shortcomings of existing post-processing technologies.