Accountancy and business advisory firm BDO LLP and Envestors, the fintech for fundraising company, have announced a joint initiative to support the growth of UK start-ups and scale-ups. The two businesses will combine their offerings in corporate finance, equity finance, tax and accounting services to create a single-point solution for high-growth businesses to raise finance. The collaboration, inspired by the increasing difficulty for ambitious, growing businesses to raise capital in the UK’s uncertain economic climate, is committed to help 50 companies in the next 12 months.

Proving to investors that your company has the legs to offer them a significant return on investment down the line is no small task for any entrepreneur, but is especially impressive for those with little experience, and whose abilities may often be underestimated.

A Brexit deal now appears more likely than a U.S.-China trade de-escalation - but global financial markets are still to remain volatile in the near term, meaning investors should revise their portfolios.

PredictImmune, developers of pioneering prognostic tools for guiding treatment options and improving patient outcomes in immune-mediated diseases, is delighted to welcome Tim Rea, an investor at BGF, to its board.

Maybe Solutions, an e-commerce platform developer that helps businesses, towns and cities analyse and engage with social media conversations has secured a six-figure funding package.

50 of the leading investors from across Europe will be arriving in Edinburgh next week looking for attractive startups to invest in at Turing Founders, and there are still a handful of spaces for entrepreneurs to attend in order to learn, network and pitch their businesses.

The Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Growth Fund (NI) has led a £2m investment in Belfast-based Silform Technologies, in syndication with private investors.

There are billions of tonnes of coal waste around the world today, causing environmental problems and giving rise to significant ongoing costs to mining operators and government agencies.

Silform have developed a unique environmentally clean, high volume, low cost pelletizing system for the conversion of coal waste deposits into pellets which have economic value.  The company is currently developing a metallurgical coal pellet for use in the steel industry and the production of an enhanced BioCoal, being 30% less CO2 than coal but with a 70% increase in calorific value compared to pure wood Biomass pellets.

Two female tech entrepreneurs who have developed the UK’s first software as a service (SaaS) platform to help companies manage rebate and pricing schemes have secured £950,000 from investors.

Leanne Bonner-Cooke MBE and Colette Wyatt have received funding from Mercia Asset Management, the MEIF Proof of Concept & Early Stage Fund, which is managed by Mercia and part of the Midlands Engine Investment Fund, and private investors. The funding will allow them to expand their sales and marketing activities and roll out e-Bate to a wider audience, creating a number of new jobs at their office in Leicester.

Three fintech mega-deals totalling $87 billion set the scene for a record-breaking $120 billion in disclosed transaction value for the sector in a ‘white-hot’ first half of 2019, reveals Hampleton Partners, in its latest global Fintech M&A Market Report.

Hampleton Partners, which specialises in international technology M&A and corporate finance, noted that all three of the top transactions were in the payments processing segment: Fidelity National Information Services acquired Worldpay for $43.6bn; Fiserv acquired First Data for $22bn and Global Payments acquired Total System Services for $21.2bn.

QueryClick, an Edinburgh-based digital marketing consultancy that aims to transform how effectively advertisers invest in digital marketing, is to embark on an expansion drive following an investment of £2m led by Scotland’s leading business angel investment group, Archangels, in partnership with the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB).  QueryClick has developed a unique, machine learning-based attribution solution – marketing software that enables companies to precisely allocate their investments in different marketing channels to ensure the maximum possible return on investment.

SpotQA a leader in automated software testing, today announces the general availability of its flagship product Virtuoso. Virtuoso tests web and mobile web apps to identify bugs, inconsistencies and errors in a fraction of the time taken using traditional manual and automated testing. Using intelligent automation powered by Machine Learning (ML) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Virtuoso increases the speed of testing by up to 25X, bringing down the costs of QA by 80-90%.

In addition, SpotQA has secured a $3.25M round of seed funding, led by Crane with participation from Forward Ventures, Downing Ventures and Acequia Capital. 

The UK tech sector has attracted more foreign investment in the first seven months of 2019 than it did during the whole of last year, according to latest industry figures, and has overtaken the US for foreign investment, per capita.