Private equity fundraising for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) hit the highest annual level in a decade in 2018 with €1.8 billion, according to new data from Invest Europe.

Scottish biotech company, and the market leader in gene therapy control technologies, Synpromics, has been bought by AskBio, the American pioneer in gene therapeutics.  EIS and VCT fund manager Calculus Capital, which first invested in Synpromics in 2015 and invested £5.6m into the company in total, will receive a return on investment that significantly exceeds target returns.

As the talent dilemma continues, UK businesses are ramping up their focus on retaining and upskilling their existing workforce. New research [1] from recruitment specialist Robert Half UK, reveals more than one in three senior executives (31%) believe employee retention and training are the two main talent management concerns facing their industry until 2020. Talent retention is a particular concern for large businesses (35%), compared to one in three (29%) small and medium-sized businesses.

Antler, the global startup generator and early-stage VC, has appointed Edward Knight as a Global Partner and Annette Wilson as European Chair and Advisor of Antler. 

Beauhurst has published its overview of the high-growth ecosystem in Scotland. There are almost 2,000 active ambitious companies in the country, most of which are buoyed by fairly different methods of support than the rest of the UK. Although private equity and venture capital funds dominate the funding scene across the UK, it is devolved government bodies and angel investors which are pulling the most weight in Scotland. So what do funding trends look like, and which other means of support are high-growth Scottish businesses drawing on?

Maven Capital Partners has invested £160,000 in data analysis business, Innotech Insights, on behalf of NPIF – Maven Equity Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund. The funding will support the expansion of Innotech’s sales team, invest in product development and in the roll out of the company’s flagship analysis system product, Crowded.

Innotech provides both public and private sector organisations with the information they need to make major planning decisions by accurately monitoring pedestrian movements in an area, indoors or out. 

The organisers behind the prestigious MSDUK Innovation Challenge have announced their finalists for 2019.  After a full day of pitches from shortlisted Challenge entrants the 12 strong judging panel, drawn from a wide cross-section of UK industry and academia, were finally able to agree upon their final line up of 13 finalists.

Leading global delivery software business Sorted Group has raised £15 million in a Series B funding round led by Merian Chrysalis Investment Company Limited, alongside Praetura Ventures and NVM Private Equity LLP. The investment takes the firm’s total funding to more than £35 million since its launch in 2010.

Graphite Capital, a leading UK mid-market private equity specialist, has backed the management buy-out of Hanson Wade, the market-leading conference organiser and provider of information services, focused primarily on the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

Hanson Wade’s management team is led by Tom Richardson, who has overseen a period of rapid expansion since being appointed chief executive in 2015. Between 2016 and 2018, the company’s portfolio of events almost doubled to 108 and its revenues increased by 117% to £22.6 million.

MoA Technology Limited, the crop protection discovery company, has secured £6.3m ($8m) Series A round to develop its unique crop protection discovery platforms in a bid to avert the global herbicide resistance crisis.

The funding round into MoA was co-led by Oxford Sciences Innovation, the world’s largest university venture fund, and Parkwalk Advisors, the largest EIS growth fund manager focused on university spinouts. Oxford University Innovation, the University’s innovation arm, assisted in spinning the company out in 2018.

In this article, Beauhurst highlights the top fund raisings in 2019 by companies that were founded in the same year.

Maven Capital Partners, one of the UK’s most active private equity houses, has invested £2 million in high-growth FinTech provider Delio Limited. The funding will support the business scale its international sales team across key global financial locations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America.