Marine bycatch prevention company Fishtek Marine has netted its full £900,000 impact investment crowdfunding via the Triodos Bank UK crowdfunding platform.  The equity raise for shares in the organisation is enabling Fishtek to develop its range of products, conduct more live sea trials and help enhance global awareness.

London-based STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts and maths) learning pioneers OKIDO and OjO, have raised £18,800 on Kickstarter, exceeding their target of £15,000.

UK SMEs are losing out to big tech in the battle to recruit top tech talent, according to Robert Half UK’s new report, Recruiting for the future: The challenges for UK SMEs.

The white paper, which was based on an independent study of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) across the UK, found that three quarters (75%) of CIOs believe that it is more challenging for SMEs to attract tech talent because they prefer to work for larger technology companies. The lure of working for a household name instead of having a more significant role in a smaller company means that large tech companies appear to be winning the battle to recruit the industry’s highly skilled personnel.

The level of P2PFA platform lending has continued to increase during the first quarter of 2019 – with more than £850 million of loans facilitated over the three month period – taking the cumulative lending for the Association’s members to more than £10.5 billion.

Tech Nation, the leading network for ambitious tech entrepreneurs in the UK, has for the fifth-year running revealed a continued rise in demand for applications for the Tech Nation Visa, as the UK’s world-leading digital technology sector continues to attract exceptional talent from around the world.

hero, a health tech and wellbeing strategy provider formed to have a positive influence on individuals, organisations and communities by supporting proactive wellness across all areas of physical, mental and financial health, has closed its latest funding round, raising over £1.3 million to tackle these issues head on.  

Having already established itself in the workplace and developer markets and the professional sports sector, hero works with over 100 clients across the UK including names like the NHS, HSBC, Legal and General, Caddick Construction and Inspired Villages. hero has developed and launched a unique digital platform - Navigator to enable employers and organisation to create a full service solution to deliver preventive and personalised experiences for end users.  

YFM Equity Partners has appointed Helen Villiers as Investment Manager. Based at YFM’s London office, Helen will be focussing on supporting YFM’s new investment activity, working with the existing team to deploy funds into growing businesses at points of transformational change.

A new senior executive leadership team has been put in place at Montezuma’s following investment from Edinburgh-based private equity firm, Inverleith LLP, last year.

The Ticket Fairy, a growth and sales channel partner for the live events industry, has announced the official launch of its cloud-based events platform - an easy-to-use, self-service solution, combining ticketing, marketing and event management, that increases revenue, reduces financial risk, and provides event organisers, venues and tour managers with access to unparalleled data, analytics and intelligence. 

QuarterOne, the sales forecasting software start-up for SMEs, raises first major investment from Seedcamp, the influential European seed fund

Keensight Capital, a leading private equity manager dedicated to pan-European Growth Buyout investments, has appointed Christophe Lavigne as Operating Partner.

Inzura.ai the UK based global InsurTech has raised a further £1m in a pre-A funding round. This follows a seed investment round in early 2018 and rapid growth in the UK and South East Asian markets.

Inzura works with brokers and insurers to deliver enhanced digital versions of their insurance products through smartphone apps, leveraging telematics, integrated dashcams and artificial intelligence (AI). With some customers already achieving over 30% improvements in loss ratio, Inzura's digital products are customer focussed, cost significantly less to operate, reduce fraud, and enable greater pricing accuracy.