BVA BDRC has published its quarterly SME Finance Monitor. The largest and most frequent study of its kind in the UK, research findings have been gathered across 31 waves 

Draper Esprit has led a £7 million investment in Hadean, the London headquartered deep tech company . The round also includes Aster and specialist gaming investor London Venture Partners. Existing investors Luminous Ventures and Entrepreneur First also participated.

Beanuhurst marked International Women's Day by highlighting the continuing gender imbalance in the UK's high-growth sector. In its latest report Beauhurst has analysed funding trends into female-founded companies and found that women entrepreneurs secured just 16% of equity deals in 2018.  

eFront, the leading financial software and solutions provider dedicated to Alternative Investments, today publishes its first LP Proficiency Survey – the most comprehensive study into the sophistication of private equity’s fund investors. 

The report, which canvassed the opinions of LPs ranging from high net worth individuals to major pension plans, finds that investors are falling short of industry best practice in areas such as negotiation, reporting and position monitoring. In all, 179 investors from across the globe rated their approach to 10 private equity investment competencies, selecting from answers graded in terms of sophistication.

Foresight Group has invested £249,000 in Usheru Limited, the firm behind a pioneering technology platform operating in the £50bn film distribution market.

The investment from Foresight, using finance from the Midlands Engine Investment Fund, has been made alongside £224,000 from Enterprise Ireland, taking the total package to £473,000 and allowing the firm to relocate its head office to Milton Keynes. This is an important step for the business after successfully creating a technology platform to power direct ticketing and marketing data insights for film distributors.

Downing has appointed John Pollington as Investment Director, and Oliver Pettafor, as a Loan Servicing Analyst, to its growing Property Finance  investment team.

Tech Nation, the UK network for ambitious digital tech entrepreneurs, is revealing today the 10 early-stage tech startup winners of its Rising Stars competition. Out of the 220,000 existing tech companies in the UK today, 10,764 are early-stage tech startups and eligible for the Rising Stars programme.

OurCrowd, a global investment platform and Israel’s leading venture investor, has raised a total of $1 billion for 170 companies and 18 funds in just six years. Of those portfolio companies, 29 of them have achieved exit.

Vala Capital expects to invest all the capital raised by the Vala EIS Portfolio before the end of this current tax year on April 5.

Angel Investment Network (AIN) the UK’s largest online platform connecting angel investors with startups has launched a new platform connecting female founders and investors. The new ‘Female Founders’ platform was set up to address the underrepresentation of women in the industry both as investors and founders.

In  this month's Startup Spotlight Invested Investor speaks to Ramona Liberoff, an experienced and dynamic investor with decades of business experience.

She is currently a Fellow of the Zinc VC programme and is an active angel investor, and was formerly the chief operating officer of the Innogy Innovation Hub and CEO of SPRING Accelerator. She is passionate about global system challenges that create major opportunities such as energy access, electromobility, automation, the use of data and machine learning.

Deepbridge, the tax-efficient investment manager, has appointed Alison Maughan as Investment Manager in the Life Sciences team.