Accelerators are a vital part of the UK’s early-stage company ecosystem, going from strength-to-strength in the last few years. Beauhurst has analysed this network of programmes, and the companies that have been through them, to identify trends and future movements in the accelerator ecosystem. 

Seldon, the machine learning deployment specialist, today announced a £2.7m funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside Global Brain Corporation, Techstars and other existing investors.

Seldon is a pioneering global technology business focused on the fast-growing machine intelligence market. Its open-source machine learning deployment platform makes it easier and quicker to manage, serve and optimise machine learning models at scale. The platform is built on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes.

Since its inception in 2014, Seldon has built a global community of loyal users who leverage their diverse industry backgrounds to provide validation and feedback. Seldon’s initial product offering, Seldon Core, had over 170,000 installs in 2018 and recorded 38% month-on-month growth in H2 2018. In 2019, it will release new enterprise-scale software, Seldon Deploy, which enables data science specialists to move into production more easily with compliance, offering audit trails and approvals, advanced experiments, and model explanations.

Cycle.land, the bike sharing marketplace unlocking the assets of unused bikes, has announced that it has raised over £200,000, thanks to its highly successful second equity crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs. 

Alex Sleigh, Investment Director at Newable shares his thoughts on trends from last year, what to expect for 2019 and how the upcoming year will impact businesses at the heart of the economy.

School Space, a leading platform for schools to generate extra funds by hiring out their spaces, has announced that it has secured £800,000 in equity funding with the help of ClearlySo, Europe’s leading impact investment bank.

Maven Capital Partners has, through its management of two regional funds, provided £1.95 million of capital to Dyer Engineering Ltd, the largest independent engineering business in County Durham. The North East Development Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund and the Finance Durham Fund, established by and using funds from Durham County Council have respectively invested £1 million and £750,000, with an additional £200,000 sourced from a local private investor. The investment will support the company’s growth plans to exploit new opportunities in multiple industries and will create up to 100 new jobs in the region.

BGF has announced the exit of its minority investment in Jumpstart, the UK's leading R&D tax credit specialists, as the business is acquired by Visiativ Group. Visiativ’s Consulting division, ABGI, will acquire Jumpstart following a period of acquisitive expansion and growth.

The Board of Sanford DeLand Asset Management (SDL) has announced the appointment of Rex Orton as Chairman with immediate effect, following FCA approval.

he latest Companies House data, as analysed by the Centre for Entrepreneurs (CFE), shows that business formations recovered from a drop in 2017 to reach a record 663,272 in 2018.

“It is encouraging to see formation numbers recover and hit a new high,” says Matt Smith, director of the Centre for Entrepreneurs. “These figures demonstrate the resilience and confidence of entrepreneurs across the country, confirmed by a 5.7% increase of business registrations and the strengthening of London as Europe’s leading startup hub.”

eFront, the leading financial software and solutions provider dedicated to Alternative Investments, has published its latest Quarterly Private Equity Performance report, showing that venture capital funds globally currently offer a highly attractive risk-return profile, with Western European funds significantly outperforming the historical average.

Key findings

• Performance, risk and holding periods of global venture capital funds have both fallen over the last two quarters, hinting at a wave of new investments.
• Risk-adjusted performance, however, has improved markedly, with risk levels returning to pre-2013 levels and returns remaining above 1.4x.
• Western European venture capital funds are setting a “new normal” for returns, with performance consistently higher than the historical average and convergence with US performance on the horizon. Performance is led by the extremely strong 2009 and 2010 vintage years, while 2011-15 funds are also performing well.
• The picture of US venture funds is increasingly contrasted, with vintage years 2009 and 2011 underperforming, while 2010, 2012 and 2015 significantly outperform.
• The average number of years companies are held in portfolios dropped sharply in 2018.

With 17 years’ experience working in asset based lending and invoice finance, the appointment of Nigel Hibbert as ABL director strengthens IGF’s presence in the South East. Following this latest appointment, IGF’s ABL sales team has increased 50 percent in the last 12 months.

Immersive Labs has announced that Goldman Sachs has led an $8m Series A investment round in its fast-growing cyber security skills platform. The funding, made alongside smaller private investors, will grow an offering which arms enterprise IT and cyber security teams with the latest skills by combining threat data with gamified learning.   The award-winning Immersive Labs platform uses real-time feeds of the latest attack techniques, hacker psychology and technological vulnerabilities to rapidly