By Martin Sherwood, Enterprise Investment Partners

If you are considering investing in the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) this year, here are a few tips to bear in mind. The tax benefits of SEIS are very attractive, but there are a few pitfalls you need to avoid.

Green Angel Syndicate has invested in Piclo (formerly Open Utility) in its latest round to finance the expansion of its revolutionary energy trading software system, Piclo Flex.

‘Flexibility’ is the term used in the energy market to describe the balancing of energy consumption or generation in response to a price or an instruction. There is currently no efficient system to trade flexible energy consumption and generation in a dynamic, responsive and – most of all – rapid manner.

Dr Steve Garnett, the angel investor behind Fairsail which was sold last year to The Sage Group for $150 million, shares his experiences of angel investing, with Funding London.  

Edinburgh-based venture capital firm Par Equity has invested £1.3m in a rapidly growing stem-cell research company that is helping pharmaceutical giants to develop new treatments for diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Investment platform Downing Crowd is launching a ‘7-day access’ bond which will invest a further £2.5 million for renewable energy generation and reserve power company, Bagnall Energy. 

Bagnall Energy, which is managed by Downing LLP, has funded more than £165 million of UK energy projects since launch in 2013.  It currently has a portfolio of 40 projects in operational solar, wind, anaerobic digestion and reserve power, across the UK.

Downing Crowd has already successfully raised £2.2 million for Bagnall Energy. To help fund its future pipeline of energy projects, Bagnall Energy plans to issue up to a total of £20 million of additional bonds. 

Maven Property, the property arm of Maven Capital Partners, has completed the £14.5 million sale of Hotel Indigo Glasgow, a four-star, 94-bedroom hotel with restaurant in the centre of the city, to Heeton Holdings, a Singapore-listed real estate conglomerate. 

The structure of the transaction includes the sale of the Freehold (in Scotland “Heritable”) interest in the hotel to a Ground Rent Fund and of the resultant long leasehold interest to Heeton, which has acquired the trading business and goodwill of the Hotel. There has been little precedent in structuring hotel sales in this way, but Maven’s significant experience of hotel development funding structures has enabled it to split these two interests in the Hotel and drive additional value for its investors.

Foresight Group has announced the £2.5 million growth capital investment into Accrosoft Limited.

Based in Loughborough, Accrosoft is a software as a service company with two products currently in the market, Vacancy Filler, an Applicant Tracking System which automates the recruitment process for organisations and Weduc, an engagement tool to enable parent-teacher communication.

Accrosoft was founded in 2008 by Alex Khakbiz and Mitesh Chauhan, experienced SaaS entrepreneurs. Vacancy Filler, launched in 2013, automates much of the recruitment management process for businesses. The product now boasts over 200 customers across a range of sectors, including supermarket Aldi, which manages over 4,000 daily applications.

Deepbridge Capital has confirmed its Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS) and Seed EIS (SEIS)  product range for the 2018/19 tax year.

A University of Oxford spin-out company which has developed a software platform for broadcasters has secured an £850,000 investment led by the MEIF Proof of Concept & Early Stage Fund, which is managed by Mercia Fund Managers and part of the Midlands Engine Investment Fund.

The funding will allow Covatic to bring its software to market and create six new technical and management jobs. This latest investment, which also includes money from Oxford Sciences Innovation fund, Creative England, management and private investors, brings the total raised by the company to over £1.6million.

By Graham Bishop is Investment Manager at Heartwood Investment Management, 

With only a few weeks of initial negotiations remaining, some form of exit deal between the UK and the broader EU still appears more likely than no deal at all. However, both scenarios – ‘deal’ and ‘no deal’ – serve as umbrellas for many possible eventualities, and the situation remains extremely fluid.

Ventrica, a European, award-winning, outsourced contact centre, has attracted a £9 million investment from Mobeus Equity Partners.  Ventrica provides intelligent, multi-lingual and omni-channel outsourced customer contact services to a range of global ‘blue-chip’ brands.

The latest Fintech M&A Market Report from international technology mergers and acquisitions advisors, Hampleton Partners, reveals that the fintech sector reported 141 transactions in the first half of 2018, with a total disclosed transaction value of nearly $40 billion ($39.3 bn), more than 26 percent up from the prior half year.