IP Group tops Beauhurst's list of the top investors of Britain’s university spinouts since 2011 .  

Downing Ventures has committed £4.2 million of funding to Rated People Limited, to help the company accelerate growth by investing in marketing and sales and continue driving innovation in its product offering.

Rated People is an online home services marketplace that aims to connect homeowners with high quality local tradespeople. The company offers access to more than 50,000 tradespeople, representing over 30 trades, and covering the whole of the UK.  It is free for homeowners to post jobs on the platform. Trades customers pay a subscription fee, along with transactional revenues to access the marketplace and provide quotes for homeowners’ jobs. Its annual membership offering reflects the company’s ongoing commitment to helping tradespeople run successful businesses, providing trades businesses with inbuilt features that help them stay organised and track the work they’re doing. Annual membership also provides trades businesses with access to over 200 personal and business discounts to cut costs on everything from tools at Jewson, to fuel and free mobile phone insurance.

ForeVest Capital Partners (“ForeVest”), a leading private equity fund manager operating primarily in Central and Eastern Europe, announced the close of a general partner-led secondary transaction of a fund it advises, PineBridge New Europe Partners II, L.P. (“NEP II”). 

Go Beyond Investing and Bamboo Capital Partners have announced a strategic partnership that will see the firms combining expertise to target early stage growth businesses across Europe, with some exposure to US and Israel based companies.

Mambu, the SaaS banking engine powering modern digital financial services, has launched Mambu Process Orchestrator (MPO). 

Nosto, a leader in ecommerce personalization and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for retail, has raised USD $7.4 million led by European investment companies Tesi, Open Ocean and Idinvest. Nosto’s innovative retail personalization solutions have fueled a three-year growth rate of 260 percent in North America driven by deep relationships with 2,500 of the world’s fastest growing retail brands. To date, Nosto has raised more than $25 million from investors to further expand its leadership in artificial intelligence and deep learning for retail.

CrowdProperty has been accepted as the first property development peer-to-peer lending platform to join the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association (P2PFA). 

Durham County Council and Blaenau Gwent Borough Council have launched a call for technology businesses to develop innovative solutions that can capture and analyse data to transform Local Authority service delivery. Development funding is provided under the GovTech Catalyst Fund scheme and the competition opens for applications on 24 September.

Full competition documentation will only be available to applicants who register via Innovate UK’s website once the competition opens on 24 September. Further information can be found https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/245/overview.

Polling commissioned by British Business Bank, the UK government-owned economic development bank, has revealed one in three (33%) smaller business owners want to grow their businesses but are unsure on how best to achieve that growth.

Often, smaller businesses want to grow but just don’t consider, or know of, the alternative finance options available to them. The new polling reveals, for example, that only 5% of businesses have considered angel investment whilst only 7% have considered crowdfunding.

Older business owners are significantly less likely to be aware of or to have used alternative growth finance options than their younger counterparts. One in five (19%) millennials (under-35s), for example, have considered crowdfunding, compared to fewer than one in twenty (3%) over-35s.

Scottish Equity Partners has been named as one of the world’s most consistent, top performing venture capital fund managers by Preqin, the data and intelligence specialists for the global alternative assets industry.  

See the full rankings here.

Optoscribe, a leading supplier of glass-based integrated photonics components, has raised £2.8 million. This funding will facilitate an expansion of current manufacturing capacity, the hiring of key engineering resource and allow the business to meet the demands of a growing customer base.

An Edinburgh-based startup enabling businesses to gain insight from customer support conversation data has secured £115,000 in seed funding.