Filed under: venture capital
26 storiesThe archive, indexed. Every story carries its tags at the foot of the page.
Imperial alumni fund opens with £100k-£300k cheques
Project Ventures has launched a £5m debut fund for pre-seed and seed deeptech founders connected to Imperial College London. Three companies are already in.
Oxford, Cambridge and London take two-thirds of spinout capital
A review published by UK Research and Innovation found three cities absorbed most of the venture money going into UK university spinouts. Founders elsewhere are still buying train tickets to London.
CloudNC adds $20m to Series B, taking lifetime raise to $128m
The London-founded CNC software firm says more than 1,000 machine shops use its CAM Assist tool. Lockheed Martin's venture arm is among the backers.
Government hunts manager for £150m northern scaleup fund
The UK government is looking for someone to run a £150m fund for scaleups in the north of England. The terms have not been published.
Sheffield ticket startup raises £3.9m from NPIF II fund
Tickets for Good, which sells low-cost live event tickets to key workers, has taken a further £3.9m from a regional public-backed equity fund and says it will add 10 Sheffield jobs.
Molten raises £175m growth fund, £75m of it from the state
The British Business Bank has cornerstoned Molten Ventures' new scale-up fund with £75m. Molten wants to double the fund to £350m.
Strolll stacks £3.6m state loan on IW Capital round
The Stafford medtech has taken an Innovate UK innovation loan of £3.6m and a £700k Growth Catalyst award alongside an equity round led by IW Capital. Two of the three cheques cost it no shares.
UK rules out exit tax on university spinouts
The government has said it will not charge founders a tax for moving a spinout abroad. Investors welcomed the decision.
British Business Bank puts £46m into Zinc's £70m science fund
The state-backed lender is committing up to £46m through its Enterprise Capital Funds programme to a pre-seed fund that intends to help start 80 deeptech companies. What it will not yet say is how founders get in.
Scan.com raises $220m and books a meeting with the LSE
The London imaging company has $90m of equity and $130m of debt to fund a US push. It earns most of its money in America and is still weighing where to list.
Humanities PhD dropout raised $92m for AI billing startup Tabs
Ali Hussain left Oxford two months into a doctorate, spent six years learning operations at a 10-person startup, then hired a technical co-founder to cover what he could not do himself.
DOJ tests 112-year-old board law against a16z's two seats
Ben Horowitz sits on Databricks' board. Martin Casado sits on Fivetran's. The two companies now compete, and prosecutors have reportedly spent almost a year looking at what that means.
Rillet raises $100m in 48 hours after a board meeting
The AI accounting company was not fundraising. It showed investors a quarter in which annualised revenue doubled, and a $1bn valuation followed two days later.
Medly raises $8m seed for AI exam tutoring
Felix Capital led a €6.89m round in the London platform, which says it has passed 400,000 UK users 18 months after launch. Two former NHS doctors run it.
QuantumLight closes $500M second fund, doubling its first
Nik Storonsky's venture firm now has €432 million to test whether software can pick startups better than partners can. Founders pitching it are pitching a screening system called Aleph.
US voucher worth up to $200m pulls rare-disease money west
The FDA's Priority Review Voucher scheme was signed back into law in February. UK rare-disease founders have no equivalent, and one of them says investors notice.
Gumroad cut 75% of staff, then became a good business
Sahil Lavingia raised $8m at 19 to build a billion-dollar company. He ended up running it alone from Utah — and says that was the better outcome.
Carpenter turned founder raises $70m for construction AI firm
Sarah Buchner started on Austrian job sites as a teenager. Trunk Tools, the company she founded in 2021, now employs more than 100 people and was valued at $325m last year.
Jason Fried built Basecamp in Chicago on no venture capital
The 37signals co-founder turned investors down repeatedly, stayed profitable, and wrote two books telling other founders they could do the same. Twenty-five years on, the industry is arguing his case for him.
$250m exit collapses into fraud and forged-signature claims
VideoVerse's investors are still waiting to be paid a year after the deal was announced. Its founder is now a defendant in a cluster of Delaware cases.
Cytix raises €6m Series A led by Northern Gritstone
The cybersecurity startup says the round will fund work on the risks created by fast-moving software change. Northern Gritstone led it.
Three AI firms hit $100m ARR. Multiples ran 50x to 100x
Harvey, Sierra and Legora each crossed $100m in annual recurring revenue within nine months. The venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz argues the gap between their valuations is not explained by how fast they grew.
Wordsmith AI adds $14m to a Series B it closed in June
The Edinburgh legal AI firm has bolted a $14m extension onto a round announced two months ago, with Intact Private Capital and FT Ventures joining the register.
Sovereign AI takes equity in chip startup OLIX, its fifth deal
The government's venture arm has joined a nine-figure round in a two-year-old London chip designer. It is the fund's fifth equity cheque, and the announcement says nothing about how other founders get one.
Airtable sells at 2.7x ARR, a ninth of its 2021 mark
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable at a $1.285bn enterprise value on roughly $480m of recurring revenue. The company was worth $11.7bn in December 2021 and raised $1.4bn along the way.
Treasury puts £100m into regional and first-time VC funds
The second tranche of the £400m Investor Pathways Capital Initiative goes to early-stage funds outside London. Who gets the cheques has not been named.