Unfabled raises £1.26M to crack the £790B Women's Health and Wellness market
Unfabled, the leading destination for women’s health and wellbeing, announces a £1.26M round to address the gender health gap, taking its total funding to £1.59M. Prominent investors joined the seed round including Morgan Stanley, Exceptional Ventures, Atomico Angels, Founders Factory, Chai Ventures, SyndicateRoom, and 3 Sisters Ventures. Angel investors, the majority of them women, also joined from across technology and healthcare. They include Maya Ghosn (a scout for Sequoia) Shefali Roy (Apple, TrueLayer), Elaine Groenestein (first angel at Elvie), and Fiona Pathiraja (Healthcare investor and philanthropist).
Founded in 2021 by Hannah Samano (ex-Unilever, Kasha), Unfabled is a data-driven health platform that delivers curated and personalised solutions for women. After answering a series of questions about their hormonal and health priorities, Unfabled provides users with a curated selection of trusted and effective products to support their needs. Over 300,000 people are using Unfabled to discover effective treatments for a range of conditions, from menstrual cramps to pregnancy and menopause.
Unfabled’s market intelligence platform, the B2B element of the product, provides crucial insights into consumer behaviour for healthcare and businesses to drive future advancements in women's health.
“A major cause of the gender health gap is the lack of sex-aggregated data which causes a lack of insight and understanding across women’s health. We’re building the most user-friendly platform possible while also filling the massive gap that continues to exist in health-related data. The more we understand about female health, the more laser-focused we can become on improving it.” - Hannah Samano, Founder and CEO of Unfabled
Sentify raises more than £860K in oversubscribed pre-seed round to build the leading analytics platform for LLM products
Sentify, the platform that enables users to extract actionable insights from large language model (LLM) products, is pleased to announce the completion of an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round, raising just over £860K. The round was led by Episode 1, with Adam Shuaib joining the board, and supported by 500 Emerging Europe, along with a select group of top-tier angel investors.
Sentify was founded through the collaborative vision of Alex Marantelos, formerly of Confluent, George Pastakas, previously with Revolut, and Dimi Ilias, ex-Meta. The trio, originally from Greece, embarked on their careers in London and have since transitioned from their successful roles at prominent tech firms. Their motivation lies in addressing a significant challenge and opportunity within the Generative AI field: unlocking actionable insights from the vast text data produced by LLM products and applications. The Sentify platform offers an interactive, real-time interface, transforming idle text data into valuable intelligence, revealing customer behaviours, user intents and action inference, product usage patterns, as well as spotting inefficiencies and inaccuracies in LLM products.
The Sentify engine stands out in the market due to its deep-tech Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and user-friendly interface, intuitive and powerful semantic search capabilities, and data categorisation.
Tuum raises £21.3M series B financing, led by CommerzVentures, to fund product and market development
Tuum, the leading next-generation core banking provider, today announces that it has raised £21.3M, in a series B financing round led by CommerzVentures, with participation from Speedinvest alongside existing investors.
Tuum's mission is to allow banks to replace their legacy systems quickly and safely, to lower their maintenance spending and to open up new possibilities to adapt and prosper in the digital world,
Tuum has expanded rapidly since signing its first client partnership in February 2019, working with banks to ease their digital transition onto cheaper, flexible systems that can free them up to develop new products and enter new verticals. The company now boasts a customer base across 10 countries, with a pronounced presence in the UK, and Nordics. Over the last three years, Tuum's revenues have soared, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate of over 250%.
"Tuum’s standout modular approach is particularly suited to today’s ever-changing environment, offering a mature, yet flexible solution to a real pain point." says Heiko Schwender, Managing Partner at CommerzVentures
Clue Software raises £4M to detect, investigate and prevent rapidly advancing worldwide threats
Clue Software, the leading provider of software for investigations and intelligence management, has today announced its £4M funding led by Frog Capital, with £1M from angel investors and employees, supported by investment advisor ScaleUp Group.
Founded by Clare Elford (CEO), and Thomas Drohan (CCO), the tech for good platform has grown exponentially despite challenging UK market conditions for tech investment. Investigations professionals use Clue to conduct enhanced end-to-end operations enabled by proactive threat detection and prevention, operational pace and confidence in decision-making. The company is trusted by a diverse and global investigations community dedicated to preventing harm and bringing justice to victims in society, spanning government, corporate, law enforcement, not-for-profit and sports organisations.
The investment will be used to increase the company’s commercial and community capacity as well as fund R&D and product development. The funding follows an impressive year for the Bristol-based company, which grew its ARR by 60%. Clue also increased its headcount from 45 to 70 in 2023, with this number likely to surpass 100 this year.
BGF backs holiday parks IT specialist with £5M investment
Elite Dynamics, a leading provider of software solutions to the holiday park and marina industry, has announced a £5M investment from BGF. The deal was led by Harry Jones and Courtney Walker, investors in BGF’s North-West team.
Founded in 2015 by Jamaine Campbell, Nicola Campbell and Jack Vernon, the North West-based business has developed a range of digital transformation solutions specifically designed for holiday parks, marinas, as well as holiday home manufacturers and dealers. These help to improve business functions from maintenance, memberships and marketing, to reservations, sales and finance. The range is currently used in more than 350 parks, both in the UK and internationally.
BGF’s investment will support the continued development of Elite Dynamics’ proprietary software, which is built on the Microsoft Dynamics platform, as well as plans to invest in sales and marketing.
"In order to achieve our growth ambitions, we needed an investment partner that recognised the potential of our business, as well as that of the sector, and was willing to take a long-term approach in helping us to seize the opportunities that lie ahead. In BGF we have found that investment partner." says Jamaine Campbell, CEO and co-founder of Elite Dynamics.
GenAI-powered AudioStack raises £2.5M pre-Series A round led by Quadri Ventures to revolutionise audio production
London-based startup AudioStack has raised a £2.5M pre-Series A round led by Quadri Ventures to revolutionise large scale audio production for enterprises through Artificial Intelligence.
AudioStack’s technology suite provides an end-to-end platform with the capability to scale audio production without sacrificing quality – from voice overs, to audio spots, dynamic creatives, custom brand voice synthesis (voice cloning), sound design, mastering and delivery.
With AudioStack, studio quality audio assets can be created faster than real-time, empowering users to create thousands of variations of audio assets at speed and scale, allowing for more personalised, better quality audio based on voice, language and Call-to-Action and reducing the turnaround time for audio production from several days down to a few hours or even minutes.
"This funding round will enable us to continue our global growth and double down on the business cases that are working so well: we have been helping our customers realise enormous savings throughout their creative processes while enabling them to massively scale the output of their production to levels they never dreamed of, allowing us to supercharge creativity." says Dr Kunz, CEO and Founder of AudioStack
Kennet Partners and Federated Hermes Private Equity to invest £21.4M in Screendragon
Screendragon Ltd., a technology leader in SaaS-based workflow automation, announced today that Kennet Partners and Federated Hermes Private Equity, have invested £21.4M in the software company to drive the continued expansion of the business.
Screendragon is a highly awarded platform serving the agency and marketing sectors. Their platform is designed to automate complex workflows, connect distributed teams and provide visibility and agility at scale. Powering many of the most well-known brands and agencies, it helps teams plan, innovate, create and deliver content to market efficiently and effectively. In a margin-compressed, P&L-constrained environment, where teams are asked to take on increasingly heavier workloads, Screendragon eliminates unnecessary work and compresses cycle time enabling teams to be more efficient while focusing on the work they were hired to do versus managing workflow processes.
The £21.4M investment aims to facilitate a commitment to invest in the company’s Irish operation, doubling Screendragon’s workforce in Cork and underpinning the further expansion of the company into the US market. The company’s executive leadership team, and founders, John Briggs, Jan Quant and Fergus Ashe will continue to lead the company with Executive Chairman, Clive Sirkin assuming the role of Chairman of a newly constituted Board of Directors.
Spin-out raises £1.4M for lung test to aid early diagnosis of asthma
PulmoBioMed - a Northumbria University spin-out which has developed a new lung test that could lead to earlier diagnosis of asthma and other conditions - has raised £1.4M to help commercialise its technology and target the US market. The investment round was led by the North East Venture Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund and managed by Mercia Ventures, and included Northumbria University, SFC Capital and private investors in the USA, EU and UK. The company has also secured a £700K grant from Innovate UK to help it demonstrate the benefits of its technology.
PulmoBioMed’s breath sampling technology offers a fast, non-invasive way to obtain fluid samples from the deep lung without contamination from fluids from the mouth. PulmoBioMed’s hand-held device, PBM-HALE, captures the breath as the patient exhales. It then separates large aerosol droplets which come from the mouth from fine droplets which come from the deep lung. Clinical studies have shown that it provided uncontaminated deep lung samples in just two minutes that helped detect and quantify lung infections and inflammation in 100% of symptomatic cases.
PumoBioMed has already completed one successful UK government contract and won a number of accolades including the 2021 BioNOW investability competition. The company initially plans to target the US market and focus on asthma diagnosis, though the device is suitable for diagnosing other conditions including pneumonias. It could also improve outcomes for lung cancer patients by providing a better way to detect returning tumours and identify the best treatments.
In other international investment news
Watershed announces £79.63M in new funding as corporate climate action accelerates
Watershed, the leading enterprise sustainability platform, announced a £79.63M Series C funding round at a £1.43B valuation. The financing was led by Greenoaks, with participation from existing investors including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, Emerson Collective, Galvanize Climate Solutions, Neo, and others. With this new funding, Watershed will continue powering best-in-class climate programs at the world’s leading companies, while redoubling its investment in Europe.
With embedded climate intelligence from the world’s leading climate and policy experts, Watershed is the platform of choice for companies seeking to satisfy regulatory requirements, unlock new business opportunities, and address climate-related risks. Watershed customers also have exclusive access to a marketplace of pre-vetted, high-quality carbon projects and groundbreaking virtual power purchase agreements.
This investment caps a year of increasing climate imperative in the private sector. Two-thirds of the global Fortune 500 have made significant climate pledges; 23,000 companies now report emissions data to CDP; and the US Inflation Reduction Act has spurred hundreds of billions of dollars of private-sector climate investment. 2024 represents the first year of government-mandated climate disclosure for nearly 12,000 global companies under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
Gresham House Ventures makes growth investment in business process automation company Azarc®
Gresham House Ventures, a growth equity investor specialising in software and digitally-driven businesses in the consumer, healthcare and service sectors, has made an investment in Azarc®, a business process automation company that uses technology to streamline cross-border supply chains.
Azarc®’s software platform helps businesses reduce costs in their international trade by automating customs clearances. Since its launch in 2021, the business’s highly scalable technology has already been adopted by leading companies, including BT Group.
Addressing a significant cross-border trade market globally and particular challenges around UK trade caused by Brexit, the business offers a compelling value proposition for importers. Recent trials have demonstrated the platform’s potential benefits, including an 85% faster processing time, a 30% reduction in labour hours and a 75% decrease in errors for customs checks when using its technology.
Swedish skincare startup, MANTLE, raises £2.4M in investment round led by British venture capital firm Venrex
MANTLE, the Stockholm-born company developing clean and clinical skincare since 2020, today announces that it has raised £2.4M in a round led by London-based venture capital firm Venrex. The round brings the company’s total funding to date to £6.9M.
MANTLE is a Scandinavian skincare company transforming the way we see beauty. The company was founded in Stockholm in 2020 by tech entrepreneur and investor Josefin Landgård and branding specialist Stina Lönnkvist. MANTLE’s award-winning products are transformative and made to empower customers to embrace their personal expression. Produced in the company’s own laboratory in Sweden, MANTLE combines clean ingredients with high-performing actives to create formulas that are gentle on the skin but create clear results.
This year, MANTLE is launching in the US, Germany and the Netherlands. With this new backing, the company will also be accelerating its research and product development, all taking place from MANTLE’s own lab in Sweden.Since its inception, MANTLE has brought to market award-winning and transformative formulas incorporating a wide variety of innovative and active biomimetic ingredients. Its products are designed to ensure that formulas penetrate all layers of the skin and strengthen the skin barrier.
In other investment news
Episode 1 raises £76M fund to back early-stage innovators
Episode 1 is today announcing the close of a £76M early stage fund - including a £20M cornerstone commitment from British Patient Capital and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund. This fund, the third from the firm, will enable Episode 1 to back a new generation of B2B innovators at pre-seed and seed stage, as well as deepen their reputation as the UK’s most innovative early stage investor.
Launched in 2013, Episode 1 has backed over 69 portfolio companies to date, including Carwow, Huboo, CloudNC, Raft, Robin AI, Fatmap and Omnipresent. 73% of portfolio companies from their prior fund have gone on to raise a Series A - ~3x higher than the average pre-seed and seed graduation rate. The team has also overseen high-profile exits including Fatmap (acquired by Strava), Passfort (Moody’s), Feedr (Compass Group), Touch Surgery (Medtronic) and Atlas (Meta).
With this capital, the team will be making investments of between £250K and £3M in pre-seed and seed stage startups, with a significant amount allocated for follow-ons. Episode 1 plans to make between 10 to 15 investments per year in software-led companies operating primarily in the UK which focus on key areas including AI, TechBio, open-source, software infrastructure, healthtech and marketplaces. There will also be some allocation available for US and European-based companies that have a UK footprint. The team has already begun deploying capital from the fund.
UK government announces £100M to support AI regulation
The UK government has announced £100m to support ‘more agile’ AI regulation.
It comes as £10M is announced to prepare and upskill regulators to address the risks and harness the opportunities of this defining technology. The fund will help regulators develop cutting-edge research and practical tools to monitor and address risks and opportunities in their sectors, from telecoms and healthcare to finance and education.
As part of the package of measures, nearly £90M will go towards launching nine new research hubs across the UK and a partnership with the US on responsible AI. The hubs will support British AI expertise in harnessing the technology across areas including healthcare, chemistry, and mathematics. £19M will also go towards 21 projects to develop innovative trusted and responsible AI and machine learning solutions to accelerate deployment of these technologies and drive productivity.
