Made With Intent raises £1.5M to put customer intent at the heart of eCommerce
Made With Intent have raised £1.5M to bring their segmentation platform and their vision for more appropriate eCommerce to market. Led by Mercuri, with Portfolio Ventures and previous investors Haatch following, the seed funding will support the fully remote team of 15 with their product, marketing and partnership efforts.
Made With Intent is a segmentation platform helping data-led retailers to understand and target customer intent. Through intent metrics, predictive targeting and tech integrations, it helps eCommerce businesses to optimise customer journeys based on how people actually buy. It gives experience, CRM and performance teams a more appropriate way to respond to and re-engage customers based on their needs—boosting short- and long-term revenue in the process.
The platform works by collecting data through an easy to implement script, modelling 250+ signals from online shoppers and returning predictive intent metrics in real time. Visitors are then automatically segmented based on their journey, momentum and how likely they are to buy, exit or return in the future.
“Made With Intent has embraced first-principle thinking and a decade of insights to shake up the vast eCommerce market,” says Alan Hudson, Founding General Partner at Mercuri.
Gresham House Ventures invests £10M into leading event accreditation platform Accredit Solutions
Gresham House Ventures, a growth equity investor specialising in software and digitally-driven businesses in the consumer, healthcare and service sectors, has made a £10M investment into leading event accreditation provider Accredit Solutions. The investment was made from Gresham House Ventures’ recently launched institutional private equity fund, a new limited partnership to enable institutional investors to support growth companies headquartered in the UK and Ireland.
Accredit Solutions provides end-to-end software for the accreditation of all workforce, media, broadcast, athletes, performers and officials at stadiums, festivals and large-scale events. Its feature-rich platform allows organisations to set levels of personnel security and risk-based data collection while removing pain points for venue owners and event organisers, with tools for data registration and document collection, data review & vetting, automated background checking with external sources, badge printing, access control and tracking.
Sitting at the crossroads of operations, health & safety, security and IT, Accredit Solutions’ platform benefits multiple client departments by streamlining efficiencies and driving increased security to protect against the global terrorism threats to events, making it a mission-critical technology.
Symbe raises £1.2M for AI that helps GTM teams win deals
Symbe, an AI-powered platform that helps sales teams win more deals by automating the creation of tailored business cases, has raised a £1.2M pre-seed round led by Concept Ventures and joined by Pact VC, Notion Capital, and a range of leading angels through Nodes Ventures. Angels include Resolv Labs Founder, Fedor Chmile, Founders Capital CEO, Richard Hadler, and a series of angels from Stripe.
The company has been founded by a trio of serial entrepreneurs. Martin Blinder (CEO) and Thomas Laurbjerg (CRO), who scaled digital healthcare company Tictrac before exiting in 2022, and machine learning expert Xavier Wilders, who founded SME budgeting platform Beyond Labs, which was acquired in 2023.
With over 20 beta-customers from a diverse range of sectors already using the platform to boost their sales, and with a large number of additional companies on track to onboard within the next quarter, the team behind Symbe believe their AI-powered tool could unlock billions in sales for businesses across Europe and the US over the coming years.
Triple Point and Ethical Power agree £7M debt facility
Triple Point, the purpose-led investment manager and Ethical Power, the utility-scale solar and battery storage company, have agreed a debt facility of £7M to support Ethical Power’s development of early-stage Solar and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) projects in the UK.
Triple Point has a long track-record of providing unique debt financing for energy transition asset developers that support the renewable energy integration across the UK – and has provided financing for over 16 gigawatts (GW) of UK Solar and BESS assets in development.
Ethical Power is the UK’s only independent vertically integrated energy infrastructure company. Its end-to-end capabilities add value across the entire lifecycle of green energy infrastructure projects. The company’s current pipeline of renewable energy projects in development in the UK represents 175 megawatts (MW) solar and 225MW BESS, on top of over 1GW in construction and development globally.
The £7M debt facility is the start of a new partnership between Triple Point and Ethical Power. The funding will support expansion of the UK’s green energy infrastructure therefore ultimately contributing to keeping energy costs down and balancing the electrical grid.
Twilio preferred partner Zing secures additional £1.25M funding to support US expansion
Zing, one of the most prolific Twilio consulting partners, has raised an additional £1.25M from existing shareholders Maven Capital Partners to support its expansion in the United States (US).
Headquartered in the United Kingdom (UK), Zing builds exclusively on the Twilio technology stack, helping organisations around the world deliver amazing customer experiences. Through its propriety quick-build platform, customers accelerate the roll-out of their Twilio implementations, while retaining complete control of the underlying code.
In recent years, Zing has experienced significant organic growth in the US, fueled partly by increasing demand from organisations seeking to capitalise on the rapid advancements in generative and conversational artificial intelligence (AI).
"We look forward to working with Julian and the team to build on the company’s success as it continues to grow globally.” says Tom Purkis, Partner at Maven Capital Partners.
Pollen Careers secures £112K to make entry-level job market more inclusive
Pollen Careers, a job platform on a mission to transform the entry-level job market into a more inclusive and equitable space, has announced it’s successfully raised £112K. The funding round, which was run via SeedLegals, reached 100% of the target amount in just one week and closed the round after being overfunded by 12%.
Launched in 2023, by Sophie O'Brien, Pollen Careers is on a mission to transform the entry-level job market into a more inclusive and equitable space. The team believes using traditional screening methods, such as CVs, to test candidate suitability has often led to ineffective and biassed hiring processes that disadvantage those without elite qualifications or extensive work experience. In turn, employers struggle to hire diversely. Pollen is changing this by innovating how young job seekers access personalised support, skills and opportunities they need to thrive, and provide employers with access to a diverse pool of talented individuals ready to make an impact.
Since its inception, Pollen Careers has proudly built and supported a community of over 2,500 entry-level candidates and helped companies such as Cubitts, HPS Engineering, MyBigCareer, Kitt and more to hire exceptional entry-level talent.
“We’re incredibly thankful to all our investors for supporting Pollen Careers and look forward to bringing them on our journey to transform the entry-level job market into a more inclusive and equitable space, where everyone has the chance to succeed.” says Sophie O’Brien, Founder of Pollen Careers
In other investment news
Founders pool £36M of equity into second Collective Equity Fund with £10M cashback
Collective Equity, the startup providing innovative liquidity funds for founders, today announced the launch of its second pooled equity fund. Nineteen founders from 12 UK based, high growth scaleups (with a combined equity value north of £1B) have pooled £36M of equity from the businesses they founded.
The equity pooled into this second Collective Equity fund is from companies that have all received a recent investment from VCs or institutional investors. The companies have been trading for an average of eight years and represent a range of sectors including healthcare, fintech, sustainability and regulatory technology.
In addition to the initial cash boost, when one or more of the Limited Partners (LPs) has a liquidity event, such as an IPO or acquisition, each LP receives a share of the proceeds. This gives founders diversification of their investment portfolio.
Gideon Valkin launches debut fund to back Europe’s fintech mafias building the next-generation of tech giants
Gideon Valkin – the former Monzo and ClearScore commercial leader, investor and entrepreneur – is today launching Andrena Ventures: a £9.61M solo GP fund backed by tech’s best founders and VC leaders to capitalise on the ‘spin-off’ flywheel being seen across Europe. The fund has reached its first close with a final close planned for later in the year. He’s also announcing the fund’s first investment into Nustom, the new AI-powered software-building startup from Monzo co-founding CTO, Jonas Templestein.
Just as the PayPal Mafia used experiences gained at the global payment pioneer to build the world’s biggest tech giants – from YouTube to Tesla, LinkedIn and Palantir – Valkin believes a similar flywheel is being seen across Europe today. Over the past decade, European fintech scale-ups have become fertile territory for world-class talent. According to Dealroom data, there are 10 fintech unicorns in Europe that have spun out 145 new startups which have raised ~£4B.
The size of the fund allows Valkin to bring a level of close support, dedication and alignment to the leaders he invests in. He combines the access and network that founders expect from institutional funds, with the personalised support and operational know-how typically only delivered by angels. It’s an approach that allows him to keep ownership low and value high, providing a fresh alternative to today’s founders who demand much more than just capital.
