Startup Funding Club ranks in the Top 5 Most Active Angel & Seed Investors in the World in PitchBook’s 2018 Global League Table.

Maven Capital Partners, one of the UK’s most active SME finance providers, has invested £150,000 in cloud-based project management system, Collabor8Online on behalf of NPIF – Maven Equity Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.  The funding will support the expansion of the senior management, including the appointment of a Chief Technology Officer, strengthen the sales team and invest in extensive product development. Collabor8 will also use the funds raised to commence a targeted contact marketing campaign to better penetrate its customer base in niche sectors, principally construction and associated professional services.

London-based VC fund Fuel Ventures has expanded its portfolio of early-stage companies and invested £1 million in Capdesk, a progressive private equity management platform.

Deepbridge Capital, the tax-efficient investment manager, has announced the appointment of Anjali Roberts as Strategic Partnerships Manager.

WarDucks, the Dublin-based augmented reality (AR) game development studio, has announced a €3.3 million funding round. Lead investor in the round is the EQT Ventures fund, with participation from Suir Valley Ventures and other investors. The funding will be used to drive the development of WarDucks’ new location-based AR game and expand the company’s development team. WarDucks’ is the latest investment to be discovered by AI platform Motherbrain. The proprietary platform is used by EQT Ventures to leverage data to identify and proactively contact promising start-ups.

Since 2010, £120 million has been pumped into UK mapping businesses, a third of which was invested in 2018. Beauhurst has looked at the 21 companies exploring new ground in the UK's mapping sector.

Fast-growing international investment and corporate advisory group Mayfair 101 has added leading business figures from telecommunications, 

UKCloud, the multi-cloud experts dedicated to making transformation happen across UK public sector, today announced a significant £25m investment from Digital Alpha Advisors, LLC, that will enable accelerated digital transformation of UK public services through its unique multi-cloud platform.

By Caspar Bowes, Bowes Wine

Marketplace lending hit a record £6.1bn in 2018, according to Link Asset Services’ inaugural Marketplace Lending Index, powered by Brismo (formerly named AltFi Data).

The value of gross marketplace lending conducted by tech-enabled platforms (which includes crowdfunded or peer-to-peer loans) reached a quarterly record of £1.6bn in Q4, up 13.9% year on year.

The record end to 2018 marks an impressive rise for this form of lending.  In 2011, new gross lending amounted to just £92m. It now takes a shade under six days for marketplace platforms to originate this amount. 

Leading estate agency comparison business GetAgent has closed a £2.2m super-seed round from a consortium of investors led by Marchmont Ventures, backers of Motorway.co.uk and joins the Channel 4 Commercial Growth Fund, the investment arm of Channel 4 Television which invested in 2018.  GetAgent is the estate agency comparison website, comparing the performance of every UK estate agency via multiple, third party data points to reliably help potential home sellers choose the right agent based upon performance.

Private investor Rcapital has completed a Franchisee-led Buyout of Cash Generator, a successful and well established retail business, focused on being the first place customers come to sell and buy second hand items.