Welsh businesses showed resilience in the face of a difficult financial year, with a strong increase in exports and growing business confidence.

The Venture Capital Trust Association (VCTA) has published new data gathered from over 600 early-stage companies that have benefited from VCT funding, which shows that deployment of capital into early-stage startups grew 8% year-on-year to £664 million, proving resilient in context of wider UK venture capital funding, which fell by almost a quarter (23%) in 2022.

Money.co.uk Business Loans research into UK Kickstarter campaigns for the past five years has revealed that women are more successful at hitting their crowdfunding targets. They are 16% more likely to succeed at raising the capital they need to start a business in comparison to their male counterparts. 

Seedrs - Europe's leading private investment platform - has revealed the results of its 2023 Investors Survey, 

eFront, the leading financial software and solutions provider dedicated to private markets, and a part of BlackRock, has released its latest eFront Insight Quarterly Performance Benchmark report, covering the period to the end of Q1 2023.

Two in five (40%) small and medium sized enterprises have had to stop or pause an area of their business because of a lack of finance over the last couple of years.

Recent research from the British Business Bank found there has been no improvement in the value of investment deals to all-female founder teams over the past decade. While the Small Business Equity Tracker 2023 found that 27% of deals went to teams with at least one female founder, the highest proportion ever, all-female teams accounted for 9% of deals in 2022 but only received 2% of funding, which reflects no improvement since 2011.

A move towards AI as a trusted ‘advisor’; the impact of the cost of living crisis and a move away from ethical investing are just some of the key findings published from the Investor Index - an annual study of UK investors.

The increased use of heat pumps in line with the EU’s REPowerEU plan will create 3 million net additional jobs by 2030. The reason: GreenTech heating is much more energy-efficient than fossil fuel boilers. This will lower energy bills (with fair energy prices), enable spending elsewhere and benefit employment. This is according to a new study by the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA). 

Scaling is a multifaceted phenomenon with a steep path to hypergrowth that only a few European companies are able to climb – in fact only 1 in 10 firms are able to scale more than 10% annually. A new report from the European Scaleup Institute analyses the dynamic landscape of high-growth firms (HGFs) and reveals a multitude of growth paths across Europe.

New research from the UK’s leading insurance premium finance company, Premium Credit, shows nearly five times more SMEs expect to see growth in revenues compared to those who expect revenues to shrink (please see the attached press release). 

There is still money out there, but less appetite for risk and greater demand for faster returns, says Sarra Mander, CMO of Small Robot Company (SRC), talking about the climate for agri-tech funding.