Forward Health, the app working to reinvent healthcare communication, has raised a $3.9m seed funding-round led by Stride.VC, with additional backing from Albion Capital. The funds are joined by an impressive roster of angel backers, including healthtech founders Jay Desai from US company Patient Ping and Melissa Morris from UK-based Lantum.

Forward was founded in 2016 by UK doctors Barney Gilbert and Lydia Yarlott, alongside serial entrepreneur Philip Mundy. Their mission is to connect healthcare systems around the world, making communication secure, transparent and flexible for healthcare professionals and patients.

Edinburgh-based venture capital firm Par Equity has invested £1.3m in a rapidly growing stem-cell research company that is helping pharmaceutical giants to develop new treatments for diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Siilo, the secure instant messaging app for healthcare professionals, has raised a €4.5 million funding round. Lead investor in the round is the EQT Ventures fund with participation from existing investors. The funding will be used to scale-up Siilo’s user base across Europe, with a particular focus on the UK and Germany.

Medical professionals are faced with an increasingly fragmented healthcare system and outdated methods of communication, such as fax, pagers and landlines. This often results in key patient data being siloed and valuable time being wasted trying to get access to the right information. To ensure the right teams have access to vital patient data at the right time, healthcare professionals have taken matters into their own hands. According to British Medical Journal research, 98.9% of UK hospital clinicians now have smartphones, with about a third using consumer messaging apps in the clinical workplace.

Locum’s Nest, the app that connects doctors to locum work in hospitals, has raised £3m in further funding from Albion Capital, the leading independent investment manager, and IDO Investments. The new funding takes the total investment in Locum’s Nest to £4.1 million.

Inverleith LLP, the specialist consumer brands investor, has taken a majority stake in Planet Organic, the London health and wellbeing supermarket, food-to-go chain and online retailer.  Inverleith has injected equity into the Company to expand the existing store footprint in London, to more than double the current portfolio of stores over the next 5 years.

HBAN (Halo Business Angel Network), the all-island organisation responsible for the promotion of business angel investment, and a joint initiative of Enterprise Ireland and InterTrade Ireland, today announces that its MedTech Syndicate has led a €1.1 million Series A funding round in medical device start-up, Ostoform. HBAN Angels contributed €280,000, with venture capital investor, SOSV, Enterprise Ireland, and other angel investors making up the rest of the funding round.

Dublin-based Ostoform was set up to address the management of a stoma – a small surgical opening on the surface of the abdomen to divert the flow of waste. A common complaint is irritation, redness and discomfort around the skin caused by leaks of the acidic content contacting the skin. Ostoform has developed the Ostoform Seal with FlowAssist. This is a seal that is secured to the skin around the stoma to effectively guide the acidic stoma output into the ostomy bag, thereby preventing it from contacting the skin. 

The latest Healthtech M&A Market Report from international technology mergers and acquisitions advisors, Hampleton Partners, reveals how Big Data is fast becoming the common currency that lies at the heart of high-value business models in the healthtech sector.

In addition to booming strategic investment in the sector, the first half of 2018 saw record private equity investment and five multi-billion-dollar deals, pushing the total disclosed transaction value to $13.4 billion with a 30-month trailing disclosed EV\EBITDA ratio in excess of 16x.

Download the full Hampleton Partners Healthtech M&A Market Report: https://hampletonpartners.com/healthtech-report-2018

NPIF - Maven Equity Finance, managed by Maven Capital Partners and part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, has invested £200,000 as part of a £700,000 funding round in Biorelate, a technology platform using artificial intelligence (AI) to efficiently curate data in biomedicine.

Existing investors, Catapult Ventures via the Greater Manchester and Cheshire Life Sciences Fund, provided £150,000 and the Manchester Tech Trust Angels provided £350,000. The funding will be used to expand the team, and to develop its product offering, including three new SaaS products.

aescuvest and EIT Health have launched the first pan-European equity crowdfunding platform for European healthcare companies today: aescuvest.eu will be the number one such platform dedicated to foster and fund innovations from European start-ups and SMEs in an end-to-end digital process, and allow companies to promote campaigns and EU citizens to invest across borders. The platform will give both, retail and institutional investors access to best-in-class companies in the core health sectors biotechnology, medical technology and digital health. As prospectus-based security offerings, investment opportunities went through a thorough approval process. The start of the first campaign is expected in Q4 2018.

In partnership with The Invested Investor, a project founded by Peter and Alan Cowley to help entrepreneurs and early stage investors achieve greater success by sharing lessons learned, Angel News is delighted to publish this interview focusing on the altruistic, enterprising, human genomic data expert and CEO of Repositive, Fiona Nielsen. 

This interview was originally published on The Invested Investor https://www.investedinvestor.com/articles/2018/9/11/start-up-spotlight-with-fiona-nielsen

Arecor, the UK-based biopharmaceutical formulation company, has raised £6 million from new and existing investors to develop groundbreaking pharmaceutical drugs to transform the treatment of diabetes. The fundraising was led by Calculus Capital, Albion Capital, and Downing Ventures.  BioScience Managers Limited, the international healthcare investment firm, advised Downing Ventures.

Through the application of its technology platform, Arecor is creating faster working, more effective drugs that help progress the creation of the next generation of artificial pancreas systems. The Company’s ultra-rapid acting insulin and ultra-concentrated insulins more closely mimic the insulin profile and response to glucose of healthy individuals, improving health outcomes and quality of life for people living with diabetes while reducing the wider costs to health services and society.

NVM has invested £2.75 million of growth capital (with the balance of the £3.2m funding round provided by existing investors and private individuals) into Reading-based pharmaceutical company Ridge Pharma Limited (“Ridge”). Ridge is an emerging UK pharmaceutical business set to commercialise their first product in late 2018, with further launches thereafter.   Ridge was founded on the belief that consistently offering medicines with distinct benefits and clear value is at the heart of a rewarding and sustainable business.