MIP Discovery, an innovative developer of non-biological affinity reagents designed to accelerate the development and production of cell and gene therapies, has closed a £7m (~$9m USD) Series A financing round led by Mercia Ventures. Existing investor Calculus Capital also participated in the round, along with Angel investors.

A café operator who set out to find an alternative to single-use coffee cups has helped to develop a new re-use system that claims to be the most simple and cost-effective to date.

Alasdair Hood and his team have raised £350,000 from angel investors to launch Delete Cups. The system has already been successfully trialled in the two pop-up cafes he runs in Braintree Village, Essex - Roo and FryBaby - and the company is in talks with other potential users in the UK and Europe.

GameCentric, the region's newest gaming platform at the forefront of connecting brands with gamers, has raised $1.5 million (AED6 million) in capital from a Dubai-based angel investor, Bilal Merchant. The platform went live on December 1st, 2023, right after the funding round. 

Angel Academe has made its 49th investment in a female-founded agri-tech start-up PheroSyn, an innovative agricultural technology company using green chemistry techniques to produce identical copies of nature’s own pheromones, providing an alternative to damaging pesticides.

Oxford Innovation Space, which already runs 32 centres in the UK and Ireland, have come on board to run and operate the Wellsprings Innovation Centre.  The team has over 35 years’ experience in supporting economic growth through a focus on advice, finance, and space.  In that time, Oxford Innovation Space has helped in excess of 7,000 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to become more sustainable businesses.

Cambridge-based Infersens has launched Cortense®, its first commercially available solution to transform Legionella risk management and dramatically cut water waste.

After growing to support a membership of 200 Angel Investors in the last five years, the Newcastle Angel Hub was relaunched last night (Thursday 8^th February) as the ‘Northern Investor Hub’.

Seedrs’ January 2024 Highlights 

The United Kingdom’s score in the National Entrepreneurial Context Index (NECI) continues to fall, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2023/2024 Report, released this week in Morocco.

Coenseo Ventures has announced the launch of FundIQ, a groundbreaking platform designed to transform the early-stage investment market in the UK. FundIQ emerges from the successful acquisition of Capital Pilot by Coenseo Ventures, bringing with it a legacy of innovation and a commitment to enhancing the investability of startup companies.

Focused on fostering the equal opportunity for all within innovation and education, Catalyst has launched its free work experience programme, 

BugBiome, a biotech harnessing nature’s microbial defences for pest protection to benefit human and planet health, has successfully closed a pre-seed funding round, securing £310k from Cambridge Angels and Discovery Park Ventures.  This investment will support BugBiome’s mission to address agricultural and human pest protection with naturally derived solutions harnessing the microbiome as a sustainable source of alternatives to synthetic and bio-accumulative chemicals.