Steve Holt is Director of Angels Invest Wales, part of the Development Bank of Wales Group. He explains what the new rules for angel investing mean for high-net worth individuals in Wales.

WineFi, the fine wine investment platform, has appointed Jonathan Keeling as their Chief Commercial Officer. Keeling, who spent 8 years at leading crowdfunding platform Crowdcube, most recently as Chief Growth Officer, will also be joining WineFi’s board of directors.

Metris, the first AI-powered solar energy platform for commercial property owners, has raised £2 million in a pre-Seed funding round led by Octopus Ventures and Aenu VC with business angels in support, to revolutionise how property owners assess, install, and monetise solar energy within their portfolios. 

The British Business Bank has announced that the third iteration of its Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS) has supported £1bn of finance offers to smaller businesses since its launch in August 2022.

Nicolas Barthalon, Principal at Ventech VC, asks to what extent changing market conditions should influence VCs' and other investors’ decision-making.

Sheep producers will be able to improve their flock’s efficiency thanks to Innovate UK and Defra funding towards developing a field based automated system to monitor lamb growth and in turn, provide data to make advanced and accurate predictions of time to reach target finished weight.

Angel-backed spinout About:Energy, a world-leading innovator in battery development software is launching ‘Formula Student: Drive to Recharge’, a new initiative to help address the UK's battery skills gap and support the development of 1,500 battery engineers by 2030.

About:Energy span out of the University of Birmingham and Imperial College London in 2022, and the sponsorship, which covers five Formula Student teams in the UK, includes teams from both.

Female founders of science, digital and technology businesses based in the South are invited to take part in a women-only two-day business support initiative at the University of Southampton Science Park on 6 and 7 March.

Did you know that 45% of the world’s electricity is used by electric motors? 

QPT is a next generation power electronics business dedicated to reducing the energy wasted by electric motors.  Its technology could cut this by around 10% or more, helping combat climate change as well as reducing energy bills.

QPT is looking to raise over £1 million via Crowdcube which will be used to fund the next stage of its growth, file additional patents and grow its team.

If this is a sector that interests you, check out the investment advert on our Funding Pages website.

Oxford Innovation EIS Growth Fund has made a follow-on investment in the latest funding round for Interpac, who offer a sustainable and low-cost solution to the production of corrugated board.

Northstar Ventures has launched its first EIS fund, the Northstar EIS Growth Fund, which is now open for subscriptions. The first close of the fund is targeted for 31st March 2024, with investment then being made into a diverse portfolio of technology companies during the 2024/5 tax year. The fund will invest in the North East's highest potential technology scale-up companies, focusing on the clean tech and healthy ageing sectors, where the region has global competitive advantage.

BULGARIA: Nasekomo, the European scale-up focused on insect bioconversion for sustainable high-quality protein production, has raised €8 million in growth capital.