March funding deals down slightly on February peak

Welcome to our new monthly feature focussing on the Scottish investment sector, brought to you in partnership with Beauhurst, the platform that shares rich information on UK based high-growth companies.

31% of Scottish investments during March 2017 were in growth-stage companies.

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This represents a considerably larger-than-usual share of investments for growth-stage companies as over the last year, only 12% of deals have been into growth-stage companies.

To complete the picture, 38% of investments in this period were into seed-stage companies and 31% into venture-stage companies.

51.3% of investments went into technology and IP-based companies – a significantly higher proportion than the yearly average, which mirrors the rest of the UK and hovers at about 35%.

In February we saw a spike in both deal numbers (20) and the amount invested (£17.7m). Comparatively March’s figures were 13 and £13.7m respectively, however this was still an increase on January’s numbers.

The biggest equity deal of the month was the £3.6m raised by ZoneFox, a developer of technology that monitors and protects business data, providing alerts in cases of policy breaches.

Antimicrobial therapeutics company NovaBiotics and silicon chip and battery management system developer Dukosi raised £3m and £2m respectively.

Other notable deals include MacRebur who raised £1.27m to develop MR6 plastic pellets made from old plastic bottles and Elasmogen’s £1.2m to develop biologic medication.

Scottish Investment Bank was the most notable investor during the month, investing a total of £7.7m in five deals.

Archangels made two deals investing £4.3m.

Other investment players with one deal each in March were CF Woodford Equity Income Fund, Crowdcube, Deepbridge Venture Capital, IP Group, Par Equity, Seedrs and TRI Capital.

TRI Capital invested £3.6m, CF Woodford Equity Income Fund invested £3m, IP Group invested £2m and Par Equity invested £2m.

Beauhurst is a platform where you can access rich information on UK high-growth companies.

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