Welcome to our 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.
April was a fairly quiet month for deal making in Scotland with five significant deals being made.
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BrewDog’s huge raise of £100m from TSG Consumer Partners skewed the total value of deals in the month.
The Ellon based brewer has since received a £324k grant from Indiegogo, taking its total amount raised through equity to £136m, and its grant finance to £2.38m.
Synpromics, which is attempting to design synthetic gene promoters, raised £5.2m, MGB Biopharma which develops anti-infective medicines based on compounds which are DNA minor groove binders raised £922k.
Two companies raise £500k in the month – The Ardgowan Distillery Company and Stochastic Solutions which offers data consulting services and develops data science sofware for customer behaviour modelling.
Excluding TSG Consumer Partners in the Brewdog deal, the other investors making these smaller deals included Scottish Investment Bank, Calculus Capital, Archangels, Barwell, TRI Capital and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, with only Scottish Investment Bank being involved in more than one deal.
50% of the deals were into seed-stage companies (far higher than the average, although the numbers in question are small).
Deals declined this month, but a note of caution: several deals completed in the second half of the month may not yet have been filed (companies have 30 days in which to do this).
Nonetheless, the BrewDog deal has been the joint-second biggest raise in Scotland since Beauhurst’s records began in 2011.
It is second only to Skyscanner, which raised £128m in January 2016, and on a par with Sparrows Offshore, which raised £100m in October 2012.
Beauhurst is a platform where you can access rich information on UK high-growth companies.
