The Edinburgh-based business investment group, Archangels, has led investment of GBP12.4 million in innovative Scottish tech and life sciences companies in the first half of 2021 (H1 2020: GBP9.5 million).
Archangels’ H1 2021 deals data, released today (14th July 2021), reveals that Archangels itself invested GBP7.3 million during the first six months of 2021, with co-investment of GBP3.1 million from Scottish Enterprise and GBP2.0 million from a range of other co-investors. Archangels’ investment of GBP7.3 million is a record for any six month period.
During the period, Archangels invested in one new business and provided follow on growth capital to seven existing portfolio companies. These included:
• A first time investment in Scottish bio-tech company, BioCaptiva, the University of Edinburgh spin-out that has developed a novel next generation “liquid biopsy” technology device that could revolutionise the early diagnosis and monitoring of difficult-to-detect cancers.
• A follow-on investment round in Edinburgh-based Administrate, the industry-leading platform that equips organisations around the world to plan, organise, deliver and scale training to match their business objectives. This investment round will be used to accelerate and capitalise on the strong growth which the team at Administrate had already been experiencing.
• A further round of investment in Optoscribe, the world-leading supplier of 3D glass-based integrated photonics products, whose innovative and proprietary laser direct-write technology produces optical components at a wafer level, primarily for optical communications applications such as optical transceivers in the rapidly growing data centre market, or precision fibre alignment structures and interconnects for high density fibre-optic connections. Optroscribe’s market has seen significant growth in the last 12 months and its products are uniquely placed to support the rapid growth in the telecoms data centres market.
David Ovens, Joint Managing Director at Archangels, says: “While the pandemic has had an inevitable impact on areas of the economy such as retail and hospitality, Scotland has a world-renowned tech and life sciences community that supports many thousands of high quality jobs and is making an increasingly important contribution to the economy.
“At Archangels, we are committed to providing the growth capital and access to networks that support our portfolio companies, based here in Scotland, as they scale up to become truly international success stories.”
