Allocations
Private equity and venture capital investment in Latin America soared to USD11.6bn in 2012, the second highest level in the past decade and more than double the performance in 2011, according to Venture Equity Latin America, an annual report from Thomson Reuters.
The report describes the deal, fundraising, and exit activity in Latin America and the Caribbean for 2012. It is produced for private equity investors under the WorldTrade Executive (WTE) brand, which is affiliated with Thomson Reuters Checkpoint research platform.
The report notes that private equity activity in the region looked bleak in the first half of 2012,
British Columbia Discovery Fund (VCC), a venture capital investment fund managed by Discovery Capital Management Corp (DCMC), has exercised warrants previously issued to it in May 2011 to purchase 1,153,846 common shares of its portfolio company, Vigil Health Solutions.
These shares represent nine per cent of the outstanding common shares of Vigil prior to exercise of the warrants held by the fund or of any other outstanding warrants to acquire common shares of Vigil. The exercise price was USD0.10 per share, so that Vigil receives proceeds of USD115,385 as a result of this transaction.
Following this transaction, as
Octopus has led a GBP2.95m investment round into Conversocial, a specialist in social customer service solutions whose clients include Tesco, Waitrose, Barclaycard, Groupon, Hertz and Net-A-Porter.
With consumers increasingly using social media as a channel to communicate with businesses, Conversocial has developed a social media engagement system for customer service teams. The platform enables companies to communicate and respond efficiently to their customers on Facebook and Twitter.
Alliott Cole (pictured), a principal on the ventures team at Octopus, says: “We’re thrilled to be working with the team at Conversocial as they continue to grow their brand, technology development
Venture capital performance for the 10-year horizon continued its upward climb for 11th consecutive quarter, as returns across the one, three, five and 20- year horizons fell slightly as of 31 December 2012, according to the Cambridge Associates US Venture Capital Index, the performance benchmark of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).
Slightly higher returns were also seen in the quarterly and 15-year horizons. Additionally, the venture capital index outperformed the DJIA, NASDAQ Composite and S&P 500 across the quarter, three, five, 15 and 20- year time horizons, falling short of these public indices in the one and 10-year
Littlejohn & Co, a private investment firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, has made an equity investment in Gulf Coast Shipyard Group, a manufacturer of ocean-going and inland marine vessels for commercial and military markets under the brand name TY Offshore, as well as superyachts under the brand name Trinity Yachts.
Centrally located on the Gulf Coast of the US, Gulf Coast manufactures offshore supply vessels, tank barges, military patrol vessels, tugs and superyachts from two facilities located in Gulfport, MS and New Orleans, LA. Gulf Coast entered the commercial vessel market in 2010 with the brand name TY Offshore
LDC, a mid-market private equity house, has completed a significant investment to support the management buy-out and continued growth of Node4, a regional data centre, managed IT and communications specialist.
Node4 provides a wide range of data centre and managed IT services, including colocation, connectivity, managed hosting, communications and hosted telephony, and a range of cloud services, to a UK-wide network of around 700 fast-growing SME customers.
Established in 2004, the business is headquartered in Derby and operates four state-of-the-art data centre facilities – two in Derby, one in Northampton and a further site in Leeds – which all
Three-time entrepreneur Ed Bussey has closed a GBP1m investment in Quill, the content creation platform he founded in 2011.
The investment comes from Ariadne Capital’s fund and entrepreneur investors, including Shakil Khan (Spotify, Summly, buy.at), Rupert Ashe (Graze, Videojug), Karen Hanton (toptable.com), Andrew Burge (King Content, iSUBSCRiBE), Nick Beare (BBC Worldwide, LGI), Peter Read (Techlightenment, Songkick) and Andrew Grahame (Mr & Mrs Smith).
Formerly called iTrigga, Quill provides businesses, including Shop Direct Group, Swiftcover/AXA, WPP and Aegis, with high quality, web-optimised content, on any topic and in any language, helping them increase both revenues and reputation.
In
Secondary buyouts (SBOs) helped to prop-up a deflated private equity market during 2012 as volumes and values hit an eight-year high, according to a report on global M&A trends.
Since 2007, SBOs have on average represented 20 per cent of all private equity deals by volume and 30 per cent by value, but in the second half of 2012 this rose to nearly 25 per cent and 40 per cent respectively.
The rise in SBOs has taken its toll on private equity exit multiples which were at their lowest for three years. This trend looks set to remain during
Fenwick & West has released the results of its First Quarter 2013 Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey, which analysed the valuations and terms of venture financings for 118 technology and life science companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley that raised capital in the first quarter of 2013.
"During the first quarter of 2013, up rounds exceeded down rounds 68 per cent to 11 per cent, with 21 per cent flat. This was a slight decline from the fourth quarter of 2012, when up rounds exceeded down rounds 71 per cent to eight per cent, with 21 per cent flat," says
Hyperoptic, a UK provider of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband technology, has received an equity investment commitment of GBP50m led by Quantum Strategic Partners.
Quantum is a private investment vehicle focused upon long duration investments and managed by Soros Fund Management exclusively for the benefit of George Soros and Soros family clients.
The new funding will enable Hyperoptic to meet its ambitious plans to reach more than 500,000 homes with its market-leading 1 Gbps true fibre hyperfast broadband within the next five years.
In September 2011, Hyperoptic was the first to deliver a 1 Gbps symmetrical residential broadband service
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