Preservation Capital Partners (Preservation Capital), a financial services-focussed private equity firm which last year acquired an interest in the insurTech-driven cyber and specialty lines MGA Ascent Underwriting (Ascent), has made a strategic investment in US construction-focused MGA Cove Programs (Cove). Together the business will manage in excess of USD200 million GWP, making it one of the largest independently owned emerging risk and specialty lines MGAs. Ascent and Cove will continue to operate under their respective market-leading brands. Each is a pioneer in speciality product development and distribution within their respective markets, supported by best-in-class underwriting and claims teams. However, senior

Essling Expansion has acquired a stake in the Evolucare Group alongside its manager Elie le Guilcher and his team, becoming a reference shareholder in the process. Founded in 1988, Evolucare Technologies is a family group that publishes medical software for healthcare institutions. The group’s offer covers the entire patient journey within institutions through 3 areas of activity: Computerized Patient File (CPR), Critical Care and Imaging. With sales of EUR23 million in 2018, the group is already present in nearly 1900 institutions in France and abroad and is, through its positioning, perfectly at the crossroads of Essling Expansion’s investment universes.  

Palamon Capital Partners (Palamon) has completed a roll-over investment, alongside core Palamon investors Adams Street Partners and PGGM, in Ober Scharrer Gruppe, following the sale of the Company by Palamon to majority owner Nordic Capital Fund IX in 2018. Palamon originally acquired a majority share in Ober Scharrer Gruppe from its two physician founders in 2011 having identified the opportunity created by deregulation and the subsequent corporatisation of healthcare delivery in Germany. Palamon executed a substantial transformation programme to institutionalise the business and accelerate its growth through M&A. Under Palamon’s ownership, the Company unlocked the sizeable consolidation opportunity in the

Catering management software company Spoonfed is planning major expansion in the US, following GBP575,000 of development funding from Equity Gap.  Aimed specifically at contract catering firms and restaurants supplying catering to businesses, universities, hospitals and many other institutions, Spoonfed’s SaaS (Software as a Service) platform creates real efficiencies for caterers and provides a straightforward ordering system for their customers.   Spoonfed, headquartered in the UK, currently employees 11 people and intends to increase this to 20 by the end of 2019.  They will add software engineers at their new Glasgow HQ and further customer support staff in the US, where

Hivemind, a UK-based data science company and member of the Investment Association’s fintech accelerator Velocity, has closed a funding round led by Fidelity International and Barclays. Hivemind, which was spun out from global investment management company Winton Group in June last year, develops software that helps create valuable and structured data sets from complicated, unstructured sources such as news articles, company reports, blogs and images.   This funding round will be used to expand Hivemind’s sales, engineering and data science teams, driving the continued development of the company’s proprietary technology platform and making its data science expertise available to a

Leicestershire HR software firm StaffCircle has secured GBP250,000 investment from the MEIF Proof of Concept & Early Stage Fund, managed by Mercia and part of the Midlands Engine Investment Fund StaffCircle’s platform helps clients to improve communication and feedback between employees in different location, providing them with easy access to training, tasks and contacts within the company. The equity investment will allow the company to create five new jobs, add further software features and launch a sales and marketing campaign.   StaffCircle’s software breaches the ‘digital divide’ between office-based staff and those working at home or on site – who

Two UK artificial intelligence (AI) companies, Biorelate Limited and Intellegens Limited, have secured a significant investment in the third round of the Innovate UK open grant funding competition. Together, the two companies have secured over GBP300,000 from Innovate UK and will co-invest an additional GBP130,000 to deliver a partnership project entitled: “Chemeia: A synergistic AI integrated architecture for augmenting high value dark-data”.   Project Chemeia (‘Chem-ee-a’) will test the potential for combining the capabilities of Biorelate’s deep text mining (Galactic AITM) technology with Intellegens’ sparse data solution, to produce up to date, comprehensive, and reliable data sets for high-value R&D