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European impact investment bank ClearlySo has appointed Gillian Wilmot as chairman.
Wilmot has a strong background in the consumer sector before she developed a wide range of corporate, non-profit and government experience in a variety of fields. She is also an experienced mentor and has helped coach many high growth businesses and their executive teams.
Wilmot joins two other recent board additions – Tracy Lewis and Jospeh Krant.
Lewis is chairman of Inspired Thinking Group, and a non-executive director of Staffline Group Plc and Bluebella Lingerie, following a successful career as an entrepreneur in the retail sector. Krant,
Intertrust has repositioned its two specialist fund service offering in the Channel Islands with a new unified team now servicing both private equity and real estate.
Michael Johnson, Head of Funds in the Channel Islands, now oversees both Intertrust’s private equity and real estate businesses. He will lead a team of more than 150 fund service specialists across Jersey and Guernsey, making Intertrust one of the largest fund administration businesses in the islands.
Alex Di Santo, as Head of Private Equity, will continue to lead a team of 65 industry specialists and grow Intertrust’s private equity business in Jersey.
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
Global private equity firm The Riverside Company has made a significant investment in E&A Scheer (Scheer), a global blender and vendor of premium rum in bulk.
With origins dating back to 1712, Scheer specialises in sourcing and custom-blending to create high-quality, tailor-made rum blends. Scheer’s blending operation is located in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and ageing facilities reside in Liverpool, United Kingdom, where its subsidiary the Main Rum Company (MRC) is located.
Scheer occupies a unique position in the rum value chain, connecting the output of high quality rum distilleries with rum brand owners. Thanks to an extensive inventory of high-quality
Alliance Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, has made a new investment in PowerShare, an electric vehicle (EV) charging platform startup based in China.
PowerShare provides an online platform that connects EV drivers, charge point operators and power suppliers to streamline the charging experience. It offers a cloud-based system, enabling suppliers to monitor the demand from vehicles with the supply capacity of the grid and drivers to find available charging stations.
PowerShare is the most recent addition to the Alliance Ventures portfolio in the field of early-stage development and entrepreneurs on the cutting edge of next-generation systems
Private equity investor Mid Europa Partners (Mid Europa) has sold Bambi, a biscuit producer in the countries of former Yugoslavia, to Coca-Cola HBC AG (Coca-Cola HBC). The transaction is subject to customary competition authority clearance and is expected to close in Q2 2019.
Mid Europa acquired Bambi in 2015 together with Imlek and Knjaz Miloš, the leading regional dairy and natural mineral water players, respectively, forming the consumer group – Moji Brendovi. Bambi, a confectionery producer, recognised the increased consumer focus on health and wellness and emerged as the regional biscuit category leader.
Robert Knorr, Co-Managing Partner of Mid
iwoca, one of Europe’s fastest growing small business lenders, has raised an additional GBP150 million in equity and debt capital. The investment brings iwoca’s total funding to GBP350 million.
iwoca’s most recent fundraising included a Series D equity round led by Augmentum Fintech, the specialist fintech venture capital investor. NIBC Bank and other existing investors, including Prime Ventures, also participated.
The capital raised will enable iwoca to support more small business owners across the UK, Germany and Poland. iwoca reached profitability in 2018, while doubling its revenue in each of the last three years.
iwoca built award-winning technology
Triggered by both limited partner (LP) requirements for more ‘skin in the game’, and the rising demand for private equity funds pushing up fund sizes, GPs are struggling to free up funds for increasingly large personal commitments, according to the 2018-19 Investec GP Trends survey.
The research, which surveyed 289 private equity professionals around the world, revealed that GPs expect to commit an average of 2.9 per cent to their next fund. While this is a drop from 3.3 per cent 12 months ago, the rise in average fund sizes – up from USD1,765 million for the five years from
Future Ventures has launched an oversubscribed fund of USD200 million to invest in frontier technologies across diverse industries including machine intelligence, sustainable mobility, the future of food, computational biology, high-performance computing, aerospace, and more.
Future Ventures is co-founded by Steve Jurvetson and Maryanna Saenko. Jurvetson is well-known as an early leader in identifying and backing industry-redefining companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, Nervana, Mythic, and Memphis Meats. Saenko’s background as a research engineer and her venture capital experience from prior roles at leading firms combine to give her insight into technology business growth and a thoughtful approach to funding audacious ideas.
Mid-market advisory firm Clearwater International continues to grow, with 70 per cent of its deals in 2018 having Private Equity (PE) involvement.
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