The Rainbow Seed Fund, a fund investing in early stage technology companies, says five of its investments raised over GBP22m over the summer.
The Rainbow Seed Fund is a GBP10m independently managed seed capital fund dedicated to investing in technologies from its publicly funded research base of ten partners who collectively spend over GBP1bn on research annually.
Set up in 2002, to date Rainbow Seed Fund has invested over GBP5m in helping to create 22 spin out companies which between them have raised well over GBP60m of additional capital.
Dr Andrew Muir, investment director at the Rainbow Seed Fund, says: “Raising over GBP22m of capital in the current difficult financing environment is testament to the quality of the companies RSF has helped to start and to the importance of specialist seed capital in backing early stage technology companies. Rainbow Seed Fund continues to support early new ventures, investing in the best technologies and helping to bring in experienced management.”
P2i, a developer of liquid-repellent nano-coating technology, which protects objects with a liquid-repelling shield, has raised GBP4.1m from new and existing shareholders to support its accelerating commercialisation and international growth. Its technology helps customers protect and improve a wide and growing range of products including performance textiles (such as hiking and military boots; running and golf shoes), hearing aids, laboratory consumables such as pipette tips, and a wide range of filtration products.
Microvisk Technologies, a company that enables improved measurement and monitoring of blood conditions for the growing number of people on long term anti-coagulation therapy, has raised over GBP725,000 as the first stage of a fund-raising designed to take it through FDA approval and full launch in 2011/12.
Novacta Biosystems, which is developing a portfolio of antibiotics, raised GBP13.1m of funding to drive novel antibiotics platform addressing areas of major unmet need, including hospital acquired infections C. difficile and MRSA.
Crescendo Biologics has raised GBP4.5m in a seed-funding round to advance the development of its antibody technology. The company’s fragment antibody technology platforms bring together in vivo and in vitro technology platforms invented by scientists at the Babraham Institute, a Rainbow partner.
