Funding

ePOS Hybrid

Hospitality tech startup ePOS Hybrid is hoping to raise £500,000 through crowdfunding in its second seed funding round to help with future expansion plans.

The Edinburgh and London-based tech specialist has seen increased demand from investors previously, achieving 145% overfunding in its first funding round, and beating its original £250k target.

The investment will enable ePOS Hybrid to roll out its tech to more businesses in the UK, support international expansion into new territories such as India and enable further innovation.

Commenting on the funding, Andrew Gibbon, Head of Growth at ePOS Hybrid, said: “The advances we have made since our last crowdfunding success are game changing and our second round is already highly anticipated, with overwhelming demand already being seen from both existing and new investors.

“From our discussions with key investors over the past six months, no one wants to miss out, it seems that everyone is excited to be part of our next round.

“However, this also represents a great opportunity for interested members of the public who missed out on our first round, to join us on our exciting journey as we begin scaling internationally.”

He added that the crowdfunding opportunity will go live on the renowned Crowdcube platform in early May and is likely to quickly become oversubscribed.

If you want to know more, read our full article.

Nebu~Flow

Glasgow-based medical device specialist Nebu~Flow has secured an oversubscribed £1.7 million investment round.

The new investment will help the company commercialise and deliver its next generation respiratory pharmaceuticals.

Nebu~Flow’s nebuliser has been developed to provide a number of advantages over existing technologies in a global nebuliser market valued at over $1 billion. Overall, the worldwide inhalable drug market is estimated to be worth over $43bn in 2022.

The latest round was led by Foresight Williams Technology, a joint venture between Foresight and Williams Advanced Engineering. Science Creates Ventures, Ascension Life Science Fund, and SIS Ventures also participated in the investment.

CEO Dr Elijah Nazarzadeh said: “Our technology enables efficient respiratory delivery of a wider range of drugs that are hard to nebulise. Many of these drugs, like biologics, are potentially life-saving. We are pleased to have the support of Foresight and our other investors, whose ambitions for the business are very much aligned with our own.”

For more, check out our full article.

SolOLED

SolOLED, an early-stage spinout from the University of St Andrews, has secured funding to boost the sustainability of key materials used in everyday devices, such as televisions and mobile phones.

The firm, which was formed last year, has raised £200,000 from Scottish Enterprise and has initiated a collaborative research project with IoT Innovation Centre CENSIS to commercialise its novel materials as components in solution-processed organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

OLEDs are rapidly replacing traditional LED and liquid-crystal display (LCD) technologies and are used in a variety of technologies that are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in modern life.

CEO of SolOLED Eli Zysman-Colman said: “The market for solution-processed OLEDs is growing apace and will need new and improved performance materials to feed its supply chains. We believe we are the first company to be dedicated to developing sustainable materials that can replace the scarce, noble metals presently used in solution-processed OLEDs.

“While they have different physical properties, the materials have similar performance characteristics, but with the added benefit of being much cheaper and more sustainable than the compounds that contain iridium.

“Although the concept behind our materials has existed for decades, its relevance to OLEDs has only really been put into practice in the last ten years. Our specific focus is on developing emitter materials for solution-processed OLEDs. The next step is to commercialise these materials and the project with CENSIS and funding from Scottish Enterprise will help in this endeavour.”

Interested in knowing more? Check out our full article.

IRT

Thermal imaging firm IRT will receive funding from The Data Lab for AI to reduce heat loss in homes and support Scotland’s net zero strategy.

Dundee-based IRT will work alongside academics at Robert Gordon University to develop AI-based software to automatically remove redundant objects such as trees and cars from its thermal image scans, saving the organisation significant time per year in manual cropping.

The company identifies how housing developers and associations can improve the energy efficiency of their property portfolios, allowing organisation to rapidly scale and helping to create high value jobs.

IRT already has a framework to process and analyse thermal images to estimate the heat loss in homes, capturing between 300-500 properties per day. However, the process relies on staff to manually process and prepare images for analysis.

Given the automated process of other elements of this framework, IRT will use the new funding, as well as the skills provided by The Data Lab and Robert Gordon, to develop its AI solution.

IRT CEO Stewart Little said: “Image cropping has become a very labour-intensive task for us resulting in bottlenecks for our relatively small team. This has had a direct correlation on productivity as we can lose weeks of time as we crop hundreds of images a day.

“Once the software has been developed in partnership with the brilliant team at Robert Gordon University, our team will once again be able to focus on image analysis which will increase the quality of service we provide our customers, as well as provide us with a competitive edge.

“This will also mean we can better serve our client base which will, in turn, allow us to hire more staff. In addition to meeting our ambitious growth plans, our work will further contribute to the decarbonisation of the existing building stock in Scotland.”

If you want more information, check out our full article.

Aiber

Inverness-based medical technology firm Aiber has successfully raised £2 million pounds of investment in its latest funding round.

The company, which operates under the trading name of MIME Technologies, develop first aid devices and software designed to manage medical emergencies during flights.

Aiber hopes to further roll out its in-flight technology across the aviation and maritime industries following the fresh investment.

Speaking about the fresh investment, Aiber co-founder and chief executive Anne Roberts said: “This investment will allow us to accelerate the roll-out of our potentially life-saving solution to more customers in our target sectors.

“Whether in the air or at sea, a medical event in these situations can be incredibly stressful and isolating for those tasked with responding, and we are confident Aiber can reduce the burden and improve passenger health outcomes.”

If you’re interested in learning more, read our full article.

448 Studio

Scottish EdTech company 448 Studio has been backed by £100,000 of Scottish Enterprise investment in the form of a Smart:Scotland grant.

The company aims to conduct a feasibility study of a hybrid learning and teaching platform for the higher education sector in the UK. Its platform aims to create a virtual campus for students and their teachers, offering live video streaming and recording.

Through this, 448 Studio will develop a robust platform that is simple to use for lecturers, easy to access and engage with for students, and integrates fully with a variety of learning management systems already in use.

448 Studio’s Founder and CEO, Dan Marrable, said: “We aim to commercialise the platform we’re developing within six months of completing the feasibility project. Thereafter we hope to target up to eight UK academic institutions initially for sign-up at a discounted price to enable the development of early adopter programmes.

“We are hugely grateful to Scottish Enterprise for their faith in us. 448 Studio’s marketing strategy will be fully integrated with the project giving updates on progress across social media and newsletters to existing clients of our event platform.

“Longer term, we aspire to engage with the angel investor market to secure investment to enable the product launch and growth of our technical development team and our own commercial team of marketing, sales and customer support specialists.”

Find out more by reading our full article.

OGI Bio

University of Edinburgh biotech startup OGI Bio has secured £1 million of investment.

The company has developed a new device to automate microbial culturing, improving processing capability, cost effectiveness and data analytics. This increases R&D capability, helping accelerate innovation.

OGI Bio will use the fresh investment to develop its new approach. With the funding, the biotech company will establish a new laboratory and manufacturing facility, grow its team, and ramp up sales of the company’s automation systems to the microbiology and biotechnology sectors.

The investment round was led by TRICAPITAL alongside Apollo Informal Investment, Old College Capital, the University of Edinburgh’s in-house venture investment fund, Sapphire Capital Partners in conjunction with Queen’s University Belfast’s QUBIS Innovation Fund, Merleview (Capital), and Scottish Enterprise.

EO and co-founder Alex McVey said: “Our aim is to ultimately have one of our devices on the bench of every microbiologist and biotechnologist, enabling them to innovate more productively, flexibly, and sustainably.”

Interested in knowing more? Why not read our full article?

Stamp Free

Edinburgh-based digital postage startup Stamp Free Limited has raised £600,000 as part of an oversubscribed funding round.

With a pre-investment valuation of £4 million, the company doubled its £2m pre-investment valuation from its Seed One funding round in September 2021.

This increase reflects the progress Stamp Free has made in recent months, with its solution now being trialled by postal carriers, retailers, and locker providers in different geographic locations around the world.

The new investment will help the company reach the commercial launch of its global award-winning AI phone-based alternative to traditional mailing and returns. Stamp Free expects the solution to be available for consumers later this year.

Managing Director of Stamp Free Hugh Craigie Halkett said: “This investment signifies a further endorsement of the Stamp Free solution, which is poised to disrupt the postal and logistics industry.

“We’ve made excellent progress since our last funding round, commencing trials with postal carriers, retailers and locker providers around the world, and this new raise will accelerate our development.”

Our full article has more.

Scottish Government

The second phase of the Scottish Government’s Tech Ecosystem Fund will be launched later this summer, aimed at projects helping start-ups grow and succeed through learning from each other.

Coming as part of a wider Government strategy aimed at bolstering the Scottish tech sector, the Tech Ecosystem Fund – which saw the launch of its first phase last October – is designed to support businesses and activities that facilitate the community and ‘market square’ dimensions of the Scottish tech ecosystem, supporting a learning environment for technology start-ups to grow and succeed.

“The Tech Ecosystem Fund is adding to the growing sense of momentum building around our efforts to make Scotland one of Europe’s leading start-up nations, as part of our national strategy to transform the economy, scale up businesses and boost productivity,” said Economy Secretary, Kate Forbes.

She added: “In the last year, the Fund has given money to more than 30 different projects to foster a greater sense of community, at home and internationally, amongst our entrepreneurial talent.

“The second round of grants from the Tech Ecosystem Fund will build on that progress by creating valuable opportunities for key players to come together, connect and exchange ideas.”

The Tech Ecosystem Fund is a key recommendation from Mark Logan’s Scottish Tech Ecosystem Review (STER). Since it was established in October, the Ecosystem Fund has made awards to deliver meet-ups, events and other projects.

For more, read our full article.

Biotangents

Biotangents, a Scottish biotechnology business, has secured £2.2m of new funding.

This consists of £1.6m from the UK Government’s Innovate UK innovation loans programme and a further £600,000 from a funding round. This was led by investment syndicate Kelvin Capital with Scottish Enterprise participation.

The funding will help support the development and roll-out of Biotangents’ ‘on farm’ rapid disease detection technology.

The company also secured £1.2m in August 2021 in a successful funding round also led by Kelvin Capital, following an initial £1.5m in May 2019. Kelvin Capital represents private investors in the UK, Europe, and the USA.

Chairman at Biotangents Ian Hamilton said: “Rapid diagnosis on the farm and in the veterinary clinic is a step change in the treatment and prevention of Mastitis and the consequent improvement in animal husbandry.

“Critically it allows vets to promptly decide on the most effective treatment programme including the correct antibiotic to be administered and length of treatment period, and lets farmers implement prompt procedures to minimise further infection within the herd.”

Vivolution

A new project could see as much as £1 billion per year in Scots fintech funding from international investors to boost business portfolios.

The plans are looking to create greater links between Scotland’s fledgling startups and international investors and capital that are the critical pathway to becoming successful businesses.

Led by Scottish venture builder and cluster developer Vivolution, the Scots fintech funding project is delivered in collaboration with the Scottish Government’s Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review and tapping funding and expertise from international investors including Silicon Valley Bank, EquiSolve, Pario Ventures and the Rainmaking Fund.

Vivolution CEO Mark Roger said “Our aim is to dispel the myth that there is not enough funding out there for our growing companies – the opposite couldn’t be more true. In fact, there is a significant shortage of investable companies on the global stage for the international private investment market.

“The investors we are speaking to are excited to partner with us as we play our part in opening up further the Scottish fintech sector to international investment, while our corporate partners are eager to engage to develop world-leading products and services.

“We in Scotland have the companies and the potential, and our investors and corporations have the capital, cash and the know-how to turn start-ups into unicorns.”

Want to know more? Check out our full article.

Neurolabs

Computer Vision startup Neurolabs has raised $3.5 million (£2.7m) in seed funding as the firm continues to expand operations.

Led by European specialist fund LAUNCHub Ventures, the seed round also included participation from Berlin’s Lunar Ventures, Techstart and London-based 7% Ventures.

Neurolabs said it will use the investment to further scale operations and expand its offering into several consumer-packaged goods use cases.

Based in Edinburgh, but with offices in London & Cluj, Neurolabs harnesses synthetically generated data to develop object recognition models more efficiently.

CEO and co-founder Paul Pop said: “Generating synthetic data doesn’t automatically translate into working Computer Vision algorithms,” he explained. “It’s a learning process in itself and we have been perfecting it for more than two years now.”

Pop said Neurolabs is currently amassing the “largest 3D product repository” in the retail industry and aims to reach over 100,000 products by the end of 2022.

“The sky’s the limit: a streamlined process of adding any existing product to our database in minutes is in place,” he added.

If you’re interested in learning more, our article has the full story.

iBioIC

New funding has been made available by the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) to help grow Scotland’s bioeconomy with the latest tranche of its innovation fund now open for proposals.

Awards of up to £100,000 will be made to support collaborative projects that can deliver measurable economic, societal or environmental impact, using industrial biotechnology techniques to develop new processes and materials.

Research teams must include partners from both academia and industry, and demonstrate a clear route to market for the technologies and products being developed.

IBioIC said that while any area of industrial biotechnology will be considered for funding, it is particularly interested to hear from projects focused on agriculture and food and drink for this latest round. Teams have until 1st September to submit proposals, with projects expected to start in early 2023.

Director of business engagement at IBioIC Liz Fletcher said: “Industrial biotechnology offers a more sustainable way to produce a wide range of products and processes, using bio-based raw materials combined with scientific expertise as an alternative to fossil fuels.

“Scotland has an opportunity to become a leader in the biotechnology field – particularly as we transition to net zero – and our role as an innovation centre is to support companies to take concepts and ideas to the next stage of becoming reality.”