Vibrant tech sector attracts record cash
Added on 18 January 2022
It is thought the total for last year will top £630 million once the final data has been calculated despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Venture capitalists had already put £519 million into Scottish companies by the end of September, according to the Venture Pulse research produced by KPMG. Since then more big deals have been announced. Research by Young Company Finance suggests about £111 million of transactions were completed between October and mid- December. That includes Intelligent Growth Solutions, a provider of software and systems for vertical farming, completing one of the largest deals of recent years when it raised £42.2 million in November.
A team of former executives from FanDuel, one of Scotland's first big technology start-ups, also recently secured about £15 million to build Betdex, a global betting exchange.
Glasgow-based Enough, which is making plant-based protein from fermented fungi, got £36.2 million and Snappy Shopper, a Dundee company helping convenience stores offer online grocery deliveries, raised £19.5 million. Scottish Enterprise, in its Investing in Ambition report, suggests that £400 million was raised across 374 deals in 2018. That sum grew to £485 million across 428 transactions in 2019 and the pandemic was blamed for a decline to £430 million, across 446 investments, in 2020.
The UK total for 2020 was £13.6 billion across about 5,900 investments.
Andrew Noble, from Par Equity, said this year could be even bigger for Scotland, with a "mega deal" investment of more than $100 million into one company next year.
Jock Millican, the chairman of LINC Scotland, the angel investor association, and a director at Equity Gap, believes after many years of development Scotland now has a "credible market" which is attractive to domestic and international investors.
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Photo Courtesy of Intelligent Growth Solutions
Source: The Times
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