A new venture platform that will fund all stages of the digital technology business lifecycle, from entry to exit has just been announced. Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV) will make funds available to digital technology SMEs, boosting sector growth across the UK. The platform will support the existing digital technology hubs in Belfast, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford and Sheffield.
ADV is a new venture platform, created by entrepreneurs, operators, and collaborators. Its team has learnt the hard lessons and now want to pay them forward. ADV provides a full-scale model for venture, across the business lifecycle. It is a meritocratic investment platform that offers access to capital, coaching, customers and corporates; a platform that champions the innovators. It seeks to help build the large ‘difficult’ businesses that the UK is uniquely positioned to foster: the complex, technical, global ones that have a chance of solving real world problems.
Lee Strafford, CEO at ADV said, “ADV has been established to help more of our emerging start-ups and scale-ups to scale big. There are world-class innovators in every corner of the UK. We intend to seek out the best investment opportunities at scale and ensure these companies, irrelevant of size and location, have the support they need to supercharge growth.”
Serious Support
ADV is supported by British Business Bank, Legal & General, and Woodford Investment Management, as part of its remit to design, deliver and efficiently manage UK-wide smaller business access to finance programmes for the UK Government.
A third of the funding for the new £150m platform, which will provide evergreen, patient capital to smaller businesses looking to grow no matter what stage of development, will be provided under the British Business Bank’s Enterprise Capital Funds (ECF) programme.
ECFs are commercially-focused funds which bring together private and public money to make equity investments in high growth businesses. This latest commitment – the 23rd ECF – brings the programme’s total investment capacity to over £815m.
Keith Morgan, CEO at British Business Bank said, “This new venture platform will help innovative digital technology businesses to start up and scale up rapidly and successfully throughout all stages of their development. We are pleased to be a part of this exciting new initiative, and look forward to seeing businesses across the UK benefit from the much needed long-term funding it will provide.”
Find Out More
Businesses can find out about their finance options, including equity finance, by accessing the British Business Bank’s Business Finance Guide (co-published with the ICAEW), which provides a comprehensive overview of funding choices for businesses at all stages of their development.