Hi-tech duo raise £5.6m
TWO high-tech ‘rising stars’ have raised £5.6m of new funding.
The pair, Acal Energy and Medalytix, both part of Lancashire-based Enterprise Ventures’ RisingStars Growth Fund, have been backed by international technology investors, including motor giant Honda.
Acal Energy, the Runcorn-based fuel cell business funded as a start up by EV in 2004, has raised £3.6m, from a syndicate formed with three new investors, including Honda and Solvay.
Acal Energy, a pioneer in fuel cell technology, started life with a £50,000 investment from RisingStars, provided to prove the key technical principles and file its first patents. The company is now housed in newly equipped laboratory premises at The Heath in Runcorn and employs 18 people.
Medalytix, based in Daresbury, Warrington, is a medical screening business. It has raised £2m from new investors, Hotspur Capital Partners and Corporación Empresarial ONCE, the business and venture arm of the Spanish National Organisation for the Blind.
The funding will enable Medalytix to develop international sales and marketing of the company’s ground-breaking iGrading™ product, and will also help to build its pipeline of intellectual property. iGrading™ provides automated detection of diabetic eye disease, the leading cause of working age blindness.
Julian Viggars, EV’s head of technology investment, commented:“The Acal Energy story is a clear-cut demonstration of the RisingStars Growth Fund seed model: we identify credible founders at the pre proof of concept stage, help shape the business model, attract the required additional management expertise and, when the time is right, we introduce further investors.
“That Acal, working from scratch in the North West, in the highly competitive fuel cells sector, has now attracted the commitment from the likes of Honda, is a measure of the credibility of EV’s seed investment model.”
“With both companies it was crucial that we kept faith with the opportunity and this we did by investing more from RisingStars in each successive funding round”.
“The Medalytix history is similar, but in this instance the EV investment team actually promoted the creation of the company, having first identified the importance of automated diagnostics. The investment team was directly involved in the early stages and helped bring together the Medalytix management team.”
“Both fundraisings reflected an increase in the value of the Fund’s investment and. critically, will enable the companies to continue their work in 2009, making technical and commercial progress unhindered by funding constraints”.
