Participated · Equity · Nov 2023

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in the UK, Paysend operates a global digital payments network that connects more than 25 billion endpoints and serves over 12 million customers. The platform supports cross-border transactions in more than 170 countries and has reported increasing payment volumes as it scales internationally. Paysend offers products for both consumers and enterprises and continues to expand its product suite. The company emphasizes development of proprietary technology to underpin its network and product roadmap. Recent funding from an existing investor is intended to accelerate geographic expansion and product launches. Claret Capital cited Paysend’s scalable infrastructure and execution against growth plans as reasons for the follow-on investment.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2020

EDITED provides an AI-driven merchandising experience platform that connects business analytics with external market data to help retailers make faster, data-backed product lifecycle decisions. The platform delivers Market and Enterprise Intelligence and automation to help retailers increase margins, generate more sales, and improve predictability for merchandisers. Brands such as Columbia and Inditex use EDITED’s Retail Intelligence products to expedite insights into action. EDITED reported strong, capital-efficient growth last year despite difficult market conditions. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate product development, invest in partnerships, and pursue opportunistic M&A to expand its value proposition to customers. Edited provides a retail tech platform that tracks over 375 million products and 2.5 billion SKUs across the apparel, beauty, and homeware sectors. The platform uses AI, analytics and image and text recognition to understand pricing, discounts, assortments and trends in real time. It is used daily by approximately 50,000 retail professionals across more than 200 brands, serving customers from fast-fashion to luxury, including PUMA, Tommy Hilfiger, Diesel, Ann Taylor and the Arcadia Group. Edited was founded in 2009 by Geoff Watts and Julia Fowler and is based in London. The company recently raised funding to support product innovation, accelerate hiring and expand its global presence. To date the company has raised $34m in total capital. EDITD provides real-time market data and analytics for the fashion and apparel industry. Its platform analyzes more than 50 million product SKUs, tracks over 4,000 global retailers’ webpages with day-to-day updates, and maintains a searchable database of more than 2,000 blogs and 600 million social opinions. The company translates these data into actionable insights to help retailers set price architecture, product assortment and positioning, and avoid investing in the wrong products or quantities. EDITD is used daily by retailers and brands including ASOS, Gap, Gilt Groupe, Missguided, Target and Motel across five continents. Led by CEO Geoff Watts, the company plans to use the funds to hire in key strategic areas in its London, Melbourne and recently opened New York offices. EDITD raised $4.4m in funding from Index Ventures, new investor Frog Capital and other existing backers. EDITD provides a retail monitoring and analytics platform for the fashion industry, mining the social web (blogs, Tweets, Facebook) and the wider web to measure what’s being talked about and what’s selling. The company aggregates more than two million products and captures about 300,000 new opinions daily to identify emerging trends. Brands and retailers use EDITD’s data to improve production planning, pricing, inventory management and competitor intelligence. EDITD positions itself as a big-data play enabled by the rise of social media. The company plans to further develop its product, increase the amount of data analyzed, enter new markets and expand its team globally. The recent $1.6M seed financing led by Index Ventures provides capital to support those plans.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2012

Bluewater Bio International is a London-based provider of high-performance water and wastewater treatment technologies built around its proprietary HYBACS process. HYBACS uses naturally occurring bacteria to remove nitrates, phosphates and carbonaceous matter, producing high-quality, odourless, reusable water from domestic, agricultural and industrial effluents. The process is particularly suited to upgrading existing activated sludge plants for improved performance or to accept increased pollution loads. The company was founded in 2007 by CEO Daniel Ishag. Bluewater Bio has offices in Busan (South Korea), China and Bahrain, and partners in the USA, Russia, Spain and South Africa, reflecting an international footprint. In March 2012 the company raised £22.5m (approximately $36m) from institutional backers named in the press coverage.