Meridian Growth Capital
Unit 4 Manor Farm Offices Flexford Road, North Baddesley, Southampton, Hampshire, SO52 9DF, United Kingdom
Overview
Meridian Growth Capital was established in 2009 and is an early stage investment fund focused on supporting ambitious management teams and exciting products. Meridian often invest in engaged client businesses across a wide range of sectors that fit their criteria. Their aim is to add value and expertise to companies and assist them through applying their “next step thinking” in achieving their growth objectives, with the ultimate goal of assisting with a profitable exit at the right time. They typically invest between £50,000 and £500,000 and focus on backing dynamic and proven management teams. They do not ask for any control in the business and usually take a minority stake. If appropriate, they will take a Board position and have an enviable track record assisting in the delivery of significant shareholder value by becoming more involved and gaining a more in depth understanding of your business. Don’t take their word for it, they have several early and late stage companies, as well as investments that they have exited that demonstrate that working with Meridian has been game changing.
- Total investments
- 2
- Lead investments
- 1
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 0
Sector focus
- Finance
- Financial Services
Investment portfolio
- NewsWhip
Participated · Equity · May 2015
NewsWhip is a real-time media monitoring platform based in Dublin and New York, led by CEO Paul Quigley. Its platform predicts the stories and topics that will matter in the hours ahead, helping communications professionals make quick, confident decisions. The product is used to predict the news, unpack crises and issues, and understand which stories are engaging audiences on global and local scales. Customers include PepsiCo, Google, Tinder, ConAgra, Samsung, McDonald’s, Walmart, ABInBev, the Associated Press, Condé Nast, the Washington Post, and NGOs such as Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Health Organization. NewsWhip raised $13M in funding and intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and its business reach. NewsWhip offers a SaaS platform that transforms data from stories, videos, and social posts into actionable insights to inform content strategy. Its technology scans the world’s social media activity every two minutes and compares that activity to millions of pieces of content to identify what is spreading fastest and overperforming. The company serves clients including Associated Press, BuzzFeed, MTV, Edelman, and Bauer. Led by CEO Paul Quigley, NewsWhip plans to use the new funding to continue developing its platform. The company is based in New York City and Dublin, EIRE. The announcement frames the Series A as support for product development rather than specific operational metrics or revenue figures. NewsWhip provides a social content discovery platform called Spike. Spike tracks social network activity around millions of stories daily, giving newsrooms, marketers and PR professionals real-time indicators such as tweets, shares and comments. The platform detects articles, videos, Facebook posts and other content and predicts what will matter in hours or days. The company is led by CEO Paul Quigley and is based in Dublin, Ireland. NewsWhip raised over $1.6M in funding to develop the next generation of its platform—improving tracking, predicting and understanding capabilities—and to grow its New York business development team. NewsWhip is a Dublin-headquartered breaking news aggregator whose core product, Spike, identifies and surfaces stories gaining real engagement for journalists, editors, producers, and marketers. The company stores vast volumes of social data and captures hundreds of social data points and metadata for every piece of content to map what it calls the "genome of social distribution." It reports newsroom clients in 12 countries, plus freelancers, small publishers, agencies, and some brands focused on content marketing. NewsWhip will use the new funding to continue developing Spike and to update its main website and Android and iPhone apps. The company also plans to expand geographically, opening a New York office this month and hiring a New York-based sales and communications team. NewsWhip surfaces the latest news by aggregating social signals (tweets and Facebook Likes) from the broader crowd rather than a user’s personal social graph. The company operates a consumer-facing service and has redesigned its site while preparing native mobile and tablet apps. NewsWhip also offers a professional product called Spike, a newsroom dashboard that shows which stories are trending or about to trend; Spike is being trialled with newsrooms and is intended to be subscription-based. Spike was developed with input from the BBC, MSNBC, BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Co-founder Paul Quigley has described the product as emphasizing what everyone is sharing across topics to avoid the echo chamber of an individual’s social graph. The company is Dublin-based and has already participated in the NDRC Launchpad program.
- Blis
Led · Equity · May 2012
Blis builds an integrated planning and buying platform that does not rely on personal data, layering location data with hundreds of other aggregated and anonymised signals to inform brands and media agencies. The company is opening an R&D centre in Scotland supported by a £1.4 million grant from Scottish Enterprise and is initially investing in 14 high-value R&D roles, nine of which have already been hired. Leadership says the investment will speed delivery of technology and team expansion to drive growth. Scottish Development International supported Blis with introductions to academic stakeholders and property searches for the new centre. Blis operates from more than 40 offices across five continents and is positioning the Scottish hub to attract local technology talent. The move emphasizes continued product development around privacy-first audience planning and buying tools. Blis provides a location-data technology platform that delivers accurate location data and contextualized consumer behavioural insights to media agencies, publishers and brands. The company operates in over 50 markets from eight offices across APAC and EMEA and counts clients such as Airbnb, Ford and Samsung. Blis is led by Founder and CEO Greg Isbister and President Harry Dewhirst. The company secured US$25m in funding and also obtained credit facilities from Silicon Valley Bank. It intends to use the proceeds to expand into new markets including the US, scale international sales and marketing, and develop new product features. Blis is also planning to enhance its core data engineering capabilities to support those product and market-expansion efforts. Blis Media is a media and technology company founded in 2004 that provides targeted advertising solutions. It operates bases in London and Sydney and lists clients including Epson, Google, adidas and Unilever. The company builds advertising technology aimed at delivering targeted campaigns and the article notes the technology’s potential to scale quickly and be disruptive. Management includes CEO Gregor Isbister, who remains in his role following the investment. In May 2012 Blis received a $1.4m tranche of funding led by Meridian Growth Capital (Hal Philipp) and Ballpark Ventures, with existing investor Beringea LLP increasing its stake. Hal Philipp, inventor of widely used touch‑screen technology, joined the board as part of the deal.
Team
No current team members are available.